Old Testament Ethics, Isaiah, and the Moral Vision of Scripture with Dr. Iain Provan

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova. Today we've got an amazing guest, and we're going to tackle some really interesting topics when it comes to the Old Testament, ethics in the Old Testament, and some of the harder verses. That is Dr. Iain Provan. Dr. Provan, thank you so much for joining us today and taking some time out.

Dr. Iain Provan: It's a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. Let's jump right in from the beginning. Give us a little history about your background. Were you raised in a Christian home, and what inspired you to pursue biblical studies?

Dr. Iain Provan: I was born and raised in Scotland in a Presbyterian family. That was still very much a churchgoing culture, so it was pretty normal to be inducted into Christian things, broadly speaking. We had good teaching, I think, as far as I could understand it as a child. Like many people brought up in churches, I graduated gradually into an adult grasp of my faith somewhere around my mid-teens. I became conscious of the need to make decisions personally about such things. Then I went to university believing I was being called to be a pastor. In Scotland in those days, everyone went to university first and then went on to do what we call the divinity degree. Various things happened that led me down a different path. I ended up going to England to a Bible college to study there, then worked full time in a church for two years, then went back to doctoral studies and set off on the academic track, much to my surprise. Eventually I went back to Scotland, where I ended up being ordained as a minister, but as an academic. So it's a rather strange way into the whole thing. I ended up in this vocation quite surprised, and it certainly wasn't part of my planning.

Johnny Ova: That seems like a fascinating journey. What were some of the things you were wrestling with as you got into your teens? Were there verses or stories that stuck out?

Dr. Iain Provan: The interesting thing is I don't remember that being part of my Christian experience as a teen. I think it's because we didn't read the Old Testament very much. If you don't read it, you don't have to worry about it, which is a great advantage. In retrospect, the version of Christian faith I was inducted into was quite narrowly focused on a pietistic, personal relationship with Christ. That's very important, of course, but it still wasn't very broad, not very big, and not very whole Bible either. So I really don't remember struggling much with those kinds of questions. The questions I began to struggle with as a university student were more of that nature. At university you're being opened up to a wider world, and all sorts of questions arise about the faith you've been inducted into.

Johnny Ova: We're going to get into a couple of those that are probably top of the list today. Let's narrow it down and talk about Old Testament ethics in general. What does that mean to you? If somebody listening has no idea what Old Testament ethics means, can you explain it?

Dr. Iain Provan: It might be good to begin by saying what it's not. Old Testament ethics is not necessarily the way ancient Israelites lived, because we know from the biblical narrative that they tended to live in disobedience to God much of the time, not obedience. It's also not just the laws of Israel, the legal sections of the Bible, because quite a bit of that doesn't have much to do with ethics, if by ethics we mean a set of ideals we pursue, virtues you might call them. I think Old Testament ethics is really what I call the moral vision of the Bible, which is the things that arise out of God's character. And we are to be like God. So we are called to live in a certain way. These are moral ideals we're told to pursue when we're told, be holy as I am holy, in the Old Testament, or be like your Father in heaven, in the New Testament. Those are two versions of the same thing.

Dr. Iain Provan: So the crucial thing, in terms of how the Old Testament informs our lives, is to be able as readers to make distinctions between the things I've just described. Distinguish what's really part of the moral vision of the Bible, right across Old and New Testament, things that don't change. Distinguish those from things that were just for Israel for various reasons, which do change. And distinguish both of those from how Israelites actually lived, which may not even have been law-abiding, much less driven by a moral vision. Your listeners will understand immediately that if we make mistakes in these areas, we'll be in trouble, because failing to distinguish these things leads us quite badly astray.

