 Mike, you provide a lot of insight into very natural reasons that the Bible says what it does. Your explanations make very good sense, but they have demystified a lot of how I understood inspiration and the role of the Bible in the lives of Christians today. What evidence do we have that the Bible is uniquely inspired and special from any other document from the ancient world or even today? What reasons do you believe that God has provided this collection of writings as a way to communicate with His people today or humanity at large? What advice do you have for Christians who do not have the level of training that someone with your credentials has in their personal study and how to apply it to their lives and to their relationship with God directly? Well, I would like to think that what I do is, Joe used the word demystified, you know, I hope that doesn't mean desupernaturalized because I take a very supernatural view of inspiration. On the other hand, I hope it does mean I've DX filed it because again, we have a I just I hate to use this term, but I'm going to use it. We have a bizarre cartoonish way of thinking about inspiration. People getting zapped and their minds going blank and their automatic writing and, you know, paranormal view of inspiration. OK, that I do want to debunk because it needs to be debunked because it sets up. There are so many ways that that can be undermined. And if people are thinking that's what inspiration means, then their faith is going to be harmed. As soon as you show them how these those ideas, those approaches don't work with what you actually find in the biblical texts and for maybe new listeners who are kind of, you know, wondering what in the world does he mean? If you go to the Naked Bible podcast, go up to the Start Here tab at the top. And one of the videos is how Mike approaches scripture. I recommend watching that because I'll tell you just exactly what I mean by what I just said. But, you know, so I'm focusing here a little bit on the word demystified. Again, I hope it means I've DX filed it. But it shouldn't mean that I've D supernaturalized it. You know, what do you how do you think the inspiration process worked? Again, I have recommended in the past that how we need to think about this is we need to think about Providence. We need to think our God needs to be bigger. And frankly, less cartoonish and bizarre. Inspiration means that God, you know, in his omniscience knew that he wanted things written down for posterity, and he knew who he wanted to do that. And so from the moment a person was born, OK, God was interacting and using his imagers or his spirit. You know, in Paul's case, you have more of a direct divine intervention. He has to basically assault Paul and appear to him personally and again to put him on the right course. But again, that isn't typically the norm. Typically, God is working in the lives of the people who will be the writers of scripture from the time they're born, moment by moment, their education, you know, how they were thinking, what they experienced, what they saw, what they heard, what they read, what they were taught. You know, all this stuff contributes to who that person is and where God finds them, where the Lord, you know, where Jesus finds them at a certain point in their life to call them into ministry or whatever. Our lives are the result of a long, long series of events. And if, you know, all I'm saying is there's an intelligent mind behind all that, and it's called God, all right? And so we need to stop needing, you know, being the wicked and adulterous generation that seek it after a sign, you know, that wants something spectacular. OK, God doesn't often work with a spectacular. But that doesn't mean God is not at work. God is constantly at work. And it's this providential process of bringing a person to the right time, the right place, the right occasion, the right moment, so that when they are prompted to write something down, they have been prepared for that every step of the way. They are the perfect choice for what God wants written down. And, you know, there are many hands that will never know their names that contribute to this this thing we call the Bible, you know, various stages of how it was put together as a totality. That is not non supernaturalistic. That is supernatural at every step of the way. What it doesn't do, though, is divorce humanity from the process. And what I'm suggesting is if you divorce humanity from the process of inspiration, you undermine the doctrine and make it vulnerable to criticism. And because the cartoonish approaches, the automatic writing, the downloading, the mind dumping of every word in syllable is just demonstrably assailable. And that's why, again, I go after the X file's view of inspiration. But I don't want people to think that that that leaves you with a non supernaturalistic thing. It doesn't. And the way I look at scripture is is what we what I'm, you know, holding on my lap or looking out on my screen, that is that is the result of countless acts of the providence of God and the oversight of God to make sure that the final product was what God wanted. Period. God was happy with the result. Now, you know, we could talk about things within the content that for me distinguish it from everything else. You know, the easy ones are things like fulfilled prophecy. OK, that takes a divine mind, OK, to make all that work out. And it's not it's not just seeing the future. OK, again, we have this very too simplistic view of what does fulfilled prophecy not mean somebody saw the future. Well, you know, you can have some competing divine being dispensing information, you know, to some Joe Blow over here, you know, that, you know, it's just just some guy and can get stuff right because, hey, there are disembodied divine being, they can do that on occasion. So it's not just seeing the future. It's not just being able to predict something fulfilled prophecy. Again, I think well understood, correctly understood is not just an isolated event that somebody saw before it happened. It is the network of events that lead somewhere intelligently, directly and intent intentionally. Where things work out the way God wants them to work out and says they'll work out. It's statements and things written by people, dozens of people who lived hundreds and thousands of years apart, coming together and converging in a very particular way. Again, that shows that there was one mind behind it all. But again, moving the circumstances to produce a certain outcome. OK, you have to have sovereignty for that. You have to have providence for that. So again, when I say fulfilled prophecy, I'm thinking very big picture and the whole narrative of God's activity in history, not just isolated events. So that again, that's one thing for me. I'm just speaking for me now. The interconnectedness of the of the ideas and the concepts, the intelligence to me set scripture apart from anything else because there's so many hands over so much time. In so many different circumstances, that just they just come together. They just come together. Again, I think God, you know, to me, that says we have a really big God to be able to pull that off. That's not just something that's not a happenstance that could happen without divine activity, divine, you know, supervision, so to speak. Thirdly, I'll give I'll just wrap it up with this one, because I think this is really fundamentally a significant one, maybe the most significant one. And that is the gospel, the coherence of the content of scripture. OK, what is scripture about? You know, ultimately, it's about, you know, who God is, what God wants to do, why why we're here, all that sort of stuff. Again, the big picture stuff, I talk about an unseen realm. The centerpiece of that is the coherence of the gospel. The content of the Bible is the is the only, you know, sacred book period that really has a coherent answer for how people can rightly relate to God. What do I mean by that? Well, just think about it. Every other religion. Asks imperfect fallible beings to become perfect or nonfallible so that they can please a perfect infallible being. And get to heaven. That just doesn't make any sense. That's asking people to do the impossible. That's defining salvation as an impossibility and saying, well, tough, that that's what you got to do. OK, you want to you want to, you know, be in heaven with a perfect, holy God. Well, you better be perfect and holy, do the best you can. Now, in other words, all of the other systems are somehow works oriented. They somehow put the onus on the person, on the hopeful participant, on the worshiper, whatever, whatever you want to call the person who wants to get get to heaven. Every other system makes that individual accountable for achieving this final end. And to do that, they have to please a holy, perfect being. But they're not holy and they're imperfect, in fact, hopelessly imperfect. So how does that make any sense? Well, to me, it doesn't make any sense. What we see in scripture. We have the only alternative, and that is the perfect, holy God wants to be with people badly enough that he will solve their problem for them. And just ask them to believe that he did. It's the it's the only approach that offers any hope and any coherence. It takes people for exactly what they are. And doesn't forget what they are. In fact, it confronts people with what they are, that they need God to act on their behalf, to take care of an insurmountable problem. Either sin, their offense against God, overcoming death, the resurrection. OK, none of these things are possible to the human being. But all other religions, again, have it just make effort, either central or a really, really, really important part. Of, again, getting to heaven, you know, the positive afterlife. And that just makes zero sense when you really think about it. So when I look at scripture, again, I can look at, you know, all these other things that, you know, about what it is. But I also want to include what it actually says. And to me, those things, and I've only mentioned three of them, but to me, those three things are fundamentally what separates this thing we call the Bible from anything else.