The Butcher, the Book, and the Bloody Good Theology - Episode 144

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and today I'm very excited to bring you my conversation that I had with Phil Bray, the author of the book, Leviticus on the Butcher's Block, as well as the mind behind the YouTube channel, Leviticus is Fun. [00:00:34] Now, first of all, I have to apologize a little bit for the sound quality of this episode. It's a little bit hit and miss and I'm not sure why exactly. This is just sometimes what happens when you do recordings. So apologies for the quality and if you have some problems hearing. But I do have transcripts of my episodes. You can find those at genesis marks the spot.com. [00:01:01] You can find the episode there on my website, and it has transcripts. So if you're having trouble hearing anything in the episode, you can go there and read along with the episode. But at any rate, I really want to encourage you to check out Phil's work, check out his YouTube channel, check out his book. [00:01:21] Phil has a lot of good things to say and he says them really, really well. So I really appreciate Phil coming on to have this conversation with us. We get into atonement, we get into Leviticus, we get into all kinds of interesting topics. So go ahead and have a listen and check out Phil's book. [00:01:43] Well, thank you Phil, for joining me for this conversation today. I am so excited to talk to you about your book and your other work and whatever else we end up talking about today. So welcome, Phil. I am really glad you're here. [00:02:00] Phil Bray: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here at dawn in Sydney as the sun is just coming up, [00:02:06] Carey Griffel: Right, you live in the future compared to me. That's right. [00:02:09] Phil Bray: Yep. [00:02:10] Carey Griffel: Awesome. So Phil, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. I want to know why you have gotten into the work you have. What about Leviticus really has pulled you in? [00:02:22] Phil Bray: Yeah, so it started with thinking about atonement. It started with someone's throwaway comment of the father poured out his wrath on his son. And I was like, yeah, that's the gospel. That's what I'd been taught. And I'd been watching a lot of Bible Project. Listening to a lot of Tim Mackie. And they given me license and the freedom to read the Bible for myself. So I thought I'd do that, look for in the Bible where God poured out his wrath on his Son. [00:02:55] And it wasn't there. It it wasn't immediately obvious but it definitely wasn't explicitly stated. So that was, that was like seven years ago. And then eventually in that journey of trying to find out like, well, if that's not in the Bible, like, what else isn't in the Bible? Like, have I been lied to my whole life? [00:03:15] I kind of arrived at Leviticus and I'm still not sure why, but Leviticus kind of made sense. And it kind of became a way to understand atonement and avoid a lot of the messy and heated and passionate atonement debates that are out there. And I just found that Leviticus helped me understand sacrifice quite a lot better. [00:03:40] And then when I looked at the atonement and how it connected to Jesus, I just found that I was in a better place to understand it . [00:03:47] Yeah, Leviticus and I'm still there all these years later. [00:03:52] Carey Griffel: It's so funny because you're not the only one I know of whose Levitical journey started seven years ago, and so it's just a really interesting confluence I feel like that we're having today with conversations of people really digging into theology, digging into biblical studies on their own, being given permission to do that and saying, Hey, you can actually look at this stuff yourself and come to some conclusions, and you can compare what you're hearing in the pulpit or in your Bible studies or wherever else, you can actually go to Scripture yourself and dig into it and find things yourself. [00:04:32] It's just such an interesting and exciting, I think, really trend that we have going on today. And I think maybe there's a lot of bad things with social media. People don't like Facebook, and I totally get that. But we also have the ability to talk together faster, to talk together more, and to encourage new ideas and new permission for people to actually study Scripture. [00:04:57] Phil Bray: Yeah. Like, yeah, I agree with you. I don't love Facebook. I'm on there. I don't love Twitter X, but I'm on there. But yeah, you're right. It's a good place to, I guess you could easily end up in an echo chamber and a lot of people are in an echo chamber, but I found that it's good for testing out views, I think maybe, and finding people who hold views that you thought were wrong. Maybe. [00:05:23] In my kind of little community here in Sydney there was only like a really very narrow gospel presentation that was given. And when I started reading the Bible for myself, I'm like, well, have we just got it wildly wrong? Are there no other Christians anywhere else in the world that are reading the Bible and seeing the things that I'm seeing? But yeah, online I found people who were, and then I've discovered actually that in Sydney, the way we've been presented the gospel probably is maybe a minority, but there it's just like a little sliver of the Christianity. Which it's super encouraging to see. [00:05:59] I've done courses and listen to lectures from people at seminary and they're just talking about things in a way that totally makes sense. That maybe people local to me would call wrong. But yeah, super encouraging just to hear people lecture on stuff that is what I'd been discovering just from reading the Bible. [00:06:17] Carey Griffel: Well, it's so interesting to me to find that in different sectors of Christianity, even in different traditions, different locations, you will still find this thread that is common to them. When you rethink things and you really go back to Scripture and you're careful to look at context, then people who do that tend to come up with the same ideas, and that's really fascinating. [00:06:43] So when you're dismantling your current ideas. And you know, people love to throw around the idea of deconstruction and all of that. But you know, that's its own little thing. I'm just talking about deep Bible study and looking at it for yourself and saying, what can I see here? [00:07:03] And when I talk to so many different people, they get similar ideas. And yet there's this undercurrent , I might even say, a threat within denominational institutional Christianity where people are like, no, you can't do that. You have to do it within the institution. You have to do it with the approved teachers. [00:07:24] You have to do it the way that we do it because otherwise you have bad hermeneutics or whatever else. And really, it seems to me like your average person can really think well if they try to do that. [00:07:38] Phil Bray: It's a fear. Yeah. I think people are actually scared of recommending books outside of the tradition as though you might read some dangerous theology and then start this slippery slope that leads you down to, who knows, it's like liberalism or denying Christ or something. [00:07:54] But I've heard that kind of talking. Even the early fathers, like in youth group days, we were kind of warned against the extra books, like the Catholic books in the Bible, or even reading the church fathers, like Athanasius and whatever, because for some reason they thought that it was old text that shouldn't be trusted. It's so weird. [00:08:14] Carey Griffel: Yeah. So it's really freeing to be able to actually delve into things yourself and to be able to look at the ideas. So tell me what came first for you? Was it the YouTube channel or the idea for the book, or did it come as kind of a package? [00:08:32] Phil Bray: Yeah, good question. So I'd been listening to lectures and reading books and listening to books and doing courses and everything. And I'd been taking notes as I've been doing it, and