Johnny Ova: Such a great point. I hate saying it like this, but when people talk about the Bible as God's word, they think of it as God's dictated word. The way we talk about it is God's dictation versus God breathing on things. There is a humanity to the Scriptures. We have stories, and we even have people who think they're doing things for God when they're really not. I think we see an arc that ends up finalized in Jesus, the "it is finished" version of Christianity we have today. I agree that's where we get messy: taking things meant just for Israel and applying them today as dogma, or taking things that are temporary or just opinion and pushing them as, well, God said this. That's where we get a lot of these contradictions and ideologies that do more harm than good to people and to humanity as a whole.

Dr. Iain Provan: I agree with that. It should be obvious if we take any biblical character. Think of David. David is worthy of imitation in some respects, but in other respects he's not at all worthy of imitation. The story of David is given to us partly to show us what not to do, what not to believe and pursue. It is all the word of God to us, but God speaks about different things in these narratives, and we've got to be well-educated enough Bible readers to see the difference.

Johnny Ova: When Old Testament ethics gets mentioned, like you said, too many times people think of the laws, the codes, the rules, and I think that's too narrow a view of the grander picture. So would you say there's a unified moral vision running through the Hebrew Bible, or is it more complex?

Dr. Iain Provan: I think there's a unified vision at the core, and we would expect that, because God is God eternally and doesn't change in his character. When we're talking about God calling his creatures to live in accordance with his character, we're right at the core. It is always and everywhere right to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. It is always and everywhere right to treat people justly and not unjustly. You can go on, and in the end you find yourself saying quite a lot about the coherent, consistent core of Scripture. That really is the stuff that doesn't change in the New Testament, because God has not fundamentally changed in character in moving from the Old to the New Testament. So we would expect a coherent, consistent core. The challenge is to be clear about what it is.

Johnny Ova: One hundred percent. I watched a YouTube version of a podcast you did, sitting with a young man in what looked like an auditorium, talking about your book on the cuckoo bird and how you and your wife came up with the name. I'm going to have links to a lot of your works in our description. Can you explain why the cuckoo bird, and why you felt it was a good way to describe what you're building?

Dr. Iain Provan: I think it's a good image for the situation that confronts us, but the problem is that it needs some explanation, because it's an image from the European context. So I find myself explaining it all the time before we even begin, which is not great. The European cuckoo doesn't build its own nest or raise its own young. It smuggles its eggs into another bird's nest, and the home bird raises the cuckoo chick as if it were her own brood. The cuckoo chick then gets rid of all the other birds in the nest, chucks them out, rolls their eggs out, and grows to some enormous size. You can see hilarious pictures on the internet of a tiny mother bird feeding a massive cuckoo chick without even noticing what's going on.

Dr. Iain Provan: I think that's a great metaphor for our current situation in the church. We're in a phase where so many foreign ideas are no longer outside the church but inside it. Like the cuckoo chick, unless we identify them accurately and eject them from the nest, in the worst case they will destroy our Christian communities, and we'll fail to be the church. That book, Cuckoos in Our Nest, has the subtitle Truth and Lies About Being Human. It's focused specifically on what I think is the great issue of our time: what is a human being? And the related question: how would you go about answering that question? How would you know? To me this is one of those issues in church history where, if we get it wrong, we fail to be the church. It's as big as Martin Luther's question about how we are saved, or the early church's question of who Jesus is. It's of that magnitude.

Johnny Ova: There has to be some kind of baseline, right? Would you say the Bible is the baseline for making sure there are no cuckoos in the nest? Or is it more of a deeper understanding? Because you say the Bible, and somebody up the road says, yeah, read this verse over here. It's more about understanding context, better teaching of the Scriptures, what they were even meant for and how we apply them to our lives. Would that be a good baseline?

Dr. Iain Provan: I think clearly the Bible is our canonical rule. The Greek word canon just means measuring stick or ruler, and the Bible provides us with our ultimate ruler in terms of what we should believe and how we should behave. But as you were saying earlier, God has chosen to reveal himself in the Bible through different people in different cultural contexts at different times. That means we need to do some work understanding what each biblical author is saying in their own time and place, in their own language. Then we need to consider what it means when we read all those authors together as God's word. We're right to believe that all Scripture is inspired and useful for us. Paul uses that language, of course. The problem is we often draw the wrong deduction from it, as if God were speaking directly to us without any intermediaries. In fact, God has chosen to speak to us through all of these intermediaries, like Moses and Isaiah and the Gospel writers and the rest of them.

