Wes Huff’s Interview @Shawn Ryan Show SRS #279 (Transcript)

Talk a lot about a lot of the research you’ve done. But first I woke up in a weird mood today and had an interesting conversation with my wife this morning.

And so last week was a rough week of interviews. We had an interview about all of the Epstein stuff going on and politics right now and that’s always a dark, dark place to be. And then another interview that we had last week was Elizabeth Phillips, whose brother was molested at Camp Kanakuk, one of the biggest Christian camps in the world. And after she dug in, allegedly there’s been thousands of kids abused.

And well, I just, whenever I do these, uncover this kind of stuff that’s going on with kids, Epstein, that camp, I mean, we’ve done a lot of them. It just, it really throws me into a thing, you know, that why is this happening? And it makes it just, man, it just, it like reopens all the questions that I used to have before I really came to Christ about three years ago. And I don’t even know how to organize all my thoughts. I thought I had them all organized before we started this, but I don’t.

WES HUFF: But—

SHAWN RYAN: Basically where the conversation ended is what is, you know, if, what is the point of living like a Christian if the common thing that I find in Christianity is really all you have to do is believe to go to heaven. And so, you know, I grew up Catholic, joined the SEAL teams, pretty much lost my faith for about 14, 15, maybe 20 years, and then came back about three years ago, had a very profound experience in Sedona.

But you know, and so through my journey, I’ve been talking to people like you and Lee Strobel and John Burke and priests and Father Rehill that lives down in Columbia, just 45 minutes away. And I’m learning from all of you guys a tremendous amount.

But you know, I’ll bring up John Burke, for example. John has researched, I think around 1,500 near death experiences all throughout the world. Different religions, different countries, different ethnicities, different everything. And what he does is he finds all the commonalities of these near death experiences and relates them all to Christ.

Now in his studies, sometimes he talks about people go to hell and they’ll have a hellish near death experience where they die on the operating table or wherever and then they wind up in hell. And Jesus is there basically saying, “Do you accept me as Lord and Savior?” Yes. Boom. Out of hell and to heaven.

I was a lot more upset this morning, so it would have flowed a lot better. But kind of the point being is it’s hard to live as a Christian. It’s hard to do the right thing. It’s hard to admit you’re wrong. It’s hard to say I’m sorry. It’s hard to not lie, cheat, steal, screw people over to get what you want. It would probably be a lot easier to get what you want, get to your goals in life, if you didn’t live as a Christian.

And so, you know, kind of my point here is, is if you can go through life a sh*tbag, not being a Christian, lie, cheat, steal, kill, adultery, break every one of the Ten Commandments all the time, and then you die and you are in hell. But you still have that one last chance that says, “Hey, do you accept me as Lord and Savior?” Yes. Then what is the point of playing it out every day as a Christian?

The Problem of Evil and God’s Compassion

WES HUFF: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s probably two components to that question. One is a very, I think, honest assessment of what’s typically called the problem of evil. And I think that totally makes sense. And I think if you don’t feel those things, you’re probably not living your life in the real world, in that we see that this world is beautiful, yet it’s profoundly broken.

And that’s the testimony of scripture, ultimately, is that God created the world to be good, but something took place. We know deep down that the world is not meant to be like this. People aren’t meant to die prematurely. Children aren’t meant to be abused. People aren’t meant to get cancer. And we know that there’s something wrong. And there’s this gut feeling that we get.

And ultimately, I think it’s Jesus who puts that gut feeling there. I think the fact that we understand that evil is something speaks to the fact that there is an objective evil to be outbalanced by an objective good. Because in one sense, there’s this understanding that if you subjectivize evil, then we can say we don’t like those things, that they really, you know, shouldn’t happen. But to say that we need to stop them, that these are objectively evil, is actually admitting that there’s some sort of moral law. And a moral law needs a moral lawgiver.

And so ultimately, I talk to a lot of people who almost assume that taking God out of the picture solves the problem. I think it actually makes it more complicated. It makes it more complicated because now you’ve removed the objective standard by which to actually say something is truly objectively evil.

And there’s something that’s unique about the Christian worldview in the question of pain and suffering and evil, in that the God of the Bible describes himself. There’s this really great instance in Exodus where Moses, he’s up on Mount Sinai and he says, you know, “I want to see you, God.” But God says, you know, “I’m too great, going to put you in the cleft of a rock. I’m going to pass by and you’re just going to kind of see a snippet of me.”

But God describes himself, as is Exodus 34:6, he’s compassionate, he’s gracious, he’s merciful, and he’s overabounding in steadfast love and kindness. And there are different iterations of that particular description of who God is throughout the Bible, throughout the Psalms, throughout the prophets.

In fact, if you read the book of Jonah, it’s actually Jonah’s beef with God. He doesn’t want to go to Nineveh and preach repentance. And at the very end he says, “I didn’t want to come here because I hate the Ninevites. And I knew that you are a God who is compassionate, that you’re overabounding in steadfast love and kindness and that you’re true to your word and if they repented, you would forgive them. I didn’t want that to happen.” Right. His beef is that actually God is too good.

But I think what’s interesting about all of the common denominators within that sort of description of who God is, despite the differences, is that it all includes some version of what we would translate as the English word compassion. And compassion in English comes from two Latin words, “com” meaning “with,” and “passion” meaning “suffering.”

And I think one of the things that’s unique about the Christian worldview is that the God of the Bible actually steps off his throne in eternity and into humanity and experiences brokenness. He experiences abandonment, he experiences pain and suffering, and ultimately he experiences being murdered.

And in that way, the God of the Bible is not distanced or aloof to the pain and suffering that we actually experience, because he can actually relate to it. That as the second person of the Trinity entering into humanity, he understands what depravity actually is because he can relate to the pain, suffering, abandonment, hurt, turmoil that we experience in this world.

I think that actually changes the dynamic when we understand the different worldview perspectives and how they describe God. Yes, God is transcendent. Yes, God is holy. Yes, God is above anything we could fully comprehend. But God actually experienced what we experience in that brokenness in the world and that he conquered that. I think the second part of your question—

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you say he conquered that? Because it’s still here.

Finding Meaning Beyond Temporal Pleasures

WES HUFF: Yeah, it’s a very good point. So it’s what theologians sometimes refer to as a now but not yet reality, in that when Jesus rose from the dead, what he did ultimately is he said that death has no hold anymore. You know, the wages of sin is death. Paul says, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.

And so the punishment that was given to our first parents, Adam and Eve, when they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of evil, good and evil, and God said, if you eat from this, you’re going to die, was that they did die. They didn’t die right then and there, but there was a spiritual brokenness.

Let me put it this way. So when you read Genesis chapter one, you see all these iterations. You know, God makes the sea and the fish and the land and the animals and the trees and the plants. And if you separate the fish from the water, right, it dies. God speaks to the water and it teams with life. But if you separate the fish from the water, it’s going to die. God speaks to the land, and it brings forth vegetation and greenery. But if you remove the plant from the soil, it’s going to die.

Who does God speak to when he creates humans? He speaks to himself. What happens when we remove ourselves from our Creator? We die. There’s a relational component to it that I think is very profound. No matter how you want to read the literalism or the figurative aspects of Genesis chapter one and two, I think the point there being is that we were created for relationship with God.

And that’s been affected, that’s been broken. That’s why we have covenants that God makes with his people. Those are promises. They’re relational in their ultimate articulation and their practicality. And so when Jesus comes and he dies a death that we deserve because of the cosmic rebellion, the evil that we commit, the sin then is in the grave, but then rises from the dead. What that is symbolic of is that the grave death has no hold on those who are found in Jesus Christ anymore.

So though we still live in this beautiful yet broken world, all things will be made new. And that’s the promise. And this kind of leads into the other part of your question. You know, why do we bother living our lives if it’s just full of pain and suffering? I think when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

This life matters, and it can be profoundly beautiful. And just as you know, we bring children into the world and there’s a lot of potential for hurt and pain and suffering, but we still see that as a good thing. We still see the beauty and the amazingness of new life. When I saw my children come into this world, it was incredible. It’s a miracle, right? How did this come to be?

And yet we understand that there’s so much opportunity for hurt and pain and suffering and getting messed up there. And yet the potential for goodness and beauty and to be poured into, in that little child, to grow up as a virtuous individual of character, as a good citizen and a person who can understand what is truly meaningful in this life, that’s worth doing.

SHAWN RYAN: Absolutely.

WES HUFF: And I think that’s part of, you know, the surrendering of making. It’s not just about dying and going to heaven. If it was, you know, the gospel authors could have just solved the whole problem by just having Jesus’s passion narrative. But a lot of the gospels is about his life. It’s about just the daily struggle and the beauty and the amazingness of friends.

You know, it’s interesting in Scripture, in John’s Gospel, he records this event of Jesus’s friend Lazarus dying. And Lazarus goes to the tomb. And Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha basically think that Jesus has procrastinated and he’s got there too late. Like, if you were only here, our brother would still be alive.

And it’s interesting because Jesus fully knows what he’s going to do. He’s going to speak into that tomb and tell Lazarus to get out. And yet John records it and says that Jesus stood there and he wept. He wept because his friend had died. And that feeling of that raw emotion, that’s not wrong. Jesus knew he was going to raise him from the dead.

But he’s also weeping, I think, because Jesus understands more than anybody else what the true significance of the brokenness of this world can be in the physical death. But that we look forward to something amazing in the resurrection of life eternal. But that doesn’t mean that this life is a throwaway by any means.

Confronting Fear and Responsibility

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I have another interesting conversation with Wyatt, who you met earlier. And we were just chatting upstairs right before I came down and talking about the same kind of thing. And I can’t remember how he worded it, but he had asked.

I have a whole other life where I was addicted to cocaine and partying and doing pretty much anything. Living the non-Christian life, right? It was a lot of fun. It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had. I’m just being honest. I wasn’t riddled with anxiety. I didn’t have to worry about shit because I had no responsibilities. I didn’t have a son, I didn’t have a daughter. I didn’t have a wife.

But so there were no worries. There were no anxieties. There was, I don’t know, I have to get this stuff done. I mean, yes, I had a job, but it was. Do you understand what I’m saying?

And so back then, I didn’t, I wouldn’t say I was an atheist. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God. I just didn’t give a shit. And I was a sideline person. And with no fear of death, it actually went. I lived in Colombia. I went down there with full intention of dying down there. Been an OD on drugs. And when life gets boring, I’m checking out.

Well, that didn’t happen. Right, let’s fast forward. You know, and now I’ve come to Christ. I believe in Christ. I’m a Christian. I’m scared to death of death. I’m scared to leave my kid behind, my kids, my wife, because I know how f*ed up this world is. I have more. I have a team I’m responsible for. I have a business I’m responsible for. I have anxieties, I have worries.

It seems like you would be not worried about death after you believe in Christ? After you come to Christ?

WES HUFF: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think…

SHAWN RYAN: Seems like life would be, I don’t know if easier, but less anxious, less worries, less. I mean, but it’s actually, I’m just being honest, it’s the opposite for me.

WES HUFF: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think when we’re young, we’re kind of naive in thinking that the indulgences are just what matters. And as we mature, we realize that there’s so much more than just pleasure and pouring our lives into temporality.

And I totally get what you’re saying in terms of there being no outward effect on. You don’t have a family, you don’t have friends necessarily. I bet, though, if you had died, it would have affected somebody. And there’s a ripple effect that we often don’t realize to how our lives actually impact others.

I mean, this is a lie that a lot of people who commit suicide often just assume they’re better off gone. Right. Everyone’s going to be better off without them. And just the ripple effect outwards of how much pain that causes.

I also think, you know, C.S. Lewis, the famous theologian and writer, he wrote a book called “Surprised by Joy.” In that when he writes, he said, you know, if I was looking for happiness, a good cigar and a bottle of scotch could have sufficed. That would have got me there.

And in his own autobiography, he talks about the fact that he was actually surprised at the fulfillment that was brought and the realization and the maturity that came with it of how much his life affected the people around him and how much more meaningful it could be realizing what his purpose and identity actually was in Christ. That he actually was surprised by joy and that he thought his life was basically going to be over. He couldn’t do all the fun things. He couldn’t jump into those vices and indulgences.

But that he failed to realize that the temporal ecstasies, those were ultimately fleeting, that they wouldn’t fulfill him in the way that he was actually looking for. There, what I was referring to earlier when, you know, G.K. Chesterton says that the man is walking to the brothel is searching for God. He’s looking to worship something.

And I think maybe the anxiety and the stress of what you’re feeling, because I feel that too, in that one of my biggest fears is dying and leaving my family and then not being able to see my children grow up. And not being able and then thinking I don’t want my children to grow up without a father. And that weighs on me.

Not because I’m necessarily afraid of death, because I truly believe that I will be united with my Lord and Savior. But it’s a grieving of the reality of what could be left behind. But I think that’s a realization of a maturity, that as we grow older, we realize the responsibilities that come with the things that we do and the people that we’re connected to.

And that though we might feel like the drugs and the sex and the physical things, and that those are going to give us meaning and purpose when we’re younger, it’s largely because we have a mentality that fails to realize our mortality more broadly. That this world has a lot more to offer than fleeting pleasures.

And that, you know, when you pour into your kids, when you’re building the train sets with your son, like the joy that that can bring and just seeing a child light up and seeing your child being born and the love that you share with your wife, that’s something that I think goes beyond a high. Right. Which is a very, in one sense, a very selfish thing. Right. I’m experiencing this.

But when we get to do something like raise children as virtuous citizens, when we instill character in them, that’s a legacy that goes beyond the simple, you know, I’m feeling this right now, and that feels great. But the thing that lasts are the things that are truly going to give meaning and purpose in the world around us and is ultimately going to change the world. We have that potential.

SHAWN RYAN: So maybe we should be looking for fulfillment instead of happiness.

Faith, Love, and Sacrifice

WES HUFF: I think sometimes I wonder, you know, we tease out the differences between joy and happiness, and in some ways those are synonymous. I don’t think that. But yeah, fulfillment. Fulfillment goes beyond simple happiness in the same way that love is far more than an emotional feeling. Right.

There are days that I wake up and I don’t necessarily feel like I’m loving my wife like I did on our wedding day or on our honeymoon or whatever. And that love transcends that because love is actually about sacrifice to a certain degree. And that’s what we see. I mean, if God’s character is love, John the apostle in his epistle says, God is love and love is the greatest ethic.

So if the greatest God is going to encompass himself, his identity in the greatest ethic, well, the greatest example of that ethic is actually self sacrifice, which is what we see in the person of Jesus Christ. No greater love has this. Then a man lays his life down for his friend, it says in Scripture.

And so whether we’re talking about happiness or whether we’re talking about love, or whether I think we need to calibrate these within a framework that actually puts them into an understanding that goes beyond a simple feeling. Because if love is a simple feeling, if happiness is a simple feeling, if meaning and purpose and identity are simple feelings, well then those are going to change with my mood, it’s going to change with my diet, right?

And so these concepts go beyond maybe the simplicity that we often describe them as. Because I love my wife even when I’m not necessarily feeling as in love with her as I could possibly be. And I can actually live that out in a self sacrificial way that will truly be loving to her, even if I’m not feeling the warm fuzzies all the time.

