Preaching and Discipleship in the Metaverse and Gaming Spaces

So equipping digital missionaries is going to be something, as Pastor Dominic was talking about, being in the gaming space. I am a gaming outpost leader for the church digital. So my focus is in gaming space. I'm on Twitch all the time as he talks about being in Red Room, being in VR. I'll talk about that as well. I'm in those spaces connected with other churches in those spaces. There are several people pioneering, but... If you're not thinking gaming space, if you're not thinking VR, even though you're here in the VR space, that's okay. One of the things that we will do in that course on Equipping Digital Missionaries is talk about where are you called? What space are you called to? We'll think through that process. We'll ask questions. And I love how Pastor Dominic said, joining other people who are already on mission is an amazing way to be able to... To work into it, to volunteer in spaces. So let me, well, I would have introduced myself at the beginning, but we had some tech issues. So I have been the host here in the VR space. Maybe you've heard my voice. Now, my name is Lane Size. You may not remember that. I usually introduce myself because people can't remember my name or pronounce it as. It rhymes with Satan Lies. So, yes, yes, I am late in size. It rhymes with Satan lies, and he does. But digital spaces, you're going to see me all over the place as flat-capped after pastor. I'm a little disappointed in spatial that the best I could do was get a top hat. By the way, I've been married for over 30 years, and I wore a top hat at my wedding. There really is not a fancy enough black hat to look like it is, you know, tuxedo-worthy, so I wore a top hat for my wedding, and yes, my wife was fine with me wearing a top hat. She knows me well enough, knows I love her, and she loves me very much. I've got three kids, all who are... are out of the house. The oldest and youngest are married, and during COVID, they moved in my basement and lived there for a while. And now they've been able to graduate from college during COVID and now they've moved out. I'll tell a little bit more about myself as we go along. I'm going to turn around and make sure if there's anything else on the slide. So yes, I'm going to be speaking and focusing on preaching in the metaverse. And I'm not the most qualified person that should be speaking about preaching in the metaverse because although I've been preaching for 20 plus years or about there, I have not done a lot of preaching in the Metaverse. And I'll tell you about how I ended up here. And I love the fact that we have a whole section here in VR focused on that because this is my learning and growing area where I'm at. Have you been going to the next slide, Pastor Dominic? It's not Pastor Dominic. Chatters, chatters. I think my slides are in the wrong order there. That's not the first slide that I had. I think you got them in a different order. Let me pull it up on my screen. I'll tell you which one I want. Getting closer. It should have a picture of Insane Irvine. There we go. We got the right one. Still hearing an echo? Okay. We'll have to get that fixed. I'm one of those people that always ask questions why. Now, you've probably heard this story. Lots of pastors have told this story. So if you've heard it before, that's okay. What you see here is a roast in a pan. Nothing unusual about that. But there was a new couple that got married and the wife to celebrate Easter was super excited, going to make a roast for her husband. They were newly married and he's watching her make the roast. And he noticed that his wife cut off both ends of the roast before she put it in the pan. And he asked her, why are you cutting off the end of the roast? She said, because that's what my mom did. I said, well, why did your mom cut off the ends of the roast before putting it in the pan? She said, I don't know. Let's call her. So they go and call Mama. Mom, hey, I'm just making a roast. And my new husband was wondering, why do I cut the ends off? Why do you cut the ends off of the roast? And Mom said, I don't know. That's what Grandma did. She cut the ends of the roast off, and that's how I learned how to do it. So that's what I did. So let's call grandma. So they go and they call grandma and find out from grandma, why do you cut off the ends of the roast? And grandma said, because it wouldn't fit in my pan. That's why I had to cut the ends of the roast off. I just had a tiny pan and it wouldn't fit unless I cut the ends off. So if you've heard that before, you know, I think it's pretty funny, but it's one of those things that just points out. We often do things that are passed down to us and we don't have any idea why we're doing the things that we're doing. We just saw them done. We think it's the only way to do them. And so we continue to work and operate from doing them that way. Now, I'm going to give you a simple overview of things that the church has had passed down to it that maybe you don't know why the church does it. Now, I'm not telling you that these are bad things. I'm not judging these things. I'm only asking if you know why they're done, and do we still do them for the same reason, or should we do them for a new reason? So the first one of those whys. is creeds and confessions why do we have creeds and confessions again i'm going to oversimplify this But creeds and confessions, many of them were established by Protestants when the Protestant Church split from the Catholic Church. It's not to say the Catholic Church doesn't have some as well. But a lot of the creeds and confessions were written in that first century in order to teach Protestants how to be Protestants instead of being Catholics. So we have those in order to teach Protestants what does it mean to be a Protestant. an additional thing with confession sometimes it was to be able to defend yourself to say i truly believe in jesus and here's what i believe and i'm within the faith i do have these beliefs i'm not some strange person out there making my