Johnny Ova: Great. I know it's such an open-ended question, but you said the most important question is what it means to be human. What is your response to that?

Dr. Iain Provan: Well, gosh, that would take a book.

Johnny Ova: And luckily you have one, and it's linked right in the description.

Dr. Iain Provan: But the heart of it is that we are image-bearing creatures of God, called to mediate his blessing and to rule creation on his behalf. That's the beginning of it. That's who we are in the book of Genesis, and we go on from there. And of course it's Scripture that informs us about this, not, for example, what the culture at large is saying or what our own intuitions may be, because our intuitions by themselves are very unreliable. The culture has other ways of answering big questions, whether it realizes it or not. What's distinctive about the Christian way of approaching the question is that Scripture is central, and it's central because we believe Christ has given us Scripture to function in this way. So it's really just part of our discipleship that we should believe that.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. I knew you could talk for two hours on that topic and all its nooks and crannies, but thank you for sharing. Isaiah came up in some of the podcasts and teachings of yours I was listening to, so I'd like to ask a few questions about the book of Isaiah. We had Dr. Paul Wegner on a couple of weeks back, and he was great at breaking down how the book seems to restart over and over and go a little deeper each time. How would you describe some of the ethical themes that rise to the surface in Isaiah?

Dr. Iain Provan: If you look at the very beginning of the book, chapter 1, I think it's a bit like a modern table of contents. Chapter 1 encapsulates many of the great themes the book will return to. Right at the beginning you see two things. First, the people of God have departed from the worship of God and are worshiping other gods. That's the core human problem as far as the Bible is concerned: we worship as gods what are actually creatures like ourselves. So idolatry is a big theme. Second, because we've lost touch with God, we treat our neighbors badly in all kinds of ways. That goes under the heading of unrighteousness or injustice, or many other threads of the bigger idea of failing to love our neighbor.

Dr. Iain Provan: As we go through the book, we see these themes illustrated in all sorts of ways. The idolatry theme comes back later as, for example, depending on other nations to get you out of a problem: idolizing Egypt, depending on Assyria, or whatever. The unrighteousness theme is developed at great length, particularly in chapters 2 to 12. As we get going, there are any number of judgment oracles in which God holds people to account and basically says, it really doesn't matter whether you call yourself my people or not. What matters is how you actually live. The last thing to say is that Isaiah's vision in the temple, where he's called to his prophetic job, is all about God being holy and the people not being holy, and Isaiah being cleansed from sin so he can then preach to the people.

Johnny Ova: When you look at it through a zoomed-out lens, at the big overall picture, I see two threads: religious complacency and systemic injustice. Usually the church mirrors those things. As Christians we always want the deeper things because they seem so much more exciting, but you're right, it's the basic love your neighbor. And who is your neighbor? It seems we only like to love people who agree with us and are like us, and then we justify hatred toward groups who believe or think differently. Even if you think someone is your enemy, Jesus has a solution to that too. We're told to love our enemies.

Dr. Iain Provan: There are some very remarkable passages in Isaiah, like chapter 19, I believe, where the Egyptians and the Assyrians are gathered in to be part of God's people along with the Israelites. Elsewhere in the book these are the enemies. These are the nations whose gods you should not worship. So there's no naivety about the situation. But the ultimate vision beyond judgment is the hope that the foreign nations will be incorporated into the global people of God, which is where we get to in the Gospels and after Pentecost.

Johnny Ova: On Isaiah's vision of justice and righteousness: do you see that as a true reflection of the heart of God, or is it more about preserving Israel's covenant identity?