What Happens When We Die

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. I’m trying to think how to ask this. I mean, what do you think happens when we die? When you think of heaven, what is your imagination? What does your faith tell you? Where is it? What do we see? Where are we going?

WES HUFF: Well, Paul says it is appointed people once to die and then the judgment. So I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to be judged where we’re going to stand before our Creator and there’s going to be an instance of we are either. Theologians sometimes describe it as being found in the first Adam or the second Adam.

So Jesus is described as the second Adam in Scripture. And the idea is you’re either going to be found in your sin and you’re going to take the brunt of that, or you’re going to be found in the covering of Christ and he’s taken the brunt of that.

So what we do in this life, it’s not that we just punch our ticket. We say, you know, Jesus, I believe in you. And then whatever we do after that doesn’t matter. You know, what we do actually does matter. We’re not saved by our works, but we’re saved for works. And those works can actually be an example and an outworking.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean by that we’re not saved by our works, we’re saved for our works?

Saved by Grace Through Faith

WES HUFF: Yeah, so in the book of Ephesians, Paul writes. And he says that in chapter two, he says, “And you are dead in your transgressions and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler and the power of the air. And the spirit is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of our flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love which has, which he loves us even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated. He has seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ.”

And he says that you are saved. So “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of yourselves. It is not the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

So in other words, there’s nothing you can do or I can do that is going to placate God. We’re not going to be able to earn our salvation because compared to the standard of the holiness of God, it’s always going to fall short. We’re broken whether we realize it or not. And we’re often, I sometimes say, you know, worried about the evil out there when there’s a lot of evil in here.

And so what God has done on our behalf is through Christ Jesus. He has saved us, like Paul says, that we are saved by faith in grace. And it’s not works. So in one sense, you know, the law is like a mirror. So when we see God’s law and his holiness displayed in his character, that calls us to righteousness, to call us to do good things. That’s like a mirror showing us how dirty we are.

But we make a mistake when we think that we need to grab the mirror and wash ourselves with it, right? That’s not going to clean us. We need something external. We need to jump in the shower. That’s what’s truly going to clean us. The law has a purpose and a good purpose, and that’s to show us that we’re dirty.

But it’s through faith alone in Christ, alone to the glory of God alone, that we’re saved, that that’s something that he has done. We’re saved by works, just not ours. Christ, who has done them perfectly. And the works that we do. When I say we’re not saved by our works, but we’re saved for our works, what I mean by that is that the works are actually the evidence to show that God has truly done something in our life and now we see that movement in our heart.

So I was talking to someone recently who was saying, you know, I have a friend who, he claims to be a Christian, but he’s really not living a life that I would say is overly a good example of what a Christian should be living. He said, Wes, do you think he’s a believer? Do you think he has a genuine faith in God?

And what I said to him was, you know, ultimately that’s between him and God. But I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at that person and say, listen, your salvation is between you and God. But I have no reason to believe that. I have no reason to believe that you’re saved. And I think that should worry you.

I think it should worry you that when I look at the world and I look at you, I really don’t see that much of a difference. And that either means that you’re not living the life that God has called you to, or you’re in real danger that you don’t actually understand who Jesus is and what he’s done for you on your behalf.

And so I think the mistake we can make is thinking that God is like the gods of the Old Testament, that the nations surrounding Israel were trying to offer up sacrifices to the agricultural gods so that, you know, if I sacrifice my son on the altar of Baal, maybe he’ll grow good crops for me. And God says, I hate that. I hate that. Because that’s an, it’s making the thing a means to an end.

I don’t want you to sacrifice to get. I want you to love. I want you to love me. And I want this to be an act of devotion. Which is why eventually God, through the prophets, starts to condemn the sacrifices which he commands the Israelites to do. Not because the sacrifices are bad, but because he says, you know, you’ve just made this. You’ve made it a meaningless act. You’ve made it something that just becomes rote. It’s just a ritual.

God says, I don’t want ritual. I’m not interested in that. All those other gods, they can get the rituals. Right. It’s fake, it’s meaningless, it’s purposeless. But I love you and I want you to do this because I want you to understand the relationship that I’ve called you to be in.

And so those works, those works are an outpouring of the love, right? If I were to ask you, Shawn, what’s the opposite of love? What would you say?

SHAWN RYAN: Hate.

The Opposite of Love

WES HUFF: Hate. That’s a common answer. And I think that’s a good answer. But if you think about it, to hate something is actually to invest emotional energy in it. Apathy. Apathy is actually the opposite of love because apathy just doesn’t care.

When we see people who abandon children, who, you know, evil is being done around them and they’re just indifferent, that stirs us, as it should. And it’s because apathy is the opposite of love. And what God is calling us to is, you know, the way that we live out that love is by showing that that is actually not because it saves us, because it can’t. There’s nothing that we can do that God, you know, God doesn’t need us to love him in one sense. God doesn’t need us to do anything.

But it’s kind of amazing that he wants us to. God is no better off or worse off if I don’t love him, if I don’t worship Him. God exists perfectly in a set of living, loving relationships and did eternally. And yet out of an outpouring of his love, he decides to create. He doesn’t need to do that. He existed instead of living relationships in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And yet he creates. And even he creates knowing that his creation is going to rebel. That’s going to cause pain. And that He Himself in the second person as the Son, is going to enter into that pain. And yet it’s to his glory.

In the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, it says that before the foundations of the world were lain, the Lamb was slain. And so the cross wasn’t a contingency plan. It wasn’t an oops, I better fix things. It was all for the glory of God because He loves us and he wants right relationship with us.

Faith and Works

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re saying it’s not the works, it’s grace and faith. So the way I understand what you’re saying is if you have faith, then you wouldn’t do the latter anyways. You wouldn’t act like that anyways. Am I correct?

WES HUFF: In the wrong things?

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, we’re talking about. It’s not for your Deeds or your works.

WES HUFF: Correct.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s, it’s for your grace and faith.

WES HUFF: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: To get you to heaven. Is that, that’s what you said, correct?

WES HUFF: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: So if you had faith and grace, then maybe you wouldn’t have done the works, but you wouldn’t have lied, cheat, steal, murdered, or done any of that sh. Does that make sense?

WES HUFF: Yeah, I mean, I think so.

SHAWN RYAN: But by having faith alone, you would not partake in breaking the Ten Commandments.

# Understanding Sin and Conviction

Or at least there’s an understanding that this is not what I should be doing. There’s a changing of mind in the mindset of. When I think of my life before really understanding what Jesus had done on my behalf, I could easily explain away bad things, because the significance of them was different.

Martin Luther, the German reformer, he talks about the difference between falling in a hole and making a bed in a hole. Or if you fall, you trip in the hole, and then you get out of the hole. But that’s a mistake, and you understand that it’s a mistake. You don’t then set up camp in the hole, or a bird flying over your head and a bird making a nest in your hair.

Like when we truly understand the significance of the weight of the wrongdoing that we participate in, it grieves us and we want to change. Maturity is realizing that we shouldn’t be doing these things, though we do them, because we’re still on this side of eternity. We’re still in a broken world, but we have an understanding and we have that conviction of the Holy Spirit that we shouldn’t do them. We don’t want to do them.

When I sin, when I sin against my wife, when I sin against my family, my friends, anybody, I feel convicted of that because I know I shouldn’t be doing that. And that’s not to say that, you know, if you aren’t a Christian, that you don’t feel guilt or conviction. I think we all do by nature of the fact that we’re created in God’s image. There’s an aspect of that that still it’s crying out to us in our identity. We know we’re not meant to be doing these things.

Faith and Works

But in the book of James, there’s this really great passage where James, he talks about the fact that if you break one commandment of the law, you’ve broken all the law. And what he says there is, “What use is it, my brothers, if someone says, he has faith but he has no works, can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to him, go in peace. Be warmed and be filled. And yet you do not give him what is necessary for their body. What is the use? Even so, faith, if it has no works, is dead by itself.”

Now, you could read that and think, well, he’s saying it’s faith and works. But what he’s getting there is not that it’s both faith and works, it’s that the works are going to be an outpouring of the faith that you have. He says, now, let me see if I can find it. That if you, if you commit, if you break one aspect of the law, you are held accountable for all of it.

And it’s kind of like this, Sean. If you’re hanging off the edge of a cliff and you’re hanging on to, like a chain, if one of those links in the chain is cut, you’re going to fall as if none of those links are holding you up. And that’s kind of what James is getting at there. If you break one of the commandments, you’ve broken all of them. It’s not that if you lie, you’re now held accountable for murder, but it’s that I’m hanging onto that chain. And if one of those links is severed, I’m going to plummet to my death.

Because there’s no small sin, because there’s no small God. That doesn’t mean all sin is created equal. We know that murder is worse than sin. And we even see when Jesus is handed over to Pilate just before his crucifixion, he says, “The one who’s given me over to you has committed the greater sin.” The law has more severe penalties for some sins and less severe penalties for others. In the Old Testament, it’s not that this is all, you know, flattened out. There are gradations of sin, and we even understand that in our own civil law, but it’s cosmic treason against a holy God. And so in that sense, it’s always going to be significant because of who it’s against.

Handing Over Your Problems to God

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I read this. Have you heard of the Jesus Calling? I read this every morning. I read it more than my Bible because I actually understand that. And I know it’s funny, but it’s true. But, you know, this morning I was reading it and I was a couple days behind, so I’ve caught up. But you know was talking about. And a common thing in there is. So it’s always talking about, hand over your problems to me, hand them over to me. All the you’re worried about, hand it over to me, I’ll take care of it.

And I was, I just, I just, I don’t understand what that means. I mean, I’ve got all kinds of problems. I pray for them all the time. Years, some of these problems. And I’m not saying I have more problems or less problems than anybody else. They’re just problems, you know. And I pray about them. A lot of them don’t get answered. And then I think about it, I’m like, what does that mean?

Like, it’s Monday morning, I’m anxious. I’m a business owner. I got, I’m a family guy. I got all kinds of problems and anxieties. And so what is it when it says, don’t worry about your problems, hand them over to me, I’ll take care of them. Like, I’ve been praying for years for you to take care of some of these problems. And they’re all, not all of them, but a lot of them are still here. So what does that mean? Like, I can’t just go, hey, I got all this s coming up, and there are problems and things that I’m stressed about, but I’m just not going to fing do any of it. Because you said you’re going to handle it. That’s not going to work out well for me. And so I don’t even know what that means. Just hand over your problems. Here you go. Here they are.

WES HUFF: Yeah, exactly. I think one way that it could be looked at, and maybe this is a unique way of framing it, but I think part of that calling that God says, you know, “Come to me because my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” is an invitation to be transparent with God in those things.

Psalm 23, pretty famous Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd. Yahweh is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”

One chapter over Psalm 22 starts very different. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from me, from this, my salvation? And the words of my groaning, oh, my God, I call by day, but you do not answer. And by night, and I have no rest.”

The Honesty of Lament

You know what I find really interesting about the God of the Bible is the God of the Bible who calls us to come to him sees both the person who says, “Yahweh is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and the person who says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as equally valid forms of worship. In that one third of the book of Psalms is what is sometimes referred to as the lament or the complaint psalms.

And that God wants us to come to him. He wants us to be transparent with him. He wants us to be like David who says, I don’t get it. I’m struggling, I’m lost. I don’t feel you. I feel like you’re far away. I feel like I’m forsaken. And that aspect, I think, of God calling us to cast our burdens on him. Part of that is an acknowledgment of God realizing that this world is hard, that our burdens aren’t meaningless.

You know, some Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism and Shintoism, you read some of these writings and the way that they talk about struggle and pain and suffering is sometimes very dismissive in that it’s like, well, just stop desiring things. Just stop. You know that you’re too, you’re attached to this world because you have this desire. So cast off all desires, you know, easier said than done. You know, ironically, they desire to do that, to cast off all the desires.

But I think what we see within the just honesty of the text of the Bible is that you see that God, that God who’s compassionate, that God who understands and that God who says, you know, you can come to me and you can be honest with me about what’s going on. You don’t have to sugarcoat your problems. You don’t have to pretend that you’re holier than you really are. You don’t have to pretend that things are going well or that things are easy or. Because, listen, I get it.

You know, I walked the dusty streets of 1st century Galilee and my feet ached and my friends abandoned me, my family members died and I was betrayed and I was murdered. And I think part of God calling us to come to him is less of a cure all. You know, all of a sudden all your problems are going to be fixed. That’s not realistic. We know that’s not going to happen.

There’s a future tense of the fact that God says, you know, I’m going to make all things new. But he also says, this world is going to be hard and this world is going to be full of pain and struggle. But I’ve overcome the world and so all authority in heaven, on earth has been given to me. Jesus says, and as part of that, I think the calling is less of Jesus is just a fixer who’s going to solve all our problems. Jesus isn’t a genie.

But the relational component is that God wants us to come to him. He wants us to be honest, he wants us to be transparent because he can understand those things. And the reassurance in that is that it’s not a God that just creates and sets the dials in motion and then steps back and says, well, I hope everything works out. You know, let’s see how all these little people can figure themselves out. And I hope it, I hope it works out. No, God desires our good, but that good doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is going to work perfectly in this world.

Look at the apostles, look at Jesus himself. You know, all of the apostles, after coming to the realization that their rabbi rose from the dead and that the claims that he made about himself were true, saw that proclamation and the new life that was a possibility for others as something worth suffering and dying for. And although we can’t be sure of all the martyrdom stories that they’re rock solid about all the apostles, we know that they had minimum suffered pain and persecution for that.

And they desired that. Not that they were going out to get hurt, but they understood that, you know, the God who loves us is worth knowing personally because the God who loves us cares about us when we are in those seasons of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and in the seasons of “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

The Pre-Existence of Souls

SHAWN RYAN: All right, all right. Where do you think we were before we were born?

WES HUFF: I don’t think we existed before we were born.

SHAWN RYAN: You think that. It’s just. You don’t think. I mean, when you hear the term old soul, does that mean anything to you?

WES HUFF: No, I think it’s a turn of phrase. You know, it is interesting. I’ve thought about this with every kid that’s been born of mine. You know, it’s so crazy that a new life just pops into existence. And that is something like the, I can see the personality of the baby and I can see how my wife’s personality and my personality are articulated in my sons and my daughters and how amazing that is and that that fact is a little bit incomprehensible.

But I don’t believe in the pre-existence of souls. I don’t think that that’s something that scripture articulates in a way that’s concrete. But I think there’s a divine mystery to the act of life. How does non-life produce life? We don’t really have an answer to that question in terms of a scientific pursuit. And even the fact that this, how many pounds of gray matter in my brain is able to ponder those questions is pretty crazy in and of itself if we really think about it.

Why? Why can I trust this? If this is a product of time plus matter plus chance, what is really grounding my ability to trust my reasoning faculties? Well, I think it’s because I am endowed with the image of my creator, which gives meaning and purpose to that. But man, there’s something crazy about, you know, seeing a new life coming to existence and watching that person grow up. And oh yeah, it truly is miraculous. Yeah, but it.