own things up so creeds and confessions oversimplifying it is one of the reasons we had those i'm not answering why we have them today i just answering why did they start okay how about altar calls i know we we talk about those some traditions use those a lot some traditions don't use the altar call why do we have an altar call well one of the things this goes back to is charles finney not directly but connected with charles finney who created a anxious bench is what i believe he called it and it was a front row where he would emotionally connect with people and get them emotionally worked up. And he felt that if he did that, he could get people to respond to coming to Jesus. And so that's part of where altar calls come from. I'm not saying that that's the purpose of them. I'm saying that's where the heritage of them comes from. I'm just reading the text there. Okay. uh length of service anyone usually go to a church service in a physical space your church service at least growing up for me was typically a one hour length of time and if you went long people usually complained about going long now some of these things i'm saying might be north american centric they may not be globally true as far as you know length of time of the service but why did the length of service get established because about a century a century and a half ago when radio became a prominent thing radio started putting church services on or would put sermons on and as they did they had a set schedule at the top of the hour is when programs start so you need to start at the top of the hour and end at the bottom of the hour so that in some way contributed to the ongoing length of time that we have for worship services again not the only thing oversimplifying it but that gets sent forward then we have uh announcements that get made where where do we have announcements not that this is the only place but one of those things that solidified doing announcements was around civil rights movement in the u.s so you would have community announcements that were made about what was going on in the community what was happening where people were meeting different things so there were was a community that gathered on sunday and as they gathered as community they talked about and gave announcements of things happening throughout the week now we've adjusted that in some ways to giving announcements about everything happening in the church and all the activities we have but again why did they start what was one of the catalysts that that gave them to us and do we know that and why do we continue to do those things if we don't know why we're doing them or why or how they started okay i did see a couple of things in the in the chat let me just see uh spicy taco said do you know most creeds were written early in church history uh lost all credibility and leaving until next speaker oh so Heidelberg Catechism was written in the 1500s. There's canons of door. Also, we have one from this century, the Belfer Confession. And it depends on your tradition. So sorry, Spicy Taco. I wasn't trying to say there weren't any. I was trying to talk about some historical sections. So sorry if I did not mean to offend anyone. And like I said, I was oversimplifying these just for point of we often don't know where things come from and how they are going. A tradition is set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Oh, very good. Very good. Creeds and confession answer the question, which Jesus do you believe in? That's an interesting way to say it. I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that's an interesting way to say it. So I hope you're tracking with me. I'm not trying to say good or bad or otherwise. I'm just trying to point out we often inherit things that we're not always reminded of why they began. So let's move on to some other things in the past from the early church that we may not have known. So we often overlook changes in the past. And so one of my favorite places to go is the book of Acts because it is the early part of the church that's getting started. And what we have in the book of Acts is a problem that needed to get solved. So the widows are not being fed that are the Greek widows. They're getting forgotten in the daily distribution of food. So they needed to problem solve what happened. I'm not going to read that whole section. We know that that happened. And one of the key things was finding people who were full of the Holy Spirit was a requirement for those seven individuals who became deacons. now what follows after that chapter of them appointing deacons to help serve the church isn't any description of deacons distributing food it's not a hey so stephen came in and he passed out some bread to everybody and everyone was all excited because stephen passed out amazing bread or he made it himself or anything like that no what we immediately have is stories not about deacons doing bread distribution we have stories of people who are doing ministry that is different from what their position was. So let me know. I see you asking if my sound is good. Is anyone else having issues with my sound? Let me know. Okay. I'm not seeing anything else. So Okay, you're saying clear? Okay. Acts 6, 8. Now Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. Great signs, great wonders, and miraculous signs doesn't sound like food distribution and passing out bread. It sounds like an entirely different thing than what he was called to do. and then we have uh philip i'm not going to go into all the stories there's more there philip went down to the main city of samaria and began proclaiming the christ to them so philip starts evangelizing stephen starts performing miraculous signs and wonders so this is this what they were called to do no but they were full of the holy spirit and once the church had seen that they had the spirit within them and then they began serving in the church the holy spirit starts moving within those group of deacons to start doing things beyond what they had set out to do to begin with And I think that that's a lesson