Dr. Iain Provan: Preserving Israel's covenant identity is very important, which is why so much emphasis is placed on it. It's important because Israel is God's chosen means of bringing redemption to the rest of the world. So if the Israelites fail to reflect God's character, that's a big deal. But the point is that Israel's covenant faithfulness is only ever a means toward an end. It's not an end in itself. Where they go wrong, very often, is to begin to think of themselves as the only people God really loves in the world, and to resent to some extent God's patience with the nations. The book of Jonah is all about that. It's about how even a prophet can come to resent God's mercy toward the Assyrians, in that case. So the two things are connected, but the idea of being the chosen people can come to be misunderstood, and often is misunderstood by the Israelites.

Johnny Ova: There are so many parallels to today as you're talking, Dr. Provan. The greatest fault comes when you think you're the only person God loves, and you get angry when God shows mercy to your so-called enemies and lets them into the kingdom too. There's so much of a bigger picture we can learn from understanding those concepts, specifically in the Old Testament. There are parts of the Old Testament that are really difficult to understand because of context, culture and language, and some are even disturbing. How do you encourage people to wrestle with these texts in a way that is honest and faithful?

Dr. Iain Provan: When we come across passages in the Old Testament that we immediately think are problematic or even shocking or offensive, I think we have to pause and ask, why am I shocked? There's more than one possible answer. One answer is, I'm shocked because I'm so thoroughly integrated into my culture that I can't get beyond it to think a different thought. That's the kind of shock that arises from the fact that we're not sufficiently converted yet, and we ought not to give in to that, because the word of God challenges culture and challenges us if we're happily integrated into the culture. But if on reflection we discover that we're shocked because other parts of Scripture did not lead us to expect a passage like the one we're reading, that's a different question. That has to be explored, because we don't expect the word of God to be incoherent or at odds with itself. It's an invitation to go deeper and ask, what's going on here? Why is this apparent tension present? Are there things I've missed in my reading, things I don't know yet that I need to understand this text?

Dr. Iain Provan: In this respect, I think reading the Old Testament is a bit like traveling to any foreign country nowadays. When we travel abroad, most of us realize in advance that it's going to be challenging. Things will be said and done that are not our way of saying and doing things. We'll have to learn a bit of the language and get a good book on the culture. We accept a degree of work if we want to understand that culture. In the Old Testament it's not only cultural distance we're dealing with, but a large distance of time as well. I think many of the problems we run into come from not taking seriously that God has chosen to reveal himself through persons in time and culture. So we don't expect to have to do any work. We might even resent having to do any work, particularly if our view of Bible reading is, stick your finger on the page, take the text and go with it. Sooner or later that approach will get you into a lot of trouble. So that would be my general advice on a posture toward passages we initially think are difficult.

Johnny Ova: That's good. What would you say to this statement: maybe their understanding of who God was was incomplete, and it was then revealed in Christ, so now we have a full understanding of who he is?

Dr. Iain Provan: I wouldn't jump too quickly to that. In a way it's obviously true, because they did not visibly understand God as triune in the Old Testament, for example. I know there are various little hints about plurality, but there's nothing you could really call the doctrine of the Trinity in the Old Testament, as far as I can see. So clearly we do know more about who God is than people did before Christ came. But what we said earlier about the character of God not changing remains the case. God took on human flesh, and you might well say that was something that changed, if you like, in the nature of God. If we say that carefully, we should say it, otherwise we're not taking the incarnation fully seriously. But I don't believe God changes in character. So when it comes to the ethics of the Old Testament, it's not clear to me that that move helps us much. The Old Testament ought to make sense within itself. I think we should begin by trying to work out what's going on in a passage that seems out of joint with other parts of the Old Testament, leaving the New Testament aside.

Johnny Ova: So from your perspective, how do we hold on to the value of Old Testament ethics while also recognizing the fulfillment that comes in Christ?

