Transcript

I want to get started because I'm so tired. If I don't start teaching, I'll just ramble. I was on staff with a wonderful Bible teacher who I admire greatly. And he told me his gift is, he can talk about anything, and he really can. He's a gifted speaker. He said, the goal is when I open my mouth, that I say what the Lord wants me to say. So, let me introduce Proverbs, and then in a few minutes I'll tell you, more stories about Bonnie and Steve and Mike after they're not listening, okay?

The book of Proverbs is part of the Bible, and I want you to think about this, because every book of the Bible has something in common and that is, that it's the Word of God.

So, what is the book of Proverbs about? It's about two things, God and what God's desires are for us. Now, I could say the same thing about Genesis. I don't know what books you guys have covered so far, but every book of the Bible has two parts. It's about God and God's desires for us. Now, each of the books gives a little different direction on His desires.

 Genesis. If I was teaching Genesis, what a book. It's, God wants us to know where sin came from, where we came from to where the universe came from. And in Genesis, what's in the news right now is explained. What's the biggest thing in the news right now? What is the, what is everyone protesting right now? All over the world, probably in Korea too. What is everyone protesting? The war in Gaza. Yeah. Israel. Gaza. Did you know Genesis explains that and explains what God thinks of the war in Gaza? What God thinks of Israel? What God thinks of what's going on in the world? See, the Bible is so exciting because once you understand, or I should say, the more you understand this book, the more everything going on around you becomes clear. And it's just marvelous. It's the Word of God. The Word of God tells us about God and what God desires.

I'm going to share with you from the Book of Proverbs. By the way, the Book of Proverbs is unique. It has 140 different topics covered. 140. Like... parenting, how to be a good son, how to be a good daughter, how to be a good husband, how to be a good wife, how to be a good mother, how to be a good father, how to be a good worker, how to be a good student, how to... you know what I mean? 140 different topics are in Proverbs. I picked the top 10 and that's what we're going to cover in our classes.

So, what does God desire for us and what can we learn about God Himself? And that's what we're going to be covering in Proverbs.

Class number one, how to be sure you're saved. Now, boy, that's the most important thing in the universe, to know for sure that we know the Lord. If you want to open in your Bibles, we're going to read Proverbs 1. And I will be, I know we have all different versions. In fact, I remember the first time I taught here, Bonnie and I were here in 2011. Some of you were just little tiny people 12 years ago. So, we were here in 2011, and they didn't have all this. The dining hall was over there somewhere, and it was plastic that blew in the wind. It was like an igloo, plastic. And it just was really unusual back then. Everything has gotten nicer the longer we've been here. But the one thing that hasn't changed is, we always use the Bible. But one of the students, I think he sat right about here, he had three Bibles. He had his Korean Bible, he had his English Bible, and I don't know what the third Bible was. But, every time I taught he was turning between all three Bibles and I'd never seen such focus. And whenever I didn't say something clearly, he would stop, and he couldn't turn any of the three and so it taught me to watch and make sure you understand what I say.

But Proverbs chapter 1, now look at this, verse 7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. So, it's interesting. All of a sudden, we start seeing Proverbs divides everybody into two groups. The first ones are the ones that fear God. So that, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. On the positive side... fear of God, wisdom, knowledge. That's the good side. But fools. So, there's two groups. Foolish. Wise. Positive and negative. And what we're going to see. The longer we go through Proverbs, this list gets longer and longer. And basically, these are the saved, and these are the lost. The book of Proverbs is completely about who's really a Christian. God says a Christian has been changed on the inside. Everything changes. They fear God, they have His wisdom, they have His knowledge, and on and on and on.

Keep reading in chapter 9. So, Proverbs chapter 9, and look at verse 10. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. See, it's repeating. The fear of the Lord. Proverbs 9:10 is the beginning of wisdom. Verse 10, and the knowledge of the Holy one. Now, I'm not sure of your background. How many of you grew up in Christian homes? A little higher, can you. it's early in the morning. There we go. Most of you. Okay. So, you guys know basically what I'm talking about. The Bible describes salvation as this, John 17:3, This is life eternal, that they may know You, the only true God. That's what Jesus said. So, Jesus said, to be saved means you know God. The book of Proverbs explains what it means to know God, what happens in our life.