that we should pay attention to, because when you are full of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit starts taking you into places and doing things that you had not planned to do or were thinking about doing. And I'm going to go over how that's happened for me in just a little bit. But before we move from the first century, I want to talk about the tech that was used for the gospel in the first century. Now, these aren't things we might think of as tech, and I'm not saying these were created back in the first century. Some were developed before that, but this is what the early church had access to for tech. They had letters. Now, not everyone could read, but letters could be sent to the churches so that they would know the teachings of the disciples. So they have letters, which is a way to communicate and send information and knowledge and also could go back and forth as we see what happens with the church in Corinth. The disciples also used scribes. Scribes were professionals who could take and write efficiently as to not waste space, as to communicate clearly, as to know the language well, as to be able to do all of those things. So scribes were also something that could be utilized, which we see that Paul says he does utilize. Greek, Greek might not think of, oh, that's a tech of the day, but it is the way that people communicated across continents, across ethnic groups, because Greek was commonly spoken everywhere. Writing in Greek became something that everybody could utilize and be a part of. That's changed over time. Greek isn't the language of commerce anymore. Now English is, and that is shifting and changing again, perhaps. uh couriers couriers would be people who would take the letter to someone so you didn't have to go yourself you didn't have to rely on just putting on a boat and hoping it gets there but you would have an actual person who would go with the letter who would know what was in the letter and they would be able to communicate that what your thinking was behind the writing and be able to bring a response back for you yeah paul did use letters and and and scribes uh but he always lamented not being in person uh yes he often uh lamented not being in person um he he i think i've got a slide they'll talk about that in just a second um he also the roads were utilized and ships were utilized how do you get the letters to someone you send them on their way by a courier using the road using ships to be able to get there all kinds of different tech was used which we don't always think about because we have had those for so long we don't remember that some point those became new things for people to be able to have and use uh and one thing about paul when he's writing letters He had never been to Rome when he wrote the letter to Rome. He wrote to people he had not yet met personally. Now, it's not to say there weren't people in that church he didn't know, but Paul wrote to Rome before he ever went to Rome. And yes, he longed to be there in person. I don't think there's anything wrong with longing to be there in person, but he still used all of this different tech when he had no ability to be there. And one of the things I don't think that anyone said was to Paul that a letter to the church isn't good enough. You have to go teach them in person. You have to go over to that person in Rome. You can't just write a letter. You have to go to the person in Corinth or Ephesus. He was in prison many times writing these letters, so he couldn't go in person. There were limitations and he utilized what he had. So I'm not saying in person is worse. I'm not saying in person is not valuable. I'm simply saying is if we evaluate Paul used everything accessible to him. to be able to do what he could do for the gospel we could do the same thing and apply everything we have access to to reach people who are far away from god yeah he only wrote letters because in person wasn't possible he wrote letters to encourage he wrote letters to teach he wrote for for various different reasons now i told you i was going to tell you a little bit about my journey into tech and where i find myself now so as i mentioned uh i've been a pastor for many years i'm coming up on 20 years graduation from seminary going to that uh celebration this year of 20-year reunion And my journey didn't start out because I thought I was going to go and teach in a tech space or I was going to utilize the latest tech of the day. But along the way, as ministry was happening, there were needs and I stepped in to try to reach and fill those needs. So in 2005, I was doing an internship at a church in the Dallas area and Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And we had and it was the county north of Dallas. We had half a million people who were in our county displaced because of Katrina. And we were trying to help with doing a warehouse to be able to bring in goods that people needed and get them set up in housing and provide furniture and all of those things. So I needed to be able to communicate throughout the whole US to communicate what we needed so that people could send it, do all those things. So I sat in my office for a week, 10 days, taught myself HTML coding so that I could run and operate a website. I had no training. I had no knowledge. There was no Google to teach me. There was no AI to ask. And so I did that because a need arose and I responded to a need. I then went to a church in South Dakota. And as we were doing things, I'm like, you know what? I can record sermons and send them out to people. This new thing, digital spaces, is becoming. We could put videos of sermons and services online. And it's before YouTube would let you do long-form content. I believe YouTube at the time only allowed about a three-minute video. But I found a service, and I wish I could remember what it was, that would allow you to upload a total of one hour a week of video content. So I would upload the service each week to that site, and it would be stored there and connected to the website, and people could watch. A short while later, because I was in a college town and emailing college kids about activities and events, and they said, Facebook me. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? They said, yeah, get on, get on this platform. Send me a message there. That's where I communicate. That's how you can reach me. So I adapted and I adopted because in order to reach and connect with my community, I needed to do that. uh jumping ahead because i'm not going to give you every step along the way sometimes it's repeated it's growing it's continuing but the next shift was uh when youtube started allowing live worship in around 2011 i started doing live worship the reason i did is we had shut-ins that were 45 minutes away to an hour away all four different directions of where i was living and it was cumbersome to take a vhs tape yeah that's what we had a vhs tape to go on monday to one direction on tuesday the next direction and i'm like we can do better than this so to reach those who were either sick or shut-ins we started live streaming our services then then during covid uh i shifted to making little shorts now i don't think they were called shorts at the time i was just creating short encouraging videos two to three per week to my community uh throughout uh 2020 and putting them out to communicate because i couldn't see people in person for a short period of time so how do we communicate and encourage that was a way that i found to do it but it wasn't until 2021 that i saw a shift in my thinking from i use technology to connect with people i already knew to seeing that there was a mission field of people who the church had not been reaching who the church was not reaching And I started streaming on Twitch. So I stream regularly Monday through Friday, reading the Bible on Twitch. We study, we read. I've done a Bible in a year a couple of times. Right now we're doing more in depth, slower pace. And I started doing that. And along with that came Discord and being able to do that. I had set up pastor groups in person. And I saw... pastors and missionaries online who didn't have places to connect and to collaborate and to come alongside of one another and so i started creating those in digital space and then along that way in 2023 i joined the team of the church digital as the relationship director of helping connect people so if you're doing something i want to know what it is you're doing and help you find what other people are doing like you so that you can partner so that you can encourage so that you can be lifted up in the things god is calling you to do and then I've now worked into being a outpost leader for those who go through the equipping digital missionaries in gaming. I'll connect with you and help you in gaming spaces if you're over there. And then also I work with tangible resources. What is it that your church may need and is missing? And this is how I got into VR preaching. I have friends who are in VR church, VR MMO church, that I've known for three, four years, some of them, some of them less than that. And they were struggling with being able to have pulpit supply. Maybe you've never thought about that, but if your pastor goes on vacation, they usually get pulpit supply in a physical space. Well, digital churches need that too. so i got a vibe about six months ago so that i could see could i do this could i be in a vr space could i help friends out who were on mission to to be in that space so uh i i got tried to get myself comfortable with it and then i finally after uh maybe six eight weeks i said okay i think i think i'm comfortable enough to do a sermon and so the first sermon i was doing i was walking up the grade so you can see here like we built a whole world uh the church has a whole world that was built and we're on the side of a mountain and we're walking up the mountain except i was walking into the mountain instead of walking up the mountain so i decide to just take in and uh and jump so that i would uh you know be able to go up the mountain and as i jumped instead of just you know getting half of my torso out of the mountain that i was walking into i just started floating away and i couldn't get down and i just kept floating up and then i was stuck up there so i find glitches usually in video games i actually glitched in here earlier today where i got stuck in the wall and i had to leave and respawn and i'm oh no am i going to have to leave and respond what's going on well we got some great tech people that figured it out and then somebody tackled me and dragged me back down to the ground so i could finish my sermon so uh yes best bug tester ever yes i'm pretty good at that so it was a hilarious and embarrassing moment but it's also look i'm i might have expertise but i'm not an expert in everything And we have within our communities experts in other things besides ourselves. And I can be humble enough to say it's going to take me years before I feel comfortable preaching in VR. I'm still not there. I mean, I haven't done it for a year yet. But I still think it's going to take me years because it took me years to get comfortable of being able to get up every Sunday and prepare a message every week and bring that to people so I could interact. But I'll tell you right now, if I had a physical church friend down the road or someone who said, hey, on a Saturday night, our pastor called in sick. Can you come tomorrow? And I'm available. I can jump in and do it. It's going to take me a while in VR space and in digital spaces to get that same level of comfort. Okay, so as we go in, so that's kind of my story. How did I come here? I just want to talk about digital spaces for a minute. So where are you going? So just like you would go as a missionary to a physical place, you would want to learn and study the culture, the environment, the history of... China, if you're going to China. India, if you're going to India. Africa, if you're going to Africa. All of those, and including language, including cultural norms. You're going to study all of those things before you go. You do the same thing