Dr. Iain Provan: I would say that Christ himself, the only sinless person in the entire biblical narrative, perfectly represents what the righteous, virtuous life looks like. He constantly explains himself to the people listening to him and watching his actions, and he constantly reveals himself as a person who embodies the Old Testament moral vision, it seems to me. I'm not convinced at all that the ethical teaching of the New Testament is different from the ethical teaching of the Old Testament. I'd be rather surprised if it were, because it would imply something very strange, as if God had had a personality change at some point between the Testaments.

Dr. Iain Provan: The reason we get puzzled is that we don't distinguish between ethics and law in the Old Testament. That's where we need to do a lot more work in the church, getting our heads around the difference between genuinely ethical teaching and other things, like rules about sacrifice or food, which were only ever meant to be temporary, and which the New Testament explicitly tells you in many cases are temporary. So I would encourage people to make sure they're really reading the Old Testament in pursuit of the moral vision. That would solve a lot of problems. I suppose what I'm saying is that I don't think the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ means things are fundamentally different for us now in terms of how we should live our lives.

Johnny Ova: I guess the hiccup for most people would be this. You read in the Old Testament that God commands the Israelites to kill the Canaanites, for example. Then in the New Testament, Christ tells you to love your enemies, and those who live by the sword die by the sword. In one place he's saying kill these enemies, and in another he's saying love your enemies. So which one is it? If God is the same throughout, why is he telling them to kill here, when you'd never think Jesus would command anybody to kill anybody, the way he lived in the New Testament?

Dr. Iain Provan: You're right to identify that as a big issue for people. But here's where I think reading the Old Testament more deeply would help us. If we do that, first of all we discover that love for enemies is already an Old Testament teaching. We're told to love our enemies in Proverbs. David is implicitly commended for not taking vengeance on Saul when he had the opportunity. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord," which is a way of saying it's not yours, you should not engage in personal revenge. These are all Old Testament ideas. So if we take something like the conquest of Canaan, where the issue you're raising comes up big time, the question really is, what is it about the conquest narratives that I haven't quite understood yet? Because if you read them the way you might instinctively first want to, they don't fit very well with the rest of what the Old Testament teaches about how to regard your enemies.

Dr. Iain Provan: That gets you into a couple of things. First, are there reasons God's judgment sometimes falls spectacularly on people groups in the Old Testament, even though generally that's not true? Generally speaking, God wants to save the nations, not judge them. Second, what is the character of these conquest narratives? That's where some of the cultural background helps. I'll say more about either of those if you want me to.

Johnny Ova: Definitely. Please do.

Dr. Iain Provan: When it comes to what we call holy war in Canaan, I think it's pretty obvious that the Scriptures themselves do not tell us God gave the Israelites license to kill everyone they wanted to. That's not what the Scriptures say. What they say is that God brought judgment on very wicked people groups in Canaan, and the Israelites were part of the process by which he did that. Interestingly, though, the normal way the Old Testament speaks about the conquest is of God driving out the Canaanites before the Israelites. So this is not God changing his mind about whether people get to kill their enemies. From the scriptural writers' point of view, it's an example of the unusual, end-of-times kind of judgment of God falling into the present moment in a particular way that had to do with his redemptive plan for the entire globe.

Dr. Iain Provan: So that's number one: what is the character of the thing we're dealing with? It's the judgment of God. Usually the situation is more like the wheat and the weeds. God allows them to grow up together and judges only at the end of time. But sometimes in the story of Israel, for particular reasons to do with the safety and protection of his people, God's eschatological judgment, a big word but a useful one, falls into the present time.

Dr. Iain Provan: The second thing is all that disturbing language about killing everything that breathed. All I would say is that you have to be awfully careful with that kind of language, because as you read Joshua and Judges and further on, you discover there are all kinds of Canaanites still around in the story afterward. That should make you ask, what have I missed about the language of killing everything that breathes? What have I not understood? That ought to drive us back to good books that tell us that in ancient times, when people talked about glorious victories, this was the kind of exaggerated language they used. What we have here is a literary convention, and we ought to be very careful not to press it too far, because if we do, we make nonsense of the book of Joshua and the book of Judges for that matter. It's a long answer, but big questions require long answers. Trust me, that's an abbreviated version of the long answer we'd really need here, because it's a very important question.