Islam’s Historical Claims and the Quran

SHAWN RYAN: There is no doubt. Wes, let’s take a quick break.

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All right, Wes, we’re back from the break. So all that wasn’t on the outline before this, but so now I want to get into your story. Born in Pakistan. What were you doing over there? What were your parents doing over there?

WES HUFF: Yeah, that’s right. Usually when I cross the border and people look at my passport, they ask military or missionary? Because why else would a guy that looks like me be born in Pakistan? Yeah, and it is missionary. So my parents were missionaries in the early 90s in Pakistan. So I was born there.

But we weren’t there for very long because the Gulf War broke out and Pakistan sided with Saddam Hussein. So it wasn’t safe to be in Pakistan anymore. And so we eventually came back to Canada and then my parents went back to the missions field where my dad worked in Amman, Jordan where for a short time he was the chaplain at the British Embassy.

So very short stint of my childhood. I actually went back after I graduated high school, I went back to Jordan. But it was very different because when I was there as a child, we were in Amman and it was very urban. And then when I went back it was very rural. We were, I was working with Bedouin with a tuberculosis clinic.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh wow.

WES HUFF: And so it’s a very different experience. Even the language, the Arabic that the Bedouin spoke, the locals said like, don’t worry, we can’t understand them either. So it was great. And I think it formed a lot of my desires and interests in even something like inquiry into Islam. Having understood what a majority Muslim perspective was and some of the things that might not totally compute if you were just learning about something like a worldview like Islam from a book.

Studying Islam and the Quran

SHAWN RYAN: Did you, how foreign to Islam did you get?

WES HUFF: Well, I researched it pretty heavily. Like I read the Quran cover to cover a few times and connected with some people who were doing academic work on the Quran. There was a period when I was in university where there were other Muslim students who, during Ramadan they would read the Quran from beginning to end and I would do it with them almost as a way to establish relationships but also to talk through some of these things. And then I would also share some of what I was reading in the Bible as well.

But in my four year undergraduate degree I probably read the Quran five or six times.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

WES HUFF: And in English, mind you, never in Arabic, which my Muslim friends would say, you haven’t read the Quran because it only exists in Arabic. Right. An English translation they wouldn’t consider properly being a Quran. But I read quite a bit of the adjacent stuff, the Hadith and the Sunnah and then the Surat Rizul Allah, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad IBN Ashak.

So I was genuinely interested in it because of the interplay historically with Christianity and Islam and also just trying to figure out, okay, well, what are the claims of this worldview? Could they actually be legitimate compared to something that I was raised to believe? And ultimately I found them very wanting.

SHAWN RYAN: Really. I mean, what would you say, what are some of the main teachings in the Quran?

The Quran’s Denial of the Crucifixion

WES HUFF: Well, I think Islam has an issue in that there are historical articulations of what’s going on in the biblical stories that are just false. So the main one would be in The Quran, Surah 4:157, it denies the crucifixion, so says that it has the Jews speaking and say be crucified Jesus the son of Mary. Which is kind of an odd thing. If the Jews believed he was the Messiah, that they were crucifying him.

And then it says that he was not crucified nor was he killed, but it was made to appear to them. And so there’s a face value denial of the crucifixion. Now there are, they say that he was real.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes. So Muslims believe in Jesus.

WES HUFF: In fact, Jesus is mentioned 25 times in the Quran, far more than even Muhammad is mentioned in the Quran.

SHAWN RYAN: Really.

WES HUFF: And if you think of the traditional Islamic narrative of Muhammad being a 7th century caravanner, I think it makes sense for some of the stories that you find of whether that’s Abraham or Noah or Jesus, John the Baptist, Mary who are in the Quran. Because I think what’s probably going on is that you have an individual, if we’re accepting the traditional narrative that there was a historical Muhammad, that he’s a caravanner, that he’s traveling in and around the Arabian Peninsula, up into areas like Syria and Jordan, he’s being exposed to Christians and Jews.

And I mean, the traditional narrative is that he was illiterate. So he’s not reading these stories, he’s hearing them orally. But because there’s really no exposure to what we call the Old and the New Testaments. And even then it’s up for debate whether they existed in Arabic, as Arabic existed in like 7th century Hadji script at that point in time anyways.

But he would have been hearing these stories with no kind of discerning ability to differentiate between fables and campfire stories about these characters and what were the actual historically reliable, non-apocryphal documents.

Apocryphal Stories in the Quran

So the earliest source material for Jesus are the 27 books that we call the New Testament, primarily the biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But there are other stories that are apocryphal in nature that talk about, say, Jesus, what Jesus was like as a child. So there’s one called the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas has a story about child Jesus.

Now this is coming a long time after Jesus. Everyone who knew Jesus was dead by the time these stories were developing. But the biblical gospels are very sparse on what Jesus was like as a child. The Gospel of Luke has a very brief story of Jesus when he’s 12, going to the temple with his family and then teaching in the temple and Mary and Joseph forget him in Jerusalem and then have to go back.

But so there’s a body of literature that pops up that’s basically talking about, well, what was Jesus like as a child? And so infancy narratives become kind of this very popular, if we want to call them fan fiction, it’s not really like a proper historical designation, but kind of like that.

And one of these is the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which has a story about Jesus making clay birds by a riverbank. And then some of the Jews get mad at him because it happens to be the Sabbath and he’s working on the Sabbath. And so the story goes that he breathes on the birds, they turn into real birds and the evidence flies away. This story ends up in the Quran.

And we know that this is an apocryphal story. We know that it has no historical designation of actually being tied to the 1st century itinerant Jewish Rabbi Jesus Nazareth. But it is something that would have been available potentially in oral form in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century.

And so you have these things that get smuggled into the text of the Quran but they’re jumbled and they have, so there’s their characters that are in some places that shouldn’t be in others. Haman, who is from the book of Esther, ends up in the Exodus story as the right hand man to Pharaoh. Well, there are hundreds of years between the Persian story of Esther and the Egyptian story of Moses and Pharaoh.

So there’s confusion and conflation that’s going on. And I was at least when I was reading the Quran early on, aware of the biblical narratives. And so when I’m reading the Quran and I’m reading some of the Quran’s versions of these stories, it’s not hard to pick up on where they’re just not right.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

WES HUFF: And ultimately Surah 4:157 that denies the crucifixion. That’s a pretty serious one.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what does it say? What does it say? I mean, it denies the crucifixion.

Different Islamic Interpretations

WES HUFF: Yeah, it says that he was neither killed nor was he crucified, but it was made to appear to them. And it says that even those who proclaim it are in doubt about it. So part of the problem is that there’s a little bit of ambiguity in the wording of the Arabic.

So some Islamic exegetes and interpreters have interpreted this as he wasn’t killed, but he was put on the cross and crucified. Others take that, but it was made to appear to them and take that as what’s sometimes called the substitution theory, where someone else was made to look like Jesus and put in his place. That’s a minority view, but it is a view that some scholars like Shabir Ali has articulated in the past.

The Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, this is the perspective they hold. And they actually believe that, well, they believe actually, so I’ll back up. I thought that was a mistake. They don’t believe that. They believe that Jesus was on the cross but he survived, which is called the swoon theory. That in the crucifixion when it says that he did not die nor was he crucified, it’s that he wasn’t crucified all the way because he didn’t die, but that actually he recovered afterwards.

And they have a story about him going to India and living to over 100 years and having a family and that kind of thing. But there is some ambiguity in the historical commentaries, the Tafsir on this particular passage to where there’s debate even amongst Muslims as is this a full outright denial of the crucifixion. That’s what the kind of mainstream Sunni Orthodox perspective would be.

But some believe that maybe Judas was dressed up like Jesus and he was put on the cross in Jesus’s place or that Jesus recovered or that it never happened, it was all an illusion to begin with. But no matter which way you swing it, it’s still a denial of one of the most established facts of all of history.

Yeah, even like the most skeptical of biblical scholars that they can say we can basically know nothing about the details of Jesus’s life. We can say that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate because we have so many intersecting sources, Christian and non-Christian alike.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, that’s, I mean so are they bringing up, is the only point of bringing up Christianity, the crucifixion, Jesus, Moses, everybody, you know, that plays a role in the body. Is it to discredit Christianity in the Quran?

The Quran’s Relationship to Biblical Texts

WES HUFF: I mean, I think the answer to that would be yes and no. There is a clear line of succession within the Quran. And I think part of this is the confusion on the author of the Quran’s part that they thought they knew what the Torah and the Gospel were. So the Torah and the Injeel, the Torah and the Gospel are referred to multiple times within the Quran itself.

And you have a kind of succession language that the Torah was given to Moses and it was full of guidance and light and the Gospel was given to Jesus and it was full of guidance and light. And then the final revelation is the Quran. But there’s almost a tacit implication that they’re all saying basically the same thing and that God’s message is unified across all of them.

The problem with that is that we know what the Torah and the Gospel looked like in the seventh century in Muhammad’s day. It doesn’t look any different than what we have now. But I don’t think that the, I don’t see any evidence that the author of the Quran knew what the Torah of the Gospel, Torah or the Gospel were.

So you have 900 approximately either direct quotations or illusions of the Old Testament in the New Testament. In the Quran you only have one quotation of either the Old or the New Testament, the lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. So in terms of the synchronicity of the Quran to these previous books, it’s lacking to say the least.

It’s not an organic cultural document like the New Testament is. The New Testament was predominantly written by Jews for Jews and is saturated in Hebraic and Jewish and Old Testament understandings. If you don’t understand something about what’s going on in the New Testament, going back and reading the Old Testament might actually help you because there’s just so much symbolism and calling back to and the Gospel authors. Jesus is paralleled with Moses and David and you know, there are all these things.

But the author of the Quran I think is aware of some of these Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian fables, is assuming that those are what’s going on. And so he’s baking those into the text maybe with the implication to kind of woo the Christians and the Jews to come over to his side.

Judging the Quran by the Gospel

But you see, so I think there’s one passage in the Quran that says it has this kind of succession narrative, right? It talks about the Gospel or the Torah being full of guidance and light and being given to Moses and then the Gospel being full of guidance like given to Jesus and then it says let the people of the Gospel judge by what they have therein. Talking to Christians, right? Those are the people of the Gospel, the Al Angel. But if they do not judge by what they have therein, they are the defiantly disobedient.

Now in the grammatical context, what they have therein for the people of the Gospel is the gospel. So when I’m talking to my Muslim friends, sometimes I open to this passage and I say, hey, I don’t want to be one of the defiantly disobedient. I want to stand before God and not have that on my shoulders. However, in order to be obedient to this passage and I judge using the gospel, which it’s telling me to do, and I judge the Quran by the gospel, I find the Quran doesn’t understand the Gospel, has no earthly understanding of what I believe, and actually denies central points of it. The divinity of Christ, the crucifixion.

And so if the Quran is true and it’s telling me to do this, then I have to conclude that the Quran is false because it’s telling me to do something that’s an impossibility. I cannot judge the Quran by the Gospel and find that the Quran actually understands what the Gospel is saying.

And so this kind of, my Muslim friends often have large articulations. What you have in the gospel isn’t what they had in the gospel. I think that’s highly problematic. I don’t see any reason why in the seventh century a gospel would be any different than it is to what it is now. Especially when, I mean, in my own study in manuscript studies, I can find copies of the Gospel in Syriac from Syria in the 6th and 7th centuries. It reads exactly like what my gospel reads today.

So it’s not that there’s no evidence for that or if that is the case, and the Quran says that nobody can change God’s words and the Gospel is God’s word, who changed it, who was able to kind of thwart the God of Islam’s ability to preserve his word in that endeavor? He’s either he was either unable to do it or he didn’t do that. And when he says, no one can change my words in the Quran, it’s not true.

And so ultimately, I think Muslims have a problem. They’re painted into these corners. They have these passages about the Torah and the gospel, and yet the Quran doesn’t seem to understand what those are or just flat out contradict it. The Quran denies the crucifixion when we know that the crucifixion happened. And so they’re kind of painted themselves into these corners in defending these particular positions. And I just don’t think that they can stand up to scrutiny.

SHAWN RYAN: That is, I mean, I’m not, I’ve never studied it, I’ve never read it. I find it very interesting how much of the Bible is in there.

Jesus in the Quran

WES HUFF: Yeah, I mean, Jesus is a central figure. He’s even referred to as the Messiah. Although it’s ambiguous in Islamic understanding what that means. He’s said to be sinless, he’s said to be virgin born. He’s said to be the one who’s going to come back at the end of time. So there are all of these things, Jesus is a prominent character. Like I said before, I mentioned 25 times, far more than Muhammad is mentioned.

In fact, the only woman named in the entire Quran is Mary, the mother of Jesus. And so these figures have prominence within the Islamic holy book, but ultimately, they have no full historical understanding of who they are. Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Very interesting. I want to talk about this miracle, about you walking.

WES HUFF: You, we kind of talked about a little bit of the hot question.

SHAWN RYAN: Can we go into that a little bit?

The Miracle of Healing

WES HUFF: Sure, yeah. Let’s do it. Yeah. So I was just before my 12th birthday, I was diagnosed with a condition called acute transverse myelitis. And so I had the flu. And my body’s immune system, in sort of a freak accident response, attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord, the myelin sheath, instead of attacking the flu. And so what that caused is inflammation on the base of my spinal cord, which severed the communication between my legs and my brain.

And so the diagnosis, I literally woke up from a nap and couldn’t feel my legs. And so how you remember this? Oh, yeah, very vividly. Yeah. Yeah. The diagnosis was that I would most likely be a paraplegic for the rest of my life. So recovery wasn’t impossible, but it was, you know, you’re going to dig in for the long haul kind of deal.

Especially because transverse myelitis as a condition, how it’s been described to me by medical professionals, is that the recovery rate has a correlation to the quickness of the actual paralysis. So because mine was instant, the conclusion was that the recovery was going to be long and it was going to be hard.

And the short story is that one month from the day that I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs, on February 8th, I woke up, got out of my bed, and walked over to my wheelchair.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you know to get up?

WES HUFF: So it was kind of instinctual. It’s a, yeah, how did I know to get up?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, for one month, you were paralyzed.

WES HUFF: For one month, I was completely paralyzed. No feeling from the waist down. Yeah. And I don’t know how long it was that I sat in my wheelchair until I realized that I, what I’d done, but I knew something was different. And I could have been five minutes, could have been 45 minutes. I couldn’t actually tell you how long it was, but eventually I looked down and I wiggled my toe, and that kind of broke me out of the spell. And I ran upstairs and got my parents.

SHAWN RYAN: You ran upstairs?

WES HUFF: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy sh.

WES HUFF: Which was preceded by my mom telling me to run up and down the stairs and weeping. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You were in bed. And you’re just like, I’m going to get up and walk over to my wheelchair?

WES HUFF: I mean, did you, I mean, did you prepare yourself? Was there anything? Or you just did it realizing, like, whatever?

SHAWN RYAN: Did, I mean, did you prepare yourself? Was there anything? Or you just did it realizing, like, whatever?