I looked at my notes and I had like 40,000 words of notes and I thought, oh, maybe I should turn this into something readable. Maybe I should write a book. And so I started writing a book. But it was like too big and covered too many things and no one would've wanted to read it. [00:09:00] But then I came upon the idea of having the same kind of information, but doing it from a butcher's perspective. Because my first job outta school was a butcher, so I'm a qualified butcher. And then when I hit on that, and it just made a lot of sense at the stuff that I was reading, just thinking about it from my knowledge as a butcher my knowledge that I'd probably have that not many or maybe no one else would have. [00:09:24] Like there wouldn't be many people who cut up meat for a living who were also studying Leviticus. So when I arrived on that angle, I thought I'm kind of a nobody, like I don't have a doctorate behind me. I don't have formal studies, even though I've been studying it for years myself. So the YouTube channel called Leviticus is Fun, was a way kind of to get my name out there, I guess to start. [00:09:50] Also testing the waters just to see what people liked and what people responded to. But mainly just to get some kind of an online presence, I guess. So I wasn't just a nobody who'd written a book. But now it's actually the thing I look forward to most each week is to record a video. And I often dress up, do something crazy. And it's taken on a life of its own. Like it's, yeah, it's super fun. Like I said, it's what I look forward to each week. [00:10:19] Carey Griffel: I don't know if you've realized the impact I think that this channel is going to have, because I love Leviticus. I absolutely do. [00:10:28] And I came to it in similar fashion to you in some ways through podcasts and other things for myself, but just realizing how core Leviticus is to Scripture, the Torah in particular, and kind of the center of the message of the Bible. And you see that through the design pattern of Scripture and the structure of it and all of these things, which is really hard for just someone who picks it up and just reads it themselves. They're not comprehending all of the Hebraic mindset behind it. [00:11:02] So this is why, you know, it's really important to also get into the contextual study of Scripture because then you can actually see it for what it is versus just reading it through your own lens, all of that kind of thing. [00:11:15] Years ago I said to my pastor who was doing his PhD, I thought he'd pretty much agree with me or something like that. And I tried to tell him how awesome Leviticus was and he's like, if you say so, and I'm like, no, you don't understand. This is awesome. So if I got that kind of a reaction from my pastor who was doing a doctorate and didn't really understand the core value of Leviticus for what it could be and what it should be for us, what chance do we have for the average churchgoer to understand that value? [00:11:54] And so your channel is the best angle to approach it, I could possibly imagine to bring it to lay people. I absolutely love it. [00:12:06] Phil Bray: Yeah. Thank you. I've been surprised so many times. I mean, it's like the running joke that Leviticus is the most boring book in the Bible, or that you start your Bible in a year reading plan, you get to Leviticus and that's where you hit the eject button, you abandon. So that's why I named the channel Leviticus is Fun, just to try and tap into that. But yeah, you're right. Like even pastors, they often dunno what to do with it. [00:12:31] Or the only way they know how to read it is through like a shallow post- reformation lens where they define sacrifice by looking solely at Jesus' painful suffering. And they read that back into Leviticus and define sacrifice. That's one of the biggest things I think I've taken away. [00:12:52] I think in the medieval period when people were doing a lot of work in theology, there was a bit of disconnect from the Jewishness and the Hebrew Scripture. And so they looked at sacrifice and they weren't doing sacrifices anymore. It had been like a thousand years since anyone was offering sacrifice. So they read the Bible and they saw Jesus is a sacrifice and Jesus' death was really painful. And so that must be what a sacrifice is. It's a painful death. And they read that back into the Old Testament. And that's why I think understanding Leviticus properly is super helpful. It's not even really a reframe, it's just looking back at the proper, ancient context of what sacrifice meant and then what sacrifice meant within the broader context. [00:13:39] So a lot of people will, define sacrifice as though Leviticus was written in a vacuum. Even if they say that the animal was dying in my place, maybe that's true, but no other ancient culture thought that. What happens if Leviticus was written to mean that? It didn't just magically happen in this vacuum. Ancient cultures were practicing sacrifice for a long, long time and there's like a whole meaning and culture around what sacrifice is and what it means. [00:14:09] Carey Griffel: Well, here's a bit of a controversial question. Do you think the Levitical system was an accommodation by God? I can see a couple of different ways personally where you could take that. Like it's entirely an accommodation. And then if it's entirely an accommodation, then what you have is God didn't give them anything in the Levitical system and he's just using the system that they already have. [00:14:36] Another way of viewing accommodation might be a little bit of a lighter view of accommodation, where it is an accommodation, like God didn't dictate everything. He didn't come from heaven and say, here's your Levitical system in a package. There you go. But there are some parts of it that are contextually situated more in a way that we could see as accommodation. Does that make sense? [00:15:00] Phil Bray: Yeah. So I'm happy to say that I don't know. and it's something that I love to think about. [00:15:07] So on the one hand, you've got Cain and Abel bringing offerings, and did God tell them to? We don't know. Perhaps it was just like an innate desire of the very first humans to bring their creator a gift or bring their Heavenly Father a gift. Perhaps from that it evolved into all of the nations continuing to give God a gift just out of a desire to give God good things. [00:15:37] Maybe that evolved into trying to placate or appease the gods to get what you want. Or maybe God told them to and down the line it was kind of made bad as the other nations took something that was supposed to be good and twisted it into something that was no longer good. So yeah, and then you think about Isaiah's vision and there's an alter in heaven, like, why is there an alter in heaven and was the alter in heaven there before people started building altars on Earth? [00:16:09] Like which came first or is the alter in heaven just an image to help us understand what we're doing on earth so that we can understand what it means to relate to a Holy God? I dunno. I'm happy to say, I dunno, but I would love to talk about it for hours. But yeah, I do think the Levitical laws or the book of Leviticus was given to Moses and given to Israel amidst a culture that was doing sacrifice. [00:16:35] So when Abraham was called, his family would've been doing sacrifice. When he was told to offer Isaac on the altar, he would've known that that's a normal thing that his family may have done. Definitely his wider community. So that's possibly why he didn't really question it. He's like, oh, that's what the gods require. That's what I'll do. [00:16:57] And so here's the thing. Abraham goes to offer Isaac his son and kill him on the altar. Which according to Leviticus is not on, you don't slaughter an animal on the altar. And so I think that gives us a little insight into Leviticus where God gives Leviticus to a culture that was doing sacrifice, but they were doing some things that weren't okay. [00:17:20] And so God says, if you