Podcasts about judeans

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

When the Assyrians carried off the 10 northern Israelite tribes, they imported pagans into Samaria. What is the nature of the religion these people then practiced, and why did Judeans despise them? Take a deep dive with us into the history of the Samaritans.

This is the Pentecost Service from Greenfield Presbyterian Church in Berkley, MI. SCRIPTURE READING: Acts 2:1-21 Pentecost 2 When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. 4 They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak. 5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. 7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren't all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? 8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” 12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” 13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They're full of new wine!” 14 Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! 15 These people aren't drunk, as you suspect; after all, it's only nine o'clock in the morning! 16 Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17 In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. 18 Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. 19 I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and a cloud of smoke. 20 The sun will be changed into darkness, and the moon will be changed into blood, before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes. 21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

It was an absolute honor to speak with Maria Friedman, the Executive Director of RICI (Rhode Island Coalition for Israel). Together, we explored our Zionism journeys, both being Russian Judeans and how that shaped our initial connection/disconnect to our actual identity. Despite obstacles, we both leaned in to Zionism, in different ways. Maria and the organization she leads, RICI, embodies what activism ought to be - meeting Jew-hatred straight on and countering effectively without a victimhood mentality. Judeans are not victims; an indigenous to Israel race which not only survived but thrived for the past 4,000+ years are not victims. Yes, atrocities were targeted towards Judeans, but that is not the entire history of the Judean people. If every Israel-related organization which claims it fights Jew-hatred copy and pasted RICI's actions, it would be a far better outcome for the Judean population in America. Join us as we delve deep into our conversation on Zionism, both from a macro and micro level. For more information about RICI: https://www.ricoalitionforisrael.org/

Scripture: Obadiah 10-14Title: The Relationship Between BrothersSHOW NOTES: For encouragement on your spiritual journey, we invite you to visit our ministry website, Discover God's Truth, where you can access additional resources to enrich your Walk with God.NEW! Watch us ONLINE! Click here!Obadiah is the shortest book (21 verses) in the Hebrew Scriptures, found among the Minor Prophets. This powerful prophetic message delivers God's divine judgment against Edom for their pride, arrogance, and exploitation of Jerusalem during the Babylonian invasion. Edom, descendants of Esau, is condemned for failing to support their brothers, the descendants of Jacob—they even captured fleeing Judeans and handed them over to enemies.It was morally wrong for the nation of Edom to harm, rather than bless, their brother. This goes back to the very origins of the two nations — it began with Esau's hatred for his brother Jacob. That hatred eventually led to outright physical violence.When they were invaded, you stood aloof, refusing to help them. Foreign invaders carried off their wealth and cast lots to divide up Jerusalem, but you acted like one of Israel's enemies.Obadiah 1:11 Edom watched with complete indifference to the pain and suffering of their close relatives, Israel. They saw what was happening but did nothing.Why will Edom be judged? The prophet Amos provides this word from the Lord.This is what the Lord says: “For three sins of Edom, even for four, I will not relent. Because he pursued his brother with a sword and slaughtered the women of the land, because his anger raged continually and his fury flamed unchecked.”Amos 1:11 Head to Heart – God is a Righteous Judge, and He keeps the score. Under His watchful eye, no one will escape His judgment. Let us remember that the Lord is merciful and gracious. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).SONG: The Lord Our Righteousness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3NbYyW-OcY&list=RDy3NbYyW-OcY&start_radio=1

3.8.2026 – Rev. Ben Roberts for Foundry UMC, Washington DC The author has wasted no time being extra scandalous here. It's not just that Jesus is meeting with the Samaritan woman but also that he's doing it at a well. Other biblical narratives of men meeting with women at the well usually ends with some sort of marriage; Isaac and Rebecca.  Jacob and Rachel.  Moses and Zipporah.  These are all encounters at wells. So the overtones for the original audience of this story hint at courtship.  If you've encountered this story before maybe you've heard it sad that this woman social standing should be questioned because of the marriage history that's presented. But Dr. Laura Holmes at Wesley Theological seminary invites us to remember that permission to divorce would have been handed down by male family member it would not have been possible for a poor woman. She couldn't have chosen to get divorced. So the multiple husbands noted in this story likely are “related to tragedies either death or being divorced or both.” So it would be inappropriate to make those sorts of conclusion about here moral or social standing. She also notes for us that we should pay attention to the way that the community responds to this woman's testimony, that many people receive it and believe because of her. If she were ostracized, it is unlikely they would have even listened to what she had to say.  This story also follows closely to that of Nicodemus' the story we heard last week. The contrast being that the Nicodemus story takes place in the middle of the night, but Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well in the middle of the day. Their stories present a series of opposites: “They embody gender, class and status, and ethnic and religious differences. The setup for each encounter also differs: Nicodemus initiates the conversation with Jesus, while Jesus initiates the conversation with the Samaritan woman, and the former is at night (3:2) while the latter is at noon (4:6).”  In both stories, Jesus's answers are interpreted literally causing confusion; when talking of being born again or drinking living water. As Pastor Ginger said last week, very unhelpful answers provided by Jesus. But we see different responses within the confusion. Nicodemus's story somewhat ends after a couple of follow-up questions; he the learned teacher doesn't continue the conversation. While the Samaritan woman asks for the living water and goes and tells others about what she has encountered. So we get some of the feeling that they learned teacher Nicodemus who is inside the community doesn't quite get it what this random Samaritan outsider woman stays engaged and curious.  After the woman asks for the living water, Jesus does something that reveals and points to himself as Messiah. He knows things that haven't be said yet. He tells her about her husbands and current situation, nothing she had shared with him. This, him knowing something that hasn't been reveled,  is enough to begin this revelation and journey for her.  Let's note they have this discussion on worship. Localities are brought up as she says “this mountain” and then says, “but you (y'all) say the place where people MUST worship is Jerusalem.”  We'll talk some more about this, but suffice it to say for the moment the Jewish tradition is telling them that worship must be in Jerusalem, while the Samaritan tradition says it should be on Mt. Gerizim (or this mountain).  She points to this dogmatic divide between their communities and Jesus' response is to say neither Jerusalem nor this mountain. A time is coming when true worship will be in spirit and in truth. Worship that is born not from obligation to ritual but love of heart and active in the world as Jesus was active (mercy, service, justice, compassion). She goes from there and tells others in her community and it's said that many listened to her, came to see Jesus for themselves, and also believed. The woman becomes one of our traditions' first theologians discussing proper worship, first preachers telling her community what Jesus had done, and is every bit a disciple/apostle as those other…guys. And that is lovely.  There are few major stories where the Samaritans were mentioned in the New Testament. We have this story of the Samaritan woman at the well. We have the story of a thankful Samaritan leper. And we have probably the best-known story of the Good Samaritan parable. In each of these cases a person who is Samaritan is held up as an example of someone who did the “right” thing where the more faithful person or the Jewish person in this story does the wrong thing or is just slower at…the thing. For example, in the Good Samaritan parable this is the Samaritan who stops to help the injured person after some priests and Levites had passed by on the other side. Or in the case of the leper the Samaritan is the one who gives thanks and tells the story where the other nine just leave. I'll note that in the other two cases a person is in some ways reduced to being an object lesson, that is they are just held up to teach us something about the ways we're supposed to act. There's not a bunch of character development. We don't learn about the actual people or their communities through these stories. They're just being used to show us something. By comparison, today's story is rather robust for the Samaritan character; despite not being given a name. Last fall (2025) as part of our foundations of sacred resistance series, we did a Bible study that included talking about the Good Samaritan. Someone brought up that it would be helpful for us to expand on who the Samaritans were. Usually we (and the Bible) just note there is animosity between the Jewish community and the Samaritan community. There was one Kingdom and a united monarchy until the time after King Solomon. So we have one Kingdom under David and then under his son Solomon, but after Solomon, the kingdoms and the tribes split. Ten tribes remain in the north, which becomes the Kingdom of Israel, and two remain in the South, which becomes the Kingdom of Judah. The reason for that split is often characterized as a continuation of tax policy and harsh leadership. This would have been around or between 975 and 930 BCE. Whatever the day-to-day on the ground specifics, we end up with two groups where there had previously been one. Differences begin to emerge for a variety of reasons. But we'll start with something that's common, and that is that both groups followed the Torah or the fist 5 books of what we would call the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy). For portions of this Northern Kingdom that eventually become the Samaritan community, the scriptures stop there without additions of prophetic texts, Psalms or others that Christian circles are familiar with from the Hebrew Bible or Old testament.  And within that holy text of those first five books, there are differences between the Torah used by the Samaritans and the Torah used by the Jews. There are 6,000 differences: half of which are grammatical or small changes for flow, and the other half are larger ones like entire conversations (missing/not included) between characters like Moses and Aaron with Pharaoh and a difference in the 10 commandments. Where we might be familiar with the 10th commandment being “thou shalt not covet,” the Samaritan version has the 10th commandment as an instruction to build and alter at Mount Gerizim (believed to be the place Abraham was going to sacrifice Isacc for this tradition rather than Mount Moriah/The Temple Mount in Jerusalem). So differing scriptures (yet the same), differing instructions, differing locations claiming to be central to the faith if not the center of the world. These realties come together over time. The distinct group of the Samaritans does not really emerge however until after the Assyrian conquest in 722 BCE.  The Assyrians come through and take over the Northern Kingdom (Israel). When the northern Kingdom fell some of the members of the 10 tribes are deported throughout Assyrian territory.  Some remained. But the Assyrians also send colonists and other deported people from other places into the region of the northern Kingdom. And the population that remained from the 10 tribes begins to intermix culturally, religiously, and socially.  Differences are magnified  because of the experience of the Southern Kingdom with the Babylonian exile. Where the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdome sends the people away. The Babylonian conquest takes the people of the southern kingdom in to exile in Babylon (this where books of the prophets come from) but there's an end exile (where there wasn't for the northern kingdom) 200 years later, Persians allow the southern kingdom Judean's to return. This has a big impact on the development of Judaism. And upon their return, while it's said in the book of Ezra, the Samaritans were willing to welcome back these cousins and work with them to rebuild. Those returning did not want to mix because of the ways the Samaritans had mixed with other cultures over the centuries. At some point during the Assyrian conquest and the people being deported. Some lions showed up, killed some people, it was a big mess. It was a whole thing. The Assyrians said, you know, those people we sent into that land don't know how to worship the God of that land. So we need to send a priest back to teach them (2 Kings), because we can't have lions running around killing people. So our tradition, from the start says, those people who remain, those Samaritans who have been mixing, they don't know what they're doing when it comes to worship when it comes to being faithful. They're doing it wrong and need to be fixed. That becomes the one-sided story we inherit. This experience of exile, return and non-return becomes a big divergence for the two groups. The returning Judeans don't want to mix with those people who are doing it wrong. They reject the Samaritan's help. And as the returning Judeans begin to do things like rebuild Jerusalem and the temple after rejecting the Samaritans' help. The Samaritans in turn find ways to oppose its construction by lobbying the Persians.  Laws and prohibitions around mixing and inter-marrying are put in place. The marriage prohibitions persist to this day. Animosity and separation continue to grow over hundreds of years by the time the Jesus story begins. In 128 BCE the Hasmonean's (Judea/Southern Kingdom) destroyed the Samaritan Temple at Mt. Gerizim. Little more than a century later (6-9 AD) around the time of Jesus' birth, the Samaritans dump human bones throughout the temple in Jerusalem, rendering it unclean and unavailable for the Passover celebration. There is long-range tit for tat going on. And at roughly the same time as Jesus' life and ministry and the budding of the early Christian church, the Samaritans were essentially in collaboration with the occupying Romans; collecting taxes and helping keep order compared to the rebellious Jewish community. Samaritan community still exists. By all accounts there are 8-900 people left in the community. The population is mainly split between Tel-Aviv, Israel and Nablus near Mount Gerizim in Palestine/West Bank. There was a NYT article from 2021 called “The World's Last Samaritans – Straddling the Israeli-Palestinian Divide.” So with all of that, recent desecrations and destructions of temples, differing yet the same scripture, vastly differing experiences, prohibitions on marriages and sharing food, and hundreds of years of growing divide; Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman at a well. No shortage of old divides on display for us in the world right now. No shortage of one-sided stories about how awful the other side is, right now. No shortage of stories about how awful we are. No shortage of conflict and suffering because of it. I think I very much like the idea today of Jesus stepping into and interrupting old, entrenched conflict. I like the idea that people, like the woman, are still curious and willing not be held by old tropes and dogmas; social, political, or religious. I like Jesus stepping in and saying not your mountain or ours; it's not what matters and they're not worth staying divided over.  If we keep drinking from these old wells; of nationalism, Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, racism. Drinking from wells of sexism misogyny, racism, or homophobia. Drinking from the wells of ethnic conflict the wells of polarization. Drinking from these old wells of division and violence will just keep us coming back to these old wells of division and violence. Four years from now, 100 years from now, 200, 700, 3000 years from now. Instead, we're invited to the living water that can satisfy and move us into relationship. And for those who would step into that relationship, having experienced the living water, within them a spring would form and other could experience it too. Through that expansion may  we (with God's help) somehow move closer to the days of Spirit and Truth; changed hearts and just action in the world.

In John 10:30-33, was Jesus claiming to be God, and the religious leaders in Jerusalem knew it?Discussion with Troy Salinger (Author, Painter: Let the Truth Come Out) focusing in on John 10:30, 33:“I and the Father are one." The Judeans replied, "We are not going to stone you for a good deed but for blasphemy, because you, a man, make yourself God." Resources:Let the Truth Come Out, Troy Salingerhttps://letthetruthcomeoutblog.wordpress.com/author/troysal/“I and the Father are one” and “the glory I had with you” are NOT deity of Christ Textshttps://youtu.be/av0s_M4rYJcPre-incarnate Appearances of the Son of God in the Old Testament: Truth or Mythhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUqWXumvcp5p1klRmE6uAaU7uGSOMDuCX

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

Discover often overlooked reasons for divisions between Samaritans and the Judeans in Jesus' day and how He demonstrated God's love to them; as well as how this part of His ministry illustrate how we are to live as American believers - and Kingdom Citizens - today.