in digital spaces. TikTok is not the same place as Rec Room. Rec Room is not the same place as Final Fantasy of any other place. you're not in video games in facebook they have different cultures they have different histories they have different cultural norms you're going to study the place you're going now maybe you already know the place you're going maybe it's the place you already are but even if you already are there there are things to learn just like if you were a missionary in the u.s and you're from the u.s or you're in africa and you're from africa you want to study to make sure that you aren't just imposing your own thoughts on everyone else but you are listening to those who are in the space okay uh so what do we do in this place how do we figure it out we we go in and the what we do is we encourage so as we go along we find others who are already in the space maybe they're christians who are in the space maybe there are churches in the space maybe there are missionaries in the space or maybe it's just a person of peace someone who welcomes us in so we encourage those who are already there and we encourage those who are new who show up Two, we explore. You go in and you discover new things. I'm still in that exploring space in VR. There are a lot of places I have not been. I haven't played a lot of games in VR. Rec Room and VR Chat are probably the two places I have. And then after you encourage and you explore, you want to empower. So if there are things that we're doing today to help all of you who are here at this conference, that's one way that we are going to empower you by bringing up new things to expose you to, by giving you suggestions on how to do things. We're going to empower you to be able to be in that space, and we want to empower others who are already there and those that follow behind us. then we want to experiment i can't remember who said it earlier but i was just like a hundred percent yes uh go try new things see if they work learn from those i think it was jay kranda that said that uh experiment with things and try them so i've done that a couple of times uh some of those have worked some of those didn't i tried on my twitch channel to play boulders gate three for three hours a day on mondays and tuesdays for about three months and i didn't gain any new community i didn't expand to the community i had it was absorbing a lot of my time and i didn't find any fruit for the gospel so i shifted what i was doing uh i seeing a comment in the chat so uh jfp lines you found doing evangelism on roblox that you should be very careful in disclosing personal information there's paranoia about adults talking to children yes some of that is valid and false accusations are easy to happen consider evangelism in these spaces like you would in a closed country that is really really good so that is part of what i would say is exploring you've done exploring in that space you've learned the culture there and now you are empowering others with what you have learned and you're encouraging us so that's fantastic i appreciate you sharing that with us so uh you had you you had not explored it it would have would have learned that yes yes okay i just want to check on my time here a second before i keep going okay how far do i'm sorry i'm scrolling different things if i was in vr i wouldn't be able to do this but i'm here so okay i we've got maybe 10 15 minutes and then we'll be moving on okay so what do we adapt because i think that's one of the things that we need to do is figure out adaptation when we're going to do experiments so what do we adapt uh in here we have adapted by building a world unique for us to come into this space but one of the things the space has limitations so we have to uh adapt to the limitations of the digital realm that we are in so we've built a world that that shows things i love a friend of mine who is a vr pastor for a while talked about at his church if you came in on sunday this was his ultimate goal and after fellowship before worship some people would turn to the left and walk to the sanctuary and you'd be learning about the israelites crossing the red sea and other people would turn to the left and go into the vr lounge and then put on vr headsets and in that world you would walk through the red sea and experience it and that's one of the things that we have capability to do is build worlds and show what the bible teaches not just have someone on a stage uh speaking like i am right now another way is you can do this in immersive games uh that you are inside of the game and you're immersed in the game and you're bringing the gospel inside of it uh so final fantasy uh church does that they are inside of the game they gather inside the game so you don't even have to build the platform you can go into one that already exists and adapt inside the game now one of the things they had to do to adapt you can't have a microphone and talk to each other in the game so they use discord server to have their conversations while they physically see each other in the game so using what people have already created to adapt to bring the gospel into places and then participatory practices now i had really hoped and l michelle had tried to do this as well i was going to plan on having you read some things on the screen but since we are in multiple servers that's going to be inefficient but one of the things that uh rec room does well and when i preached in there is we'll have the scriptures like we have all the screens around here in the billboards we'd have slides of of the scripture and we would ask for a volunteer and then we have a little paintball shooter that will paint the person so that they have a megaphone so that they can speak and they will read the passage for us and they will do that so that it's participatory not just one person on stage doing all of the talking now we also need to develop new practices and new rhythms there are things that nobody has figured out yet that we're going to do so how might we do that i don't know what those are they're going to