wanna give gifts, that's great. Here are the kinds of gifts that I like to receive, and here's the way that you're gonna do it so that you're not doing anything that's disastrous, like bringing death into holy space or slaughtering an animal on the altar. So yeah, I guess it can get controversial, but I'm happy to say, I don't know. [00:17:44] But yeah, at some point God's like this is how we're gonna do sacrifice. And when you start pointing to Jesus, like it's a shadow of Jesus, what came first? Was it always God's plan to have sacrifice or is he taking a practice and is he using that practice as a way to point to his eternal plan of uniting humanity to himself? Fascinating to think about. [00:18:07] Carey Griffel: Well, it seems to me that a lot of it has to do with how we're approaching Leviticus to begin with the way that we would answer that question, like if we think that the sacrificial system is necessarily about death and blood and blood manipulation and forgiveness, if we're presuming that that is the overall context of any sacrificial system in the ancient Near East, and we're gonna take all of that into Leviticus and say, this is what's going on. Although God is now correcting the things that are wrong, and he's showing them corrections, but ultimately they're still basically thinking about the sacrificial system in a way that is about death and about blood, and about, you know, all of these negative things versus a reading of Leviticus where you're seeing the core is about life, about fellowship meals. [00:19:03] Those are two different pictures to me. I don't think you can really combine those in the same system. This is just my opinion, but part of the polemic of Leviticus is this distinctive difference here. And if the core message of the whole thing is communion with God. [00:19:21] Well, that's what they've been doing since the beginning, according to the Bible. So the core is not an accommodation. And if the core is not an accommodation, then the polemic is correcting instead of introducing something brand new. [00:19:37] Phil Bray: And that's, like I said before, why I think it's important to read within the ancient culture. Because if you just start with Leviticus, you can assume that sacrifice is about death primarily. And then you can get from Leviticus that the animal is dying instead of me. But if you try to map that onto another ancient culture, you can't get that. It's not there at all. [00:20:04] Even if you read the classics, like Homer's Illiad, they offer sacrifices like every other page. they're doing it all the time. And it's never about death, and it's never about this animals dying instead of me. Like that's just not what it is. Like it's about giving the gods food, basically. [00:20:24] And then the men, like the warriors, having a meal. Even to the point of trying to trick the god. Is it Zeus that they try to trick when they offer bones with a layer of fat on the top and they're like, here you go. Here's some tasty meat with a layer of fat on top, but actually underneath it's just bones. And then the god gets really angry. That's what sacrifice is. It's offering the best meat and tasty food to a god. But yeah, reading Leviticus in a vacuum, you can, get some weird ideas. [00:20:53] Carey Griffel: So when we're talking about the Levitical system and it's got an introduction in history. It's got a very particular period of time where before they were not doing the Levitical system in the way that they're now doing it. A lot about atonement in Leviticus and the whole system is about the fellowship meal as we were just talking about, but there is the additional factor of purification. That is something that is really deeply part of what we have going on. [00:21:24] I think pretty clearly anybody who's reading Leviticus is going to see that. What they mean by that, it might vary from person to person, but there's this idea of purification, or people might call it covering or whatever else. This is something that was not done by Abraham or you know, previously in Scripture. [00:21:45] So what is it about what's going on at this period of time or the Levitical system that suddenly requires purification and this whole idea that we have here? [00:21:58] Phil Bray: Yeah, that's a really great question. So what I do know, and I wrote this in my book in the last chapter that there were many other ancient cultures who had like a scapegoat ritual. [00:22:11] So I don't think that is new to Leviticus. And that, by the way, is super helpful in understanding what day atonement means and what the scapegoat being sent out means. But other ancient cultures had a ritual where they would put some kind of impurity onto an animal, like sometimes a frog or a goat. [00:22:31] They would put their sickness or impurity, and again, sickness is a helpful thing to add into the mix because it's not just about moral failure or sin, it can be sickness or some kind of ritual impurity. So they put that on an animal, a frog or a goat or something, and they'd send it away, like out into the wilderness or out into the swamp back to where that impurity should go. [00:22:56] So those kind of rituals existed for removing impurity. But yeah, you're right. Perhaps the blood is an a new thing. I think that comes from back in Genesis when God says to Noah when he's talking about, you can eat meat now, or this is the way that you can eat meat. Just be careful because there's life associated with animals and you're not to take that lightly. It's important. Don't go around killing just for the sake of killing. [00:23:26] Life at that point, I think is God's saying that there's something sacred about life and it's the blood of all creatures, humans and animals that is sacred. And so when you get to Leviticus and the sacrificial system, that sacred life that's contained within an animal is used to purify or removing impurity from space. So like the scapegoat ritual is removing impurity, the blood and the life stuff from inside an unblemished animal is removing the impurity from the altar before the offering to be placed on it or from the tent before anyone can approach God's presence in that tent. So it's like a way to get the space ready, to make the space a purified space so that God and humanity can exist together so that God and humanity can dwell in the same space. [00:24:18] Carey Griffel: So, okay. I'm gonna ask you something that just came to me when you were talking, and I don't know if I can really even formulate this thought accurately, but it seems to me that if we have this idea of purification being the removal of the bad stuff, whatever the bad stuff is, there would be a difference when you are a people who is wandering around or who is not centralized or who is just living amongst other people versus a people who is now going to be centralized in one place, in a land where that kinda thing is going to build up. [00:24:57] Do you think that's part of what we have going on now here in the Levitical system formally? [00:25:04] Phil Bray: Yeah, so I had a chat with Amber Marone a while ago about Passover and the blood on the doorframe, and from that chat what I took away was that they were in slavery. So they were under Pharaoh as the tyrannical master who had them in slavery. [00:25:24] And the whole thing was that they wanted to be released so that they could go and worship Yahweh. They could go and offer sacrifices to Yahweh. That's what they told Pharaoh. And so while they're in slavery, I don't think that they could do that. They couldn't approach God. [00:25:39] They couldn't draw near to him in an appropriate way because they were basically in the realm of unholy gods. They were basically being held captive in a demonic realm. So they needed to be removed from that so that God could claim them as his own people and claim the space that they were in as sacred space. [00:26:01] So what I think we discovered is that the blood on the doorframe was claiming a little patch of sacred space in the midst of a demonic area. It was like