ADVENT WEEK THREE: JOYDecember 19 Rev. Jenny WynnJoy Breaks ThroughIsaiah 52:7-9Break forth; shout together for joy, you ruins of Jerusalem, for the Lord hascomforted his people; he has redeemed Jerusalem… Isaiah 52:9Advent draws us into a liminal space, a threshold between what is and what isyet to come. Advent invites us to voice our longings along with our bold decla-rations that our broken and fragmented world can be made whole.Advent draws our attention to those who have existed and continue to exist indifficult and painful liminal spaces. It is into such places that the prophet Isa-iah spoke. The prophet knew the deep pain that the Judeans in exile voicedwhen they cried, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me” (Isa-iah 49:14).Yet into this despair, God speaks words of hope, words brimming with joy. Isa-iah responds to their fears with profound assurance that God was still moving,still working toward renewal. “Break forth; shout together for joy, you ruins ofJerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people; he has redeemed Jerusa-lem (v. 9).”This is Advent's promise: our whispered prayers in uncertainty are not the endof the story. We are not alone, God still has need of us, not as passive waiters,but as joyful, active participants working for the peace we long to see throughacts of compassion, justice, and love.Where might God be calling you to participate in bringing wholeness to bro-ken places this Advent? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeremiah 32 (Listen) Jeremiah Buys a Field During the Siege 32:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. 2 At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah. 3 For Zedekiah king of Judah had imprisoned him, saying, “Why do you prophesy and say, ‘Thus says the LORD: Behold, I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall capture it; 4 Zedekiah king of Judah shall not escape out of the hand of the Chaldeans, but shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye. 5 And he shall take Zedekiah to Babylon, and there he shall remain until I visit him, declares the LORD. Though you fight against the Chaldeans, you shall not succeed'?” 6 Jeremiah said, “The word of the LORD came to me: 7 Behold, Hanamel the son of Shallum your uncle will come to you and say, ‘Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.' 8 Then Hanamel my cousin came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, ‘Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.' Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD. 9 “And I bought the field at Anathoth from Hanamel my cousin, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. 10 I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. 11 Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions and the open copy. 12 And I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch the son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of Hanamel my cousin, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard. 13 I charged Baruch in their presence, saying, 14 ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware vessel, that they may last for a long time. 15 For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.' Jeremiah Prays for Understanding 16 “After I had given the deed of purchase to Baruch the son of Neriah, I prayed to the LORD, saying: 17 ‘Ah, Lord GOD! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you. 18 You show steadfast love to thousands, but you repay the guilt of fathers to their children after them, O great and mighty God, whose name is the LORD of hosts, 19 great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open to all the ways of the children of man, rewarding each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds. 20 You have shown signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and to this day in Israel and among all mankind, and have made a name for yourself, as at this day. 21 You brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and outstretched arm, and with great terror. 22 And you gave them this land, which you swore to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey. 23 And they entered and took possession of it. But they did not obey your voice or walk in your law. They did nothing of all you commanded them to do. Therefore you have made all this disaster come upon them. 24 Behold, the siege mounds have come up to the city to take it, and because of sword and famine and pestilence the city is given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it. What you spoke has come to pass, and behold, you see it. 25 Yet you, O Lord GOD, have said to me, “Buy the field for money and get witnesses”—though the city is given into the hands of the Chaldeans.'” 26 The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: 27 “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me? 28 Therefore, thus says the LORD: Behold, I am giving this city into the hands of the Chaldeans and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall capture it. 29 The Chaldeans who are fighting against this city shall come and set this city on fire and burn it, with the houses on whose roofs offerings have been made to Baal and drink offerings have been poured out to other gods, to provoke me to anger. 30 For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth. The children of Israel have done nothing but provoke me to anger by the work of their hands, declares the LORD. 31 This city has aroused my anger and wrath, from the day it was built to this day, so that I will remove it from my sight 32 because of all the evil of the children of Israel and the children of Judah that they did to provoke me to anger—their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 33 They have turned to me their back and not their face. And though I have taught them persistently, they have not listened to receive instruction. 34 They set up their abominations in the house that is called by my name, to defile it. 35 They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. They Shall Be My People; I Will Be Their God 36 “Now therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, ‘It is given into the h...

Can you question what Israel's government is doing and still stand with Israel in a biblical way?  Many Christians feel trapped between blind support on one side and hostility on the other. In a noisy moment filled with slogans and hot takes, the conversation needs more covenant, not less. In this episode we step back into the big story of Scripture to separate three things most people blur together: Israel's government, the Jewish people, and God's eternal covenant.  We look at the prophets, at Jesus, at Paul, and at the Gospel of John to see how the Bible itself models sharp internal critique without ever erasing God's promises to Israel. You will come away with a simple “compass” you can use before you tweet, preach, repost, or debate.  The goal is not to tell you what to think about every policy, but to help you think inside the covenant story of God, so that your words carry truth, humility, and hope for both Israel and the nations. Key Takeaways The Bible gives a long history of covenant insiders critiquing Israel's leaders while still honoring God's choice of Israel. Nathan with David, Elijah with Ahab, the prophets, and Jesus in Jerusalem all confront sin to call Israel back, not to cancel the covenant. Romans 11 holds two truths together: regarding the gospel, Israel is an enemy; regarding election, they are beloved, and God's calling is irrevocable. “The Jews” in John is better understood as “the Judeans” or specific authorities in conflict, not a timeless verdict on all Jewish people. Israel's government is not the same as the Jewish people, and the people are not the same as the covenant; those distinctions really matter. Many Jewish people have real zeal for the God of Abraham, yet lack saving knowledge of Yeshua; our posture must be truth with tears, not contempt. A simple four-question “compass” can help you speak about Israel in ways that invite repentance, resist double standards, and refuse erasing language. Chapter Markers 00:00 Plywood palace, welcome, and why this conversation matters 04:00 Can I critique Israel and not be anti-Semitic? 08:30 Nathan, Elijah, the prophets, and Jesus as covenant critics 18:00 Romans 11: enemies, beloved, and irrevocable calling 26:30 John's “the Jews,” Dale Partridge, and dangerous generalizations 37:00 Government vs people vs covenant: three crucial distinctions 47:00 A four-question compass for faithful critique 54:00 Hanukkah teaser, ministry update, and invitation to partner In a moment when many are either shouting at Israel or defending her without discernment, this episode offers a biblical path that refuses both contempt and confusion.  Listen in, explore more resources at thejewishroad.com, consider coming with us to Israel, and prayerfully ask if God is inviting you to be one of The Few who regularly support this work.

A Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity Ephesians 6:10-20 by William Klock If you haven't noticed, we have a mouse problem.  Usually the mice stay to the attic or the crawlspace, but for some reason, this year, they've decided to go everywhere.  For the last six weeks I've been plugging holes and setting traps and experimenting with bait: everything from peanut butter to dog treats to Veronica and Meredith's maple fudge.  All to no avail.  They don't touch the traps, but they poop right next to them as if to say, “Do you really think we're that stupid?”  And Friday, Friday was the last straw.  The last while has seemed like a steady stream of setbacks and disappointments.  This week I was working on my book on preaching while sending feedback to a couple of guys I've been advising on preaching.  I've been really struggling with that book and this week, chatting with these two guys, I finally kind of identified the obstacle I've been running up against and I don't really know how to get around it, and that's left me frustrated and discouraged.  And the City of Courtenay.  They won't clear the leaves in their little “conservation” area anymore, so I cleared the sidewalks, but then Thursday's storm blew the leaves back even deeper, so Friday morning I was using a snow shovel to move them out as far away as I could from the church so the wind wouldn't blow them back and in the process I strained something in my leg.  And then the news coming out daily this week from ACNA and about bishops not doing what bishops are supposed to do and bishops allegedly doing things that bishops aren't supposed to do.  I was really, really discouraged on Friday.  I'm rarely tempted to give up, but Friday I was close.  And then I heard a noise, and I turned and saw a mouse dart across the room and into the storage cubicle in the Sunday School.  So I got up to see where the mouse went.  I didn't find it, but I did find the nest.  In the seasonal banners.  It was gross.  The mice had peed and pooped and chewed holes in them.  And that was it.  Stick a fork in me.  I'm done.  I packed up my things and went home.  I tried the Elijah therapy.  I had a snack and a nap.  It didn't really work. I came back yesterday morning to clean up the mouse mess.  I checked the traps first.  I wanted revenge.  But alas—nothing—as usual.  So I started sweeping and mopping and vacuuming and while I was doing that I was praying—mostly for the death of the mice.  But somewhere between the mopping and the vacuuming it hit me.  Of all the things wrong with the world and wrong with the church, it wasn't the mice.  People sin, bishops sin, I sin—but not the mice.  The mice, as annoying as they are, the mice are doing exactly what God created them to do.  They're upstairs peeing and pooping and chewing on the banners, because that's what God made them to do and in doing it they give him glory.  And while I was discouraged and tempted to just give up, they were happily doing their thing, not caring at all that I'm out to get them—laughing their little mouse laughs at me as they poop right next to my traps.  Looking for a new place to build a nest after I kicked them out of the last one.  And as I vacuumed up their poop St. Paul's words from our Epistle kept running around my head like a mouse on a wheel: Stand firm! I—we—need to be like the mice.  We need to be what Jesus has made us to be and in that we will give God glory.  And, of course, in doing that, we'll catch the attention of the enemy, who will do his best to oppose us, to discourage us, to persuade us to throw in the towel.  Our Epistle today is from Ephesians 6—just about at the end of the letter.  The first part of the letter is about who we are—or, better, who Jesus has made us through his death and resurrection.  In Chapter 2 Paul writes that if we belong to the Messiah—if we have put our faith, our trust, our allegiance in him—then we are already “seated with him in the heavenly places”.  If by faith we are in the Messiah, then that's who we are: we're part of God's new creation, seated with our king in glory.  But of course, this is one of those “already, but not yet” things.  It's begun, but it's not yet finished.  Think about it.  When he rose from death, Jesus won the decisive battle over sin and death.  But that doesn't mean the war is over.  Sin and death, the principalities and powers of the old evil age still, nevertheless, continue to fight on even though they've already lost.  It won't be over until the gospel and the Spirit have gone out to bring God's new creation to the ends of the earth—until the knowledge of his glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.  And here's the point that Paul is trying to make here at the end of Ephesians: Because we've been united with Jesus the Messiah, because what's true of him is true of us, because we are seated with him in the heavenlies, that means that we've been recruited to take part in this great messianic battle to carry the gospel and God's glory to the ends of the earth—to proclaim the victory Jesus won on the cross to the people who haven't yet heard that good news, who haven't yet heard that he's the world's true lord. And if we do this, we will face opposition.  That's why, when you make it clear for example, that your church isn't in the business of playing musical chairs with other churches, but about going out to proclaim and live the gospel to bring people to Jesus, the devils will fight you.  That's why, when you make it clear that you're not going to compromise with the philosophies, with the politics, with the systems of the world, the devils will fight you.  That's why, when you make it clear that you're going to live out new creation and make the glory of God known here and now, the devils will fight you.  They will fight you.  They will throw hurdles in your path.  They will go for the weakest link and they will cause your leaders to stumble and fall.  They will do whatever they can to discourage you and tempt you to throw in the towel. And so Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians and he says, “The one thing left to say is this: Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.”  Don't be strong in yourself.  That won't cut it.  Be strong in the Lord, because he's the one who has won the victory.  “Put on God's complete armour,” he says.  “Then you'll be able to stand firm against the devil's schemes.”  And, to be clear, it's the devil's schemes.  “The warfare we're engaged in, you see, isn't against flesh and blood.  It's against the principalities, against the powers, against the cosmic powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places.” I expect this took some time to sink in with Paul's original audience—especially his fellow Judeans.  It's not that they didn't believe there are unseen forces in the world.  That's a problem unique to people today with all of our post-enlightenment materialistic thinking.  If we can't see it, it doesn't exist.  People in the First Century knew better than us.  They knew there are spiritual powers we can't see.  The issue is that when we think of enemies, we almost always think of people.  It's the guy on the city council who wants to take away the tax exempt status of churches.  It's the people in the wrong political party.  It's the people in that foreign country that hate us.  It's the Communists or it's the Muslims or the alphabet people or the pronouns people.  Paul's people thought the same way.  Judeans thought it was the pagans.  Their enemies were the Greeks who tried to stamp out their way of life back in the Second Century B.C.  It was the Romans who presently ruled them and whose grip was getting tighter and tighter.  Paul knew that as persecution came to the churches at the hands of unbelieving Jews and pagan Greeks and Romans Christians would be tempted to start thinking the same way about them. And Paul's wanting them to understand here that none of those people is the real enemy.  Maybe they once were, but when Jesus died on the cross and rose again, he redefined the battle.  Jesus didn't go to the cross to defeat the Greeks or the Romans or the Communists or the Muslims.  He went to the cross to defeat sin and death and the powers of evil—those powers that, since the serpent tempted Eve, have infiltrated God's good creation and corrupted it, that have caused us to worship idols instead of God, that have caused us to forsake our vocation as the stewards of his creation and priests of his temple, that have caused us to turn on each other instead of loving each other as God loves us.  Jesus came like a new Adam to defeat not us, but the powers of evil, and in the process to forgive us for our rebellion and treason and to restore us to our old vocation, to do the job he created us for in the first place.  That's what it means to bear his image. And Paul knew that this meant Jesus has called us to fight at his side.  Not to fight the Greeks or the Romans or the Communists or the Muslims, but to fight the powers of evil, the principalities and powers and spiritual forces that have infiltrated creation and brought darkness where there should be light.  Again, at the cross he won the decisive victory, now he calls us into his gospel army to proclaim that good news.  To announce to the world that Jesus is Lord, that there is forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God through him if we will only come in faith and give him our allegiance.  The Greeks and the Romans, the Communists and the Muslims aren't the enemy.  It's the dark powers behind them.  And never forget that those dark powers were once working in us, too.  And they're often much closer to home—even doing their work of corruption in our own house—if you've followed the ACNA news the past couple of weeks.  But the good news is that Jesus can deliver those people, just as he delivered us. This, by the way, is why Jesus hasn't just done the war all at once.  Because God is patient, loving, and gracious he's chosen to fight this war over the long term, giving the whole world the opportunity to hear and respond to the good news about Jesus.  Giving time for the gospel and the Spirit to infiltrate the systems and powers and people of this old evil age to undo what sin and death have done. So, Paul writes, stand firm and be prepared to fight—the real enemy.  And for that he says we need to take up the whole armour of God.  That's verse 13.  And this is really telling.  If you were paying attention when we read the Old Testament lesson this morning—the one from Isaiah 59—what Paul says here should sound familiar.  Through Isaiah the Lord promised that he would send a redeemer to set the world to rights.  Our Old Testament lesson is a promise of the coming Messiah, of Jesus.  Here's what we read: “‘The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede; then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head; he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped himself in zeal as a cloak. According to their deeds, so will he repay, wrath to his adversaries, repayment to his enemies; to the coastlands he will render repayment…And a Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression,' declares the Lord.” Jesus was the first one to put on this armour and now, because we're united with him, because he's made us part of his new creation, and because he's called us to enter the battle and to stand firm against the darkness, he shares his armour with us—otherwise we wouldn't be able to stand at all.  And here's the armour as Paul describes it in Ephesians, starting again at 6:13: “For this reason you must take up the whole armour of God.  Then, when wickedness grabs the moment, you'll be able to withstand, to do what needs to be done, and still be on your feet when it's over.  So stand firm!  Put the belt of truth around your waist; put on justice/righteousness as your breastplate; for shoes on your feet, ready for battle, take the good news of peace.  With it all take the shield of faith; if you've got that, you'll be able to quench the flaming arrows of the evil one.  Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is God's word.” It starts with truth.  A Roman soldier's belt or girdle was sort of the thing that everything else attached to or hung from.  Put on truth as your belt.  Everything else depends on that.  In Isaiah's vision the Messiah was to come to set this broken world to rights and that begins with the truth.  The reason the world is in the mess it's in is because we believed the serpent's lie—that we could be like God.  Brother and Sisters, the truth is that that's idolatry.  Every other sin cascades from that.  The great lie that permeates the world is that we can do and be whatever we want.  That we can make our own reality and define goodness for ourselves.  But Jesus has come to remind us of the truth—the truth of the original creation and the truth of God's new creation.  And so before we go to battle evil, we've got to tie that truth around us.  The gospel isn't about our feelings; it's not what we make it; it's not about what we think might offend or not offend people; it's about the truth, the reality of God's goodness and his good creation and his purpose to set it and us to rights revealed in the good news about Jesus.  Tie that on and the rest follows naturally. Second, as a breastplate, put on God's justice or righteousness—remember in Greek they're the same word.  It's a reminder that at the heart of the gospel is God's plan to set this broken world to rights—to undo everything that's wrong, to undo all the sad things, to wipe away all the tears—ultimately and eventually to wipe every last bit of evil and sin and darkness from creation and even death itself.  And it's a reminder that when God raised Jesus from death, he overturned the world's false verdict against him and declared him to be in the right—and that if we are united with him, then we share in that verdict, in his vindication. And then for our shoes: peace.  “How beautiful are the feet of the one who announces peace…who says to Zion, Your God reigns.”  This is the place where Paul changes that Old Testament image from Isaiah.  Instead of vengeance, he calls us to put on peace.  The Jews wanted vengeance on their enemies, but Paul's reminding us that the Messiah, through his death, has reconciled us to God.  He's given us peace.  And that peace isn't just for us; it's for everyone.  And it's on our feet.  We stand on it.  The enemy will try to knock us down by making us think we're in this for vengeance—that we need to go after the Greeks or the Romans or the Communists or the Muslims, but if we stand on peace, on reconciliation with God, we will stand firm and remember that our fight is not with flesh and blood, but with the devil. The fourth bit of armour is the shield of faith.  In the ancient world an enemy might shoot flaming arrows at you, so you soaked your wooden shield in water.  We soak our shield in faith.  That means in the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah and in our own responding faith—remembering that he's won the victory and trusting that he will empower us to stand firm in this gospel battle and win in the end.  And that goes with the helmet of salvation—like a gospel thinking cap, it reminds us Jesus has rescued the captives.  You and I no longer belong to sin and death, but to the Messiah.  It reminds us, too, why we're waging this battle: to free the men and women still captive, still slaves to sin and death. So far this armour is all for defence.  The Christian has only one offensive weapon and that should remind us about the nature of this battle.  It's not against flesh and blood, but against the unseen forces of evil that infiltrate the systems and institutions of the world.  Our sword, the weapon by which we advance the kingdom of God is the word.  In Isaiah 11:4 the Messiah smites the earth with the rod of his mouth and slays the wicked with the breath of his lips.  It's a wonderful illustration of the power of God's word and God's Spirit—not violence, but his creative and life-giving word—to free and to transform and to set the broken world right as it confronts the great lie with God's truth. But our Epistle doesn't quite end there.  Truth and justice, peace and faith, salvation and the word are all essential if we are going to stand firm.  To take up these things is to be the people that Jesus has made us through our union with him.  But union is about more than putting these things on, it's about real, literal union—or communion—with him.  We need to talk with our commander.  And so, in verses 18-20 Paul writes: “Pray on every occasion in the Spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession.  You'll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.  And also for me.  Pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the secret truth of the gospel.  That after all, is why I'm a chained-up ambassador.  Pray that I may announce it boldly; that's what I'm duty-bound to do.” Paul was in prison because of his preaching, because he'd put on the armour of God and because he'd proclaimed God's truth.  But he knew that prison could not stop the march of the gospel and so he asked his brothers and sisters to pray for him—and not only for him, but live prayer, because that's what it means to be united to Jesus and to be baptised in God's Spirit—to be in constant communion with God.  It's not just about formal prayer—like when you sit down with your Prayer Book and your Bible and you prayer the prayers and pray the Psalms.  It's a life saturated with the presence of God and with communion with him. I don't know how it works.  I don't think anyone does.  I've read books and books on prayer and it remains a mystery, but the best ones all conclude: I don't know how it works, but I know it works.  Prayer doesn't change God—as if somehow hearing from me causes him to realise that my ideas and my plans are better than his.  But prayer changes things and it changes me and it changes us and things—kingdom things, grace things, glory things—happen when we pray and live in that communion with God. Brothers and Sisters, to pray is to act on and to live out the reality of Jesus' cross and of the new creation he's made us.  It's to know that, through Jesus and the Spirit, we can now walk with God the way Adam and Eve once did.  That we live in his presence and in his grace and in his love.  It's to know that he is our strength.  And so to pray, is to be what he has made us, it's to consciously reject our rebellion and sin, and to be his new creation.  The mice—they know nothing of sin, nothing of rebellion.  Mice have always been what God made them in the beginning.  And, like I said, because of that, mice give him glory even when they're just doing the ordinary things mice do.  We, on the other hand, rejected that life.  Jesus has given it back, but it's a struggle.  That's why Paul urges us to put on God's truth and justice, his righteousness and peace.  And it's why he urges us to pray without ceasing.  Because reliance on God is the only way we'll put to rest our old nature and be able to live into the new one he's given.  To pray is to look back to the cross in gratitude and to look forward in hope to God's new world, and find our life and our strength and everything else that matters in him—so that we can stand firm and so that we can glorify him. So, Brothers and Sisters, stand firm.  Stand firm and be the new creation that Jesus has made us.  Remember that we stand with our king in the battle, but that this battle is not against flesh and blood.  It's against the dark powers that corrupt flesh and blood, that make us hate and that make us enemies of one another.  Stand firm in God's truth and justice, stand firm in his peace and his salvation.  And confront the world with the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen.  And pray, pray, pray, remembering that he is with us and that he is our strength and our hope. Let's pray: Merciful Lord, grant to your faithful people pardon and peace; that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