develop over time as we are doing those things so how could we adapt i'm not saying these are things that we have to do but what if you just gathered one way to adapt is to gather and just sing do we have to have a sermon every time we gather do we have to have everything else that a service usually has or could we just gather for one hour or two hours and just do singing only bring a space that would have videos on the screen doing a dance party like uh pastor dominic was trying to get us to do uh and just do that and worship together alone through music i think we could do that another way we do it is promote multiple voices having multiple people on staff multiple people who are doing different things i love the churches that i see where one person comes up on stages and doing announcements others are the greeters at the door others are doing breakout groups start to think of more ways to have the community invested and and Learning together and serving alongside each other. And then I think we can reimagine the Bible learning time. I've done that by streaming on Twitch and engaging the chat in the middle of it. It's really difficult how to do that when you're preaching. But what's really cool in this space. i can see the chat and you'll notice i've adapted to being able to comment to the messages that you are sending while i'm here engaging all of you i can see those i can adapt to them and i can uh engage and interact with you so well i want to share so in those ways that you can reimagine it interactive is is what i think is going to be uh the best way especially for people who are far away from church background to know enough about the bible to engage so when i start as a pastor to say you know something about the book of acts I assume most of you here knew about the Book of Acts, but I can't make that assumption in all digital spaces that you would know when I mentioned Stephen, who Stephen is, or I mentioned Philip, you would know who Philip is. So at that point, that would be the time where someone could raise their hand, they could ask the question, okay, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Back up, I need some info here so that we can engage on the knowledge level of where people are. One way to engage, if you've ever heard of it, is Lecto Divina. That's a method that's been used. Discovery Bible method is another method that's used. I'm going to introduce one method. I'd hope to have us practice this, but I don't think we have time or that it's going to work real well. But we'll give it a try anyway. So it's called the HERE method. And so it's highlight, explain, apply, and then respond. So those will be the ways that you do it. praying before you read the Bible is part of it, but you don't put that in. It's not in the acronym here. So you begin with prayer, but then you read the passage, and then people share one verse, two verses, or just a phrase. What is it that stood out from you? What did the Holy Spirit draw your attention to as we were reading the passage? And then that person would explain and then you would share with each other what you heard, what I heard in the passage and explain what it meant to the original audience. So what did this mean for the original people that were hearing it? Now, that might require someone to be able to share what the original audience is before you do the reading of it. And that's fine. But you would explain what would it have meant to the original people. who the letter was written to or would have heard this taught in in the temple the synagogue or the church and then apply it how would they apply it how would you apply that uh for yourself and then respond what are you going to do in response to the things that you have heard that you have seen so that would be the approach on those things of how all of that fits together how all of that works together so i hope to have all of you try this so i'm I'm going to go ahead and attempt it, and if it doesn't work, that's okay. But I don't want to just tell you something, and then you don't try it. So the passage we're going to read is from Zechariah 3, beginning in verse 1. I think there are 10 verses, and I'm going through verse 8. This is going to be really small on the screen. So if you can't see it, I'm going to just invite you to just listen. And then after I read it, I might read it again, or I will invite you to read it again. And then just turn to the people, to one person next to you. So you might need to move away from each other for a minute just to think about that. So you can have private conversations. Two or three people is probably a good number. Just highlight what stood out for you. Explain what did it mean to the original audience who would have been hearing this from Zachariah. How does it get applied? And then how are you going to respond? Now, maybe you can't think of all of those things. And that's where the conversation with each other helps us be able to do that. the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, with Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, May the Lord rebuke you, Satan. May the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. isn't this man like a burning stick snatched from the fire now joshua was dressed in filthy clothes and he stood before the angel the angel spoke to those standing all around removed his filthy clothes then he said to joshua i have freely forgiven your iniquity and will dress you in fine clothing then i spoke up let a clean turban be put on his head so they put a clean turban on his head and they clothed him while the angel the lord stood nearby then the angel of the lord exhorted joshua solemnly the lord of heaven's army says if you follow my ways and you keep my requirements, you will be able to preside over my temple and attend to my courtyards. And I will allow you to come and go among these others who are standing by you. Listen now, Joshua, the high priest, both you and your colleagues who are sitting before you, all of you are a symbol that I am about to introduce my servant, the branch.