WES HUFF: Yeah, what I typically do is I would kind of fall out of bed and crawl over because the wheelchair wasn’t far from my bed. Obviously it needed to be in close proximity. But at that point, that’s basically what I had done. I pulled myself up to my wheelchair. But, and it was the doctors that first used the word miracle. I think my parents are very hesitant to use that word. But the medical professionals, when they were the ones who said, we really don’t have an explanation because the inflammation was gone. There was no evidence of it.

SHAWN RYAN: What happened when you sat in the wheelchair?

WES HUFF: Well, I just kind of tried to figure out what happened, because you know something is different, but you don’t know what it is. It’s kind of like, what do you…

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean you don’t know what it is? You just got out of bed and walked to the wheelchair.

WES HUFF: Because it’s so passive that you don’t, it’s like the reality of the situation, it precedes what is actually taking place. So I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened, but I knew something different had happened. And then it was the process of looking down and wiggling my toe that made me realize, like, I can move. Jeez.

SHAWN RYAN: And you then run upstairs?

WES HUFF: Yeah, I got my parents.

SHAWN RYAN: What did your dad say?

Processing the Miracle

WES HUFF: You know what? I can’t remember what my dad, that’s probably a good question to ask him. I remember my mom because she’s very emotional, but I mean, it was pretty surreal. I think a lot of us were in shock. I was, I think after the whole paralysis incident, I was in shock for a long time because I remember feeling oddly normal.

I mean, there are obvious times. There were definitely times during that 30 days where I cried myself to sleep. But it also was just kind of strangely, you’re kind of strangely numb because it’s such a drastic change to be told, you know, you’re a healthy child, you’re 11 year old, playing sports, going to school, hanging out with your friends. Okay. Now you’re disabled. You’re not going to, things are going to look very different. You got to put a ramp on your house. You know, you can’t get up and down the stairs with regularity kind of thing.

So it was a big change. And I think my parents and my family in general, they were largely, they were kind of accepted of the fact okay, this is our reality now. We’re going to do everything we can for this to go well. We’re going to do, we’re going to put the ramp on the house. We’re gone. We moved my bedroom to the living room because I was upstairs. I couldn’t get down, up and down the stairs very easily. And so we were kind of this temporary room downstairs.

But there was an acceptance that this was probably my reality. And I was doing physiotherapy, but it was kind of a joke, you know, what do you do for a paraplegic, you know? Yeah. So we, and me, I was ready to be a paraplegic for the rest of my life.

And I think my parents’ prayer at the time was always that God would be glorified in the situation, not necessarily that I would be healed. Not that they were against something miraculous happening, but I think their perspective was, you know, God is in control and we could trust him even when things aren’t going the way we planned or even the way we understand.

SHAWN RYAN: Gee, man. Wow. Nothing. I mean, nothing, nothing miraculous, nothing crazy before he went to bed the night before. No. Wow.

A Miraculous Healing

WES HUFF: Wow. Yeah. And I think that did mark a very powerful what I would describe as a supernatural experience in my life. When the medical professionals said, “This is your lot. You’re going to be a paraplegic” to “Now I guess you’re walking again.” So that’s, it’s in some ways, it’s disorienting in other ways.

I did have a framework for the transcendent, for things that are out of the ordinary happening. But it was actually connecting the dots between my heart and my head later on that really made that more tangible in the intellectual questions that I was wrestling with later in my teens to going back and thinking I can ascribe this kind of crazy thing that happened to me as a child to something tangible.

It’s not just a random fluke. It’s not just, you know, strange things happen, no explanation. I can assign it to an actual individual in this case, right? God, who operates in time and space and history and does things out of the ordinary.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is amazing. Wow. I mean, do you remember meeting the doctor?

WES HUFF: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you walk into his office?

WES HUFF: Yeah, we did a scheduled appointment. I believe it was scheduled, like regular scheduled appointment. Shortly after I could walk and I, yeah, I walked and I was wearing these really big rain boots. I don’t know why I was wearing them. I don’t think it was raining and they got me to run up and down the hall. And I remember because the rain boots were like a little bit too big and they were like, not like, it’s awkward, but running up and down the hallway for the doctor.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s amazing. What did he, I mean, what did he say?

WES HUFF: “This is a miracle. We have no medical explanation.” I believe I’d have to double check. I have my mom’s journal entries from that time. She photocopied them all for me. But they definitely, the doctor was the first one to drop the word miracle.

And I think I’m remembering this correctly. One of the doctors, because there were a number of specialists that were assigned to my particular case, said, “What did you do?” And my mom said, “We prayed.” And I can’t remember if the story is that they went off and printed a list of the other kids in the intensive care unit, said, “Can you pray for these?” Or just said like, “You should pray for the other kids in here.”

It was something like that in her journal entry because they were like, something happened.

SHAWN RYAN: That is wild. I mean, were you at full faith back then at 11?

WES HUFF: As much as an 11 year old can be.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s kind of what I’m getting at.

Early Faith and Teenage Questions

WES HUFF: Yeah. I mean, I think I made a conscious decision that I believe was genuine when I was six, as much as a six year old can, like in my limited understanding of reality and the world. And I think I did. I remember sitting on my bedroom floor and feeling like, I need God. I need God to rescue me, to lead me in this life.

SHAWN RYAN: Age 6.

WES HUFF: Age 6, yeah. Yeah. And that being real. And I mean, that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t like, when I was a teenager, I did go through a period of, if you want to call it deconstruction or whatever. It wasn’t an abandonment of my faith. It wasn’t a crisis of faith. I think those are too strong for what I was actually experiencing. But I was investigating.

I figured, you know, okay, my parents raised me to believe something. Do I believe it based on the fact that they told me to? Now, I don’t think that’s a bad reason. I want my kids to believe what I tell them. Right? But I think everybody at some point goes through a period of time where they kind of have to figure out where the dividing lines are between their parents and them.

And part of that for me was an investigation of, okay, what does the Quran say? What does the Bhagavad Gita say? What does the Book of Mormon say? What are atheists writing about that maybe has some credibility? And I did dig into those because I wanted to be honest with the fact that believing a lie, even if it’s a convenient lie, is still not worth believing.

And I wanted to follow what was true. And so if I was living a delusion to some degree, I didn’t think I was, but if I was, I wanted to at least be aware of what that delusion was and what maybe was a better explanation for the world around me. Right?

So you’d think that that powerful supernatural experience as a child would have solidified something. And it definitely was a piece of the puzzle. But I think I still needed to remedy the intellectual questions that I had that were different than the ones I was asking as an 11 year old.

When I was 11, I was up at night with the “why me?” questions. You know, I’m a good kid, my parents are good people. Why is this happening to me? Well, when I was a teenager it was more, did Jesus actually exist? Like, what’s this thing? Can I believe this? Like 2,000 years old and I’m trying to live my life by it. What are the evidences, what are the reasons, what are the data points that point that to me?

Because ultimately, I think the worldview in the Christian worldview, it’s existentially satisfying, but it’s also intellectually robust. And there’s a cumulative case of all sorts of things, whether that’s historical or philosophical or sociological, that contribute to the truth claims that it’s ultimately making about who we are, why we’re here, where are we going? Questions that all humanity has always asked themselves.

But it’s because I think those are imprinted on our being, on our soul as image bearers of God. But it was exploring those in the capacity that I as a teenager could explore. In the same way that the commitment that I made at six years old, I believe was genuine and the investigation that I did when I was 17 or 18 years old was genuine, and that’s just grown right as I’ve been exposed to more, been given the opportunity to research, to investigate, to learn, to grow.

I think that’s only operated to bolster my belief. Doesn’t mean that there haven’t been times where I’ve questioned things or thought, you know, is this really all true?

SHAWN RYAN: But what are some of the things in there that you thought were hard to find true?

WES HUFF: Hard to find true.

SHAWN RYAN: That you struggled with personally.

Wrestling with Pain and Suffering

WES HUFF: Yeah, I mean, I think what we were talking about before, the problem of pain and suffering, I think is a genuinely good objection to Christianity because it goes beyond an intellectual question, it’s a personal question. It speaks to us in a way that a very tiny theological or philosophical answer might not actually suffice.

If I’m hurting, if I have a child or a family member or someone who’s close to me, if they’re sick, if they’re dying, if a tragic accident happens, it’s hard to really wrestle with that. And that’s why I think, you know, what we’re talking about before the Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In one way, I think the transparency and the honesty of Scripture is something that I want to align myself with because it speaks to the reality of when I hurt. There’s something there that I can reach out to. God is not afraid of our objections, of our doubts, of our insecurities. And that’s been very comforting to me.

Especially this previous year. My two year old daughter was having seizures. We almost lost her. At one point this last fall, she was hit by a distracted driver while we were crossing the road. And nightmare situations for me as a father like to sit in a hospital room with my wife thinking we’re going to lose our daughter and yet to still believe that God is in control, that God is good, that you know we’re going to get through this because God is with us in the midst of that.

I think that goes beyond any, like the personal existential struggle is hard, but the personal existential comfort is also very, very comforting. In a lot of those moments, you know, to give up my desire for control and say, listen, there’s nothing I could do. The doctors are running around, they’re intubating her, I could see her heartbeat being irregular and saying like God, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen here.

And yet there can still be peace in that despite that. And if that had gone south, I could rest in that God is good and that he has a perfect plan, even if I don’t understand it. But it’s those questions that sometimes genuinely make me feel like man, I wish I understood what’s going on here. I wish I could figure out why God allows these things to happen, because I don’t know.

I’ll give you another example. After I experienced my healing, I encountered people who were sick and who were, say, themselves like quadriplegics and to wrestle with, okay, I believe you healed me, but what about that guy? Like, why did you choose? It’s almost like a survivor’s guilt. What about them? Why are they still in their particular predicament?

I don’t have an answer to that. And that’s a hard one to reconcile, but I have enough to rest on that. I know that God is good. I know that the Christian worldview is true. And I know that despite what my maybe fleeting or subjective insecurities are about those things, there’s a comfort in that as well.

Faith Tested Through Fatherhood

SHAWN RYAN: Did you struggle a lot when you were dealing with your daughter, with your faith, or was it rock solid by then?

WES HUFF: I mean, I think we all struggle in different capacities, right? Like, you still struggle.

SHAWN RYAN: With all the research you’ve done, Dead Sea Scrolls, everything. You still struggle.

The Human Condition and Faith

WES HUFF: Well, I think the human condition is that we’re fickle and nobody is bulletproof. And like I said before, this world is beautiful, but it’s also profoundly broken. And I think we’re supposed to feel that brokenness, like that lump that’s in my throat. I believe God put that there because I think a God who is himself worried about things like hope and justice, he’s instilled us with a desire to also be concerned with justice, be concerned with injustice, be concerned with hurt and the brokenness.

And we can say all day long, God, why don’t you do something? But I think God could equally say, you can do something too. I’ve given you faculties and abilities, and this world is not moving without your contribution to it. And that’s why we’re called to go out into the world, to make disciples of all nations, because our actions mean something.

And does that mean that I don’t wake up in the morning and really struggle with this thing or that thing? No. There are periods of my life, periods of time where I just sit down and think, man, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on here. But when I have those moments, I think falling back onto the foundation of the investigation that I have done, the publicly available evidence points to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview to the degree that you would have to move so much evidence out of the way to make me not believe it at this point, that even when I don’t understand something, I can trust that maybe God knows something I don’t.

And there’s a level of giving up control in those moments that I think is appropriate. Not giving up control in that I’m just turning my brain off and I’m just a robot at that point. But that God calls me personally and understands me personally because he knit me together in my mother’s womb. And there’s an intimacy there that exists.

The Relational God

The God of the Bible is, I sometimes say, when God revealed himself to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Moses, he didn’t say, I’m the all knowing, all powerful, all everywhere God. He said, I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I’m the God relationally. I’m making a covenant, I’m making an agreement, I’m making a promise with my people.

And then that ultimately culminates in him stepping into time and reality in Jesus and having friends, having colleagues and laughing and traveling and crying and experiencing all of those things. I think that there’s something that sets apart the Christian worldview with Jesus, that he’s a real person that really lived that we can point to.

In one sense, if the Buddha didn’t exist, you could still technically have Buddhism. You could have the philosophies, you could have the noble truths and the path and all of those things. It didn’t have to be Gautama Siddhartha who came up with those things, could have been anybody. And likewise in Islam, it could have been anybody. It didn’t have to be Muhammad. The God of Islam could have chosen any person to be the prophet that he revealed his truth to.

But it does have to be Jesus. It cannot be anybody else. And there is a historical grounding of the Christian faith that the tomb is either empty or it’s not.

Liar, Lunatic, or Lord

And if it’s empty now, C.S. Lewis, who I referenced before, he said, Christianity, if true is of infinitely important. If it’s not true is of no importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. And he’s famous for the whole liar, lunatic or lord kind of trilemma.

If you look at what Jesus did and what he said about himself, he’s either a liar and a con man, he’s either a lunatic and he’s crazy, or he’s the creator of the universe and he’s Lord. Now, we could also add one more, legend. We could say, well, he’s just a good figure, he’s just a good person to pattern our lives after.

I don’t actually think Jesus gives you the room to look at him like that, because Jesus didn’t just say, here’s a philosophy to live by. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. And if you don’t believe that I am, invoking the divine name from the Old Testament, then you will die in your sins.

He doesn’t give us the room to just say, you’re a good example. I said this on Rogan, where I said, if Jesus is just a pattern, then you don’t need a savior because you can do it yourself. You just need an example. If Jesus is only an example to live by, then all you need to do is tie up your boots a little tighter and do better.

But the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross wasn’t because Jesus came to show us how to live. It was to live the life we couldn’t live. And on that basis, like I said before, you’re saved by works, but it’s Jesus’s work. It’s not yours.

The Protestant Reformation

SHAWN RYAN: I want to talk about, I don’t know what you call it, but I wanted to bring this up earlier when we were talking about all the other stuff, all the reform.

WES HUFF: Reform.

SHAWN RYAN: Is it Christian? Jeremy told me about this.

WES HUFF: The reformers, the Reformation.

SHAWN RYAN: You have some kind of reform. Am I wrong?

WES HUFF: Yeah. So I’m part of kind of a tradition of Protestant Christianity that would typically be referred to as Reformed or capital R reformed. And so what that is, is it’s going back to the Protestant Reformation. So individuals like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Melanchthon, who were, there were proto reformers, there were individuals prior to that, John Huss and John Wycliffe.

And what that period of time is in the Protestant Reformation was it was a number of individuals who were looking at the church around them and they were saying, there have been these traditions that have developed, these accretions over time, and we need to get back to the gospel. We need to get back to primitive Christianity.

There was a lot of things that had taken place in the Middle Ages, a lot of corruption within the church hierarchy. There were a number of popes who basically bought themselves into the position of the papacy and had children out of wedlock and all these sorts of things. It was a little bit of a crazy time.

Martin Luther and the 95 Theses

And there was what kind of spawned that. In what we typically mark as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation is 1517, when Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door, the chapel door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. So that’s kind of this placeholder marker as the beginning of the Reformation.