“Then Jeremiah said to them all, including the women, “Listen to this message from the Lord, all you citizens of Judah who live in Egypt. This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘You and your wives have said, “We will keep our promises to burn incense and pour out liquid offerings to the Queen of Heaven,” and you have proved by your actions that you meant it. So go ahead and carry out your promises and vows to her!' “But listen to this message from the Lord, all you Judeans now living in Egypt: ‘I have sworn by my great name,' says the Lord, ‘that my name will no longer be spoken by any of the Judeans in the land of Egypt. None of you may invoke my name or use this oath: “As surely as the Sovereign Lord lives.” For I will watch over you to bring you disaster and not good. Everyone from Judah who is now living in Egypt will suffer war and famine until all of you are dead. Only a small number will escape death and return to Judah from Egypt. Then all those who came to Egypt will find out whose words are true—mine or theirs!”‭‭- Jeremiah‬ ‭44‬:‭24‬-‭28‬ ‭NLT‬

1 Chronicles 4 records the descendants of Judah. One of the notable descendants was Jabez, whose prayer to God and subsequent blessing is told in verses 9-10. What we learn is that Yahweh is ever attentive to the pleas of His children both small and great. We know nothing about Jabez except for his prayer seeking for the Almighty to bless and prosper him. Next the record tells of Simeon's descendants - perhaps we would have expected those of Reuben. But Reuben lost the position of firstborn through a disgraceful act (Genesis 49 verses 3-4). Ezekiel 17 records the parable of the two eagles. The eagles were those kings of Judah who were promoted to prominence by the king of Babylon. But the eagles did not maintain faith with Nebuchadnezzar but broke the covenant which they had made with the Babylonian monarch. Those kings rebelled and were savagely dealt with by the king of Babylon. Our God expects His children to be truthful at all times verses Matthew 5 verses 33-37; Zechariah 8 verses 16-17; Revelation 22 verses 14-15. Yahweh will exalt the lowly and abase the lofty verses James 4 verses 7-10; 1 Peter 5 verses 5-6. In Luke 13 the enemies of the Lord maliciously attack him by drawing his attention to the Galileans, who Pilate had slaughtered as they were sacrificing in Jerusalem. Jesus tells his audience of Judeans of a recent event where a wall in Siloam - Jerusalem's backyard - fell on many Judeans. Did it happen because they were bad sinners? No, on both counts - but both tragedies provided opportunities for reflection and repentance, as any report of suffering does for us today. This is followed in chapter 13 by the parable of the barren fig tree which represents Israel's failure to bring forth fruit to God. Jesus next, on the Sabbath day heals a woman with an unclean spirit. The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven come next in the record. Then the record speaks of the parable of the narrow door, through which every disciple must strive to enter. Our Lord Jesus Christ laments over Jerusalem - to be torn down stone by stone as the leprous house. He will be welcomed in the Kingdom, when they would say, "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord" (Psalm 118 verses 26). Chapter 14 of Luke begins with Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath day. That man had clearly been planted as a test for Jesus. Would he heal on the Sabbath day? The Lord was invited to speak at a dinner for Pharisees and Jesus gives advice in the parable of the wedding feast. Then came another parable about the great banquet to which each invited class found excuses not to attend. These people who were called by the gospel to come to the wedding feast of the Son of God all adjudged themselves unworthy of eternal life in the kingdom. As a result of their rejection, we have graciously been offered a place. Two parables follow which tell us that as disciples of Jesus we must always count the cost of discipleship and wholeheartedly pursue that goal. Every disciple of our Lord must accept the peace that our Sovereign offers to us through the emissaries of the gospel and then make peace with Him verses Ephesians 2 verses 11-22. The chapter concludes with the need for zest and salt among our Master's disciples. Salt was an essential ingredient of every sacrifice and spoke of keeping covenant with the Almighty. And so, it is a vital component of the disciple's faithful walk before his/her Sovereign leading onto His gracious bestowing of eternal life on His saints. Salt speaks of sincerity in Christ's disciples as we are told in Colossians 4 verses 6. Thanks for joining us - we pray you found these comments helpful in your appreciation of God's words, join again tomorrow

A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 10:23-37 & Hosea 6:1-11 by William Klock “A lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot,” writes St. Luke in today's Gospel.  If you're following along, this is Luke 10:25.  “A lawyer got up and put Jesus on the spot.”  An expert on torah.  If you had a question about whether or not to do such-and-such or how you were to do this or not do that and it wasn't spelled out in black and white in the Bible, this was the guy you asked.  He knew how to parse it and extrapolate it all out.  And he's angry.  He's been hanging out on the edge of the crowd as Jesus addressed his disciples, but enough is enough.  He pushes forward.  He's going to put Jesus on the spot and expose him for the fraud he is.  And so he calls out, “Teacher,” and he gets Jesus' attention.  And then he asks, “What should I do to inherit the life of the age to come.”  I can imagine him leaning back on his heels, arms crossed.  Jesus is going to hang himself with his answer and everyone's going to walk away and never listen to Jesus again. But we before we get to Jesus' answer, we need to ask what the lawyer was actually asking.  “What must I do to inherit…zoen aionion?”  Zoe aionios to say it in Greek.  Zoe means “life” and we've traditionally translated aionios as “eternal”.  That's not wrong, but “eternal” doesn't fully capture the significance of aionios as it was used by Judeans of Jesus' day.  In English “eternal” just means “eternal”…“forever”.  And we think the lawyer is asking, “What must I do to live forever?”  For a lot of people that translates into “What must I do to go to heaven when I die?”  But it's really a lot deeper than that.  At the root of this word aionios is the word—and it might sound a little familiar—aion.  It's where we get our word “aeon” and it's basic meaning is “age” and it became shorthand for “the age to come”—meaning the messianic age everyone was hoping and longing for. And the lawyer asks this question about the age to come, because he's been listening to Jesus address his disciples as they returned from the mission he'd sent them on.  He sent out seventy to proclaim the good news—to gospel the gospel in the cities and towns of Israel and they came back excited because of the things they'd seen.  At the name of Jesus, even demons obeyed them.  And Jesus said to them: This is what the prophets foretold.  Isaiah and Ezekiel told of their visions of the satan falling like lightening and you're seeing it happen.  God's kingdom is breaking in.  God's light is driving away the darkness and toppling the rulers of the present evil age—and you're part of it.  And this is where he says to them, “Don't rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice [about what it means:] that your names are written in heaven.” God's got a book—metaphorically speaking—and in it he records the names of everyone who belongs to him, of everyone whom he will one day resurrect from death and lead into the age to come.  The Jews knew their names were written in that book.  God had chosen them and so long as they didn't wilfully reject him—which is what the tax collectors and sinners did—their names were written in that book and, when the Messiah came, he would set the world to rights and lead them into the age to come. But what's got this lawyer worked up is that Jesus is implying that they may not all have their names written in the book after all.  The lawyer—like pretty much everyone in Israel—knew his name was written in the book because God had made a covenant with them and because they kept their end of the covenant—the torah.  Circumcision, sabbath, diet, all these things marked them out and demonstrated their commitment and love for God.  But Jesus has just said to his disciples, “A blessing on the eyes which see what you see!  Let me tell you, many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and they didn't see it; and to hear what you hear, and they didn't hear it!”  In other words, the renewal of Israel that God had promised through the prophets had come—in Jesus—and being written in God's book is about more than just being born a Jew or even the outward observance of torah.  And it's that last bit that Jesus is getting at in his answer.  Look at verse 26.  Jesus responds to the lawyer's question and asks, “Well, what is written in the law?  What's your interpretation of it?” And the lawyer gives the answer that every kid in Judaea could have given: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your understanding; and your neighbour as yourself.” And Jesus replied—I'm sure to the frustration of the lawyer—“Well said!  Do that and you will live.”  Picture the lawyer gritting his teeth.  No, no, no.  If that's true, then we're all on the same page!  But he knew they weren't, because if Jesus' disciples were “in”, then everyone else was, by implication, “out”.  So, Luke writes, “to justify himself” the lawyer asks Jesus, “But who is my neighbour?”  It's his second attempt at a gotcha question.  And Jesus responds with a story, a parable: “Once upon a time,” he said, “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was set upon by robbers.  They stripped him and beat him and ran off leaving him half-dead.” Everybody knew that road.  Very soon Jesus would be travelling it himself, going the other direction, up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover—and to become the new Passover himself.  That road was steep and windy and notorious for the robbers hiding in wait for unwary travellers.  The wise travelled in groups or well-armed.  Travelling it alone, like this man did, was foolish.  This lawyer, listening to Jesus, would be shaking his head and thinking to himself that anyone dumb enough to travel that road alone was a candidate for a Darwin Award. But Jesus goes on.  “A priest happened to be going down that road, and when he saw him he went past on the opposite side.'”  Now, you and I shake our heads and think, “What a horrible priest!  How could he not stop to help the man.”  But we only think that way because we've been shaped by the gospel and by Jesus and the Spirit.  The cross of Jesus has taught us mercy.  That God would not only humble himself, but would shed his blood on behalf of his rebellious children has taught us mercy in a way never understood before the gospel.  But that lawyer—and the crowd and maybe even Jesus' disciples—they lived in the dark world on the other side of the good news of the cross.  They saw nothing wrong with this priest passing by the man.  The priests kept themselves ritually pure.  They had to in order to enter the temple.  Even though this priest is going in the opposite direction—probably on his way home from serving his rotation in the temple—he still kept himself pure.  He couldn't tell if the man was dead or alive and if went over, rolled him over, and found him dead, well, then he'd be impure.  That was okay for normal people, but not for a priest.  And everyone knew this.  And, again, no one had a problem with it.  And, of course, this is the very problem with Israel that Jesus wants to highlight for the lawyer. “Then,” said Jesus, “a Levite came by the place.  He saw him too and went past on the opposite side.”  He might not be a priest, but being a Levite, he too served in the temple.  Again, he's going the opposite way—like the priest, he's probably on his way home from serving in the temple.  But, still, being a Levite, he can't chance becoming impure.  And, again, this was all normal and good and right as far as most people were concerned. “But then,” said Jesus, “a travelling Samaritan came to where he was.”  Everyone frowned at this.  Samaritans were filth.  They were descendants of the Jews who intermarried with the native Canaanite peoples when the people of Judah were in exile.  They worshiped at their own illicit temple at Shechem and they compromised torah with pagan practises and pagan philosophy.  They were traitors of the worst kind.  Just being on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho meant he was fouling the promised land with his impure Samaritan feet.  And yet, Jesus said, “He came over to the man and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.  Then he put him on his own beast, took him to an inn, and looked after him.  The next morning, as he was going on his way, he gave the inn-keeper two dinars. ‘Take care of him,' he said, ‘and on my way back I'll pay you whatever else you need to spend on him.'” “Where's Jesus going with this?”  Everyone was thinking.  “What's his point?”  There's no way this would happen in real life.  But that's kind of the point.  Jesus looks the lawyer in the eye and asks, “Which of these three do you think turned out to be the neighbour of the man who was set upon by the brigands?”  Jesus is going make the lawyer come out and say it.  And the lawyer does, because there's no escape for him.  “The one who showed mercy on him,” he said. “Well,” Jesus said to him, “you go and do the same.” I fully expect that as the lawyer answered the question and said, “The one who showed him…mercy.”  The lights suddenly went on for him for everyone else.  That word “mercy” is the key.  Jesus had just turned Hosea 6:1-11 into a parable.  Here's what the Lord had said through the Prophet Hosea some eight centuries before: Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.” What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud,          like the dew that goes early away. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,          the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. But like Adam they transgressed the covenant;          there they dealt faithlessly with me. Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood. As robbers lie in wait for a man,          so the priests band together; they murder on the way to Shechem;          they commit villainy. In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing; Ephraim's whoredom is there; Israel is defiled. For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed, When I restore the fortunes of my people. This the Lord's rebuke of the northern kingdom of Israel—also known as “Samaria”.  Hint, hint.  There's a reason Jesus puts a Samaritan at the centre of the story.  The people of Israel went through the motions of obedience, but the Lord accused them.  Their love for him was “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away.”  Their nation was a nation of evil-doers with blood on their hands.  They offered their sacrifices, but there was no love in their hearts.  The priests were lying in wait for their people like robbers. Again, this was a rebuke of Israel eight hundred years before, but now Jesus brings the same rebuke to Judah.  And yet, there's still the promise.  The long-awaited age to come is breaking in.  As the Lord promised through Hosea, he will come to heal his people, to bind up their wounds, to revive them after two days, and to raise them up on the third day.  But whom will he heal and revive and raise up?  The lawyer gave the answer “The one who showed his neighbour mercy.” There was no mercy in the heart of the priest and no mercy in the heart of the Levite—and there was no mercy in the hearts of the people of Judah who saw nothing wrong with the priest and the Levite leaving the man to die.  For that matter there was no mercy in the hearts of people who saw the Samaritans as unredeemable, reprobate scum.  And that was the heart of the problem.  And this heart problem was precisely what Jesus came to fix.  Because the only people who will have a share in the age to come—in the kingdom of God—are the people who have the heart of God.  The people who are poor in spirit, who mourn the state of the world, the meek, the people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure in heart, the peacemakers—and the merciful. This is why I think it's so important to pay attention to how we translate those words in the lawyer's question—zoe aionios.  Because it's not just “eternal life” Jesus offers; it's eternal life in the age to come—in God's world set to rights and eternal life in his presence.  Brothers and Sisters, “salvation” isn't just fire insurance.  It's not just rescue from death so that we can live forever, so that we can see our loved ones again, so that we can experience bliss forever and ever.  That's all a very self-centred, a very worldly, a very therapeutic understanding of salvation.  What Jesus offers us is the life we were meant for, the life we see Adam and Eve living in the garden at the very beginning of the story, a life of perfect fellowship with God, a life serving as the priests of his temple, a life stewarding his heart for the sake of the world. And ever since he called Abraham, but especially since he rescued Israel and made them his people, God's purpose for his people has been to reveal himself to the nations through them so that the world might know his goodness, his faithfulness, his love, his mercy, his grace—and on and on.  God's purpose for his people has always been to make his heart known to the nations.  Our lives and our collective life together is meant to lift the veil on God's future, on his new creation.  It's not about us or about our glory; it's about God and it's about God's glory. When he delivered Israel from Egypt, God came down and dwelt in their midst.  He fellowshipped with them.  It wasn't the perfect fellowship of the garden that Adam and Even had known, but it was a fellowship that made know his desire for humanity and a fellowship that pointed forward to the day when, through Jesus, he delivered us from sin—and even further to that day when sin (and death) are gone forever.  He gave Israel a law that set her apart and that taught her his heart so that they would know justice and mercy, love and grace, and put his heart on display for the world.  Theirs was to be a little microcosm of his new creation—however imperfectly—where reconciling love was on full display. Israel failed.  They kept the law outwardly, but they lost the heart of God.  They offered sacrifices, but their was no mercy in their hearts.  But in Jesus and the Spirit the renewal that the Lord had promised has come.  In forgiving our sins, Jesus has taught us the true depth of God's lovingkindess, of his grace and his faithfulness.  And in the Spirit he's turned our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.  He's written his law of love on them so that we really can love him with all of our being and so that we really can love our neighbours as ourselves. But I don't think we reflect often enough on why God's done that—in part because we too often think of salvation in selfish, or at least self-centred, terms.  Our salvation is not an end in itself.  God has called and created a people to witness his heart to the world.  Brothers and Sisters, in us God is leading a redeemed people—a people he's already beginning to set right through the work of his indwelling Spirit—he's leading us to bring hope and good news to the nations.  He's using us to carry the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord, to every part of the world and with it the kingdom, with it the message of new creation, with it the hope of a world set to rights, in which Jesus has finished once and for all the work he began when he died and rose again.  In the witness of Jesus and the power of the Spirit he's given us his heart.  And that's what it's all about: bearing witness to his heart.  And the people who do that, they're the ones who will one day know him eternally in the age to come. I like to think of it like a symphony.  Jesus and the Spirit have made us the players.  We each have our instrument and we look forward to the day when we all come together in the great concert hall to play our parts in harmony and to finally hear that glorious and beautiful piece of music under the hand of the divine conductor.  It's not about us.  It's about the music and the one who leads us in it.  But in the meantime, he's given us the sheet music for our parts and he's sent us home to practise.  And we have the privilege of being able to meet in our little sections to practise some of those parts together.  And in our practising we get a foretaste of the great symphony to come.  But, Brothers and Sisters, do we actually practise?  Are we investing our practise time in the fruit of the Spirit?  Are we practising the reconciling love of God that we've known in Jesus?  Are we practising the justice and mercy we've met in God?  And along the way, are we drawing in the nations as they hear the beauty that's present even in our little bits and pieces of the symphony?  Or are we wasting the time God has given us on sin?  Instead of practising the gospel life, are we investing in the fear and wrath and scrambling and grasping of the present evil age? Like Gilead, the world around us is filled with evil and tracked with blood.  It's always been that way, but it seems we see it getting closer and closer to home.  We've seen worsening in the last months and weeks and days in the US and there's no reason to think we're somehow safe in Canada.  Because this is what happens to a people without the gospel—and to a people who have lost the gospel.  And Brothers and Sisters, the worse it gets, the more the world needs the heart of God that Jesus and the Spirit have given us.  The more the world needs God's promise to heal and to bind up our wounds.  The world needs Jesus and the gospel and you and I are the stewards of that good news.  Don't be tempted to jump into the violent fray.  Don't throw gas on the fire.  Instead, be the wine and the oil that God has made us to anoint the world's wounds.  Show the world what godly justice and godly mercy are and minister the healing power of the gospel—of the good news that Jesus the Messiah has died for us, that he has risen for us, and that he is creation's true Lord. Let's pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.  