Okay, I want to keep going on the slides. I could tell you that, I already said this. Every book of the Bible is about God and His desires for us. So, Genesis is God's desire for us to understand where the Earth came from, where the universe came from. Did you notice the order there? That's out of order, isn't it? Wouldn't you say where the universe came from, where the Earth came from? God says He created the Earth first. Did you know that? Have you ever thought about that? Do you know what that means? God says He created the Earth and from the Earth, think about this, He stretched out the stars, the universe from the Earth. In fact, the book of Isaiah, which we're covering. I can't believe they let me do Isaiah and Proverbs back to back. Do you know what Isaiah says? God rolled out the universe like a tent. Now, have any of you ever gone camping? You have your sleeping bag, and you make it as small as possible because you're backpacking or whatever. And when you finally take it out of the package, what does it do? It just, it unrolls and gets, from that little sleeping bag sack, it unrolls. That's how they used to do their tents. They were traveling. They were nomadic. They would wrap their stuff up, and then they would unroll the tent from wherever they were starting. They'd unroll it this way. That's how God said He made the universe. But where'd He roll it from? The Earth. That explains why light is 14.7, billion light years away from us. God unrolled the universe outward from here, but I'm not teaching Genesis.

It also teaches where sin came from, how God made salvation, why Israel is in the news. God picked Israel as His chosen people of promise. Isaiah says that the world ends because all the nations are trying to fight against Israel. One thing we know for sure, Israel's going to be around till the end of the world. Jerusalem's going to be around till the end of the world. Jewish people are going to be in Jerusalem till the end of the world. And the Anti-christ comes to destroy them at the end of the world. So, you're seeing something fantastic. Israel has become the center of attention for the whole world. That's how the world ends. Only it's not quite there yet because it says, everybody hates Israel at the end and right now part of Europe doesn't hate them, part of America doesn't hate them. You understand what I mean? It's not universal yet, but that's what Genesis is about. Proverbs is God's desire for us to understand how to live His way.

Now, I'm going to introduce my wife. That's my wonderful wife Bonnie, and I'm just thankful that she travels here. I was saved at age 6, Bonnie at age 21. I was called to the ministry at age nine, actually to be a missionary. That was what I surrendered to. I wanted to go and be a missionary for the Lord. I was a normal kid, went through school, but when I got to Bible college the first Bible professor I had was the best one I'd ever heard. And I said, how do you teach the Bible like that? And he was like 90 years old. And he looked at me and he said, until you have read the Bible through once for every year you are old, he said, you'll never be able to teach the Bible. And I said, what? He said, yeah. He said, how old are you, son? I said, I'm 19. He said, how many times have you read the whole Bible? I said, [once]. I got paid a hundred dollars to read it once. That's what someone in my church [did], they paid everybody that would read the whole Bible a hundred bucks so they could go to camp, summer camp. So, I signed up, and I read the whole Bible. How long does it take to read the whole Bible? Does anybody know? Guess. How many hours do you think? Four days would be 96 hours. How long do you think it takes to read the Bible?

Oh, let me back up. Let's go this way. How many of you read the whole Bible? How many of you have read every word of the Bible? A little higher. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Good. This is how long it takes to read the Bible. You were close. What'd you say, four days? That's three days, three 24 hour days. That was good. You're smart. You're all smart. You guys are smart that you're here. This is how long it takes for an American sixth grader to read the Bible out loud. 72 hours to read the Bible out loud as a sixth grader. And you know how I know that? Because you can buy the Bible on CDs. You know what a CD is? It's a little thin piece of plastic, real thin about this big around. You're in such a modern time, everything is downloaded. But it used to be you had to buy music on a piece of plastic that you put into a device and connected it with wires to your head. It's really interesting. Do you know how many CDs the Bible is? It's 72 one hour CDs, when you used to buy it. I bought the Bible. There are 54 CDs in the Old Testament and 18 CDs in the New Testament. So, now here's a big quiz. How many hours does it take to listen to the Old Testament? 54. How many hours does it take to listen to the New Testament? 18.

How long is one soccer game? How long if you watch a soccer [game]? Do they play soccer in Korea? 80 minutes is one soccer game. How long is a normal movie? Yeah, 120 minutes. What I'm saying is, we spend a lot of blocks of time doing stuff. How long do video games last? I think they never end, right? They're like endless. How [long was] Swift's last concert that everyone paid, three hours? What I'm saying is this, the whole Bible, by the way, this is on your final exam so let me cover it. How long does it take to read the Bible? [72 hours] Good. You'll see that on your quizzes and on your final exam.