In a historical sense, what Luther did wasn’t actually all that odd. Nowadays the equivalent of going to a football game now in Wittenberg, Germany, in the 16th century was that one theologian would put up their debate challenge on the door and another theologian would take it up and they’d go to the pub and they would debate, they’d go back and forth.

And so in a very practical sense, Luther wasn’t doing, this wasn’t an act of vandalism by nailing something to a door. And he actually could have very well pasted it. But the nailing and the hammer makes a good image.

But what he was doing was he was challenging the Church and particularly the Pope’s authority to forgive sins in what are referred to as indulgences. So there’s this idea, I’ll try not to go into too much detail about the treasury of Merit. But the idea is that you can, by giving money to the Church, buy forgiveness of sins to get yourselves so many years off of purgatory.

Indulgences and Corruption

So in this particular time, there was a lot of corruption in that they were trying to rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. And one of the ways they did this was that they sent these individuals out who were basically salesmen. And there was a saying, when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs. And the idea was that you give your money and you can get either your family members who have passed away, or maybe you in the future, time off of purgatory.

And so Luther is looking at this and he’s seeing people being taken advantage of at this point. He’s a professor, he’s teaching at the seminary, but he’s also a minister. He’s a priest in the Church in Wittenberg. And he sees this, and he’s seeing this as people who don’t really have the means to give, being taken advantage of for the purpose of rebuilding the St. Peter’s in Rome.

And so he writes up these theses, and part and parcel to it is that he’s saying, if the Pope has the authority to forgive sins, why doesn’t he just do it? If he can pull people out of Purgatory by the grace and loving kindness that he possesses, why doesn’t he just do it? Why do you have to pay him now?

That’s kind of an oversimplification of the 95 articulations of what he puts. But that’s a big part of it. And this gets him in trouble. It gets him in trouble because he’s really pushing against.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s making sense.

The Protestant Reformation and Scripture

WES HUFF: I think that’s part of it. And also he was at a very advantageous time. The printing press had just taken off. So it’s not that there were other, there weren’t other people who were challenging the Pope’s authority or the Magisterium’s ability, but because people then take his writings and they print them and through technology are able to get this out. And it’s just, you know, it catches wildfire.

Now all of a sudden, Luther’s teachings are all over Europe. And so the availability of the technological advancement aids the change and the questioning and all of these things. Well, so Luther is kind of championed with starting some of this, and then that proceeds into more and more, and even the questioning of, okay, at the time, the Bible is primarily read in Latin. It’s not widely available in the vernacular of the people.

And so Luther endeavors to translate the Bible into German, into the language that people can read. And this is also seen as controversial because the laity are not seen as being able to properly interpret the word of God. You need kind of the intermediaries of the priests and the powers that be to tell you exactly what’s going on.

And so these individuals are called the Reformers. They’re reforming the Church to go back. So there are these things. It’s like a tree and moss has grown all over it. And Luther is looking at this and he’s saying, there’s a tree in there, and it’s a good tree, and it’s a healthy tree, and it’s a beautiful tree. Let’s just shave all that moss off all of these traditions that we’ve developed.

And so the kind of cries of the Reformation are scripture alone, faith alone, by grace alone, to the glory of God alone. I actually have it inscribed on the side of my Bible right here. Sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christus, sola dea gloria. Right? Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

WES HUFF: And that was the cry of the Reformation is that they were saying, I mean, those ideas kind of got articulated in those Latin phrases a little bit later on. But the idea is that Scripture is unique in that it is the voice of God. It’s unique in what it is and what it does. And that doesn’t mean the tradition is not important. That doesn’t mean that the Church is not important, but it means that Scripture is our only sole, infallible rule of faith and practice for the Church.

That if you have a tradition, but the tradition contradicts or contravenes Scripture, then you go to Scripture. You don’t, the tradition is not on the same par, whereas in the Catholic Church, then and now, you do have the understanding of an infallible Church, an infallible magisterium, and an infallible Scripture, but they’re on more of an even playing field.

And so the Protestant Reformation said, no, no, no. Councils err, Popes err, people err, God doesn’t err. And so let’s go to Scripture. Let’s go to that which is infallible. Let’s make sure we’re doing our due diligence. You know, this didn’t make everyone a pope to themselves. We still, you have to read it within a proper understanding of the context and the history. There’s a meaning to the text, and you have to do your due diligence to get to that meaning.

But ultimately, in what this is and what it does, it’s unique, it has an ontological status of what it is. And it’s being. That is, as Peter says, all Scripture is, there’s this Greek word that uses theopnostas, God breathed. And so that’s different.

And I had a systematic theology professor when I was in grad school who always said, tradition has a voice, an emotion has a voice. They have a voice and they have a vote, but Scripture has the veto, because Scripture is the one that comes. Its origination is God alone.

And so in that sense, the Reformed tradition, following guys like Luther and Calvin and others, is the tradition within historical Protestantism that tries to focus on that. Those are the ideals of, you know, this is our plumb line. Everything else is measured against this. And people can get it wrong, Church leaders can get it wrong, popes can get it wrong. And they do, and they will.

But if this properly understood within its historical context, within digging into what it’s actually intending to say, the author had an intention. There are many applications, but there’s only one intention of the text insofar as it is communicated by the author, the human author inspired by God. But that’s kind of a brief overview, maybe insufficient of kind of the tradition that I find myself in. I am a Baptist, and I’m reformed.

SHAWN RYAN: You try to go all the way back to what it was written.

WES HUFF: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the thing that’s different about, say, the Protestant tradition, that’s different from maybe the Greek Orthodox tradition of the Roman Catholic tradition, is that Protestants aren’t attempting to look at the church within, say, the first hundred years and say they need to look exactly like me. Right. Like my church needs to look like a first century Galilean church.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t.

WES HUFF: I don’t. That’s not the claim. And it is in one sense the claim of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. And often kind of the accusation is that you’re not going to find anyone who looks like a Protestant within the early church. I don’t, I think that’s an overgeneralization.

But the claim is not, do the traditions that the Protestants adhere to within their church practice mirror exactly what the, like a church in the first, second, third century looked like as much as it is, are our beliefs at their central points of understanding and articulation, that which the early church articulated primarily from here. Right.

Because even, you know, even Paul writes to the churches in they’re included in Scripture. He writes to the church in Corinth and says, listen, you’re getting stuff wrong. Stop it. Right. So it’s not like if it’s earlier, it’s better necessarily.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

WES HUFF: We’re still going to get wrong things wrong. Right. Paul writes and he says, there’s a guy in your congregation. He’s sleeping with his, he’s sleeping with his, you know, mother in law. Stop it. That’s, that’s gross. It’s evil. And so it’s, it’s that there is a constant needing to be shaped by the word of God. And let the central teachings of what God has inspired be that thing which draws us together.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, good.

WES HUFF: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m learning a lot. Learning a lot today, Wesley. Let’s take one more break, and then I want to get into Dead Sea Scrolls.

WES HUFF: Let’s do it.

Modern Moral Questions and Biblical Guidance

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Wes, we’re back from the break, getting ready to dive into the Dead Sea Scrolls. But we had another offline conversation. I love these turns into rabbit holes. But we had an offline conversation about in vitro and that kind of got my mind triggered into, you know, there’s a lot of new things that are happening nowadays that with advances in technology that just weren’t even a possibility or even in anybody’s mind back then.

I would imagine in vitro being one of them, sex changes. There’s a whole slew of possibilities in present day that were not there back then. And so I’m just curious. I mean with the in vitro thing, you know, we just had that discussion. We don’t have to get into it if you don’t want to or we can, but point being, with all these new advances in technology and it’s, it is, I mean, shit, I don’t know what you would call it other than creation, but where do you send people to for guidance, for moral guidance on any one of these subjects?

WES HUFF: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And there’s a lot more that I didn’t mention.

WES HUFF: Oh, of course. I mean, AI alone. Right. When we’re talking about, there are all sorts of questions about consciousness in regards to what we’re looking at with AI. Like, is AI, is it solving the Turing Test? Can it recognize its own existence and reality? And it’s, there have been examples, I think, all throughout history of things that are spoken to directly within Scripture.

And so it’s easy when we were talking about moral prescriptions to just go to the place where the moral prescriptions apply and do this, don’t do this, that kind of thing. But there are so many things that are in these weird gray areas that, like whether you’re talking about pastors or counselors or theologians or whoever, it’s really hard to try to pin down. There isn’t just an easy, do this, don’t do this. Here’s what the outline says, you know, off air.

I was saying you don’t, you don’t open to second opinions. Chapter three. And you have that section on the exact thing you’re looking for. But I think what’s interesting about the Bible is that despite it being, you know, its most recent book, being 2,000 years old, it’s still informing our moral bases for so many things. We’re still using it in some ways as the guiding principles because it provides an objective framework to understand, you know, whether that’s when life begins, or things like consciousness or purpose or meaning or identity and how we understand things.

So I think that though there are issues that aren’t spoken to directly, we can look at examples that relate to some of the very different, very, not even within the consciousness of a first century author. But yet morality hasn’t changed. Good is good and bad is bad. And there’s still things that we need to parse through and figure out. How do we figure out the intricacies of that?

And I think that’s where something like Scripture can give us guiding principles to the best of our ability. Try to speak into those situations. Not always straightforward.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think any of the thing. I think one of them is pretty straightforward. I don’t think the other ones are very straightforward. I think, I mean, I don’t think in vitro is. I don’t know. You know, I don’t know what I honestly, I didn’t know what I thought about it until about 20 minutes ago.

WES HUFF: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, and then I thought, I was like, huh, that’s an interesting question. You know, and I mean, there’s actually something has come up in my own life. I mean I’ve, I talk a lot about defense tech here and I’ve got the opportunities to invest in some major defense tech firms. And I thought, or companies. And I thought after the, after I made the investments I was actually, there was one pending, but I had already invested in another one in a defense tech company.

But then the question after I did it popped up into my head, shit, should I have invested in this? This is, I mean, what do we use these things for?

WES HUFF: Yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And then in the same, on the other hand it’s like, well, yeah, I should have invested in this because this might be the very same damn thing that saves my kids way of life.

WES HUFF: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, in the future. And so it’s, but it’s a question that I don’t know if I could find the answer to in there because they didn’t have defense tech firms back then. And I don’t know if you could even invest in, I don’t know, a spear maker.

Just War Theory and Christian Responsibility

WES HUFF: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know what, it’s interesting you do have similar conversations within the early church period because you have say, Roman soldiers who come to faith. And you do have instances where, say especially in the time of Augustine, St. Augustine, where you have the conversations, if you are a Roman soldier and you’ve now come to faith, can you really be integrated into the Christian community?

And that’s where the whole concept of just war theory, particularly fleshed out by St. Augustine comes into purview where, you know, when is it right to fight? What do we truly understand contextually about a passage like turn the other cheek? What does that mean? Is it, you know, always be passive? Is a complete cessation of any type of self defense what scripture is teaching? I don’t think so. I think Augustine got it right and he outlines that. So there are instances of that.

SHAWN RYAN: What did he outline?

WES HUFF: Well, he outlined basically that, you know, he has these precepts and he says it is right to defend the weak. It is right to make sure that, you know, injustice is not being done. Paul says that the government has the authority to wield the sword. And so there’s a right that’s actually given to the powers that be in order to enact justice.

Now we especially Christians, it is likewise our duty to speak into that and make sure that the magistrates, the officials are not doing that unjustly. So there’s an accountability of speaking into the laws that are being enacted in order that God gives the authority to whether it’s the pharaoh or the Caesar, the emperor or the king or the governor or the president of the prime minister. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is right just because God gives them that power.

So we need to hold them accountable when they are not doing that justly right. When the laws, because what is a law? A law is prescribed morality. When people say you can’t force people to be moral, like you can’t prescribe your morality, well, do not murder is prescribed morality. So there’s always going to be a level of that where as a Christian, I want our society to live by the laws that Scripture actually dictates. I think that’s going to be better for it.

Now, a good society is one where people’s hearts are changed, not just their actions. And so it goes beyond simply making people do things, because if there’s one thing we find out time and time again is that you can make a law. But we’re really good at trying to find the loopholes. We’re really good at maybe we’ll obey it to not get in trouble. But the good society, the just society, is one where you want people to actually their hearts are changed in order that they actually want to obey because they understand why it is good for them, for society, for the world to do those things.

But Augustine looks at these things and he says war is okay as long as it is done for the right reasons. Like I think we would look at something like World War II and we would look at the tyranny and the injustice of the Holocaust and we would say it was right for nations to get involved in that, to stop that from happening. That doesn’t mean that, you know, it’s perfect that everything works out in this nice, tied up with a bow way. But those kind of understandings of the world around us and safeguarding the weak and looking after those who are marginalized and taking care of people who are being abused. I think that there is a place for that.

God’s Justice and Israel’s Role

And we see that within the enacting of Israel. In the ancient world being under theocracy, God is their leader. And God is actually enacting his justice when he tells them to go and wipe out certain nations. Because as the people of God being his hand of justice in the world at that point. Now, mind you, this is descriptive, right? It’s telling us what happened. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not saying, okay, Sean and Wes, you go and do likewise. Now this is a different situation. It’s telling us what happened.

But at the exact same time, we do have an example of God is judging groups of people because they are evil. He’s using Israel to do that. He’s using people to do that. And a lot of the time I will have, you know, skeptics, atheists, agnostics talk about, you know, if God is so good, why doesn’t he do anything in the world? You know, why isn’t he stopping evil?

Well, I think we actually have some instances of God stopping evil. And ironically, those are oftentimes when people say, oh, look, a bad God is. He’s wiping out these people. In the grand scheme of things, there’s a context to that. He was, he’s told Abraham, “I’m going to give you land. I’m going to give you a nation. But the sins of the Amorites has not come to its full fruition. So you’re going to wait 400 years.”

And he waits. They wait 400 years for those people to repent. God is being gracious and slow to his judgment there. And they don’t, they don’t repent, they get worse. And so when that time comes after the Exodus, they’re going to the land, the people are bad, they’re evil, and so God judges them.

So I think pacifism is not necessarily what I believe Scripture teaches. But you look at what Augustine articulates in saying, you know, there needs to be an evenhandedness in this. There needs to be a carefulness to this. You know, he even says that the defeated peoples shouldn’t feel disgruntled at the end of the battle. That’s really hard to do. Maybe that’s too ideal of a situation.

But unfortunately, going forward from that, especially into the Middle Ages, everybody who pointed to Augustine as a justification for war kind of ignored all of the things that he laid out and only saw fighting. You’re allowed to fight. So it didn’t always go the way it should have gone.

Accountability and Moral Responsibility

But, you know, it’s a good example in terms of you saying, you know, I having reservations about contributing financially and what’s the downstream effect of something like arms, you know, or anything else? These aren’t easy black and white topics. But I think, I trust, I hope that what I see in Scripture is that God is not going to judge us based on what we don’t know. He’s going to judge us on what we do know, and I think God is going to be gracious with us in that if we are. There’s caveats to this, obviously, but God judges those who know better, worse.

We have a story of this. I was reading this recently. So there’s First and Second Samuel are two books which are really kind of one book in the Old Testament. And you have close to the beginning of First Samuel, I have this story where the Israelites are defeated in a battle, and the enemies, the Philistines, they take the Ark of the Covenant, which the Israelites have kind of prematurely brought into battle with them because they think it’s going to be some sort of magic fix.