Listen along as we continue our series through the book of Acts. Notes//Quotes: Acts 11:1-30 -Kim reading Slide 1 A biblical proposition… needs interpretation. It does not simply interpret itself… The only way to interpret… is to look at the biblical story that reveals God's character through his actions…  The task of the church is to “faithfully improvise” the “rest of the story.” Christians are not called simply to live in the story; they are called to continue the story in their own cultural contexts. First, they must be grounded in the story. They must be people for whom the story “absorbs the world.” Second, they must together (communally) improvise the “rest of the story” faithfully to the story given in the Bible. Roger Olson Slide 2 Ritual Practices of a Typical Roman Meal - A portion of the food being offered to the gods. - Wine libations and the reciting of prayers in honor of the gods or of the dead. - Possibly even being given a dining wreath with flowers considered sacred to the gods upon arrival. Slide 3 Table comparing Acts 8:1 and Acts 11:19 https://services.planningcenteronline.com/plans/80966647# Slide 4 That's a great way of putting it. Grace is something you can see. Presumably when you watch Judeans and gentiles sharing in prayer, sharing in the Lord's supper, sharing their whole lives as brothers and sisters. You can't fake that. It's grace made visible.  - N.T Wright; The Challenge of Acts Slide 5 Acts 26:28 28 And Agrippa said to Paul, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?” 1 Peter 4:14–16 14 If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. 15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. 16 Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. Slide 6 Romans 15:26–27  26 For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. 27 For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. Slide 7 When grace is visible, when the story of God is lived out in the world, when the church is truly carrying the name of Christ… The standard conventions for who is accepted and who is left out are re-evaluated, the standard ways of giving and receiving are upended and the standard ways in which we categorize our theology can be challenged. 

Thursday with Tabitha 9. Obadiah by Tabitha Smith This week we've reached the little book of Obadiah. He was the most minor of the minor prophets, in that his book is the shortest! In fact, it's the shortest book in the whole of the Old Testament with just one chapter, containing 21 verses. ~ Obadiah means “one who serves Yahweh”. We're not told anything else about the prophet himself. In the course of the prophecy, the fall of Jerusalem (which happened in 586 BC) is referred to as a past event and the fall of Edom (which happened in 553 BC) as a future event. So it is likely that the book was written between these events. ~ To understand the background to Obadiah, we need to head back to Genesis, to the account of the brothers Jacob and Esau. These two non-identical twins were born to Isaac and Rebekah. Even from their birth, they showed signs of not exactly getting along. Esau was born first, all red and hairy, and Jacob followed after him, grasping his heel. They grew up to be very different. Esau was a skilled hunter, favoured by his father, whilst Joseph was an introverted man who preferred to stay with his mother in the proximity of the family tents. ~ Jacob famously tricked the hungry Esau out of his birth rite and later stole his father's blessing by disguising himself as his older brother and fooling the elderly, blind Isaac. So Esau swore revenge on his brother and fully intended to kill him. Rebekah helped Jacob to escape and he fled to the territory of his uncle Laban. There he met and married his wives, Leah and Rachel. Esau, who was also called Edom, married several wives, including an Ishmaelite woman (that is, a descendent of Abraham's first son by the slave girl Hagar). ~ Jacob and Esau did meet again some years later, and much to Jacob's relief and surprise, Esau didn't kill him on the spot but appeared to have forgiven him. Jacob still didn't trust him though, and he took his family off in a different direction to avoid having to be in close proximity to his brother's family. Jacob had 12 sons by his two wives and their two servants. His 4th son, one of Leah's children, was Judah, and from his line the tribe of Judah came into existence. From Esau's line came the tribe of the Edomites. The Edomites lived in the hill country of Seir. This was a mountainous region about 1500m above sea level. Their territory appeared to be impenetrable and they felt quite safe in their high dwellings. In Numbers 20 we read that after the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites asked the Edomites for permission to pass through their territory along the King's Highway. The Edomites refused, adding to the tensions between these two tribes. However, in Deuteronomy 23:7-8, God commanded the Israelites that they should not hate an Edomite in view of the brotherly connection between the two tribes. ~ Edom was defeated by king Saul in the 11th century BC and subdued again by king David 40 years later. Edom became a vassal state of Israel but it was never completely de-stroyed. ~ Fast forward to the time of Obadiah, and we find that the tribe of Judah, the sole remnant of the original 12 tribes of Israel, had been conquered and the capital city of Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians. During the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, some of the Judeans had tried to escape from the city and flee into the surrounding coun-tryside. The Edomites, rather than helping their neighbours and brothers in the time of their distress, sided with the foreign invaders and handed over the fleeing Israelites to the Babylonians. Psalm 137:7 recalls how the Edomites gloated over the destruction of Jeru-salem: Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!” ~ The main theme of Obadiah is the judgement of the Edomites for the way they betrayed the people of Judah during the Babylonian invasion. ~ The first 15 verses of the book are addressed to the people of Edom. God scorns the pride and arrogance of the Edomites, who say to themselves, “who will bring me down to the ground?” (v3), referring to their perceived safety in their high mountain region. But God will bring them down and they will be punished for their evil deeds. The prophet mixes both past tense and future tense verbs when describing Edom's fate. This is a technique that can be found in prophetic writing, when future events are sometimes described as if they had already happened. ~ God's message through Obadiah is that Edom will be completely destroyed, with not a trace left behind. The main charges against Edom are found in verses 12-14: "But do not gloat over the day of your brother in the day of his misfortune; do not rejoice over the people of Judah in the day of their ruin; do not boast in the day of distress. Do not enter the gate of my people in the day of their calamity; do not gloat over his disaster in the day of his calamity; do not loot his wealth in the day of his calamity. Do not stand at the crossroads to cut off his fugitives; do not hand over his survivors in the day of distress." ~ The judgement is summarised in verse 15: "As you have done, it shall be done to you; your deeds shall return on your own head." ~ The final part of the book relates to the people of Jerusalem. God promises that he will preserve a remnant of his people who will survive the exile and reclaim the land that is theirs, according to his plans and promise. To the devastated people of Judah, this would have been an incredible promise of hope. It seemed, to all intents and purposes, that their future was doomed and that God's promises to Abraham had come to nothing. But God promises that Judah will become like a raging fire once more, whilst Edom is reduced to stubble. Judah's time of judgement for her own sin would be over, and then God would judge her enemies. The final words of the book, in verse 21, declare that “the kingdom shall be the Lord's.” The promised land of the Old Testament foretells the reality of the greater promised land, which is the coming kingdom of God. Matthew's gospel in particular speaks of this prom-ised kingdom, which Jesus ushered in during his time on earth. The whole of the Bible is the story of this ultimate kingdom, reaching its climax in the book of Revelation. The king-dom of God is already here, but it is not yet fully here. That won't happen until Jesus re-turns. In chapter 11 of the book of Hebrews, the writer recounts the names of the men and women of the Old Testament who trusted in God's promises to them regarding the coming kingdom. He then writes in verse 13-16: “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.” ~ This city is the new Jerusalem, the heavenly kingdom. Jesus used several metaphors to try to help his listeners grasp the nature of the kingdom of God. He described it as a tiny mustard seed which grew into a huge tree, or as a tiny amount of yeast which could make a whole batch of dough rise. From tiny, seemingly in-consequential beginnings, something great grows. When all seemed lost to the exiled people of Judah, God says “just wait and see what I will do”. And the glory of the final kingdom is made all the greater by the trial of the journey. ~ You and I are invited to be part of this coming kingdom of God. No matter how small and insignificant we might feel in the great plan of God, and no matter how dire our circumstances seem to be, we can be assured that God's kingdom is coming and we can be part of it. It is surprising and mysterious, hidden and yet revealed, wonderful and awesome. It is something new, something different, something glorious. It is possible for the wisest brains to miss it completely whilst little children understand and embrace it. ~ God is doing a new thing and he invites us to come and see. The prophet Isaiah recorded God's words to his exiled people: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:18-19) ~ Some 700 years after Isaiah, Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem and declared: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) ~ Even the seemingly obscure prophecy of Obadiah is part of Jesus' great story. It's all about him. Between the lines of prophecy about Edom and Judah we see the greater picture of God's redemption plan and his justice, mercy and grace. When the risen Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus and explained to the amazed disciples how the Law and all the prophets spoke about himself, I like to think that he said a bit about Obadiah. ~ We've got four more books to look at before this series draws to a close, and there are lots more interesting things to come as we look at Haggai, Zechariah, Joel and Malachi. Join me next week if you can! ~ ~   Right Mouse click or tap here to download this episode as an audio mp3 file

The history of relations between Samaritans and Judeans meant that Hiel of Samaria's thoughts were troubled as he travelled down the Jericho road. Based Luke 10:25-37. Show notes have been posted at retellingthebible.wordpress.com. Media in this Episode The following music was used for this media project: "AhDah" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All the Lines (Instrumental) by Sascha Ende (Ende.app) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Support Retelling the Bible If you would like to support the work that I do creating these stories, go to patreon.com/retellingthebible and choose a level of support! Contact me on Social Media! Bluesky Facebook Reddit