a, a little mini tent or a little mini temple where everyone inside that house, at that point, Yahweh was claiming as his own. [00:26:22] So they were in purified space, and when the destroyer came and he saw the blood, he's like, oh, I can't go in there because that is lifeblood from an unblemished animal. And all those in there, like, I have no claim over. That's actually a Bible Project line in their redemption series talking about the destroyer having no claim over anything that belongs to Yahweh. So when God redeems them and rescues them out of Egypt and out slavery, then he can set up the proper sacrificial cult or the ritual practices. Leviticus is set at Mount Sinai. It's set in the one place, and that's where they do the blood thing again. Which is why I think Passover blood, the blood on the doorframe is more covenantal blood than sacrificial blood. Because finally when they get out into the wilderness and he's brought them out, he claims them as his own people. [00:27:17] He makes a covenant with them. He sprinkles blood on the people, and then straight away he gives the instructions for how they're to build the tabernacle and what it's gonna look like for God to live in the midst of his people. The blood is the stuff that purifies marks the people as his own. [00:27:33] So I think, yeah, Passover was like a mini way of doing that in the midst of demonic oppression. Finally when they're released, we can, see it as how it's supposed to be. [00:27:45] Carey Griffel: So I think in Andrew Rillera's book, lamb Of the Free, he makes a distinction between the original Passover and I think the Bible Project people do this as well. A distinction between the original Passover and the remembrance Passovers after that. Like the remembrance Passovers become sacrifices because they are remembrance meals as opposed to the original institution of the Passover, the original thing where they're putting the blood on the door posts and that is something different. [00:28:17] So would you make a distinction between the two things like the original institution of the Passover, the original actual act of that, and the later ones, would you describe them as something else other than a sacrifice or... [00:28:31] Phil Bray: I'm still working through this, to be honest. It's kind of a recent thing that I'm being forced to consider Passover and holy communion, the Lord's Supper, as I'm being forced to consider the covenantal aspect of it. [00:28:47] So yeah, to be honest, it's something that I'm still working through. It's called a sacrifice in Exodus, Passover is definitely called a sacrifice. But it's not a sacrifice that maps onto any other sacrifice in the Bible. So God isn't given any of it, and yet it's still a sacrifice. Normally the burnt offering, the people don't eat any of it. It's all given to Yahweh with the understanding that it's his food and he gets the whole lot. [00:29:14] But Passover, the people eat all of it. There's no altar with Passover. Like there's many, many things that, you begin to question like, is it even a sacrifice? And I think that's part of the problem where if you define sacrifice as something died, then you look at Passover, you're like, yeah, of course it's a sacrifice like the lamb died. [00:29:33] But when you work out that no, a sacrifice is placed on an altar and it's placed on an altar so that it's turned into smoke and that smoke ascends up into the heavens or to the gods, if you're doing a pagan sacrifice, then you're like, well, yeah, is Passover a sacrifice or not? Because which god is it being given to? [00:29:52] So yeah, I think that's partly why I've been forced to consider it more as a covenant. And then the later remembrances of it, the annual remembrance of Passover is. It's a memorial. Yeah. So it's, a recalling of that event and it's a participating in that event. They're participating with their ancestors and acknowledging that they are Israelites, that they are God's redeemed people, and the meal is a way to participate in that event. [00:30:22] But yeah, I'm still working through whether, how of it is sacrifice, how much of it is covenant, and then what that means. This is the fascinating part, I guess is what that means for holy communion and Jesus' offering of himself because he says, this is my blood of the new covenant. And so that is a whole other level that almost no one's talking about, they just assume Jesus' death is the sacrifice. [00:30:47] But he doesn't say that. He says, this is my blood of the new covenant. And he aligns his death and resurrection with Passover. So there's something really deep and covenantal about that, still working through to put proper language to it, I guess. [00:31:07] Carey Griffel: Right, because it's, only recently myself been that I've realized that there is a distinctive difference between the way that we talk about the Levitical system and everything that's going on there versus the way that we talk about covenant. [00:31:21] And I've realized, holy cow, why is there a difference here? Like surely there's an overlap because the people are in covenant with God. They're given the Levitical system at Sinai, which is the premier archetype of the covenantal idea, right? The people meeting God at the mountain and forming a formal relationship. [00:31:45] All of that is covenantal ideas. And yet I don't see a whole lot of people bringing in concepts of covenant when we're talking about Leviticus. Even when we're talking about Leviticus without death and that kind of a focus. [00:32:01] Phil Bray: You can't a meal with a God that you're not in covenant with, I think is something that we miss. I think that's why it happens in that order. God makes a covenant first and then the instructions say even this is something that I've only recently realized from making my videos. All of the instructions about sacrifice are listed in Leviticus in chapters one through seven. And then it's not till chapters eight and nine where they actually consecrate the priests and they can actually go into the tabernacle. And at that point, I think the way you're supposed to read Leviticus is that no sacrifices had been offered yet they're all like a prelude or a setup for the consecration of the priests and the tabernacle. [00:32:44] And that only exists within a covenant relationship with Yahweh. So the priests are being sanctified and consecrated within a covenantal relationship so that they can draw near to their covenantal God. He can't offer a sacrifice to God the way that Leviticus describes it outside of Covenant. Yeah, you have figures like Noah and Abraham who do, but I think Leviticus is setting up what it looks like to be adopted or claimed as God's sons, as Yahweh's sons, to share a meal with God or present a gift to God within that covenant or family. Leviticus is showing what that looks like. [00:33:28] Carey Griffel: Well, you mentioned communion and all of that, and I've been talking about that. I did a whole series on wine. That was so interesting to me. Like I'm still kind of mind blown myself about everything that I learned in that series because it's something that we just kind of take for granted in our Christian life. [00:33:48] I think at least a lot of us do. I'll just speak for myself. Even when I came into historical Christianity, I just kind of brought on a whole lot of baggage along with that and assumed a lot of baggage from Christian tradition when I started doing that. So how do you think Leviticus can help us to really deepen our lives as Christians in communion? [00:34:13] Phil Bray: Yeah. This is probably the main thing that when I started to become really nerdy about Leviticus. The blood is the life. So Leviticus 17 says like four times, the life is in the blood and the blood is the life. And God says, I have given you the blood on the altar to make atonement for you. [00:34:33] And so when you think that the blood of an animal offering is the thing that is its life and that that life is the thing that purifies the altar and people not as common, but