I'm only telling you that because my goal for you is to get you wanting to read the whole Bible. When I was your age, when I was 19 years old, look at this. I'd only read the Bible one time, and someone paid me to do it. And then, this professor said, son, you have to want to understand the Bible to teach it. And he said, you have enough time to read the Bible if you want to. And so, I looked at my schedule and I changed everything around and I found that I could read the Bible that I had in one month. 72 unaccounted for hours that I just spent jogging, playing basketball, playing soccer, going to the weight room, just sitting and reading magazines in the library, just wandering around. This is when I was in college. I had 72 hours a month that I didn't, it was just empty time. So, I devoted from that day onward when I was 19, all my free time to reading the Bible. And I started reading it two hours and 37 minutes a day, two and a half hours a day. And I read the Bible through one time a month for my 19th year of life. So, that on the day I turned 20 I had read the Bible through 13 times, and I was 20. So, I was still behind. My professor said, you can't teach the Bible till you've read it through once for every year you are old. So, I said, okay. So, the next year I did the same thing. 72 hours a month. And by my 21st year, I was on 25 times, and I kept going. I slowed down to every other month. And then I slowed down to every third month or so, a while back. I think I'm on 120 times through the Bible. I'm getting ahead because pretty soon I'm going to lose my sight, and I want to get all of it in for my whole... however old I get.

I went to Michigan State University, Bob Jones University, the Master's Seminary, Dallas Seminary. I pastored local churches 40 years. I've been married to wonderful Bonnie, soon to be 40 years. We have eight wonderful children. They all have their mother's personality and good looks. And what did they get from me? The sin nature. No, have you studied Romans? It says that. And so, that sin passed unto all men for that all have sin that comes through Adam. What I'm doing right now with you, we do, we've done in 70 countries. In fact, we teach in Word of Life Argentina, and Word of Life Hungary, and Word of Life New York, and Word of Life... I don't even remember all the places we've been, but we've been in an awful lot of the Word of Life campuses. And we only do Word of Life about a third of our time. The other two thirds, we work with other missions.

So, I was invited to do the 2019 or 2020 class here of Isaiah. And then what happened in 2020? COVID. And what happened in Korea? They, everything, what happened in America? They closed our airports. In fact, Bonnie and I were out of the country when COVID hit, and we almost didn't get back into America. They were going crazy. If any of you are old enough to remember COVID, it was an unusual time. And Steve said, you still have to teach. I said, how? He said on Zoom. I'm so old, I didn't know what Zoom was. That's sounds like a car driving, Zoom. And he said, no, just sit somewhere and put a camera in front of you and your computer. I said, okay. I have two sons that work in tech in California. And they said, dad, you're not going to sit in front of your computer with the screen looking up your nose or something, we're going to come help you. So, they came and set up what you see right there, and I taught 12 or 13 Korean students the book of Isaiah from my basement. It was really sweet. And Bonnie ran the control board. We had six cameras, and she had a control board. And one camera was on my Bible. And one camera was on the slides. And one camera was on each of my marker boards. And one camera was on me. And she went between them all for 13 kids. And it took 15 hours of teaching, and it took me 100 hours to study, because I thought, I've never done Isaiah before. This is hard. Steve said it. He said, it's a really challenging book. And it is.

My son said, dad, you just spent a hundred hours of your life plus 15 more teaching and all those 13 students watching. He said, now we have to post it. I said, post? What is that? When I grew up post was lick a stamp and stick something in a box, that was posting. You mailed it. So, he posted it on YouTube. Guess what? One million people watched your Isaiah class. A million people. I didn't think anybody would watch Isaiah. Bonnie and I still are getting, every week, a letter from someone that says, I was watching Isaiah.

Now, remember the first slide said, are you sure you're saved? I'm an evangelist at heart, and so I was. I'd never met the students in Korea, and so I said, now are you sure you know the Lord? Are you sure you've been born again? And I even gave a Gospel presentation in my basement for the Korean students, and the Canadians, and the Americans, and they were from all over the world like you, people watching the Isaiah class.