Johnny Ova: Absolutely. It does two things. It stops people from coming to God and having their faith ignited, and it's a stumbling block that brings confusion. And for some smaller sects, it makes them crazy: good, we can kill everybody too and wipe them off the face of the earth.

Dr. Iain Provan: That would be a very good example of missing the moral vision of the Bible, because that's exactly what the texts don't permit you to do. These are unusual acts of God at a particular time, not even the normal way God deals with the world. You absolutely cannot use them to justify the next war you want to fight against your enemies. People have done that all through church history, and it has always ended very badly. It's completely misusing the Scriptures. But I think it's also misusing the Scriptures if we simply ignore all this as if it had nothing to do with us. It does. We just have to read the Scriptures really well. As Jesus kept saying to people in the Gospels, remember, he didn't say, don't read the Old Testament because it's gone now that I'm here. He didn't say that. He basically said, you guys just can't read. You've got to read better. Isn't that true? Isn't that his main criticism of the scribes and the Pharisees? They're just really bad Bible readers, right?

Johnny Ova: That's the quote of the interview. The Pharisees are really bad Bible readers. Good rememberers, but not good readers. That's going to be very helpful for a lot of listeners, at least to pique their curiosity and start them seeing the Old Testament texts that way. As we wrap up, just a couple more questions. There's a lot of chaos in the world right now. Do you think the Old Testament still offers guidance on how we ought to live?

Dr. Iain Provan: Let me go back to 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17, where Paul says to Timothy and the churches, all Scripture is God-breathed and useful, and then he lists the things Scripture is useful for, for Christians now. The crucial thing to realize is that when he says all Scripture, he's mainly, perhaps entirely, referring to the Old Testament, because the New Testament doesn't exist yet, not as the New Testament. There are apostolic letters around, and there's a Jesus tradition, but we don't yet have the New Testament. So when Paul talks about all Scripture being God-breathed and useful for Christians, he's talking about the Old Testament. The early church fundamentally regarded the Old Testament as their foundational Scripture, and everything had to be shown to be in accordance with those Scriptures to be judged true and good. They were reading it canonically.

Dr. Iain Provan: Most of your listeners probably won't know that up until the late second century AD, the Old Testament was quoted much more than even the emerging letters of Paul. It's not until you get to a man called Irenaeus, around 180 AD, that you find any Christian writer quoting more New Testament-type texts than Old Testament. He did that because he was trying to show people that the entire Bible was one Bible, one story. That's where I would begin, and I'm not sure people really do begin there. So my answer to your question is, of course the Old Testament is directly relevant for our Christian lives, because the Bible itself teaches us that this is the case. Again, it's part of the contract of our discipleship that we sign up to that.

Dr. Iain Provan: There have always been people in the church who denied it. Irenaeus was writing his long book against precisely those people. They were known as the Gnostics. They thought the God of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New, and they wanted a Bible that was much smaller, avoiding not just the Old Testament but every New Testament text that quoted the Old Testament as well. So they had a real slimline Bible, which was very convenient for them. But Irenaeus says you can't do that. That's just completely not Christian.

Johnny Ova: Here's a fun one. Let's use Isaiah. If Isaiah were speaking to the modern church, what do you think his ethical message would sound like?