It’s captured and the Philistines just pick it up, they take it away and they put it in the Temple of Dagon. It causes all sorts of problems because the idol of Dagon falls over and breaks. And they’re like, we need to get this thing out of here. Right? The God of the Israelites is causing us too much trouble. But they just pick it up and they leave.

Whereas if you go to Second Samuel, there’s a guy named Uzzah, and the Israelites, once again, they’re kind of playing fast and loose with God’s laws. They go into a battle and they’re moving the Ark of the Covenant, but they’re not moving it how God actually told them to move it. They put it on a cart and it’s being carried with oxen, whereas they’re supposed to have four priests carrying it on either side and march with it.

Well, they’re improperly and inappropriately carrying the Ark of the Covenant. And the wheel of the wagon hits a pothole or whatever, and the Ark becomes unsteady. And Uzzah, who’s right there, puts his hand out to steady the Ark, he touches the Ark and he immediately dies.

And you read that. I remember reading that as a teenager and thinking, wait, hold on. The Philistines in First Samuel, they just pick the thing up, they just take it and they leave. What’s going on here? I think this is a good example of, you know, Uzzah was part of a nation that said, “I’m going to obey laws. I’m going to obey the good laws that God has given us as a chosen people, as an example to the surrounding nations.”

And there’s a responsibility there of what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to, the standard that I’m supposed to be held by. And so Uzzah knew better. The group that he was with knew better than to move the ark in the way that they were doing. That was inappropriate of them to do that. So because they knew better, God judged them based on that accountability. Accountability was higher.

And so when he touches the ark, he dies, because the ark is a dangerous thing. But he knows it’s a dangerous thing. And he should know better than to just kind of very glibly be treating the presence of God on the mercy seat like he is. Whereas the Philistines don’t know any better. Now, it still causes them lots of trouble, and they need to get it out of their camp eventually.

But I think in telling that story, what I’m communicating there is that there’s a level of accountability. Not that God is arbitrary and subjective in the way that he treats us, but I think that we are going to be judged on the basis of what we do know, not on what we don’t know. And that doesn’t mean that our sin is insufficient. That doesn’t mean that our sin is winked at.

But the exact same time, I think there are certain things that we need to weigh based on our conscience and on the level of accountability and understanding that we are given and do our best to operate on that knowledge. And sometimes that’s not easy. Sometimes it is. I think this is why we should seek the wisdom and the understanding of people who know a lot more than we do, who are wise, who have walked through these things, who are, you know, elders in our, you know, whether that’s…

SHAWN RYAN: That’s why you’re here.

WES HUFF: Well, that’s why also I’m here to learn from you. But so I think we should continually be trying to mature and trying to learn, but at the exact same time, you know, there’s going to be things that I do that I’m going to realize in retrospect, maybe, oh, I should have done that very differently. And that’s okay. But we should be trying to do our due diligence to try to the best of our ability to conform that to scripture and the right teaching that God reveals to us.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. A little bit ago when I had mentioned, when I called it creation, I thought I noticed your face kind of change there all of a sudden.

WES HUFF: I did.

SHAWN RYAN: What is your definition of creation? Did I strike a chord there accidentally?

WES HUFF: Not that I am aware of. Maybe that’s an involuntary face twitch. Okay. But maybe I need to see my doctor. Get that looked after. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really interesting, the topic of creation.

Modern Technology and Creation

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, when I brought it up, we were talking about in vitro. But then I think about what else are we doing? We can, we now have the ability to clone people, clone animals. We can clone humans. We have organs. Yeah, we’re growing organs. We can grow organs in a basically a plastic bag now. Or if you’re China or a bad guy, you can just harvest them.

But you know what I mean. So all these things. And I get, I don’t know what else to call it other than creation. But you know, like what I’m just, what are your thoughts on all of that? I think it’s not, it’s different.

WES HUFF: Yeah, I know. I’ve heard some people link…

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, putting a chip in your head.

WES HUFF: Exactly. I’ve heard some people argue that this is evidence that we don’t need God. Right. Like we can create, we can make life. What I always think is interesting about…

SHAWN RYAN: That’s interesting, is that what this is all about? Is this, I mean, in the grand scheme of things and the battle of good and evil, is that all of that going to create a godless society?

The Image of God and Human Creativity

WES HUFF: Well, I think if anything, what it points to is that all of these things need an originator, they need a creator. Like, and we are created in the image of God, who is himself the author of creation. And so I think it’s just part and parcel. It makes sense that we would then try to create something in our image, whether you’re talking about AI or whether you’re talking about computer models or whatever.

All of that just in my mind points to the fact that we’re just patterning ourselves after our own creator. And all of these things, whether it’s a beautiful painting or a work of art or, you know, how an artist puts together visually, there are all different ways that that can manifest. These are testimonies to our ability to exemplify what God has instilled in us as humanity.

There’s something unique about humanity that other living things on this planet just don’t do. They don’t do it in the same way. You can get an elephant to paint a picture with its trunk. But is it really meditating on the beauty and the aspects and the angles? If a monkey painted the Mona Lisa, would it be really thinking about the expression on the individual’s face and how that might be understood by the viewer?

All of these things, I think, are unique to humanity. There’s something about us, something about this species on this planet that is just completely different than every other species. And I think as technology advances and you get to something like AI or Neuralink, in my mind, these are just testimonies to we are endowed with an ability to create.

The Sabbath and the Lord of Creation

I mean, that’s the whole concept of the Sabbath. Within the old covenant system, you work six days, but the seventh day you rest, and it’s not resting. You know, God doesn’t rest on the seventh day because God is tired. God rests because he is viewing his creation and he’s just looking over it.

And so there’s an understanding within, I think you see how ancient Jewish writings talk about, okay, why do we rest on the Sabbath? What is the purpose of this? There’s all sorts of reasons why. One of them is that there’s an understanding that the only being in this universe that has the authority to create is God. And we create six days a week, and we stop to acknowledge that God is the author of creation, not us.

And so all of our creative acts are going to be an expression of that everything from nothing act of God, right, ex nihilo. But we pause to reflect on the fact that that doesn’t come from me. That comes from the image that I bear.

And this is why it’s so significant when Jesus calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath. When he’s accused of working on the Sabbath, it’s in all four gospels. In John, it’s a little bit different. He says, “My father is working until now, and I’m also working.”

But if you kind of put that in the framework of Jesus’s historical context, and you look at some of the articulations of ancient Jewish understanding of what the Sabbath is, when Jesus says, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” there’s an aspect of what he’s saying that is, I’m the only one who’s allowed to work on this day.

And what he’s really claiming, even the Jews get very mad at him for it, is, you saw that sunrise in the morning? That was me. I did that. I’m the Lord of the Sabbath. So, you know, being accused of picking some heads of grain with his disciples and eating on Saturday, he’s saying, listen, I’m in control of all of this.

And so that goes over our heads because we don’t have a framework for it. Jesus’s claims to be God are not him saying, “I am God, worship me.” It’s said in a much more Jewish accent than that. But they are no less a claim of divinity.

Jesus as the Author of Creation

And so when you look at these understandings of what the Sabbath is, of who God is and how he’s the one who is the author of creation, which, by the way, is the title that’s given to Jesus. He’s also said to be the author of creation, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

In John chapter one, in Colossians chapter one and Hebrews chapter one, all three of those authors give this exhaustive list that nothing was made without Jesus, that everything was made for him and by him. Paul exhausts the prepositions. The author of Hebrews calls him the progenitor of all things, in the exact image and likeness of God.

And it’s a reflection of our character that we also then create because we’re made in the image of a God who is an artist, who paints a picture of the universe with his words.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, you brought up the Ark of the Covenant. What is that?

The Ark of the Covenant

WES HUFF: The Ark of the Covenant was the presence of God on earth in the Old Testament. So you have eventually the temple being made, or prior to that is the tabernacle. And then you have this really interesting box that God tells the Israelites to make. And he says, “I’m going to dwell with you with the presence,” the presence in the garden.

So you go all the way back to Genesis chapter one, and Adam and Eve have this communicative relationship with God in a very unique way. In fact, when they eat of the fruit and they realize their shame in their nakedness and they hide, it says that they heard the Lord God walking in the cool of the day. And so there’s a presence there that’s tangible and real.

But that, as I was talking about before, that separation from God, it’s created a rift in that relationship. And so the rift has made the proximity to God dangerous. And eventually what you get in God’s chosen people, the Israelites having the presence of God in the tabernacle and in the temple, God says, “I’m going to dwell with you, but you need to be careful. You need to be careful with this.”

So there’s a particular way that you’re going to build this. And my presence, my glory is going to exist on the top of this box. And that’s the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, interestingly enough, when Jesus comes around, John’s Gospel starts out, “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But then in John 1:14, it says, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

And that word that we translate as “made his dwelling” is actually the same word that is used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, translated prior to Jesus for “tabernacled.” So referring to the tent that the Ark of the Covenant, which held the presence of God, had.

So I think it’s very overt. It would have been far more overt to the Jewish reader. Some translations just say “made his presence,” “made his dwelling.” There are some translations that say “tabernacled among us.” But I think the Jewish reader who’s reading the Greek there, if they were aware of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, would have immediately thought, he’s talking about God’s presence. He’s talking about what was dwelling over the Ark of the Covenant.

And guess what? God is with us again. But it’s in Jesus. Jesus is that presence. He’s dwelling with us. He’s walking with us. He’s in the midst of his people. And that’s what ultimately, you know, in Revelation, in the last book of the Bible, it says that that presence is going to be there in the new heavens and the new earth.

The Fulfillment of the Old Covenant

And so the Ark of the Covenant was part of this old covenantal system, which is always meant to point to something. And this is, if people are interested in this, reading the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament, the whole theme is how all of these things in the old covenant were shadows cast by Jesus.

All of these things are fulfilled. You like Moses? Jesus is the new Moses. You like the priestly system? Jesus is the priest who’s never going to die. He’s always going to intercede on your behalf. You like the angels? Jesus is greater than the angels. You like the temple? Jesus has fulfilled the temple. You are now the presence of the Holy Spirit. You are now the temple.

So it’s all of these things. It’s an amazing book in that way, and it’s talking to Jews who are tempted to go back. They’ve been ostracized from the pagan Greco-Roman culture of their day. And now they’re proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah and they’re being ostracized by their Jewish communities as well.

The author of Hebrews says, there’s nothing to go back to. Don’t be tempted. Jesus is the fulfillment of all these things. Don’t go back to the shadows when you know what casts them. It’s just foolish.

And ultimately part of that is that, you know, that presence of God in the tabernacle, there was a curtain in front of the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant was in the Temple. And in the Gospels it says that when Jesus died, the curtain was actually ripped in two.

And there’s a symbolic meaning in there in that the divide between the priests who get to go into the Holy of Holies once a year on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, well now that divide has been eradicated because the author of Hebrews says you have a priest who now intercedes on your behalf, where you can go into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, you can talk to God directly.

So that was a long-winded answer to what the Ark of the Covenant is.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, The Dead Sea Scrolls.

WES HUFF: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What are they?

The Dead Sea Scrolls

WES HUFF: So the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish writings. They were discovered between 1947 and 1956. We have discovered some since then, just fragments, but the story is that there were some Bedouin on the northwest side of the Dead Sea between the border of Israel and Jordan, and they were herding some sheep and they discovered these jars full of documents.

So in the Roman-Jewish wars, which happened kind of into the mid-late first century, but after Jesus, which also ultimately culminated in 70 A.D. when Rome marched into Jerusalem and they sacked Jerusalem and they destroyed the temple, these Jews went and they hid, kind of maybe knowing that danger was coming, they hid these documents in these caves in the hills along the coast of the northwest side of the Dead Sea.

That’s why they’re called the Dead Sea Scrolls, because that’s the location, 11 caves altogether that they were discovered in, probably with the intention to come back and get them when things had simmered down. But they got wiped out and so they never had the chance to go back and get them.

So ironically, the arid environment of the region there preserved these things for close to 2,000 years. We discovered them in, like I said, the late 1940s into the 1950s. And they revealed a ton, around 970 documents in between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments. So some of them are entire books. Others of them are very, very fragmentary. They need to be pieced together.

Now, interestingly enough, the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibition at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. right now.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh really?

WES HUFF: And I will actually be giving a tour on March 28th, the Dead Sea Scrolls. So if people are listening and this goes out in time, you can actually have a tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls with me in my partnership with the Museum of the Bible. But otherwise, I think it’s worth seeing. I think these are probably the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

The Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls

WES HUFF: And they shed so much light on ancient Judaism leading up to the time of Jesus in understandings of different Jewish thought and practice. But also every book of the Bible, apart from two of the Old Testament, was discovered in these.

And some of them were so well preserved that what they did is they pushed back our understanding of the text of the Bible close to a thousand years, sometimes even further than that. Because for a long time our copies of particularly the Hebrew Old Testament, so we had translations, I’ve referred to the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Those have existed for a long time. It’s called the Septuagint, is one of the mainstreams of the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

Most people in the time of Jesus were speaking and reading Greek, if they were able to read, because that was the lingua franca, the language of the day. And so about 200 years prior to Jesus, a bunch of the books, particularly the Torah, the first five books of the Bible were translated from the Hebrew into the Greek.

And then as time went on, more and more books were translated of the Old Testament into Greek. So that started about the third century B.C. It didn’t really finish until the first century A.D. But our Hebrew copies of most of the Old Testament were from the Middle Ages for a long, long time.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Preservation

WES HUFF: And what the Dead Sea Scrolls did is all of a sudden we have pre-first century copies of some of these books and we’re able to compare them, to compare something like the great Psalm scroll or the great Isaiah scroll with copies of what’s called the Masoretic text, which is the text of the Hebrew Bible from the Middle Ages copied by these scribes, the Masoretes.

And they’re surprisingly similar, shockingly similar. Some of them are exact, not all of them are. But the testimony of the fidelity between the time when we get something like the Leningrad Codex in the Middle Ages to something like the Dead Sea Scrolls is a huge gap. And yet you have now evidence of this faithful copying process over the centuries of scribes to the point where you can follow them, you know, to the letter and see the fidelity of these texts.

SHAWN RYAN: Is there any New Testament in there?

WES HUFF: No. So it’s all Old Testament. So the thing with the Dead Sea Scrolls is that most of them predate Jesus. Some of them are written in around the time when Jesus was living. But they’re mostly the writings we think of a group called the Essenes, who were a sectarian group of Jews who had removed themselves from the Jerusalem community and gone out into the desert in this area called Qumran.

So they were a, if you read the New Testament, you’re going to hear about groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Essenes were a group aside from that, and they had gone out into the desert and they had kind of their own rules and regulations, but they also copied a lot of these books.

And so along with a lot of other books, they had, like, rules and wrote about what their religious practices were and then had some other theological writings that they deemed valuable. But they clearly viewed what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the scriptures, as incredibly important, as scriptural, as their guiding principles.