occasionally people, if they've recovered from an illness or if they're being consecrated as priests they will be purified with blood. [00:34:56] There was a moment when I was thinking about the Lord's Supper, holy communion, and then it's Jesus blood and we're drinking that. And I was like, oh, wow. This is lifeblood. This is Jesus lifeblood. Hang on a second. That means that God is sharing his life with us to consume. And suddenly all of this stuff that I'd been reading about and just thinking about an animal, I was like, oh, all of the purification and the cleansing and the healing and the removal of evil and all impurity, that stuff I'm drinking into my body and it's God's life. [00:35:40] Like God's purifying life that he's giving me to purify me. Like I, I'm gonna get a bit emotional when I talk about it. But it's so special. Like Jesus has the fact that he, that God entered into humanity and united humanity to himself as a human. And then he shares his life with us, and he gives us his life, his body, and his blood as a, a regular participation and a way to become united with him. [00:36:10] Like it's such a, it's a big deal. And it's something that in my tradition now, we don't, we don't do communion every week. And it makes me really sad. Like I, I, I really feel like I, I'm missing out and it's something that I, really want regularly because it's just become so, so much more meaningful. Yeah. [00:36:30] But the invitation and the gift that Jesus gives to sharing and to participate in, and a physical way of feeling and knowing that we're united and we're Christ's body. Yeah. It's so special. [00:36:45] Carey Griffel: Yeah, I've had similar transitions to understand what this is, so much more deeply than just thinking the way that I used to think about it. And once you get that connection with the life and the blood, like so much opens up to us. That's been my experience. So how do you think blood connects to water in Leviticus? [00:37:07] Phil Bray: That is a great question and one that I haven't fully thought through. So another surprising thing was that people, became impure or ritually impure, which basically just means that there's something about the state of your being or your body that meant that you couldn't approach holy space. [00:37:28] Just, say, you'd just been to a funeral or touched a dead body or touched a scorpion or something. John Walton talks about things being outside of their order. The way that makes sense to me and it's a debated thing, but the way it makes sense to me is that when God created the world, he made order, he ordered creation out of chaos. [00:37:50] But we see things that still seem like they're outside of the good creative order. Look at a crab, does it live in the ocean or does it live on the land? That's like a little bit in between. So we'll call that not inside a good creative order. It's stepped out of its water abode or something. [00:38:09] Death is the big one, We just know that death is not right. So that's outside of a good created order. Things like menstruation or pain during childbirth you could say is outside of God's good created order. Because there's just things about it that are painful or dangerous. [00:38:31] So when you were impure, you could often just wait a day and the impurity had kind of disappeared. Or you would wait a day and wash yourself with water and that would be enough to remove the impurity. [00:38:44] So I think that was just the most common way that people, they would often be in a state of impurity and they just wait a day and then they'd wash themself and they'd be fine. I think you would only have to bring a sin offering if you needed to participate in something If you needed to celebrate Passover, you needed to purify yourself to eat a holy sacrifice, or you were doing something that involved going to temple or drawing near to the tabernacle or something. [00:39:12] You needed to be ritually clean and you couldn't wait for a day or two and cleanse yourself with water. That was a big mindset shift for me to just realize that they would've been impure, like all the time, every time someone had sex, they were impure, both of them every time they accidentally touched a scorpion or, you know, whatever, spider, they were impure. So, water was the thing that cleansed them. And yeah, so water in the New Testament, I think is bringing in part of that. So when John the Baptist does his baptisms in water, I think it's partly just a cleansing of impurity, but I think he's bringing in bigger ideas of removal of moral impurity as well because he calls it a baptism of the forgiveness of sin. [00:40:01] I think that's right. Baptism for something that's more than just ritual impurity. And then later on Peter talks about baptism as being associated with removing impurity and removing evil. So yeah, I think it's like two things that are so closely tied together, that they're kind of achieving the same thing. [00:40:20] Jesus' blood is a thing that gives us life and removes the death and impurity from us. But water is also the thing that washes away the impurity. Yeah, there's probably a lot more to be looked into, investigated. [00:40:36] Carey Griffel: Well, it's interesting to me that with water, quite often people would have to wait, so it's like time plus water, whereas the blood cleansing would be, seems like a step up. [00:40:49] Like it's more immediate, it's more powerful. I don't know, maybe. Okay, so, oh, here's a thing. Water from rivers and things, it's called living water. So there's a connection to life there. And then we have connection with life in the blood. So life is the thing that seems to maybe purify. I don't know. [00:41:12] Phil Bray: Yeah, that's very interesting. I hadn't considered that, but yeah, that blood is like a more potent version of water. Yeah. That's fascinating. [00:41:21] Carey Griffel: So several scholars talk about how I think Matthew Bates brought this out in his recent book that in at least the culture of the first century, you have the people at Qumran who did a whole lot of washing, and of course, baptism and washing is a big deal in the New Testament. [00:41:42] Well, we read in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the water is not actually purifying the people. There's an indication that the people are purifying the water. So the people are first being purified by repenting. And I think Matthew Bates brings this us out. I could be conflating him with somebody else, so forgive me if I am, but the idea that it is righteousness that is coming about because of the repentance that first happens, then the washing happens, and this is part of John the Baptist's whole baptism for forgiveness because they're connected. [00:42:21] And so the idea here might be that the repentance is what cleanses you internally. And the baptism in the water is part of cleansing your body, but maybe also a dedication of yourself, physically. And so this idea that the people could purify the water because they were already pure... this is just material from the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's fascinating. [00:42:50] If you bring that into the context of Jesus, who then enters the waters of baptism. He's the ultimate purifying force and he is ultimately purifying the water himself. So it's not that Jesus needs to be purified 'cause he had no need for that, but he entered the waters and he purified the waters. And I think this is also, I don't know who says this, but I believe it's a historical position as well, that Jesus purifies the waters himself and he makes the waters pure. [00:43:21] So that's, that's really fascinating. So is there any suggestion in Leviticus or the Old Testament that purification can be contagious or is it only sin that's contagious? [00:43:35] Phil Bray: Yeah, that again, fascinating. Definitely holiness is contagious. The chapter I'm reading at the moment, chapter 10 after the death of Nadab and Abihu, the priests had just been consecrated. They're sitting in sacred space and