Dr. Iain Provan: Well, gosh, let me see if I can quickly work up a summary. I think Isaiah would say: you guys, and I don't just mean the world at large, I mean you people of God, are worshiping other gods in all sorts of ways rather than the one true and living God. You are consequently failing to love your neighbors properly, and that includes your enemies. You're missing the point about who you are and what you're here for. You're not an end in yourselves. You're called out as God's people to engage in God's mission in the world. You need to repent, start worshiping the true and living God exclusively once again, set aside the other gods of the day, and begin to live righteously once again. If you don't, there's trouble ahead. If you do, you'll be working with the grain of history, because God is one day going to bring all things to judgment and bring cosmic redemption as well, including to the nations. So if you want to be on the right side of history, as people say nowadays, though they mean very different things from what I mean or what Isaiah meant, that's what it involves. I think that would be what Isaiah would say.

Johnny Ova: It's the same old song, isn't it?

Dr. Iain Provan: Well, it is. There's a reason Isaiah and Psalms are the two most quoted books in the New Testament. They're the books where the heart of the thing is perceived to lie. Other texts are quoted as well, as we'd expect, and whether a book is quoted or not doesn't really matter in terms of whether we should pay attention to it. But as a matter of fact, Isaiah is terribly important to the New Testament authors in talking about what the gospel is.

Johnny Ova: Last question. For any listener who wonders whether the Old Testament is still relevant, and I hope by now they're sitting there thinking, man, I really need to take a look at this, what would you say to help them reengage the Old Testament with fresh eyes?

Dr. Iain Provan: I don't think there's any way around the question of Christian education here. This is one of the ways I think the church generally has to up its game, because we're living in a culture that has developed incredibly powerful delivery mechanisms for its own messaging, and we are assaulted by all of it every moment of every day. If we truly think that we can combat all of that effectively by listening to one sermon a week and maybe having a midweek meeting for keeners, I think we are sorely deluded. If you say it out loud like that, you immediately realize it's just not a strategy. So I think all of us need to commit in a fresh way to a deep, wide Christian education. Each Christian disciple should aspire to be as well educated Christianly as they are in any other part of their life. Not everyone has the same capacity, but if we're honest, we would all admit we're working well below our capacity when it comes to our Christian education.

Dr. Iain Provan: That involves finding the means to do it. It involves churches upping their game in their educational programs, and encouraging people and pointing them to good books to read, in this case on the Old Testament. If I may suggest one book that might be helpful, given the themes we've ranged over today: you kindly mentioned the cuckoos book, but I have an earlier book called Seriously Dangerous Religion, with the subtitle What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters. So it's right on track here. It's not the only book your listeners could read to go deeper, but it's deliberately written for folks in the church asking these kinds of questions, looking for a way to reframe their reading of the Old Testament so it comes to life and is much more directly relevant to them. That would be one starting point, not the only one.

Johnny Ova: We'll have a lot of your works linked in the description on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so if you're interested, please check those out. Dr. Provan, thank you so much for your time. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I was blessed by it. Is there anything coming up that you're working on, or a way for people to get a hold of you? Anything you want to plug?

Dr. Iain Provan: Sure. People can get a hold of me through my website, which is simply my first name and last name dot ca. I'm one of those people blessed with an unusual name, so I got first spot. I didn't have to put a number in. iainprovan.ca, top of the Google page. It's really good. You can go there and see what I'm up to, and there's a contact page. In terms of what I'm doing, I'm trying to develop some Christian curriculum for churches that don't have a lot of resources, along the lines we've just been talking about. I'm very busy these days. I'm retired, which is really good because it gives me time to do things I couldn't do before. My next big thing is going to Brazil for three weeks to speak to the church there about Christian faith and politics, because they have a very polarized situation down there. Then I'm going back to Brasilia, where I've been before, to speak to the Vocatio Institute about a range of topics we've yet to settle, but it will probably be based on my cuckoos book. So that's my next big thing, and we'll see what else pops up for as long as the Lord gives me time.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Provan, thank you again so much for joining us today. Guys, make sure you share, like, subscribe and turn on notifications for the Dig In Podcast to get more great content like we had today with Dr. Provan. Again, Dr. Provan, thanks again.

Dr. Iain Provan: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.