But they often viewed the propheticness of those as applying to their day right then and there. Like, they thought kind of apocalyptically that they were going to be the reason why, you know, everything was solved because of their very faithful practice.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay?

WES HUFF: In Jerusalem, they’d capitulated. They were, you know, in bed with Rome and they’d removed themselves. They were pure, they were holy. And they had some other, you know, practices that were a little bit more sectarian and dogmatic there.

So not all of the documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls are part of the Qumran community. A lot of them are. But then there are other writings from groups that were hidden in the caves that kind of, and then some of them are just, like, very unusual. There’s a treasure map.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a treasure map, too.

The Copper Scroll Mystery

WES HUFF: So it’s known as the Copper Scroll. So it’s the only one that’s not on either parchment or on papyrus, but it’s on very thin sheets of copper, and it’s rolled up and it’s a treasure map with all of these locations of a lot of gold and silver, really.

So some people have tried to kind of decode it and figure out where, you know, is this some of the stuff that’s the treasure from the temple, is this, you know, some of the treasure of Solomon from the Old Testament? It’s not entirely clear, but it does appear to be like, the person who wrote it does seem to think that this is where treasure is.

But that’s kind of an outlier. A lot of the others have to do with religious practice or kind of historical scriptural things.

SHAWN RYAN: What percentage of this is in the Bible or is a book in the Bible?

WES HUFF: So about, so all of the books of the Bible, apart from one prophetic book and Esther were found in amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s also in a number of different languages, so about 75% of it is written in Hebrew, but some of it is written in Greek and some in Aramaic. And a minority, a very small minority in Nabataean.

So that’s where it’s like, it’s kind of a grouping. The Dead Sea Scrolls is an umbrella term for all of these writings. They just happen to be discovered in these 11 caves on the northwest side of the Dead Sea. But they’re incredibly important and shed light on even things like there’s one particular manuscript which talks about the Messiah and talks about the Messiah in divine terms.

And so this kind of sheds light on our understanding of accusations that early Christians are imposing a foreign idea onto Jesus. The Messiah was going to be a divine figure. Well, we have actually some texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls which actually do kind of indicate that the Messiah who’s about to come, this anointed one, he’s actually going to have a divine quality to him that exceeds just a mere man.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re writing about this before he came. Really?

Messianic Expectations in the Dead Sea Scrolls

WES HUFF: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was the expectation that the Messiah was going to come. So that’s going on all throughout the Old Testament period. But the Essenes, they have an understanding that there’s going to be two Messiahs, one from the line of Aaron, who’s going to be a priestly messiah, and one from the line of David, who’s going to be a kingly messiah.

And that these people are going to fulfill the expectation of making all things right with the nation of Israel, particularly their kind of sect of Israel that they see as the pure one. And part of that was going to be they were going to drive out the Romans and make all things right.

And they have a lot of writings about them being the children of light. And it’s going to, they’re going to defeat the children of darkness, which could be assumed as, you know, the Greeks or the Romans or whoever. But either way, they’re very apocalyptic in their understanding of these things.

SHAWN RYAN: What else have we learned from them?

The Book of Enoch and Ancient Jewish Literature

WES HUFF: I mean, they’re very, I mean, the Dead Sea Scrolls are so fascinating because they shed so much understanding on, like, how Jews were, say, parsing out some of the things within the Old Testament that may be we’d like to know more about. So something like the Enochian literature.

So there’s the Book of Enoch. So there’s actually three Books of Enoch, first, second and third Enoch. The one that’s typically referred to as the Book of Enoch is first Enoch and some, it’s an amalgamated group of different literature. The Book of the Watchers, the Book of the Giants, the Book of Parables, these kinds of things that we all put into one book that we call First Enoch, some of it’s really old.

And actually, right now on display at the Museum of the Bible, you can see a fragment of Astronomical Enoch, which is on display, I think, for the first time ever. I don’t think it’s ever been displayed, this fragment of astronomical Enoch.

But what the documents that make up what we call First Enoch are trying to extrapolate on is what’s going on before the flood. So you have in Genesis, chapter six, this very, you know, cryptic passage of the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they came and they slept with them, and these women gave birth to these children that were the Nephilim, that were the heroes of old men of renowned.

And so there’s a bunch of different interpretations in the ancient world as to what this means. The Greek translation of the Old Testament translates Nephilim as gigas, which is giants. And so there’s one particular understanding of that, and there’s both a kind of naturalistic explanation that the sons of God weren’t necessarily angels.

But then there’s another stream of interpretation that’s fleshed out in something like the Book of Enoch where it talks about, okay, well, who are these sons of God? And so why were they, why, what were their progeny? What were the Nephilim? And how did this come into being?

And so it kind of does this through a narrative about the great grandfather of Noah, Enoch, and fleshes some of these things out. And this goes into, like, a long history of leading up to the New Testament where there’s a, you know, the demons kind of show up in the New Testament. There really isn’t all that much said in the Old Testament about demons.

But in some of this ancient Jewish literature that’s incorporated and found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have some of these discussions of things like, what are the demons? Well, there was a pretty strong thread of thinking within ancient Judaism that demons were disembodied spirits of the Nephilim.

So the Nephilim, if you’re taking a supernatural understanding of who they are, their fathers are angels and their mothers are humans. So they’re kind of these half supernatural, half carnal things. So when they die, their spirits don’t have anywhere to go. So now they’re trapped and they’re wandering the earth.

They’re aimless, and they’re constantly trying to get back into a physical form. And so they possess people. And because they’re not really meant to do that because they’re these wayward supernatural beings, it never really works out. And they end up making people do all sorts of crazy things.

And they’re cursed because they’re the progeny of fallen angels. And so there’s all this stuff. So some of this literature is fleshing that out. Now, is that really what’s going on? I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think about that?

The Book of Enoch and Ancient Jewish Literature

WES HUFF: I think it’s very, very interesting. I think some of it makes sense. I think on things that Scripture whispers about, I don’t want to yell too loudly. I’m very cautious. I think it’s entirely plausible given what we see within Scripture and the fact that it’s not 100% clear exactly what demons or even angels are, but that’s what something like the Book of Enoch is trying to flesh out.

And so some of this literature kind of falls into the category of what’s called pseudepigraphical writing. So pseudo means false, right? In Greek. And grapheme means writing. So it’s a false writing. So it’s attributed to an author who’s not really the author or about an author that’s not necessarily meant to be thought of realistically as that author.

So Enoch, the Book of Enoch almost certainly wasn’t written pre-flood in the time of Enoch. And there’s all sorts of ways that we can tease that out. Even the timekeeping that it includes is very influenced by the Hellenistic timekeeping, the Greek timekeeping in the day. There are allusions to the Book of Daniel, to the book of Deuteronomy and the Book of Numbers, which are in the Enochian literature, which means that they’re probably being written after those. And especially with the Book of Daniel, which is in the Persian period that’s quite late.

And even some ancient Jewish writers like Josephus, who comes around at the end of the first century, very beginning of the second century, when he has his conversation in a writing of his where he’s talking about Scripture, he specifically says that nothing was written before Moses. So he kind of disqualifies Enoch as being, you know, this is claiming to be written prior to. There’s no scripture that’s written prior to that. So that’s kind of his category of articulating that.

But I mean, these things are, you look at the ancient world and how they’re trying to flesh things out. And though they’re in some ways very ambiguous, like Scripture tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know. But I don’t think that that means that we cancel out any idea of a theory or a probability or a possibility of, say, you know, what is a demon. I don’t claim to totally know, but I think it’s very interesting that the Jews themselves, in the ancient world prior to and leading up to and during the time of Jesus, they’re also discussing these things, wrestling with them, and coming up with these ideas that we can read too. Interesting and kind of like postulate on.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Canon

SHAWN RYAN: Why did, well, how many Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t make it? How many of the scrolls did not make it into the Bible?

WES HUFF: So, yeah, so I mean, part of the trickiness, like I said before, is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind of an umbrella category. It’s like saying library, right? Like, there’s a whole bunch. There’s a range of literature. So by the time in and around Jesus, the Protestant, what we have in the Protestant Old Testament was, I would argue, established as the Hebrew Scriptures.

So modern orthodox Jews today, their Bible is the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi’im and the Ketuvim, the law, the prophets and the writings. That’s the same number of books that are in a Protestant Old Testament. So there are other books that are also included in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like I said, some of them are apocalyptic. The War Scroll is a really interesting one, which is, you know, another apocalypse.

So we have an apocalyptic book in our Bible, Revelation. Right. But apocalypses weren’t that uncommon in ancient Jewish writings. In fact, Enoch is in many ways an apocalyptic book, but the War Scroll is an apocalyptic book. And so there’s different categories that are included within the Dead Sea Scrolls.

SHAWN RYAN: But what do you mean different? I mean, it sounds like the way I’m hearing that is there’s different apocalypses. Is that what you’re saying?

WES HUFF: So apocalypse is just a category of literature. It’s like saying biography or letter. So the one that ends up in the Bible is the Book of Revelation. And that’s tied to specifically the John who’s, you know, traditionally associated with John the apostle of Jesus.

The Formation of the New Testament Canon

And so when we’re talking about the canon of Scripture, what books are or aren’t included in our Bible, what the early church is doing, first of all, they have a direct connection in association with the early Jesus community. So there’s a chain of custody in that there are individuals who are disciples of the disciples of Jesus.

So you have guys like, so the dagger I gave you is named after Irenaeus. Irenaeus is part of a community where they’re called the Apostolic Fathers, where their own teachers are the apostles. So in one sense, the earliest Jesus community has a direct line of communication with people who knew Jesus, okay?

And so when they’re talking about, okay, you had the old covenant, and there were books that were associated with the old covenant, right? God makes a covenant with Moses. You have the Torah, you have the law, God makes covenant with Israel, you have prophetic writings. And there was an understanding in ancient Judaism that covenant and writings were intricately connected.

So Jesus comes along, he establishes the new covenant. He establishes even, like the signs of that in the Last Supper, in the Eucharist to the Lord’s table. And the apostles see themselves as kind of the arbiters of the new covenant. So the natural question for the earliest Christians who were Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, is, okay, new covenant, where are the books? Because that understanding is carried over. It’s an ancient Jewish understanding. God makes a promise, he makes a covenant with the people, and it’s followed up by books. We have the new covenant, where are the books? Kind of the natural, organic question that follows that.

And so very, very early on, the four biographies of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they are being read as scripture. Justin Martyr, this early Christian writer, refers to them as the memoirs of the apostles. He says when Christians gather together early in the morning, they read the memoirs of the apostles.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

WES HUFF: And the letters of Paul are very early, collected together and even in one single document. So we, in the late second, early third century, we have two collections of manuscripts. One, they’re referred to as P46 and P45. And those are a grouping of the fourfold gospel canon in Acts and Paul’s letters. So like I said before, most of these are circulating independently.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

Early Manuscript Collections and Apostolic Authority

WES HUFF: As like, you have a copy of Paul’s letter to Romans, because once again, it’s super expensive, right? I mentioned Codex Vaticanus earlier. There’s another one, Codex Sinaiticus, which comes from the 4th century. It would have taken 360 sheep to make. So, like, no small commitment and effort and financial, you know, contribution. So you would usually just have them in single books.

But the four gospels, we do find collections of them all together. And whenever we have conversations of what is scripture, there’s very little debate about the Gospels. And there’s knowledge of other gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Philip, but they’re always mentioned in connection of saying they have no connection to the actual apostles. We know what are the documents that have connection to the apostles. It’s Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospel of Thomas doesn’t. It’s a forgery, it’s false. Thomas was dead by the time it was written.

So we have early Christians talking about this stuff. And in going back to your original question, like when we have these conversations on canon, the Christians are wrestling. Some books are a shoe in. The Gospels we can tie directly to Matthew, he was a disciple of Jesus. John, he was a disciple of Jesus. Luke is a traveling companion to Paul and Mark is intricately and closely tied to Peter. So those are kind of a shoo in, right? And then you have the letters of Paul, those are kind of a shoo in.

But then you have questions about some of the others and some of those questions have to do with the fact that you have other letters floating around with apostles’ names. So in our New Testaments we have First, Second and Third John, right? The letters of John and First and Second Peter, those took a little bit longer for the dust to settle on to get into what we would consider as like a closed canon.

And it was partly because the early Christians were looking and they were saying okay, there are other groups writing documents and they’re co-opting popular figures’ names like Peter and like John because those are very, you know, key individuals in the early Jesus community. So we need to do our due diligence because we have First and Second Peter, we have this other writing called the Gospel of Peter. We have an Apocalypse of Peter, we have an Acts of Peter. Let’s make sure we know, let’s make sure we’re actually reading the book that is tied to the actual Peter.

And so some of these books take a little bit longer to get full wide acceptance and I think that’s a good thing. And in terms of like books that are maybe found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are like other Jewish writings, the Jews had already fleshed a lot of that out in that they saw some of these books as very valuable, very like key into the historical understandings of the Jewish nation, especially during the time of the Greek occupation and the Hasmonean revolt. And like these are important writings but the Jews didn’t consider them scripture.

Jewish Scripture and the Old Testament Canon

And we can look at individuals like I mentioned before Josephus, who talk about this and kind of lay out guidelines and say like here’s, we don’t have an innumerable books of holy scripture like the Greeks do. We have a set number and here’s how we understand that set number. And Paul says in the Book of Romans that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

And so part of the conversation of the Old Testament scripture is, okay, some people, like Jerome in the 4th century, who’s responsible for putting together the Latin Vulgate, which was the Latin copy of the Bible that was the Bible of the church for a thousand years, he goes back and he’s a very competent linguist. So he knows Greek and Hebrew. And he’s going back and he’s talking with rabbis and he’s saying, okay, well, why do you consider Scripture? What are these conversations? And there’s kind of a disagreement between him and Augustine about some Old Testament books.

But, and so there are all these conversations happening. But ultimately the dust does settle, and there is an established core of books, and that’s the 66. The 66 that’s in this Bible are the established core. And there’s debate about some others even leading up to the Reformation, which is why Luther says, you know, let’s not worry about some of these other books that there’s continual debate for that. You know, even some popes are saying, that’s not Scripture. Let’s stick to the ones that we know.

The Jews themselves considered scripture, and that’s the central core, and that’s what we will hold to as the Word of God. But all that to say it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls that kind of elucidate some of our understandings of that in looking at, okay, what were some of these groups reading? And maybe how were they treating these books in the way that they were copying them? That sheds light on some of these conversations.

SHAWN RYAN: Are the other books that aren’t in the Bible, are they published somewhere? Can you get them?

The Deuterocanonical Books and the Apocrypha

WES HUFF: Oh, yeah. I mean, a Roman Catholic Bible will have what’s called the Deuterocanonical books. So Deuterocanon means second canon. So to give the Roman Catholic Church their due, they would say second in reception, not second in authority.

So they were officially pronounced as part of the official canon at the Council of Trent in the, after the Reformation, there was a Counter Reformation after the Protestant Reformation. And that’s when those books were officially designated as, these are included in Scripture.