I'll just tell you one story and then I'll speed up because we have to get through this first hour There was a lady riding the subway in London and she on her phone, typed in hope and somehow got to our YouTube classes. And she turned her phone and sat on the subway and watch the class. And I said, okay, bow your head. So, on the subway, you know how people really get into watching stuff, they do whatever they say. So I said, bow your head. And I said, if you want to know the Lord, He's within an arm's length of everybody. Reach out to Him. She told me on the subway, she has her head down. She goes, [reaches up], what was she doing? Reaching out for the Lord. How do I know that? She wrote me. She said, I'm 60 years old. She says, I've spent my life going to Glastonbury, the big rock concert. She said, I've seen everybody from Queen, and the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, and everybody. She said, and my goal was to get smashed, stoned, and laid. It's not very proper, but that was her goal. And she said, I'm 60 some. And she said, that's all I've done since I was a teenager. And she said, I was on the train coming home from the latest rock concert, and she said, it's hard when you're in your 60s to get smashed and stoned and laid. And she said, I thought, my life is empty. And she said, I came home to my apartment and on the wall were all of the record jackets. Records are big round, bigger than CDs. They're big plastic. And she had collected from every rock group she'd ever listened to and wrote the dates. And she said that was her whole life [was] on the wall. And she said, riding the subway, she said, my life is so empty. So, she typed in something to Google. She got one of our classes, she watched it. And I said the whole purpose of life is Christ. And He's within an arm's reach. And if you want to have true joy and peace and hope, reach out to Him. And she bowed her head and went [reached up] and reached out to the Lord by faith.

She wrote me and said, that was six months ago. She said, my whole life has changed. She said, I'm going to a church in London now. I've been baptized. She says, but I'm writing to you because she said, you're the one that taught the class. She said, I want to announce to you that I took every one of the records off my wall and threw them away in the trash. She said, because they we're reminders of sin. And she said, I renounce that, and I want Christ. And I thought, did you know all that's because Steve made me teach on Zoom in my basement, and that class went online and during COVID people were so trapped they'd watch anything. You know what I mean. Even Isaiah. So, it was fun.

Here's our class. Right here, we're looking at the 10 topics. These are the 10 topics of the book of Proverbs. We're going to look at being servant hearted, the next hour, being selective, submissive, singular, self-controlled. These are just 10 of the 140 that are in the book of Proverbs. This first class, basically the book of Proverbs, summarizes the message of the whole Bible. The whole Bible is, there are only two groups of people. Everybody on the news, out the window, is either saved or lost. There aren't in between people. Everybody, every member of your family, everybody you lived by this summer, everybody you traveled on airplanes with getting here, wherever you came from, everyone is either saved or lost this moment. Think about that. It changes your life when you start looking at people. The Bible is either having the Lord or not having the Lord. And you want to respond. So, we're going to go through this.

The book of Proverbs, by the way, is an example of the three types of literature. Basically, the Bible, God's Word, is either history, or poetry, or prophecy. In each one is a form of literature, and you can see it right here. These are history books. Esther, and Xerxes, and Nehemiah building his wall, and Ezra with all the returnees, and then all this stuff about the good and bad kings of Israel, and Ruth - Moabitess, and Judges- that whole cycle, and Joshua conquering the land. That's the history stuff.

This is the poetry stuff. It's totally different. Proverbs is totally different. It's just little phrases. They don't even make sense, some of them. Have you guys started reading Proverbs yet? Some of Proverbs doesn't even make sense. But it does when you understand the form it's in. We're going to talk about that. And then over here, this is, boy... this is so timely. The prophetic stuff, that's where we get to Isaiah. Notice, Isaiah is the first of the prophecy books, and we're going to have a big time with that. But we're right in the middle, right there in the poetry.

And God has given us the guide to wisdom in Proverbs. God's way of salvation is wisdom. See, right here. Wisdom. Salvation. God says this is what you should want. Man's way that's heading toward damnation is foolishness. And so, God says the lost are foolish. The lost are characterized by, and the whole book of Proverbs describes them. Lost people, by the way, I can tell you what they are. They're lazy. They're lustful. They're dishonest. The book of Proverbs is one of the most descriptive parts of the Bible about how God sees us and how futile our lives are.

Basically, another way of looking at it is, and this is how Jesus does it, do you remember Jesus when he's teaching in the Gospels? Have you had the Gospels yet? Have you covered Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John? What books have you guys covered so far? [Students response not recorded] Okay, but Gospels is coming, right? You must do the Gospels. Oh, good. Someone knows the whole big story, the spectrum of things.

Jesus described life as the broad way. This is Matthew 7. The narrow way. He said, there are, life is two gates, two roads, two groups of people going the opposite ways. And all of us are born. I was born into a Christian family as a pagan, unsaved person, headed toward destruction. And the way I got saved, my mother used to tell the Bible story every night. And she'd tell the Bible story, and then at the end of the Bible story, she'd say, Mama's going to Heaven, Karen's going to Heaven, Sharon's going to Heaven, and she'd point at me and say, Johnny's not. It didn't bother me at all. I just wanted to go to bed. The Bible story is too long for me anyway. And that was till I was five years old. And finally, somewhere in my fifth year, I went, what did you just say? She said, Mom's going to Heaven. Karen's going to Heaven. Sharon's going to Heaven. Johnny's not. I went, Oh, and I still went to bed. Then, I got to be six years old, and I started being aware of sin. Because I got caught. I stole something at the store. My family was so poor, they couldn't buy everything I wanted.