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity St. Matthew 5:20-26 by William Klock In last Sunday's Gospel we were with Jesus and Peter in that fishing boat as Jesus preached to the crowd on the shore.  I said that I had a pretty good ides the sorts of things Jesus was preaching, because both Matthew and Luke preserve versions of his favourite sermon about the kingdom.  Today's Gospel gives us a snippet of Matthew's version of that sermon.  In Matthew 5:20 Jesus says to the gathered crowd, “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  In the words leading up to this, Jesus was preparing the people to hear this.  He talks about being the salt of the earth and the light of the world and a city set on hill and a light held high on a lampstand for everyone to see.  “That's how you must shine your light in front of people!” he says, “Then they'll see what wonderful things you do, and they'll give glory to your father in heaven.”  Do your works, does you the way you live make people take notice and give glory to God?  That's a tough one, isn't it?  And then, just in case people might be thinking that Jesus came to do away with the law and the prophets: “Don't suppose that I came to destroy the law or the prophets,” Jesus said, “I didn't come to destroy them.  I came to fulfil them!  I'm telling you the truth: until heaven and earth disappear—and since that won't happen this just means never—not one stroke, not one dot, is going to disappear from the law until it's all come true.  So anyone who relaxes a single one of these commandments, even the little ones, and teaches that to people, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.  And anyone who does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”  And this is where Jesus says those words, “Yes, let me tell you: unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”   Because Jesus was doing and saying so many things that a lot of people thought weren't right, I suspect some people thought that Jesus was teaching an easier way to the kingdom.  The Pharisees were mad because he didn't seem to keep the law with the same zeal that they thought everyone should, but I suspect there were others who thought Jesus was offering them a way to God without all the spiritual rigor and rules.  Just this week I found myself talking to someone who had left an orthodox, biblical church a few years ago and is now worshipping at a United Church.  The reason: “They aren't so strict.  They let people be themselves.  They aren't so bound to the Bible.”  In other words: The United Church offers a way to God that you can follow on your own terms.  I suspect some people thought Jesus was doing a sort of First Century Jewish version of that.  And so Jesus makes it clear that this is not the case.  No, just the opposite in fact.  Not even the Pharisees with all their zeal for torah, not even they meet the standard.  Later in the sermon he'll go on to talk about the wide and narrow way that will lead Israel to destruction and the narrow gate that few can find and the narrow and difficult way beyond that leads to the kingdom.  No, Jesus hasn't come to relax the standard.  Not at all. But before we can go on we need to ask a couple of questions.  When Jesus talks about “righteousness”, what does he mean?  Well, for the Jews “righteousness” was bound up with torah, with the law and with God's covenant.  A righteous person was someone who was faithful to God and to the covenant and that meant, fundamentally, that he was faithful in living the law that God had given his people. The name “Pharisee” means “separated one”.  That's what Israel was supposed to be.  The Lord had delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt to be his people and he gave them a law, he gave them torah, as a way of life that would separate them and that would make them distinct from every other people on earth.  When the nations looked at Israel they were supposed to be moved to give glory to God.  But for most of their history, the Israelites didn't do a very good job of being that separate and distinct people.  They were selective in their obedience.  They worshipped idols.  And so just as he cast Adam and Eve out of the garden and out of his holy presence, the Lord cast out Israel and sent her in exile to Babylon.  Righteousness means “covenant faithfulness” and if Israel wasn't going to be faithful to the covenant, then in order to be faithful himself to the covenant, the Lord would have enact the covenant curses that he promised would befall his people if they didn't keep their end of the covenant—if they were unrighteous. As I've said before fairly recently, the Pharisees knew all of this.  More than that, they believed that the exile was, after a fashion, still ongoing.  Because Israel was still ruled by pagans and because the Lord's presence had never returned to the temple.  They desperately wanted an end to Roman rule and even more than that, they prayed for the Lord's return.  But that wasn't going to happen as long as Israel was still unfaithful—still lacking in righteousness.  So the Pharisees decided to set an example.  They weren't just going to obey the law as best they could; they were going to live their whole lives as if they were priests in the temple.  They wouldn't just keep themselves from sin.  They'd keep themselves ritually pure at all times.  They were ready for the Lord to return.  If only they could get everyone in Israel just as ready!  But not everyone in Israel was as interested in righteousness as they were.  There were a lot of people who just weren't as serious about God's law as they were.  But worse were the compromisers—the Jews who gradually assimilated to the pagan ways of the Greeks and Romans and the people who willingly and knowingly became traitors to the covenant: tax collectors and sinners. Think of it this way: The Pharisees saw themselves in the midst of a culture war.  And they knew it wasn't the first time Israel had faced a culture war.  And so their heroes were the righteous men of Israel's past culture wars.  One of those heroes was Phinehas, one of Aaron's grandsons.  In the book of Numbers we read how Balak, the King of Moab, had hired a prophet to curse the Israelites.  But the prophet, Balaam couldn't do it.  Every time he opened his mouth to curse the Israelites, the Lord caused blessings to spill out.  So Balak, instead, sent a bunch of beautiful Moabite women to infiltrate the Israelite camp and to entice the men of Israel to worship the Canaanite god Baal with them.  Isreal's first culture war.  The men were enticed into sexual immorality and then into idolatry—those two always go hand-in-hand.  But Phinehas, came upon one of the Israelite men in flagrante delicto with one of these women.  Filled with holy zeal, Phinehas grabbed a spear and ran them both through together.  That was the end of Israel's first culture war and Phinehas became a hero for his righteous zeal. But much more recently, the Pharisees looked back on the heroes of the Maccabean Revolt—about 160 years before.  In those days Judah was ruled by Greeks.  And the Greeks just sort of thought that because their culture was so superior to everyone else's, everyone would just assimilate given the chance.  Think of Gus in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  “There are two kinds of people: Greeks and everyone who wish they was Greek.”  But no matter how many temples or gymnasiums the Greeks built, the Jews wouldn't assimilate.  Antiochus IV Epiphanes had enough of it and finally outlawed the law.  If you circumcised your son, you and he would be executed.  He defiled the Lord's altar by sacrificing a pig on it.  In Second Maccabees we read a horrific story of seven brothers and their mother who were tortured and gruesomely martyred when they refused to eat pork.  Jews were forced to offer sacrifices to Zeus.  Mattathias Maccabeus was watching as one Jewish man caved into that pressure.  The writer of First Maccabees tells us how Mattathias burned with zeal for the law, just like Phinehas had.  He ran forward and killed the man at the altar, then turned and killed the King's soldier.  That would kick off a revolt against the pagan Greeks.  But the Maccabean revolutionaries didn't just go after their foreign rulers; like Mattathias they went after compromising Jews as well. They were the inspiration for the Pharisees.  The Pharisees didn't have that kind of power.  They couldn't force anyone to keep the law or to keep it better.  But they had the same kind of zeal.  They desperately wanted, they prayed for the Lord to return to Zion to destroy the Romans and all the other unrighteous pagans—and all the compromisers like the tax collectors and sinners in Israel, too. And—getting back to Jesus peaching on the hillside—and Jesus now says that even that kind of zeal, that kind of righteousness isn't enough to get folks into the kingdom.  In other words, to the people who were coming to Jesus thinking he was making it easier—kind of like some modern liberal spirituality that you can shape to your own liking—Jesus says, “No.  I didn't come to make it easier.”  But then he condemns even the Pharisees.  They were the most righteous people around and even they weren't going to make the cut.  So what now?  Imagine all the people holding their breath to hear what Jesus is going to say next.  They really, really want to know.  Before he ever started preaching, they'd seen him doing all the Messiah things: casting out demons, healing the sick and the blind and the deaf.  They knew without a doubt that the God of Israel was somehow acting in and through Jesus, so they had to think that when he preached, he preached with authority and he spoke for God.  He's got their attention now.  Now they want to know what it means to be more righteous than even the Pharisees. So Jesus goes on and says, “You have heard it said to the people of old, ‘You shall not murder'; and anyone who commits murder shall be liable to judgement.  But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgement; anyone who insults his brother with foul and abusive language will be liable to the lawcourt; and anyone who says, ‘You fool,' will be liable to the fires of Gehenna.”   And Jesus keeps going on like this.  If we skip down to 5:27—picking up just were today's Gospel ends—Jesus says something similar about adultery.  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.'  But I say to you: everyone who gazes at a woman in order to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  On and on.  Divorce falls in Jesus sites too: Divorce is wrong.  Marriage is a life-long covenant.  Tell the truth, he says, and you won't need to make oaths for people to believe you.  The law commanded justice and put limits on retaliation, but Jesus says, “Don't resist evil with violence”, “turn the other cheek”.  “When someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat, too.  When someone forces you to go one mile, go a second one with him.”  And in verse 43 Jesus puts a cherry on top of all this.  They knew that the law was about loving your neighbour, but then they got the idea that the only people who were their neighbours were their fellow Jews.  Love your neighbours, yes, but hate your enemies—people like the Romans, the tax collectors, and the sinners who openly rejected God's law and covenant.  Love your neighbours.  Pray for God to smite your enemies.  And Jesus says, “No!  I tell you: love your enemies!  Pray for people who persecute you!”  Why?  “So that you may be sons [and daughters] of your Father in heaven.”   Do you want to have a share in the kingdom?  Do you want to be a child of the Father?  Do you want to know how to have a righteousness—a covenant faithfulness—greater than even the Pharisees?  Do want people to glorify God when they see how you live?  Then love the way that God loves.  That's what righteousness has always been about: it's been about a people that conforms to the heart of God.  Righteousness is about sinlessness, but it goes deeper than that and that's what the Pharisees and so many others in Israel had forgotten even though it was there all along: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.” Brothers and Sisters, this is what kingdom people look like in a culture war.  They love the way God loves.  This is the narrow gate, this is the difficult path that leads to the kingdom and life with God.  It's hard.  All we have to do is look around us.  Things haven't changed much since Jesus preached this two thousand years ago.  We're in the middle of a war ourselves and it seems like Christians are prone to the same two failures.  There's a ditch on either side of the road.  You fall into the ditch on this side when you give in and compromise.  Whether it's the Judeans who went along with the Greeks, leaving their sons uncircumcised, eating pork, and making offerings to Zeus or the Christians today who give up and buy into the pagan world's notion that love is whatever you make it, anything goes, and we can all live and fellowship with God on our own terms.  Brothers and Sisters, compromise with a godless and anti-gospel culture isn't the way.  Jesus didn't come to make it easier to get into the kingdom, but there are a lot of people and churches today who think that the answer to the culture and to dwindling interest in the gospel is to lower the bar and to make it easier to think of yourself as a Christian.  Appealing to the cultural moment might get you a few followers in the short term, but it will land you in the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing your teeth just as surely as the opposite error will. The opposite error—the ditch on the other side of the road—is Phariseeism.  And that happens when we forget that the gospel wins not through violence and force but when Christians love the way that God loves.  Brothers and Sisters, no amount of compelling, force, violence, or political power will ever move the heart of an unbeliever to give glory to God because of what they see in us.  But in the midst of a culture war it's very easy for God's people to think that seizing the reigns of power is the answer.  We'll do anything, compromise just about anything, team up with just about anyone no matter how ungodly they are, to get our hands on that power.  And we can do it all with a zealousness like that of Phinehas or Mattathias that feels so right.  We try to meld Caesar and Jesus together, forgetting that Caesars bloody and violent way is the opposite of the gospel, which conquers through love.  You can't trust in Jesus and at the same trust in horses and chariots.  You can't trust in Jesus and at the same time trust in political power.  Jesus demands our allegiance and our trust—all of it and without compromise.  And it's when we give him that full allegiance that we have the loving heart of God.  It's when we're willing to follow Jesus as we turn the other cheek, as we give both our shirt and our coat, as we go the extra mile, even as we go to our own deaths, it's then that world takes notice and give glory to God.  That's how the gospel captivates hearts and transforms the world. Brothers and Sisters, that's the narrow gate and the difficult path.  Don't give up on righteousness when the going gets tough.  And never forget that law is ultimately about loving God and loving our neighbours—everyone—the way God loves them—enough to give his own son.  Love them as God does—even your worst enemy—even to point of sacrifice.  That's how God once captivated your heart and it's how he will captivate theirs. Jesus stresses just how important this is.  Going back to the end of our Gospel in Matthew 5:23 he says, “So, if you are coming to the altar with your gift and there you remember that your brother has a grievance against you, leave your gift right there in front of the altar, and go first and be reconciled to your brother.  Then come back and offer your gift.”   We probably miss the significance of this.  To go to the temple in Jerusalem to make an offering to God was the peak of righteousness, of covenant faithfulness.  This took precedence over everything else.  No one.  No. one.  Would go to Jerusalem.  And remember, Jesus is preaching in Galilee, a three day's journey from Jerusalem.  No one would trek all that way, carrying their animal for sacrifice or buying one at an exorbitant price at the temple, wait their turn, and then standing there with the priest ready to make the sacrifice, suddenly realise they needed to go all the way back home to make something right with a brother or a sister.  Yes, I think Jesus is using a bit of hyperbole here, but he wants to drive his point home, because this is how people—especially the Pharisees thought.  If you were doing it for God, nothing else mattered.  Think of the priest and the Levite in Jesus' parable, leaving a man for dead on the side of the road lest they become ritually impure.  For all their talk of loving God, they'd forgotten just how much God loves us and they'd failed to live it out.  That's why they grumbled when Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners.  They'd forgotten that all of heaven rejoices over a sinner who repents. No, says Jesus.  Never think that you're honouring God if, at the same time, you're failing to love your neighbour the way God loves him.  Never think you're doing God's work if, at the same time, you've compromised his call to faith and to faithfulness.  Never think you're building the kingdom if, at the same time, you're compromising its principles.  Instead, stop what you're doing and make things right.  Go back and love your neighbour.  Reconcile and make things right with him.  Remember that you serve the God who gave his son out of love in order to reconcile sinful you to himself.  Have that kind of love in your heart and let it shape every thing you do. Brothers and Sisters, every Sunday we recite those words of Jesus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”  Don't just mindlessly say those words.  Be shaped by them.  Love God and love your neighbour with everything you've got and then you will have that righteousness greater even than that of the scribes and the Pharisees. Let's pray: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Thursday with Tabitha 7. Zephaniah by Tabitha Smith This week in our series on the minor prophets we are looking at the book of Zephaniah. Zephaniah was a contemporary of Jeremiah, Nahum and possibly Habakkuk and his prophecy was written during the reign of king Josiah of Judah. Josiah reigned between 640–609 BC. The prophecy includes reference to the future destruction of Nineveh, capital of Assyria, so it was likely written before the date of this event, which was 612 BC. The little territory of Judah was the only surviving part of the original people of Israel. The northern kingdom of Israel had been overthrown and Judah was under the control of the Assyrians. King Josiah was a good king who undertook significant religious reform in Judah, trying to turn the people back from worshipping idols to worshipping their God. Josiah's father, Amon, had been a wicked king, and his grandfather, Manasseh, was one of the worst kings in the history of Judah, doing evil in God's sight and turning the people away from God. The king before Manasseh was called Hezekiah. We read his story in the book of Isaiah. Zephaniah 1:1 provides us with Zephaniah's family history. This is traced back as far as his great, great grandfather, Hezekiah. It is possible that this was the same king Hezekiah, meaning that Zephaniah came from a royal family. One of the main themes of the book is the coming of the Day of the Lord. This is a phrase that appears many times in the Bible, referring to a day of judgment that would bring terror for God's enemies and blessings for those who belong to God. Many prophetic oracles in the Bible have an element of immediate historical fulfilment in the day they were written, and another more distant application in a time yet to come. Zephaniah's writings are no exception. In Zephaniah 1, the prophecy launches straight into a devastating description of coming judgement. This is portrayed as an apocalyptic event, reversing the very order of creation and sweeping away both man and beast. But the focus zooms in very quickly to the people of Judah and Jerusalem, and in Zephaniah 1:4 we learn about some of the things the people of Judah were doing to incur such judgment: they were worshipping Baal, worshipping the heavenly bodies, pretending to worship God but trusting instead in the pagan god Milcom. They were turning away from God and ignoring him entirely. God levels two main accusations against his people. The first is one of syncretism. This means mixing acts of service to God with pagan religious elements. In chapter 1 verse 8 the king's sons and officials are described as wearing foreign clothes, probably associated with other religions, and in verse 9 the curious reference to people ‘leaping over the threshold' probably refers to another pagan custom. You can read about the possible background to this practice in 1 Samuel 5:1-5. The second accusation of God against his people is that they have become complacent in sin. The Judeans had started to think that God didn't really involve himself in their daily lives, so it didn't really matter how they lived. They had reduced God in their minds to a distant, impotent deity. The prophecy describes God going through Jerusalem personally, with search lamps, to find these complacent people and punish them. The second half of Zephaniah 1 contains a fearsome description of the Day of the Lord as a day of great darkness, distress, wrath and ruin. Nothing will be able to protect human beings, not all the wealth they have collected. They will be reduced to nothing. Thankfully, the book doesn't end there! In Zephaniah 2 the people of Judah are told that repentance is still possible. This is surely good news after the terrible picture painted in chapter 1. The people are warned that the day of judgement will come quickly so they need to gather together and repent, to humble themselves and seek God. Zephaniah 2:3 proclaims: “Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, who do his just commands; seek righteousness; seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the anger of the Lord.” The word ‘perhaps' might initially suggest that Zephaniah has doubts about whether God can indeed forgive any of the people. But in fact, this statement shows that Zephaniah understands and respects God's sovereignty. God is able to forgive, but whether he does or not is entirely up to him. Any mercy he shows to the repentant is still entirely undeserved grace. The rest of Zephaniah 2 contains a series of oracles of judgment against the nations that surround Judah, the enemies of God's people. The cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron are Philistine cities to the west, along the Mediterranean coast. Moab and the Ammonite territory lie to the east. The Cushites originate from Ethopia and Egypt in the south, and Assyria lies to the north. The comprehensive description of judgment extending to the four corners of the known world includes the promise that God will return parts of these lands back to Judah and there is a hint of restoration to come. However, before the people get too complacent again, Zephaniah 3 contains a hard-hitting denouncement of the city of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah. The people of God need to learn that they are not immune from God's judgment of sin and they are just as accountable, if not more, than the pagan nations around them. The charges against the judges, officials, prophets and priests of Judah are pretty damning. They are corrupt, polluted, defiled. Zephaniah 3:5 proclaims that: “The Lord within her is righteous; he does no injustice; every morning he shows forth his justice; each dawn he does not fail.” So judgment is inevitable and unavoidable. God must be just and repay sin with punishment. But there is good news to come. Zephaniah 3:9 suddenly introduces a startling promise of hope. God says that there will be a day when he will change the speech of his people and make it pure again. The people will call out to God once more, they will serve him and he will restore them. A picture of unity, peace and holiness follows. The last 6 verses of the book contain the most glorious and beautiful image of God delighting and rejoicing over his restored people. The judgement is finished, the shame is gone and restoration is possible. God does not delight in judgment, he delights in being in the midst of his people.  Zephaniah 3:17: The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. This final prophecy seems to refer to a future time of unity and peace for God's people. In the short term, Judah was punished and judged when the Babylonians overthrew the Assyrians. Jerusalem was taken, and many of the people were carried off into captivity. After the exile, there was a degree of restoration and some of the exiles returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and its walls. But the picture of complete peace and restoration was not yet fulfilled. The gathering of all God's people, the salvation of those who are lame and broken, and the rehoming of the outcast, is something we can still look forward to. So what do we take away from the book of Zephaniah? We are reminded of the reality of the Day of the Lord that is still to come. Jesus warned that this day of final judgment would come suddenly, like a thief in the night, and many will be unprepared. We don't want to be like the complacent Judeans, thinking that God wouldn't involve himself in the reality of human affairs. Jesus is coming back! The humble people amongst the remnant of Judah hoped that their repentance might not be too late. They threw themselves upon God's mercy. For us, living in the light of Jesus' cross, it is because of Jesus that we can know with assurance that we do not need to fear this coming Day of the Lord. If you have believed and trusted in Jesus, there is no “perhaps” about it. Jesus has taken upon himself the judgment that would have been yours and mine and we can be certain that there is no more condemnation. The Day of the Lord will be a day of stark contrasts. This day will be terrible for those who have lived lives separated from God, in denial of him or in opposition to him. But for those who have humbled themselves and chosen to live under his authority, it will be a day of great joy, when God comes to dwell in the midst of his people. God will sing to us, his people! He will rejoice over us. What an amazing thought! The choices we make now have eternal consequences. I'll finish with the words that James writes in his New Testament letter: "You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, 'He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us?' But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, 'God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.' Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you!" (James 4:4-10 ESV) Right Mouse click or tap here to download this episode as an audio mp3 file