So you can get, Protestants typically refer to it as the apocrypha, which is just a designation that goes back to the ancient church for books that are not canonical. You’re canonical or you’re apocryphal. Doesn’t mean all apocryphal books are heretical. They’re just not part of Scripture.

But you can read them. Yeah, first and second and third Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, you know, the Bell and the Dragon. There’s an extra chapter of the Psalms. These are, I think, good, useful books to read. I would encourage everybody to read them because I do think that they shed light on our understanding of ancient Jewish culture.

And something like the Maccabees tell us about the story of Hanukkah, where you had the Greeks, they go in and they take over Jerusalem. And the Greek emperor goes in and he desecrates the temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar of God to Zeus. So like, bad news bears all over the place, right?

And then Judas Maccabeus, Judas, the hammer, he goes in and he defeats them and he rededicates the temple to God. And that’s Hanukkah. This is this story that happens prior to the time of Jesus. And then you get to Jesus, and in the Gospel of John, it talks about Jesus going to Jerusalem, to the temple for the feast of dedication. That’s Hanukkah.

So something like the Maccabees can actually shed a lot of light on what’s going on, even in how we understand what Jesus is doing in his own day. Like, why do Jews today celebrate Hanukkah? Well, it’s about this historical event that took place prior to Jesus, and we read about that in these very valuable books, these historical books.

But the differentiation is, are these considered scripture? And as a Protestant, I would say no. And I would say that there are good historical reasons to believe that going through all of the conversations of the last 2,000 years. But I think people should read them whether they think that they’re scriptural or not.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s in the, what you call the War Scroll?

WES HUFF: Yeah, the War Scroll.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s that about?

WES HUFF: So that’s the battle. So it’s either called the War scroll or the battle of the sons of light versus the sons of darkness. And it’s this big cosmic battle of kind of the Essenes, the Qumran community, seeing themselves as the ones that are holding down the fort for the people of God.

So the high priest under David in the Old Testament was a guy named Zadok. So they see themselves as kind of successors of the high priest under David, and they see themselves as the ones who are undefiled from all of the corruption that they see going on in Jerusalem.

So there’s this, they write this document that is this cosmic battle between angels and demons and all these things. And really it’s a representation of what they see as the marching orders of how they need to be as holy as possible. And that there’s a cosmic battle that’s raging in the background in the supernatural realm that is going to influence how one day all things are going to be made right.

God’s going to win, and they’re going to be the ones that are going to be kind of the way that this comes into fruition. Wow.

The Importance of Visiting Historical Sites

SHAWN RYAN: You know, this morning at breakfast we were talking about a lot of the people that have studied this have never been to the location where they were found. Why do you think that’s important to be there?

WES HUFF: Yeah. I think it connects us to the times and places where these things happened. And so one of the things that we, with the organization that I have the pleasure and opportunity to be the vice president of, Apologetics Canada, we have this video series, “Can I Trust the Bible?”

And what we want to do is we want to tell some of those stories in the places where they happen to try to make that kind of connection. So we go to Nag Hammadi, where the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in the desert in Egypt, where the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip were included.

And we went to the Nag Hammadi desert. I stand in an approximate location of where it could have been potentially found. And I tell the story of this Bedouin shepherd who is wandering through the desert. He’s digging for what’s arguably fertilizer and he finds this jar. And in it are these books.

And I think, you know, for me personally, there’s something really amazing about kind of just standing and visualizing where this happened and then being able to tell that story in the location.

So the one we recently did, we were just in Turkey, my colleague Andy and I, and we are filming in Iznik, which is the modern site of the ancient city of Nicaea. Because the Council of Nicaea often becomes this kind of catch all for conspiracy theories about whether that’s the books, the Bible or the divinity of Christ. That’s kind of the Da Vinci Code-esque argument is that all of these things get pinned on Constantine and the Council of Nicaea.

So we went to Nicaea and the basilica, the church where they think it happened was discovered recently. It’s in a lake. So there’s been a drought, the lake’s been receding over time. And when the lake receded, it actually revealed the footprint of this ancient church.

SHAWN RYAN: No way.

WES HUFF: Yeah. It’s really cool.

SHAWN RYAN: Where is this?

WES HUFF: This is in Iznik, Turkey.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this where you, you were just there?

WES HUFF: Yeah. So we, my colleague Andy and I, we wade out into the lake in front of the ruins. You can see them. We fly a drone over top and you can see the ruins. It’s like this footprint of a church. Really amazing stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you dive it?

WES HUFF: No. So at this point when it was discovered, you actually had to dive it. And we planned, when we mapped this out, we were going to dive it. My colleague Andy is actually a pretty experienced scuba diver, and so that was our intention. But the lake has receded so much that it’s basically on dry land at this point.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

WES HUFF: So we were not that far off the shore and the waves are lapping up on the top of the ruins. But we went there to tell the story because in 2025, it was 1,700 years, because it was 325 is when the Council of Nicaea happened.

And so we went and we’re like, we don’t just want to clear up the details of what didn’t and did happen at the Council of Nicaea. We want to do it in Nicaea. We want to do it in front of the ruins of the sunken basilica.

And I think that just, I hope what that does for the viewer is it connects them in a more tangible way that these aren’t just facts and these aren’t just kind of data points. This is real history. And when we can connect with the real history and talk about what actually happened, that connects us to something bigger than just me as a talking head. And I think it just, those opportunities are, man, that is so cool.

The Most Compelling Evidence for Jesus’s Existence

SHAWN RYAN: Amazing. All right, Wes, we’re winding down the interview. I want to ask, what is the most compelling piece of evidence for you that proves you, that proves Jesus’s existence? I’m always curious, you know?

WES HUFF: Yeah, you know, I think I don’t think it’s necessarily one thing. What I’m always blown away with for the multivalent case of the Christian worldview is that when you look at the claims of Christianity and ultimately them centering on who Jesus is, there are so many crossover, interlocking areas of inquiry and evidence.

And I went to university because I had full intention of going into the police force.

SHAWN RYAN: What?

WES HUFF: Yeah. I wanted to be, I wanted to be…

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

WES HUFF: Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to be a police detective. God had other plans, and I kind of went off. Now, unbeknownst to me, historiography and detective work are not all that…

SHAWN RYAN: I was just going to say that.

WES HUFF: But in police work, especially with something like an investigation on a murder, say you want a number of lines of evidence that vary on how good or not good they are, right? Because it makes a cumulative case. Some evidence is a lot better than other evidence. But when you put it all together, it makes that cumulative case to point to the evidence of a specific thing happening.

And this is where I think people often miss the boat in that we don’t just believe the God of the Bible arbitrarily. It’s not like I picked Yahweh, but I could have picked Zeus. You know, I believe that there’s evidence that ultimately points to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview.

So when you have someone like Ricky Gervais who says, you know, there are 30,000 religions out there, you really think yours is true? In my mind, sometimes I think that’s like standing in front of a judge and saying, there are 30,000 people in this town. You really think this guy’s the guy who did it?

Well, it depends what the evidence is, right? It depends whether the evidence is pointing in the direction of that person being the culprit. And so it’s not just arbitrary. We didn’t just pick a random person and put them on trial. There’s evidence that actually points to whether that person is guilty or not.

And actually there could be good evidence and bad evidence, and the judge could throw out some evidence as being inconsequential or weak, but it’s all of that evidence together.

And so when I’m looking at the historical evidence and I’m looking at something like whether that’s the transmission history of the manuscripts that I see. You know, we can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we can see their fidelity to a thousand years later. And that being so close that it’s staggering sometimes or just, you know, a copy.

I have some high grade photocopies, facsimiles and manuscripts that I do my academic work on. And I have a couple of late second, early third century copies of the Gospels. And I’m looking at, and I’m looking at it, I’m reading the Greek and when I’m sight translating it and I look at my English Bible, I’m like, guess what? I’m translating. Like I could, I might as well just open this up.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

WES HUFF: Because the connectivity is just there. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t differences in spelling, word order or variances. Those do exist, but it’s just the fidelity is just so mind blowing to me personally.

And then you look at the internal evidence and you look at the fact that the names, the places, the facts, the information all tie it to the first century in Galilee of people who either they were there themselves and they’re communicating this. Or like the Gospel author, Luke says that he’s interviewing eyewitnesses. He says that at the beginning of his gospel, he’s very purposeful.

You know, I’m not, I wasn’t there, but I’m writing these things down, I’m making an orderly account, I’m interviewing eyewitnesses so that you may know the things you are taught.

And so you look at these levels of the things that we’re trying to highlight with the “Can I Trust the Bible” series, the internal evidence, and with the names, the places, the people. And you see that and you go, wow, this is testifying to it being written in the place it’s claiming to be written, in the time frame it’s claiming to be written.

And when we use that exact same methodology and criteria for something like the Gospel of Judas, guess what it reveals that the names, the places, the details outed as being written in third century Egypt.

And so you’re like, so when you ask, well, what is the piece of evidence? I think it’s a multivalent web that all conjoins at the truthful claim of all of these things are pointing to this guy Jesus.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh God.

The Cumulative Case for Faith

WES HUFF: They’re all pointing. There’s prophecies in the Old Testament, there’s an expectation this guy Jesus, he comes on the scene, he fulfills in some instances, very specific prophecies, he predicts his own death and resurrection. And then he does it. As a friend of mine likes to say, people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than those who don’t rise from the dead. Right.

And so I find it so fascinating that I’m a trained historian, so I look at the historical data. But when I talk to my colleagues and friends who are scientists, who are philosophers, who are sociologists, and they also have all of these different kind of lines of argumentation, some of which, you know, I don’t like this one, I don’t like that one. But it’s the cumulative case that points to the truthfulness. So you could eliminate one. And I don’t think it wouldn’t collapse my worldview because I genuinely believe that at this point, with my inquiry and investigation, like I said before, I think it’s intellectually robust, but it’s also existentially satisfying.

It’s changed my life. It’s changed the way that I think, you know, C.S. Lewis, who I quoted before, he said, you know, “I believe in Jesus like I believe in the sun. Not that I see it, but that by it I see everything else.” And so that’s why we call it a worldview, right? It’s how we view the world around us.

And when we were talking before about those times where we struggle, those seasons of the dark nights of the soul, it’s not that those aren’t tangible, but it’s when I’m really struggling, I go back to listen. I have something that points to truthfulness. And despite my very subjective feelings, despite what I might be struggling with right now, I genuinely believe this is true. And the truthfulness of that changes the way that I live for the better.

That has echoes into not just this life, which should be lived well, which should be lived with integrity, but after my mortal coil is given up and I go into eternity, that more questions will be answered in a way that I never could have understood before.

Faith Through Research and Experience

SHAWN RYAN: I’m curious about this too. What strengthens your faith more. Is it through your research or is it through your personal experiences? When I say personal experiences, I mean the miracle that you’re not paralyzed from the waist down now.

WES HUFF: Yeah, stuff like that. I’m not judging either or. I think it’s a both and. I don’t think, you know, faith isn’t an intellectual endeavor. I don’t think we’re going to stand before God and he’s going to give us a theological test, because if he did, I’d fail, right? I think we’d all fail. It goes beyond that.

You know, Paul, I read his in Ephesians chapter two earlier. He says, you know, “Faith is a gift. It’s a gift. You’re saved by faith through grace.” And there’s something about that which has always been very tangible for me, especially in my field where there are plenty of non-believing, atheist, agnostic, biblical scholars who know all sorts of things that are even like, go beyond even my level of understanding.

And that’s been a testimony to me that you can’t intellectualize yourself into the kingdom of God. It’s not about that. It’s not about knowing the most, there is something that is genuinely goes beyond, that’s transcendent, beyond just the simple understanding. Right. James even says “You believe that God is one.” He says, “Great, even the demons believe that and they shudder at that fact.”

It’s not about, you know, who knows God the best, that’s probably Satan. But what is different about the understanding that goes beyond. I think the factual knowledge sits as kind of the confidence building of I can have hope because I truly believe that this is something that is true with a capital T. But beyond that, I’ve actually seen Jesus change my life. I’ve seen Jesus take my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh and remove desires that I had before to do things that were wrong.

SHAWN RYAN: You had a heart of stone.

WES HUFF: Yeah, we all have hearts of stone.

SHAWN RYAN: Can’t see it.

Hearts of Stone and God’s Love

WES HUFF: We all have hearts of stone. And apart from the saving work of the Spirit speaking to our life, you know, we are going to choose death 100% of the time. Me, Wes, you know, without God working in me, I am going to fight him with everything I have because I don’t know what’s good for me.

And so, I mean, that’s why the invitation that Christ extends is so amazing because he doesn’t need to do that. He doesn’t need to save us. Like I said before, he’s not better or worse off. If I choose to follow, choose to worship, he’s still God. He’s still ruling and reigning. He’s still the author of creation and the Creator of the universe.

And yet not only does he invite me into that, but He Himself steps into the conversation and he becomes a human being. He comes a baby, vulnerable and, you know, crying in a manger, a feeding trough in Israel and in Bethlehem. And how does God show? He can’t become any greater right? So he steps down from the highest highs into the lowest lows to show how great he truly can be.

And that, like I said before, if God is love, and love is the greatest ethic, and the greatest example of that greatest ethic is self-sacrifice, then the God of the Bible has truly in himself exemplified what love embodies. And it’s in Jesus Christ. Wow.

How God Speaks

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think God speaks to you?

WES HUFF: I think God speaks to me insofar as he moves me. I don’t think I’ve never heard an audible, you know, “Thus saith the Lord” statement. But I think the ways that God communicates with us in leading us, I think through our conscience, in how he directs us in the ways that certain things come together, I think are tangible, that are not necessarily like a prophetic “Thus saith the Lord” statement.

The author of Hebrews, who I mentioned before, opens his book by saying, “God, having spoken long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days, spoke to us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the worlds, who is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power, who, having accomplished cleansing of sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.”

And I think, you know, there’s something beautiful about God presenting us with his Word that’s tangible, that we can look at and can influence us. And I think in the moments where I’ve heard God’s voice speak to me most is in the quiet moments of reflection, of reading scripture and seeing just the profound truths through all 66 books woven together that speak to things that I didn’t even know I needed to know about who I am, about the people around me, about who God is, and how that just so drastically and impactfully changes the way that I understand the world. Man, I love that.

Closing Prayer

SHAWN RYAN: Would you mind leading us in prayer?

WES HUFF: Yeah, I’d love to end this. Thank you, Lord. God, pray with you. I thank you for this time, Lord. I thank you, Shawn, and I thank you for just the giftings and opportunities that you have given him, that you have blessed him with, Lord, I pray that you would continue to lead him in your understanding.

For your glory, Lord, would you shape us into the image of your son, Jesus Christ, each and every day by the power of your word and your spirit who leads, Lord, that your word would be our rule and your spirit our teacher and your greater glory, our supreme concern for the growth of your kingdom. In the name of the one who has saved us, Jesus Christ, Amen.

SHAWN RYAN: Amen.

Wes, I woke up very restless this morning, and you put me at ease.

WES HUFF: No, I appreciate that.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

WES HUFF: Yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

SHAWN RYAN: It has been. I’m so glad we met.

WES HUFF: Yeah, me too.

SHAWN RYAN: God bless.

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