holy space and they're told Don't leave because if you leave in your holy state, like the people will die because you can't bring that like saturation of potent holiness out into an impure people because probably the same thing will happen to them has happened to Nadab and abihu. [00:44:09] The, yeah. Many, many things. And Moses' face shown after he met with Yahweh there seems to be a lingering holiness around that. Things that were for a holy purpose had to be destroyed. They couldn't be used for a common purpose afterwards, or they had to be washed properly. So yeah, that definitely seems to be a contagious thing. [00:44:36] What you were just saying before though, made me think of, I think it's Jesus had to become all to purify all. So he purified childbirth, like he wasn't made impure by being born, but rather he purified childbirth, and he didn't become impure through his contact with humanity or becoming human. [00:44:59] Rather, he purified humanity by being in the body. And that's what we see, I think when Jesus interacts with people. But his holiness is contagious. So all it takes is for a woman to touch his clothes. so normally in Leviticus, if someone im pure like that woman was ritually impure. She couldn't be made pure, like the blood or water in Leviticus couldn't purify her from her impurity. She had to be healed first. [00:45:29] But Jesus' blood, or Jesus' life, just touching Jesus is more powerful than anything that existed in the Levitical ritual system. She is cleansed, not only from her impurity, but the cause and the source of her impurity is immediately removed and stopped. [00:45:48] We see that too. When Jesus comes into contact with the dead body. He doesn't just remove the impurity associated with death. Contact with Jesus removes death itself. He gets right to the source of the impurity. Death is like the ultimate source of impurity. And when he himself enters death, he just explodes it from the inside. It's suddenly just not a thing anymore. [00:46:12] Carey Griffel: So here's a weird, weird question, a little bit of a different trajectory. If we didn't have the English word atonement, what do you think we translate the words we have in Hebrew as? [00:46:26] Phil Bray: Yeah. That is an interesting question. it's further compounded because the New Testament Greek word that we translate as atonement is very different to the Old Testament Hebrew word that we translate as atonement, but it's quite unhelpful how different the words are. [00:46:42] So in the Old Testament I like the word restoration. Cause it kind of, so where do I start? Atonement was a word that was invented by Tindale in I think the 16 hundreds, maybe the 15 hundreds when he was translating the Bible into English. And he didn't know how to translate kippur which is the Hebrew word that we call atonement. [00:47:07] It could mean to cover. A lot of scholars think that it means to cover or probably more likely is that it has something to do with wiping. So either wiping on or wiping off, wiping away or removing. But the idea is that it's removing something to bring it back to its intended state. [00:47:28] So again, with the Walton's idea of things being outside of their order, I think the idea of atonement is to remove anything that had damaged it or had brought it outside of what it's supposed to be like. So it's why I like restoration, it's restoring something back to its intended original kind of condition. So whereas the altar might have been damaged by impurity or sin, atonement is made for the altar to restore it back to its unblemished or its original state. [00:48:03] Yeah. And so then when you think about the New Testament and Jesus making atonement, he is restoring us or putting us back as humans were supposed to be and are supposed to be as images of God. [00:48:18] So whatever it is about us, that means that we aren't performing or living up to being proper humans is removing whatever it is, whether it's sin or guilt or illness or sickness, anything that means that we're not an image of God the way that he intended us to be. Think atonement is making that right. [00:48:40] So I didn't finish that thought from before. Tindale made the word that means at, at one meant which it is kind of true. it's not what the word atonement means. It's just one view of what happens after atonement has been made. So being able to be at one with God is kind of a good not a definition, but a good way of saying what happens. [00:49:04] But the actual word atonement in Hebrew is more the wiping away, all the removing of the thing that meant that you couldn't be at one. In the New Testament when we get to Jesus, he's wiping away, he's removing all of the things like, yes, sin, but it's not only sin, it's also things that they called impure. [00:49:25] Today we can think about removing the things that we know are things that we are not whole. Like if I've got a broken leg, I'm no longer whole and complete like I'm supposed to be. If I've got dodgy eyes or dodgy ears or something. So if my body is being restored to its good intended state and my being like my internal character is also restored to removing any impurity and that. Something else Leviticus has helped me understand. But it's also about character and the internal kind of emotional aspect. [00:50:01] Carey Griffel: That is actually really, really helpful because I see a whole lot of conversation sometimes when people go, aha, we see that the Levitical system is doing a particular thing. Then suddenly there is a really wide disparity within our understanding, I should say, of what's going on within this English word atonement. [00:50:24] Because it's like, well, we have atonement, becoming at one with God. Well, okay, that might be an okay word and an okay concept, and this is what Jesus is doing. We inherently understand that on some level I think that's fairly obvious. But then you go into the Old Testament and you see this word and you're like, well, now suddenly it has what seems to be a really technical definition. [00:50:52] Does that then mean that it is disconnected or something different, or only a part of atonement and being made at one? So I really like your idea of restoration here, even though it is kind of tied to particular kinds of acts. Particular things that they're doing, but the meaning behind it still seems to be the same in the sense of restoring of the relationship or the restoring of creation. [00:51:20] And it helps also to broaden it to what we all innately see in what Jesus is doing is I think everybody who is a Christian and who is participating in this life here with us in understanding and discipleship, knows that Jesus did more than just pay for our sin because otherwise, well, why did he do all these other things? [00:51:42] There's obviously healing, there's obviously all of these other things going on, but there's this real, I don't know if it's kind of fear that if we can't connect these two things together, then we lose the thread entirely because we're so invested in understanding Jesus as a sacrifice. But if we get that full, complete picture of atonement and wiping and cleansing and purification and restoration as the deeper underlying purpose and meaning, then that helps us to actually then go into our modern atonement theories and actually look at those and see them clearly as part of this. [00:52:27] Phil Bray: You have to make sense of why atonement is made for the altar and why atonement was made sometimes for a house, that they make atonement for a house that it had mold in it. But you have to be able to make sense of why atonement, that word is used to describe those kinds of ritual practices. Yeah. [00:52:46] Carey Griffel: So you are gonna be continuing your YouTube channel forever, I'm sure. I'm dedicated to it now. So you're going to be going through all of the rest of Leviticus, you are currently in what chapter 10 or something like that? [00:53:00] Phil Bray: Yep, I've worked all the way through from chapter one to chapter 10. And I'll keep