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When I sat down with Dr. Ory Amitay, his passion for myth, history, and ancient cultures was infectious. Our conversation about his new book, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History, Oxford University Press, 2025, quickly revealed that for Ory, the real intrigue isn't whether Alexander literally visited Jerusalem, but how and why this story was created and retold for centuries. Ory traced his fascination with this intersection of myth and reality back to his Israeli upbringing and Berkeley days, where he mastered ancient languages and ventured beyond traditional Jewish sources. He described how, over time, different versions of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem reflected shifting political climates—from the Seleucid takeover to Roman conquest. Myths, he explained, were tools to help communities navigate upheaval, envisioning themselves in relation to powerful foreign rulers.  Pressed for the historical “truth,” Ory smiled and emphasized that the stories' meaning—how they address the anxieties and hopes of their tellers—outweighs whether Alexander's visit “really” happened. As he pursues new projects, translating ancient versions of these tales and writing a book on Western civilization, I left inspired by his view that exploring old myths is also about understanding how we shape, and are shaped by, our stories about ourselves. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting, if it happened, passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been.The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus.Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

During the reign of Ahaz in Judah, Hoshea comes to the throne of Israel, and he is the last king to reign in the northern kingdom. About the year 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire besieges Samaria and conquers Israel. The Scripture makes plain that this was no matter of historical accident, but rather, the LORD was bringing about His judgment against Israel for their idolatry which had characterized Israel from the days of Jeroboam son of Nebat. Judah too walked in these ways, but their destruction was yet to come. After Assyria conquered Israel, they moved some Israelites to other parts of their empire and moved other conquered people into Israel. The resulting conglomeration of people and religions provides the background for the enmity between Judeans and Samaritans in the New Testament.  Rev. Dr. Brian Kachelmeier, pastor at Crown of Life Lutheran Church in San Antonio, TX, joins host Rev. Timothy Appel to study 2 Kings 17:1-41.  To learn more about Crown of Life, visit www.crownoflifesa.org. "A Kingdom Divided” is a series on Sharper Iron that goes through 1-2 Kings. The division in the kingdom of Israel in this part of history was greater than a matter of north and south. The biggest division was between the people and their God. Yet even as the people rebelled against the LORD as their King, still He remained faithful to call them back to Himself through His prophets, working through history to send the good and gracious King, Jesus Christ. Sharper Iron, hosted by Rev. Timothy Appel, looks at the text of Holy Scripture both in its broad context and its narrow detail, all for the sake of proclaiming Christ crucified and risen for sinners. Two pastors engage with God's Word to sharpen not only their own faith and knowledge, but the faith and knowledge of all who listen. Submit comments or questions to: listener@kfuo.org

#khazar #khazarempire #semite Youtube link: https://youtu.be/_cLYKwLDRokPodcast link: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/zAORP76sbUbThe Thirteenth Tribe is a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler advocating the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Judeans and Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people who allegedly mass-converted to Judaism. So, join us as we have a conversation about a late great preacher from St. Louis, and his position on our people being HEBREW ISRAELITES and information about Ashkenazi smallhats being fake smallhats...tap in. #rbcf Hashtags: #stevedarby #colonialism #heritage #koelster #arthur #arthukoelster #thethirteenthtribe #bransoncognac

In Isaiah, Cyrus the Great emerges as a unique figure chosen by the God of Israel to fulfill a specific historical task: the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and the liberation of the Judahites from exile in Babylon in direct fulfillment of the prophecy spoken by Jeremiah.Cyrus's rise to power is depicted not as a product of his strength but as the result of God stirring his spirit and granting him authority over all nations.God bestows upon Cyrus exceptional titles: “my shepherd,” a nomadic-pastoral, Bedouin-styled function typical of prophetic literature, signifying his role in guiding the people of Israel back to God's land, and “my anointed,” indicating a special divine commissioning that parallels, though does not equal, the messianic expectations normally associated with Israelite kings.Through Cyrus's conquests, especially the subjugation of Babylon, the Lord demonstrates his universal sovereignty, demonstrating to all nations that he alone is the Unipolar Hegemon that directs the course of history and holds ultimate authority over the kingdoms of the earth.While Cyrus plays a pivotal role as a pawn on God's political chessboard, Isaiah carefully distinguishes him from the Slave of the Lord.The Slave—often wrongly identified with Israel itself—points to a future messianic figure who carries a broader, more enduring mission: to establish justice, bring light to the nations, and embody God's ultimate purpose. Unlike Cyrus, whose mission is temporal and political, the Slave's work is a universal call to the path of the Lord, extending beyond the restoration of Jerusalem to the transformation of the human race.Thus, Isaiah presents Cyrus as a divinely appointed instrument for a limited, though critical, historical role. At the same time, the Slave of the Lord stands as the ultimate fulfillment of God's plan of victory and liberation for his people and the entire world.Then, in Luke, the Slave landed on the beaches of the Gerasenes.Everything I do, I do for the Slave.This week, I discuss Luke 8:29.Show Notesπαραγγέλλω (parangellō)order, summon, command, send a messageשׁ-מ-ע (shin-mem-ayin) / س-م-ع (sīn-mīm-ʿayn)hear, submit!1 Samuel 15:4 - Saul, Israel's first king, asserts his leadership by gathering a vast army (200,000 foot soldiers and 10,000 men of Judah) to fulfill a divine command: to destroy the Amalekites utterly. Centralized, royal power at its peak.1 Samuel 23:8 - Saul, now insecure in his power, redirects his military might to pursue David at Keilah, driven by jealousy and fear of losing his throne.1 Kings 15:22 - King Asa commands all of Judah to dismantle Baasha's fortifications at Ramah and repurpose them to fortify Geba and Mizpah. Asa's leadership is pragmatic and defensive, focused on security rather than prophetic utterances.Jeremiah 26:14 (LXX) - Jeremiah stands alone before religious and political leaders, “I am in your hands; do with me as seems good and right to you.” Luke's lexical itinerary at Decapolis follows the biblical storyline, shifting from the king's authority to the prophet's vulnerability.Jeremiah 27:29 (LXX) - Jeremiah warns Judah that resisting Babylon will only bring destruction; the people must submit to Babylon's yoke as God's instrument of judgment.Jeremiah 28:27 (LXX) - The theme of the yoke—submission to Babylon's dominion—continues. This reinforces the prophet's earlier warning that Judah's fate is sealed unless they accept God's judgment.ע-ב-ר (ʿayin-bet-resh) / ع-ب-ر (ʿayn-bāʼ-rāʼ)pull along, pass through, pass by, go your way; consistent with nomadic pastoral or shepherd life2 Chronicles 36:22 - This verse marks the beginning of the return from exile. It records that in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, the Lord moved his heart to make a proclamation allowing the exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. This aligns with the prophecy of Jeremiah being fulfilled — God's promise to bring his people back from captivity after seventy years.Ezra 1:1 - This verse parallels 2 Chronicles 36:22. It highlights that in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia's reign, God stirred his spirit to make a decree throughout his kingdom allowing the Judeans to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, again, fulfilling the prophecy of Jeremiah.In Arabic, this root carries various functions, including “to cross,” “to pass over,” “to interpret,” or “to take a lesson.”عُبُور (ʿubūr) crossingمَعْبَر (maʿbar) crossing placeتَعْبِير (taʿbīr) expression, interpretation (especially of dreams)א-מ-ר (ʾaleph–mem–resh) / أ-م-ر (ʾalif-mīm-rāʾ)In Arabic, this root is the foundation for words like أَمْر (ʾamr) (“command” or “order”) and مَأْمُور (maʾmūr) (“one who is commanded”). Matthew Cooper observes that אָמַר (amar) “he spoke,” is inter-functional with the Arabic word أمير (emir), which means “prince,” “commander,” or “leader,” from the same root.Joshua 6:7 - Joshua commands his army to advance on Jericho. Specifically, he orders the armed men to proceed, and the seven priests with the trumpets to go before the Ark of the Covenant as they prepare to encircle the city. This is part of the famous account of the fall of Jericho, where the walls come down after the Israelites' obedience to God's instructions.צ-ע-ק (ṣade-ayin-qof) / ص-ع-ق (sīn–ʿayn–qāf)In biblical Hebrew, צעק (ṣāʿaq) means “to cry out, to shout, to call loudly.”1 Samuel 10:17 - Samuel gathers the people of Israel at Mizpah to publicly present Saul as the chosen king. This follows God's command to anoint a king, as the people had demanded one like the nations around them. Samuel is about to cast lots to reveal Saul as God's chosen king formally.In Arabic, صعق (ṣaʿaqa) means “to be struck by thunder, to be shocked, to be stunned.”י-ע-ץ (yod-ayin-ṣade) / و-ع-ظ (wāw-ʿayn-ẓāʾ)1 Kings 12:6 - Rehoboam, Solomon's son and the new king, consults the elders who had served his father about responding to the people's request to lighten their burdens. The elders advise him to show kindness. He does not listen.“To advise, to give counsel.” The Arabic triliteral carries the core function “to exhort, to admonish, to preach.”وَعْظ (waʿẓ) exhortation, admonitionوَاعِظ (wāʿiẓ) preacher, admonisherتَوْعِيظ (tawʿīẓ) act of exhorting, preaching“Call to the path of your Lord with wisdom and the beautiful exhortation (الْمَوْعِظَةِ ٱلْحَسَنَةِ al-mawʿiẓati al-ḥasanati), and discuss with them in that which is best. Indeed, your Lord is most knowing of who has strayed from his path, and he is most knowing of the guided.” Surah An-Nahl (16:125) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Thursday, 22 May 2025   Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city! Matthew 10:15   “Amen! I say to you, it will be sufferable – land Sodom and Gomorrah – on judgment day than that city” (CG).   In the previous verse, Jesus instructed the apostles to out-swing the dust from their feet of any house or city that rejected their word concerning the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Now, He tells them what that act signifies, beginning with, “Amen! I say to you.”   As has been seen, this forms an emphatic declaration concerning what follows. He is stressing the importance of what follows. In this case, it is the ramifications for rejecting the word they carry, saying, “it will be sufferable.”   It is a new adjective, anektoteros, signifying more endurable, more tolerable, etc. It is derived from the verb anechó, to endure, bear with, tolerate, etc. In this case, a single word that will fit the surrounding thought is sufferable. Next, to describe what is sufferable, He says, “land Sodom and Gomorrah.”   The epitome of what is considered biblical punishment and judgment on sin is found in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. So poignant was this lesson found in their writings that the memory of it is referred to throughout their history.   At times, the cities are referred to as the epitome of wickedness. At times, they are used as the epitome of judgment upon it. In Isaiah 1, both thoughts are referred to at one time –   “Unless the Lord of hosts Had left to us a very small remnant, We would have become like Sodom, We would have been made like Gomorrah. 10 Hear the word of the Lord, You rulers of Sodom; Give ear to the law of our God, You people of Gomorrah.” Isaiah 1:9, 10   These warnings didn't end with Jesus' words, though. They are referred to in 2 Peter and Jude. Finally, in Revelation 11, Jerusalem of the tribulation period is equated to Sodom and Egypt, a stinging and shameful rebuke.   Of these cities and what will be sufferable for them, Jesus says, “on judgment day than that city.” In other words, at the time when judgment is meted out upon the world prior to the lost being cast into the Lake of Fire, Sodom and Gomorrah will receive less punishment than such a city. How could that be?   The reason isn't the direct, flagrant, and open wickedness of these cities. Rather, it is a matter of revealed light. As Jesus says elsewhere –   “But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48   Sodom and Gomorrah were cities filled with perverts and wicked people, but they only had the light of general revelation to direct them, along with the consciences that God gave them. Israel, on the other hand, had God's special revelation in the form of the law, the writings, and the prophets.   They were given these things to lead them to the coming of the Messiah, Jesus. Upon His arrival and His proclamation that everything they were promised was about to be presented to them, they rejected what these writings proclaimed. In their rejection, there could be no excuse. This is a truth that continues to this day.   Life application: Today, it is popular among Christians to give Israel and the Jewish people a pass for their conduct and their way of life. Condemnation of those around her comes quickly, as it should, but when it comes to pointing out the behavior of Israel, there is often not a peep made.   And yet, it is Israel the people who bear the name of God, who openly hold “pride” parades, condone abortion, promote or tolerate wickedness, etc. Christians should support the nation in their state of return because God has ordained it, while not failing to call out their corruption as well as their rejection of Jesus.   Jews must be evangelized like any other group of people. Those who reject Jesus will be eternally separated from God. What came upon them for the past two thousand years was a self-inflicted wound. Paul explicitly says this when writing to those at Thessalonica –   “For this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe. 14 For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they do not please God and are contrary to all men, 16 forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins; but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost.” 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16   Be sure to pray for Israel, be willing to call out their flaws, and be sure to have tracts ready to hand out to any Jews you meet, just as you would for any other person.   Heavenly Father, help us to think clearly about how You have presented Your word, including its warnings, to the people of the world. Judgment really is coming, and people must be warned of the consequences for failing to heed the word You have given us. May we be bold in this, O God. Amen.  