And so, while my mom was tall and up there paying for stuff, you know how at the store, I don't know if they do it in Korea, but in America they put all the candy down at this level where the kids are, and they're looking at it, and so I just took what I wanted, and it wasn't candy, it was something else. It was caps for my gun. I wanted to be like the Lone Ranger and shoot my gun, and my parents wouldn't buy me caps, which makes it pop, and that was there. And so, I put it in my pocket. And I made the mistake of putting it in my gun and shooting it, and my mother knew she'd never bought me caps. And I'm out in the yard going, bang, bang, bang, real loud. And she comes out and she says, Johnny, where'd you get those caps? I said, I don't have caps. What was that called? A lie. What had I already done? So, I'm a thief and a liar. I ran into the bathroom, pulled the caps out of my pocket, the ones that I hadn't used. Threw them in the toilet and flushed it. Now what am I? I'm deceptive.

And she came right into the bathroom. She said, what are you doing? I said nothing. She said, where are those caps? I said there aren't any caps and just then they came back up because they float, and they didn't go down and there are those caps floating in the toilet. I said, where did those come from? So, I lied even more, and you know what? She didn't do anything. She didn't spank me. Nothing. The next night, or that night she said, Mama's going to Heaven, Karen's going to Heaven, Sharon's going to Heaven, you're not. And I looked at her and I said, why? She said, because you are a sinner. And I said, I know. I felt horrible. See, you can't get saved until you get convicted of sin.

The Gospel, Jesus said, this is what the saved look like. This is what the lost look like. The lost are all these things, they're on the way to destruction. The saved are on the narrow way, that know God, want His wisdom, fear Him. So, let's look at that in Proverbs really quickly.

So, look in chapter 1, verse 29, this is what it says about the lost. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. So see, these are the lost people that are always... we already read those two verses. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and understanding and knowledge for the Holy One. This is the way of the pagans. Verse 29.

Verse 26, God says, I'll laugh at your calamity. I'll mock at your terror. Verse 27, terror will come like a storm, your destruction like a whirlwind. And verse 28, you'll call, but I will not answer. What's amazing is the book of Proverbs reminds us that God says, only while you're alive do you have a choice between the narrow and the broad way. There's coming a day when it's too late, and we're going to see that all the way through Proverbs.

So, basically, this is a summary of everything it says in Proverbs. Here's God's way, the way of wisdom. You're saved. You're on the narrow way. You have a new mind, the mind of Christ. You become alive spiritually. You become sensitive to God and His Spirit and His Word and people. You worship God. You flee sin. We are being saved. What that means is, we're still struggling with sin. It's not over as long as we're on Earth. And that's a very parallel to Proverbs 20:24, that the wise people, God is saving them, the lost people are perishing. And then I love this one. This is one of my favorite verses in Proverbs. For the saved, the pathway gets brighter every day, but for the unsaved, the pathway gets darker every day.

 They just had a tragedy in America. Did anybody know the movie star that died last week in his hot tub? The guy from Friends? Probably none of you guys know. What? Some of you do? Do you know what they said about him? He could make millions of people laugh, but he lived in a dark world of depression and of addiction. And for him, the pathway got darker every day. It's amazing. He left behind $120 million U. S. dollars. Money doesn't buy happiness. It just buys a lot of places to look for it. And he looked for it everywhere. And it's so sad. Now, I don't know if he knew the Lord. I don't know. But I do know... what's his name, Matthew Perry? Is that his name? I do know that he lived like he didn't know the Lord. And it's amazing when you think about it, how Proverbs displays what we see around us. Lost people are foolish. Their minds are empty. They're spiritually dead. They're callous, which means they're hardened. They worship themselves. Proverbs 12:15 says, they mock at sin. Did you know in America they have shows at night that are called, night shows? And all it is, is making fun of sin. It's just, all the jokes are innuendos and sexual and it's just amazing how they mock sin. But they're perishing and the path grows darker.

Okay, Jesus, wisdom, salvation, and knowing God. We already read this, Proverbs 1:7 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. 1 Corinthians 1:30 says this, Wisdom is found in Christ. Jesus is the source of wisdom. Now Proverbs, we're going to see, illustrates Christ. But basically, Jesus gives us wisdom when we're saved by us knowing God. And that's what we're going to cover in this class.

