NIV Application Bible Podcast: Episode 6 (Deuteronomy 22)
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If you have been marginalized, victimized, or you just feel invisible, we have a God who loves us. We matter to him. Welcome back to the NIV Application Bible podcast. Uh, one of my favorite modern-day scholars. I have crushes on lots of long deadad theologians like Spurgeon and Augustine. But one of my favorite living scholars who happen happens to be a contributor to this uh application Bible is Dr. Craig Kenir.
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And Craig Kenir says this. If you get out of the Bible what you’re expecting to get out of the Bible, you need to raise your expectations because it’s always better. Always bigger. Always better. This love story is always more redemptive than we hope it would be. Uh when I was in my second class at Denver Seminary uh pursuing a doctorate, one of my professors, Dr.
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Jim Howard, uh gave a brief brief exugesus on a passage in Deuteronomy. And y’all, I almost fell out of my chair because first of all, I’d never really studied this passage. Second of all, I did not see how a passage like this could be redemptive. Here’s the passage. It’s a short one. This is Deuteronomy 228 and 29.
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If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father 50 shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. And I thought, why in the world are we reading a passage like that? That’s why people who haven’t put their hope in Jesus have the audacity to say that this is filled with hate speech.
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Golly jeepers, that sounds terrible. Because the way it reads in the plain text is you’ve got a girl who’s not engaged to be married. If a man violates her sexually, then he gives her dad 50 shekels and marries her. Doesn’t that sound like some horrible episode on Jerry Springer? Like like somehow insult is being added to injury, y’all.
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That’s not at all the context. That’s one of the reasons I love this application Bible because it gives us context to these stories. Because if we read all of these stories, even in the Old Testament, you’ll find that God is never a unibrow dictator just waiting to whack us over the head with a Bible if we step out of line. He is always, always, always redeeming our inherent dignity as his imagebears.