going all the way through to the end and probably when I get to the end, I'll just keep going and do other things around sacrifice or Leviticus or who knows, maybe I'll move into how it connects to the Lord's Supper. There's so much that you can do. It project, I'm sure. [00:53:23] Carey Griffel: Yeah. Well that's good to hear 'cause I love it. And I think that, the way that you're approaching it is just, it's so approachable, so reachable for people. It's so shareable. [00:53:34] So if anyone hasn't gone and subscribed to Leviticus is Fun, you really need to do that because it's such a fun channel. I just love it. And I love that you're saying that you're learning things as you're even making these, even though you've written a book, you've studied it for years, but actually producing more is actually giving you more knowledge and deeper into understanding Leviticus itself. [00:53:59] So I wanna make sure everybody knows that you have a space at my biblical theology community, On This Rock. And I'm so glad that you do. It is so cool to have you there in that space where you can post your videos and we can talk about Leviticus because like I said, if I wasn't doing a podcast that is nominally centered on Genesis, I know, I go wide field from there, but everything is kind of rooted there. [00:54:28] But if I wasn't doing that, I probably would have chosen Leviticus. That's why I'm so excited about your work. So tell us a little bit about what your plans are for that, what we might expect to see or what we can do there. What would you like to see people do in that space? [00:54:44] Phil Bray: Yeah, so I really love the idea that you've, created this community where people are only there to explore and to ask questions and to learn from each other. [00:54:57] So that's really exciting. And I'm loving the questions that you are asking around atonement as well. Yeah, I'm really excited to see where that goes. All the different aspects of atonement. The problem with Facebook is that people just get on there to have an argument, or they get on there with their idea and their idea is right, and they just wanna pull everyone down who doesn't agree with their idea. But hopefully this space, On This Rock, is a space where people are wanting to learn from each other and share their knowledge with each other and keep growing. [00:55:33] Yeah, I'm excited to start thinking about different frames of atonement and substitution. But even just starting to think about that your question about all the different frames of substitution as I feel like this is a project that could go somewhere really big. Yeah. So yeah, excited to keep thinking about that. [00:55:51] At the moment, I think that I'm writing another book, I think, I'm not sure. And I think that it's gonna be on Hebrews and how Leviticus helps us make sense of Hebrews or what we would miss in Hebrews without Leviticus, something like that. And it might even be more like a devotional style book just working through the book of Hebrews. But yeah, we'll see. [00:56:19] Carey Griffel: Well, that sounds great to me because that is one of the things is people pull out those verses in Hebrews and they're like, well what about this? This seems to say whatever they want it to say. And it's like, well, if you back up, you read the whole chapter. Usually you're seeing this is all about Leviticus. [00:56:40] You've got to first understand Leviticus. Then come back to Hebrews and say, what is this talking about? Because even though what we can have in the New Testament, it can go beyond what Leviticus is saying, because we have the full revelation of Jesus now, and all of this, we have more ideas and more revelation from God. [00:57:01] But it can't disconnect from what Leviticus is saying. And I think that's a lot of what you're saying. [00:57:08] Phil Bray: Yeah. So whatever it means without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness of sins. Like that's a line that comes up all the time as they like, that's the final argument. You can't argue with that. [00:57:19] Like yeah, I affirm that. I agree with that, but that means what it means because of its context and it actually means what it means because of covenant, which yeah, that line comes within the context of that whole chapter is all about covenant. So. It must at least have something to do with covenant blood. Not saying that that's only what it's, but yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah. [00:57:43] Carey Griffel: Yeah. So for anyone interested in joining us at, On This Rock I took the liberty to create a little project within Phil's space, and we are looking into all of the ideas, concepts, passages, anything that might fit under the umbrella of substitution. [00:58:01] Because I started that because I thought, well, this so core to what people are talking about in regards to atonement. Whenever the question of, oh, so I see that you're questioning penal substitutionary atonement. Well, surely you have to affirm the substitutionary aspect. [00:58:22] But the problem there is we don't know what people mean when they say that Jesus was a substitute. Because like even if I challenge people and I say, well, what do you mean by that? Because I really want to know, are you talking about this particular idea over here or that one? A lot of times people don't know because they just haven't thought through it. [00:58:44] I'm not trying to blame them or stick some negative meaning here to this. People just haven't thought through the idea that the overarching concept of substitution is actually exceptionally broad. So are we talking about priestly language? Are we talking about replacement? Are we talking about participation? Those could possibly be different or they might be the same. How are we going to know? We gotta figure it out. This is a big deal. [00:59:17] Phil Bray: Yeah. One example that I looked at as I was studying is, like you said, the replacement idea. So there are words in Hebrew for substitute and substitution and one of those is when if you read the old King James version, it'll say so and so, That word is actually a substitution word, but all it means is that this person reigned in the place of this other person. So this king reigned in the place of their father. It just means that they replaced their father as king as a substitute. But that's one aspect of what substitution means in the Bible, [00:59:56] Carey Griffel: Right? Like there's, it's a wide thing. So I am kind of excited. For anybody who's followed this podcast for long, you've heard me talk about frame semantics. You know I'm very excited about that. And this is why, because I see a real problem when we take ideas and we try to muddy them up so that we can all agree. [01:00:18] And I actually think it's more productive to clarify and disambiguate, and we can still in the end find out where we all agree, but it's going to be easier and it's gonna be clearer. Sometimes people want to say, I still affirm PSA because I still believe in substitution, or I still believe in this part or that part. [01:00:45] But then if you talk to them long enough, a lot of people will actually come out in the end with a different definition than you would presume they had when you started. So it's not helpful to just keep using the same words if those words are actually muddying the waters and not being clear in what you mean. [01:01:04] If we can actually separate out all of these ideas, look at them clearly, and then say, this is the one, I mean, this is what's going on in this passage or in that passage, and then we can collect all of those together and see them in their whole picture. What do we come up with? That's what I'm curious about. I am genuinely curious to see what we can find there. [01:01:28] Phil Bray: Yeah. I'm super excited to see where this goes. [01:01:31] Carey Griffel: Well, let us know where people can find your book as well. What is the best place to find it, and do you have any ideas for people of what to do with it once they've gotten