It's Tuesday, May 20th, A.D. 2025. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 125 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Kevin Swanson Fulani Muslim killed 15 unarmed Nigerian Christians On Saturday, May 17th, armed Fulani Muslim militia opened fire on Agatu Christians in Benue State, Nigeria, killing 15 unarmed men. Throughout that North Central region, the Fulani have also killed 159 Christian residents over the last 40 days, according to TruthNigeria.com.   Pray for Christians in Nigeria, suffering the most severe violence in the world today. Romania turns left after election interference On Sunday, Romania has taken the centrist-left position with the election of a new president named Nicușor Dan. Dan is supportive of Romania's participation in the European Union, and has made moves to approve the homosexual/transgender movement in his country. The more conservative candidate, George-Nicolae Simion, lost the election in a vote of 54% to 46%. Romania is the second largest Eastern European country by population.  The mainstream media is interpreting this election as an international rejection of the Trump agenda.  The back story is that Călin Georgescu, the conservative in the first round of the Romanian presidential election last December, garnered the most votes among the six presidential candidates at that time. After his opponents claimed that Russia had influenced the election through TikTok accounts, Romanian government officials detained Georgescu, canceled that election, and re-set it for May 18th.  Tens of thousands of Romanians protested in the streets back in March. At the time, Elon Musk said, “They just arrested the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election. This is messed up.” Most and least benevolent countries According to this year's Gallup World Happiness Report, the most benevolent countries in the world, judged by donations and volunteer hours, are Indonesia, the United States, Kenya, Gambia, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. The least benevolent countries are Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.  Biden announces advanced prostate cancer Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an "aggressive form" of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, reports CBS News. On Sunday, President Trump posted on social media that he and First Lady Melania Trump are "saddened to hear about Joe Biden's recent medical diagnosis." Appearing on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” on Monday, former Obama health advisor Dr. Zeke Emanuel said the cancer is so advanced, he has had it for many years. SCARBOROUGH: “Doesn't it take some time for prostate cancer to develop to a point where it would spread to the bones?” EMANUEL: “He's had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading.” Dr. Emanuel explained how serious Biden's prostate cancer truly is. EMANUEL: “That Gleason score, that score is from 2 up to 10, and he's at a 9. That means that the cancer doesn't look normal. It looks very abnormal.” Appearing on Fox News with Jesse Waters, talk show host Hugh Hewitt was incredulous. HEWITT: “This is the fourth time, in a little over 100 years, that a Democratic president -- Woodrow Wilson, FDR, John F. Kennedy and now Joe Biden, have hidden crucial details about their health as Commander-in-Chief from the American people. Ronald Reagan did not do that. “And it just astonishes me that in a free republic, we have to worry about our leaders telling us whether they're healthy or not.” Supremes allows Trump to revoke protection for thousands of illegal Venezuelans On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling allowing the Trump administration to deport 350,000 Venezuelans who are presently living in the U.S. on what they call a “humanitarian parole,” reports NBC News. Christian camp sues over foolish transgender mandates The State of Colorado is threatening to shut down a Christian Camp called Idrahaje -- short for “I'd Rather Have Jesus.” The Colorado Department of Early Childhood has refused to grant the camp a religious exemption concerning its transgender policies. This would require the camp to allow boys, pretending to be girls, to sleep, shower, and dress with female campers. The camp has sued the state, with representation from Alliance Defending Freedom. The camp disciples 2,500 to 3,000 students each year with the mission to “win souls to Jesus Christ through the spreading of the Gospel.”  Camp Idrahaje has complied with all regulations until this year when the Colorado government officials released new gender identity rules that became effective on February 14, 2025. 96% of atheists embrace homosexual/transgender agenda The most likely group in America to support the homosexual/transgender agenda are atheists with 96% professing support.  By contrast, 70% of white Evangelical Protestants oppose the lifestyle. Psalm 14:1 describes the atheist this way: "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works.” Mother loses right to disciple daughter Liberty Counsel is defending a mother in the state of Maine who has lost the right to guide the religious upbringing of her 11-year-old girl in a custody case.  This includes taking her daughter to Calvary Chapel services on Sunday.   A state district judge has ruled against the mother, citing “The ‘fear mongering,' paranoia, and anxiety taught by Calvary Chapel has, more likely than not, already had an impact on [the daughter's] childhood development.”   Expert testimony concluded that Calvary Chapel is a cult, the church's pastor a “charismatic” speaker, who spoke “authoritatively” in his messages, and that he asserted his messages were objective truth.   Liberty Counsel is appealing the case to the Maine Supreme Court. They still persecute people who preach about Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 says, “For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they do not please God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins; but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost.” Housing prices sag Since June 2022, housing prices are sagging in some metro areas around the U.S. — 22.8% in the Austin market, 9.9% in the Phoenix market, 9.2% in the San Francisco market, 9.1% in the San Antonio Market, 7.3% in the Denver market, and 6.7% in the Dallas Market. The Consumer Price Index has also risen about 10% over that period of time. Moody's downgraded America's financial rating And finally, in a year-over-year comparison, the U.S. government is still breaking records for fiscal expenditures running 10% over Fiscal Year 2024. Moody's has downgraded the U.S. as a long-term issuer of bonds by one notch, ending a perfect rating for America over the last 108 years.  No longer does the U.S, government get a Aaa rating, the highest level available. Now, it's an Aa1. Moody's noted that the downgrade "reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.” The rating organization added that: “Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs.”   Another independent rating service, named Fitch, downgraded the United States in 2023.  Close And that's The Worldview on this Tuesday, May 20th, in the year of our Lord 2025. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Or get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

22 At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24 So the Judeans gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me, 26 but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, in regard to what he has given me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father's hand. 30 The Father and I are one.”  

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter 1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23 by William Klock In the ancient church this was the Sunday when the men and women baptised on Easter would take off their white baptismal robes after a long week of celebrating their baptism.  Now it was time for the church to go out into the world to be the new people Jesus and the Spirit had made them.  At Rome, in those ancient days, the newly baptised would do this at the church of St. Pancras—a church named after a young Roman martyr.  Because of his faithfulness he would become a patron of oaths and vows.  Now it was time to live out their baptismal vows, like that young martyr.  They'd given their allegiance in faith to Jesus.  Now it was time to march out into the world, to proclaim him as the crucified and risen king, and to fight the world, the flesh, and the devil—not matter the cost. Brothers and Sisters, as the Easter story continues, we're reminded that Jesus didn't die and rise from death just to zap us to heaven the moment we believe.  He didn't die and rise again to create an escape hatch out of the world or even out of persecution and martyrdom.  He died and rose again so that we might live for him and carry the good news—like royal heralds of the king—out to the far reaches of God's creation.  This has been the mission of the people of God all along, going all the way back to Abraham.  He and then his family were called and set apart by the Lord to be a light in the darkness.  They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst.  Through them, God revealed himself to the nations. Or, at any rate, that's how the plan had started.  Abraham's family, Israel, largely failed in her mission.  That was part of the plan too.  It showed that it would take more than calling and creating and sending a special people to be light in the darkness.  The human race has a heart problem.  Instead of desiring God, we desire everything else.  Instead of worshipping him, we make idols.  And Israel had that same heart problem.  And so that story of calling and sending and failure leads us to Jesus.  It was meant to from the very beginning.  He came to set his people to rights—at least those who would follow him, who would trust him, who would give their allegiance to him as messiah—as God's king.  And in his death and resurrection Jesus defeated the powers of the old age and inaugurated God's new creation.  But John stresses, this time something was different.  This new people isn't just called and sent.  This time they're also transformed and equipped.  And that's really the theme of this Sunday after Easter.  Every week we're sent out with those words: “Go forth in pace to love and serve the Lord.”  Friends, that dismissal is a call to go out and swim in our baptism, to go our and to proclaim the risen Lord, to go out and do battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil.  I suspect that a lot of the time we respond, “Thanks be to God” without even thinking about any of that.  But those times when we do think about what those words mean, it's easy to feel overwhelmed—especially when the scriptures or the liturgy or the sermon has really spoken to us that day and we have a clear sense of why God has called us and saved us—it's easy to feel overwhelmed. So Brothers and Sisters, as we stand overwhelmed by the task before us, John assures us that if we are in Jesus by faith, there are two vitally important new realities for us.  The first is that we have been made part of his new creation.  We have a share in Jesus' resurrection from death.  Yes, there's more to come.  We haven't been resurrected yet.  That will come some day at the end of the age when the gospel, through the Church, has accomplished its purpose and brought the world to Jesus. But in the meantime, Jesus' resurrection has freed us from our bondage to sin and death and given us new life.  And, second, that if we are in Jesus, he has given us God's own Spirit.  He's made us his temple, the place where he dwells.  The Spirit's not something to be earned when we've become holy enough.  He's not some later experience or second blessing, as if we can be in Jesus, but not have a share in the Spirit.  Jesus' gift of the Spirit is the very thing that fulfils God's promise through the prophets and that defines us as his new covenant people.  And as Jesus forgives and frees us by his death and resurrection, the indwelling Spirit empowers and equips us to live the new life Jesus has given.  The Spirit's life in us is a foretaste and a down payment on the resurrection and the life of the age to come—and most importantly in light of today's theme, the indwelling Spirit is the one who makes the task set before us by Jesus possible.  He's the one who equips us to fulfil those impossible vows we made in our baptism. In our Gospel, again John 20 beginning at verse 19, John tells us: On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Judeans.  Jesus came and stood in the middle of them.  “Peace be with you,” he said.   We shouldn't pass over these words too quickly.  It's the first day of the week.  It's still the same day that Mary went to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body and found it empty.  It's the same day she went running to tell Peter and John.  The same day they went running to the tomb to see for themselves.  The same day when John says none of them—except, it seems, for him—understood what had happed.  John says he “believed” and I think that means he believed Jesus had risen, but that was crazy and he was still working it through so he hadn't said anything to the others yet.  This is that same day.  Now it's evening.  And the disciples have locked themselves into someone's house.  The doors are locked.  I expect the windows tightly shuttered.  There was no cooking fire.  Nothing that might make the house look occupied—nothing to give them away.  Maybe one little lamp, just so they could barely see each other in the darkness.  They were afraid.  Four days before, the Jewish authorities had arrested Jesus.  Three days before he's been crucified as a dangerous revolutionary.  Soon, they figured, the authorities would come for the rest of them.  Best to lay low until things blew over.  Maybe in a few days they could sneak out of the city.  And so they sat there in the darkness, some silently pondering what all this meant, some still weeping for their dead friend, maybe a couple of them arguing in low tones about what had happened to Jesus' body and what they'd do next.  But whatever they were doing, a palpable sense of fear filled that dark room.  John's telling of the story of new creation reverberates with echoes of the story of the first creation: Darkness was over the face of the deep. And then Jesus is suddenly there.  John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it.  That was an echo of Genesis.  The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness.  And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness.  And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!” Imagine their surprise.  And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts.  Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn't recognise him.  Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation.  Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn't recognise him.  Of course, it wouldn't have helped that they simply didn't expect to see him again either.  So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see.  One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see.  There were the marks left by the nails.  And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead.  And here he stood alive.  They were shocked.  How could it be?  I've said before, the reason resurrection wasn't on anyone's mind was because this wasn't how it was supposed to happen.  This wasn't a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn't supposed to work this way.  At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once.  There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah.  This just wasn't on their radar.  Not at all.  But now it is and they're confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid.  And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!” And Jesus doesn't waste any time as John tells it.  “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears.  Jesus is alive.  And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection.  Jesus doesn't waste any time.  He says in verse 21: “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”   Think about that.  Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed.  Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem.  Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed.  And Jesus says to them, “I'm sending you.  As the Father sent me to you, I'm now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.”  In other words, “You're not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness.  No, you're going out into Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people.  You're going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done.  Everyone is going to know who you are.  You're going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus whom they crucified died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God's King, and that his kingdom, God's new creation has come.” Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hunkered down with the others, afraid.  John couldn't even tell his friends what he thought had happened.  The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn't talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell.  No, he's talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody.  Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute.  Most of us are hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus.  We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus' disciples did.  The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we're weird.  They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation.  We have so little to fear, but we're afraid anyway.  We've even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible's way of speaking about evangelism.  Instead we talk about “sharing” our faith—watering it down, as if it's just another option on the religious smorgasbord that someone might want to try out for themselves.  We've lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it.  No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all. But, again, consider John.  Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand.  And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been fathered by God…because everything that has been fathered by God conquers the world.  This is the victory that conquers the world: our faith.  Who is the one who conquers the world?  Surely the one who believes that Jesus is the son of God!  (1 John 5:1, 4-5) Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah—God's king—has been reborn as part of the people of God.  And that belief changes everything.  That belief transforms the fearful John hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm.  There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness.  It's not because faith changes reality.  It's because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation.  By faith we are united with him.  By faith we share in his inheritance.  And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king. Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus. It was he who came by means of water and blood, Jesus the Messiah, not by water only but by the water and the blood.  The Spirit is the one who bears witness, because the Spirit is truth.  There are three that bear witness—the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and these three agree together.  If we have received the witness of men, God's witness is greater.  This is the witness of God, the testimony he has borne concerning his son.  (1 John 5:6-9)   John points back to Jesus' ministry.  He came by water.  That was the start of it.  He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.”  That was Jesus' initiation into his messianic ministry.  And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins.  Jesus' baptism testifies to his being the Messiah.  Jesus' blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah.  And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit.  And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men.  How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself?  And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, that is changing the world, oughtn't we to be proclaiming it to that world?  Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light.  The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world.  The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome.  Dear Friends, don't hide it under a basket.  Hold it high.  Proclaim it.  Show it to everyone.  Don't be afraid.  God has spoken: “Let there be light!”  And as John wrote in his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has no overcome it.”  He goes on in verse 10: All those who believe in the son of God have the witness in themselves.   But that's not where John leaves us in the Gospel.  Jesus doesn't just send his disciples out into the world.  That would be an impossible task.  Jesus also equips them.  Look at verses 22-23 of John 20: With that, he breathed on them.  “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he said.  “If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven.  If you retain anyone's sins, they are retained.”   As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples.  “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says.  Was the Spirit literally imparted by Jesus' breath?  Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised.  But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word.  Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that's what he's doing in this case in John's Gospel.  He is—or he soon will be—imparting God's Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn't help but connect to God's giving life to Adam.  But this is new life.  And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news.  Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is.  It's not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen.  It's not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God.  But, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel.  To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him.  “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” And then those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven.  If you retain anyone's sins, they are retained.”  Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus' inheritance and ministry.  By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus.  And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people.  And Jesus gets here at two of those things.  Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests. Our message is two-fold.  I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us.  This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins.  Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices.  That was one of their main duties: to facilitate and to mediate God's forgiveness to the people.  Think of Jesus.  He is both priest and sacrificial lamb.  He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins.  And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice.  But that is not our only role.  We also share in Jesus' prophetic office—and that's the part that doesn't come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are.  But consider what the prophets did.  Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet.  He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness.  In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word.  Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving folks nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness.  They've gutted the gospel.  But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand.  Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness.  But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it.  Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God's new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish.  One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights.  And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world. Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that?  I trust that we do.  We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord's Table.  We recall the story.  We confess our sins in repentance.  And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  But maybe we've forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table.  Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean.  Think on what the blood of Jesus means.  Think on what his gift of the Spirit to you means.  And then take seriously those words of dismissal: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” Let's pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Luke wrote “Acts of the Apostles” as a sequel to his Gospel. The book picks up after the ascension of Jesus to chronicle the life of the early Church. That makes the Easter season a great time to pray through Acts of the Apostles. Previously on The 40 Days for Life Podcast, we introduced you to 9 People You Meet at Christ's Birth AND Planned Parenthood and 10 People You Meet at Christ's Passion AND at Planned Parenthood. Today, we introduce you to 10 People You Meet in Acts of the Apostles AND at Planned Parenthood: Matthias Peter Annas and Caiaphas Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, residents of Pontus and Asia, Phrygians, Pamphilians, Egyptians, Libyans, Cyrenians, Romans, Cretans, and Arabians  The Athenians Mark Demetrius the Silversmith Barnabas The Sadducees Paul