Wise living is how God explains His will. Did you know when I was your age, the biggest thing I wanted to know is God's will? I wanted to know God's will. I wanted to know who I was supposed to marry. I wanted to know what kind of job I was supposed to have. I wanted to know what the Lord wanted. God says, My will for you is that you live wisely, and that you allow Me to give you true wisdom. And James 3 is going to be where we find that. In fact, for just a minute, look at James 3, because I want to see if you guys have this underlined in your Bible. James chapter 3. Remember James? What's James about? It's about God and His will for us, right? His desires. But James is the first New Testament epistle. You all know that, right? James, Jesus's brother, was the pastor of the church in Jerusalem. And James is the first one to write a New Testament letter. And he, by the way, he quotes Proverbs. He quotes the Gospels. He's amazing.

But look at chapter 3, starting in verse 13. Who is wise? Oh, look at this. He's starting to track with what we're looking at. Who is wise? Verse 13. Let him show by his good conduct his works are done in meekness of wisdom. Oh, wisdom. Who is wise? Who has wisdom? Verse 14. If you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your heart, don't boast or lie against the truth. That he's describing now what lost people look like. And he's contrasting the saved and the lost. Then, verse 15, This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. The behavior of lost people. Where does it come from? Proverbs tells us what lost people look like. James explains where it comes from.

Here's a person on Earth. So, this is just a person. If they have what it says in verse 16, envy, selfishness, all that stuff. Where does that come from? Verse 15. It does not descend from above. So, there's something coming down on a person from up here, from God, and it's called wisdom. But there's something coming from down here. It's demonic, and the person, by their behavior, is displaying where their source of their behavior is coming from. This wisdom does not descend from above, it's earthly, sensual, demonic. Where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing is there. So, what does it look like when a person is lost and behaving under the power of the God of this world? They're envious, they're selfish, there's confusion, they're empty. All of those things are marks of lostness.

But what does a saved person look like? Verse 17, James 3, The wisdom is from above, is first pure, then peaceful, gentle, easily entreated. You understand? You see the difference? This is from above. This wise living is God's will. And when we connect to God, He gives us this true wisdom.

By the way, we live in the most knowledge filled time in history. Scientists have calculated That all known recorded facts, if they were compared from the beginning of time until the beginning of the Steam Age, all known facts would be an inch high. Then, we started the Steam Age and all the way through the Atomic Age, and knowledge tripled. So went from one inch to three. Then post-World War after the Atomic Age started through the Space Age it exponentially grew. Knowledge, by facts, would be like a skyscraper, 55 stories high. Now, with our AI and quantum computing... by the way, my phone right here, my phone can do 17 teraflop calculations. You know what teraflops are? Terabytes per second. This is just, this isn't even a new iPhone. This is, what's the new one? 15? This is 14. It's old. It can do 17 teraflops. That doesn't mean anything to you. Did you know that in the whole world, in 1990, there were only four computers that could do teraflops? By the year 2000, they were doing multiple teraflop calculations. They were calculating atomic explosions and the weather. And those computers were, of course, in the United States. Japan had one, China built one, and the fourth one was the EU had built one. They could do teraflop calculations. Now look, I have one right here. You understand how fast knowledge has grown? When I take a picture, if I took a picture of you, this thing is taking so many measurements and it's calculating the light, the speed, the colors, and it's communicating with the processor and of course that's how you get your good pictures. You don't even think of it. But what's happened is knowledge is now with AI and chat GPT or whatever it's called. You know what I mean? It's just miles of facts, but wisdom isn't the same as knowledge. Our world has so much knowledge and so little wisdom. See, that's... and you all are going to be tempted by knowing more and more facts that you haven't experienced in, as Proverbs says, in wisdom.

Before the class is over, I have to talk about what we're doing for your assignments. You have to read the whole book of Proverbs once. It only takes about an hour and something to read the whole book, out loud. And you can read it any way you want. You can play it. You know what I mean? You can listen to it. Doesn't matter to me. You just need to go all the way through Proverbs.

Then, you need to do the 10 chapter Proverbs project, and people have more questions about that, so I'll explain it to you and I'll show you how to do it. By the way, I'm doing this course with you. Look at this. Every time I teach a course, I do it. This is my journal, just like yours, and it's Isaiah and Proverbs. And what you're doing for your project, I do. I love it. In fact, it's the way I study the Bible. This is Proverbs 1. Okay, I'll see you next hour.