it? [01:01:43] Phil Bray: Yeah, so hopefully it's everywhere. It's published through Wipf and Stock publishers, so you can find it on the Wipf and Stock website. But it's everywhere. It's on Amazon. Online books, sellers. I've even got it into, or actually, I don't know if it's physically in the bookshop, but there's a couple of bookshops in Australia that Ong reformers, bookshop. I've got it in there, which is pretty exciting. Had to push pretty hard to get it in there though. [01:02:11] Yeah, so it's hopefully everywhere. But. it's written intentionally, not as an academic work. So if Leviticus scares you, I would say read my book because I've tried to make it fun. I've tried to make it approachable tried to make it something that a teenager could pick up and read and understand. [01:02:32] It tackles some big topics, but hopefully, and this is partly doing my YouTube channel has helped me to make complex ideas simple and understandable. It's really hard to do actually. Early on, it was really hard to grab a really complex idea and boil it down into like a two or three minute video like that. [01:02:54] it forces you to pick your words really careful. To really decide on what's important and what's not important. But that was helpful in writing a book. But yeah, that's basically what it is. It's only what, it's 12 really short chapters. It's not a long book. If you listen to it, it's not an audio book yet. That's my next project, but it's like less than three hours. It's not long. So yeah, a good introduction, overview of Leviticus, but it focuses on the sacrificial system mainly from the perspective of a butcher. So what it means that priests prepared meat and placed it on the a Which bits the priest's ate. Which bits the people ate. What the kidneys and livers mean in the sacrificial system. That was one of the most exciting chapters to write. [01:03:40] Carey Griffel: Yeah, I have a whole bunch of books about Leviticus that I could suggest to people, but yours is the first one I would suggest because it is that accessible and I think it is really important to make it accessible. And you are right. It is not easy. So I really appreciate your work. I also wanna ask, what do you think about being from Australia and having such, you now have a global presence? Is that something you ever expected? W hat did you initially hope or think that your reach would be? [01:04:18] Phil Bray: Yeah, I partly, I wanted to speak into my own area. I wanted to speak into my tradition. Local Sydney Anglican culture. Sydney Anglicans aren't very Anglican compared to the rest of the world. [01:04:33] But so I wanted to do that, but then I started meeting people like yourself all over the world. And I realized, like we said right at the beginning, that people were just kind of assuming as normal and accepted the things that I'd been discovering just from reading the Bible that I hadn't been taught in church. [01:04:54] So then it kind of moved from like wanting to speak into my own tradition to, oh, this is something that could be maybe helpful for more people around the world. Like I've had photos, people have sent me photos of the book in like Sweden and all over. It's South Africa. It's pretty exciting. [01:05:11] Yeah, so that's the good thing about Facebook and these online communities, is that I've met people that I never would've dreamed of meeting. Like just being able to, text or chat with, like yourself or Andrew Rillera, or Mark Scarlata like people who, and actually the most surprising thing that's blown me away is the people who agreed to endorse the book. And who wrote some comments for me in the book. Like, I'm still floored by the kinds of people that said yes. I guess partly, 'cause Leviticus is such a niche area, but I'm like, just looking through all the books that I read and I'm like, Ooh, this Leviticus person, just send them a cheeky little email like I'm writing a book, do you wanna endorse it. But the people that replied and said, yes, I was so blown away. [01:05:56] Carey Griffel: That's awesome. And we have to mention how your book is got amazing artwork in it as well, which I just wanna thank you and your wife for doing that because it helps to open it up in a bigger way. I really appreciate, and I love the art. [01:06:13] Phil Bray: That was something that I was challenged. I gave it to someone at my church to read to kind of proofread it. I was super glad that she got from the book that it was about the immersive experience because I was hoping to communicate that if you were participating in a sacrifice, it's more than just a mental cognitive exercise. [01:06:33] Like you were smelling smells, you were hearing sounds, and you were eating meat and tasting meat and seeing smoke. And like, there's so much that's packed with so much meaning that we just don't get at all. In, well a lot of our churches, we don't have anything like that. Like we don't have smoke or smell or anything. [01:06:54] So she challenged me to put like, you can't be trying to say that in a book and then just have words on the page. So I was like, okay, I hear what you're saying. Point taken. We'll get some illustrations. Yeah, my wife did such great job. But yeah, helping to just visually connect some of those ideas. [01:07:11] Carey Griffel: Right. Well, I'm grateful to the publisher for putting all of it together and 'cause sometimes if you wanna put pictures in the book, they kind of bulk at that. They don't always like it. So grateful for that. All right. I really appreciate your coming on and having a conversation with me, Phil. [01:07:29] Phil Bray: Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a really fun chat. And actually, even while we've been talking, there's been things that I need to think about more. yeah, landed on some new things. [01:07:39] Carey Griffel: I am just sad that Phil could not join us. [01:07:42] Phil Bray: I should have set someone else like surprise. It's, yeah, he's right next to me. [01:07:47] [01:07:48] Carey Griffel: He's holding the camera, so that's, [01:07:50] yeah. [01:07:51] All right. Well thank you again, Phil. [01:07:53] Phil Bray: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it's been fun. Thank you so much. [01:07:57] Carey Griffel: All right. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up the episode here. Again, thank you, Phil, for joining me. Even though the other Phil could not join us. If you don't understand that joke, well go check out Leviticus is Fun on YouTube and you'll see what I'm talking about. [01:08:14] And if you're listening to this in real time here in September 2025, for those of you who are at On This Rock Biblical Theology community, I am giving away Phil's book this month. So come over to the community, check it out, and see how you can get a chance to be in the drawing for Phil's book. [01:08:35] And on the community, we do monthly themes there. This month's theme is on atonement, so if you're interested in that topic, come on over and have a look. Even if you're not listening to this episode in real time, you can still come over to the community and access all of the conversations and all of the materials that are in the community. [01:08:58] So if you're late to the game, it's okay. You can still come and talk to us about atonement because it's a really big topic and there is a lot to say. We can't possibly cover it within a month. This is just to help us kind of get our shared attention onto the topic so that we can talk about it together. [01:09:18] At any rate, thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for supporting me in the various ways that you do. Big shout out to my financial supporters. You guys help me and bless me so much and I really wanna thank you for that. [01:09:33] You can find me at On This Rock. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com. I will be sure to put all of those links in the show notes for you to check out. But at any rate, that's it for this week. I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.