A Sermon for Good Friday St. John 19 by William Klock Every year, reading the passion narratives over the course of Holy Week, I always find myself at some point, at least for a little while, pondering Pontius Pilate.  If we read the Jewish historians Philo and Josephus, they leave us with the impression that Pilate held the Jews and their religion in disdain and relished any opportunity they gave him to exercise his military authority.  But then we read about him in the Gospels and we see a tired and exasperated government official who seems to just want to keep the peace.  These people for whom he has no great love and even less patience have arrested Jesus.  They can't legally execute him themselves, so they drag him before Pilate.  On the one hand Pilate has no interest in crucifying Jesus.  He doesn't like these people and he doesn't want to do their dirty work.  But he's also finding the whole situation a pain in the neck.  He was there to keep Caesar's peace and the Jews weren't making it easy for him.  And so he had Jesus brought to him and he asked, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  And Jesus responded, “Are you asking because you're interested or because that's what you've heard people say about me?”  And Pilate responds, “Am I a Jew?  Why should I care if you're King of the Jews or not?  It's your skin on the line.  Your own people—your own priests!—arrested you and handed you over to me.  I'm giving you a chance to explain yourself.  So what do you have to say?” Jesus goes on to explain in those well-known (and often misunderstood words), “My kingdom is not from this world.  If it were, my disciples would have taken up arms to save me from the soldiers of the high priest.”  And Pilate, confused and getting annoyed asks, “So are you a king or not?”  And Jesus responded, “You're the one calling me a king.  I was born for this.  I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  And we can hear the annoyance and the exasperation in Pilate's famous answer, “What is truth?”  And with that he went back out to address the Judeans.  He didn't understand what Jesus was saying, but that didn't mean Jesus was guilty.  Pilate went out and told them as much.  It was usual for the governor to free a Jewish prisoner at Passover, so Pilate offered them a choice: Jesus or Barabbas.  Barabbas was a monster.  Surely they'd choose Jesus, because they certainly didn't want Barabbas out of prison.  For that matter, Pilate didn't want Barabbas out of prison!  But, no, to Pilates' great surprise, they shouted out for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus.  Pilate gave up.  He symbolically washed his hands and declared to the people, this is on you, not me.  And they took Jesus off to die. Just like Pilate, people have been stumbling over these words of Jesus for two thousand years.  People hear him say that his kingdom is not from or not of this world and they then say to us, “Well, then leave me alone.  Go worship in your church and leave the rest of us be.  Enjoy your pie in the sky when you die.”  Even Christians have misunderstood this to mean that we should disengage from the world.  But that's not it at all.  Jesus' kingdom may not be from this world, but it is most certainly for this world.  It's the only hope this world has.  It's what Jesus means when he tells us to pray “on earth as it is in heaven”—to look forward to, to hope for, and to pray for that day when God has set his creation to rights, when earth and heaven and God and man are back together as they—as we—should be.  As he created it all and us in the beginning.  This is what Jesus bore witness to and it's what we, forgiven and washed and filled with his Spirit are called not only to pray for but to witness to the world and the people around us.  It's that kingdom that comes not by the sword—which is the only kind of kingdom Pilate could think of.  Instead, it's the kingdom that comes by the love we saw last night as Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples and then washed their feet.  It's the kingdom that we see coming today, on Good Friday, as Jesus goes to the cross. On Good Friday, at the cross, all the great stories of the love of God come together in one place.  As John tells us the story of Good Friday, he brings all these other stories together.  There's Psalm 22 and Psalm 69 and there's Isaiah and Zechariah, and there's the Passover lamb whose bones were not broken and it all points us to the big story of the God of Israel and his people and his love for them—a love that was meant to be, through them, for everyone and for all of creation.  They were his agents for challenging the power of evil in the world, for being light in the darkness.  And, of course, as we read the Old Testament, we see that their story—not very surprisingly—their story got stuck in the very problem for which it was supposed to be an answer—the great problem of rebellion and sin.  And yet, Israel's failure was God's opportunity to announce his love once again.  He would be faithful to his people.  He would send his Messiah and his Messiah would fulfil his purposes for the world. Think of that bigger story.  Going back almost to the beginning we're told about the men of Babel and their tower.  They'd lost all knowledge of their creator.  They grasped at divinity themselves, reaching towards heaven.  God confused their languages.  There's that “What is truth?” question all the way back there!  And there, in the midst of deep darkness, just as the human race seems well and truly and utterly lost, God shows up to make himself known to Abraham and to announce that through Abraham and his family, he will make himself known to the world.  A glimmer of light in the darkness.  And then that family winds up enslaved in Egypt, so the Lord sends Moses to confront Pharaoh and to lead his people out of bondage—and Passover happens.  There are centuries of ups and downs for Israel, but each time things go bad, the Lord sends a deliverer.  And then finally he gives Israel a king—Saul—and the Philistines kill him.  So the Lord raises up the lowly shepherd, David, who establishes a great kingdom and the Lord promises him a future heir who will be God's own son and who will rule forever and ever.  And then more centuries of ups and downs, of faithfulness and failure—mostly failure—until Babylon brings Israel down in shame and takes her off into exile.  And when Israel is at her lowest, shamed and disgraced, that's when the Lord points to her through the Prophet and declares: Behold, my servant.  And he gives the Prophet Daniel, sitting in the shame of exile, a vision: the great empires rise from the sea, but over them all the Lord exalts the son of man as their judge. And, Brothers and Sisters, this story echoes all through our Good Friday Gospel today.  We see Rome, another of those imperial monsters rising from the sea.  And Rome does what Rome did best, brutally killing a rebel king.  John shows us Pilate as he brings Jesus out to the people the day before Passover and announced, “Behold your king!”  But those Sadducee priests didn't want a Messiah any more than they wanted a resurrection.  In fact, they didn't want a Messiah so much that they shouted out the unthinkable, “We have no king but Caesar!”  John shows us Babel and Egypt and Philistia and Babylon at their worst and then he shows us the seed of Abraham, the one greater than Moses, the son of David, the servant of the Lord and declares, “Behold the man!  Behold your king!” And yet, for all it seems that Rome and the Sadducees are out of control, they never really are.  As in Daniel's vision, the beasts rise from the sea and they rage, but the God of Israel never ceases to be sovereign.  Even in their evil, the beasts of empire serve his purpose.  So, ironically, it's Pilate the Roman governor, the man cynical of the very idea of truth, who in God's providence, declares the truth to the people as he announces to them, “Here is your king!”  Even as the priests protest his placard on the cross, Pilate again stands firm on the truth, insisting, “What I have written, I have written.”  John powerfully reminds us that even this cynical, self-serving servant of Caesar will serve the Lord's purposes.  Jesus had said to Pilate, “You have no authority over me unless it is given to you from above.”  So Rome does what Rome does best.  It mocks and it kills and yet, in doing that, it providentially serves God's purposes and proves the point that the God of Abraham and Moses and David does not fight the battle against evil with the weapons of the world, but with love.  Everyone that day thought that Caesar had won.  The devils were dancing with joy that Friday.  And yet Caesar and the priests and the devils all played right into God's hand.  As evil rose to its full height, as it was concentrated all in one place, God won the victory against it on Good Friday. At the cross, God's project to set his creation to rights is finally accomplished.  This why John opens his Gospel with those powerful echoes of Genesis.  In Genesis we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  John echoes those words as he tells us that in the beginning was the word and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us—bringing heaven and earth back together.  All through John there are these creation themes.  There's light and darkness.  There's the seed that will bear fruit and multiply.  And now on Friday, the sixth day of the week, the day when God crowned his work of creation with the creation of man to rule his new world, John shows us Pilate bringing out Jesus, robed in purple and wearing a crown of thorns, and he declares to the people, “Behold the man!”  Jesus is the true image of God and the world is so mired in rebellion and sin that God's own people, confronted with the image of God in Jesus can only shout out, “Crucify him!”  The people who prayed for the return of the Lord to his temple, turned their eyes away when he did return and demanded his death.  They were so mired in darkness that they couldn't bear the light. And yet the love of God marched sovereignly on—to the cross.  At the end of the sixth day in Genesis, God finished his work and now on this sixth day in John's Gospel we hear Jesus announce that “It is finished” as he takes his last breath.  It was finished.  His work was accomplished.  Humanity was forgiven and creation was healed.  Evil had risen to its full height, giving the love of God the opportunity to rise even higher on the cross.  Of course, no one understood that on Friday.  It would take the resurrection, in which Jesus was vindicated by his Father, in which his victory was brought out into the light for everyone to see, it would take that before they would know and understand and believe.  But on the cross, as Jesus breathed his last and slumped, hanging on those nails, it was finished.  Once and for all.  A full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of Israel, for the sins of all of the nations—for the sins of the whole world.  A sacrifice that would finally heal the breach and bring an answer to our prayer: on earth as it is in heaven. And now, Brothers and Sisters, you and I stand gathered at the foot of the cross, confronted by the very image of God and by his amazing love.  Here is the man who represents what we were created to be in the beginning and what, if we will only commit ourselves to him, God will make us to be.  Here is our King, who has inaugurated his kingdom—this new creation, this world set to rights, a world founded on love—and not the world's idea of love, but the love defined by the story of God and his people and by Jesus' sacrificed for us on the cross.  Here we're confronted by the King and his kingdom and by a vision of the world set to rights.  What will we do?  We are so often stuck in the kingdom of Caesar.  We put our trust in Caesar's sword and in Caesar's coins—even in Caesar's gods.  Like those Sadducee priests who were so dead set on holding on to what they had, that they declared the unthinkable, that they declared the very thing they knew so well was false: “We have no king but Caesar.”  And John reminds us today that whatever power Caesar may have, has been given to him by God and to fulfil his purposes, not Caesar's.  Brothers and Sisters, let go of Caesar and take hold of Jesus.  Let go everything else and take hold of the love of God made manifest at the cross. Good Friday reminds us.  We look up to the cross and we see Jesus.  Behold the man.  Behold the king.  He is the image of God and as we look in his face we see the God who loved his people, who loved the world so much, that he gave his own son that we might be forgiven and set to rights and welcomed back into his fellowship—who sent his son not to condemn, but to save.  Here is the good shepherd who lays down his own life for his sheep out of love.  Here is the one who shows the greatest love we can ever know as he lays down his life for his friends.  Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the uttermost.  This love we see at the cross is the very love that shone so brightly out of the darkness at the very moment when we thought the light had been overcome.  This is the love that redeems and renews us, but even more important than that, this is the love that glorifies the God who is love. And so, Brothers and Sisters, this Good Friday, be transformed by this love.  Our brother and our king has given his life and by that love he gives us life and hope and a lens through which we should, more and more each day, see every part of our lives and every part of the world.  This is the love that forgives our sins and heals our hurts.  This is the love that is making creation new and that, one day, will wipe away our tears.  This is the love that we, as Jesus' people, manifest to the world.  This is the truth we witness for the sake of the world and to the glory of God.

(5:16) Bible Study: Isaiah 49:1-6 Father explains this reading. John 13:21-33, 36-38 Father explains this passage and the strange customs of the time. (22:39) Break 1 (25:16) Letters: What is the difference between the Jews and Judeans? How bad is the sin of rebellion? Father answers these and other questions. Send him a letter at simon@relevantradio.com (34:25) Break 2 (38:57) Word of the Day Island (40:24) Phones: Jeff -Why in Palm Sunday Mass, they have the whole passion narrative? Why don’t we just stay with Palm Sunday narrative since we are going to go through the passion narrative on Holy Thursday and Good Friday? Second question. David - My family got invited to a Hindu wedding, are there any rituals of a Hindu wedding that we as Catholics should not be part of?

Jesus is nearing Jerusalem when some in the crowd bring up agruesome tragedy—Galileans slaughtered by Pontius Pilate, their blood mingledwith their sacrifices. Pilate, a harsh Roman governor, was notorious forclashing with the Jews. He brought Roman ensigns into the Holy City, seizedtemple funds for an aqueduct, and quelled protests with violence. Thisatrocity, possibly during a feast when nationalism surged, saw soldiers strikedown unarmed Galileans at the altar—a shocking sacrilege. The crowd, especiallythe Pharisees and Judeans, assumed these Galileans were worse sinners,deserving such a fate. They expected Jesus to agree. Instead,Jesus replies, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than allother Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unlessyou repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2-3). Then He brings itcloser to home: “Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killedthem, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt inJerusalem? I tell you, no; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”(Luke 13:4-5). The Siloam tower collapse—workers killed on Pilate's aqueductproject—stung the Judeans. They'd judged those victims too, thinking they gotwhat they deserved for working with Pilate. Jesusflips the script. He doesn't defend Pilate or the Galileans, nor does He diveinto political debates. He lifts the issue higher: tragedy isn't always divinepunishment. The Galileans weren't worse sinners; the Siloam workers weren'tuniquely guilty. Suffering doesn't always mark God's wrath—Job's friendsmisjudged that, and so did the crowd. Even Jesus, sinless, suffered. If everydisaster signaled sin, how would we explain the trials of prophets, apostles,or Christ Himself? Jesus debunks their logic, then drives deeper: all aresinners, and all face judgment unless they repent. The real question isn't “Whydid they die?” but “Why are you still alive?” Thisurgency echoes through Scripture. Jesus' first message was “Repent, for thekingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). His last, to the church inLaodicea, was “Be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:19). Paul preached “repentancetoward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). The Greekword for repentance, metanoia, means a change of mind and heart—a turning fromsin to God. It's not just confessing; it's forsaking sin and trusting Jesus.The Bible calls for repentance 969 times—it hasn't dropped out of God's vocabulary,even if it's faded from ours. TheGalileans' fate and Siloam's collapse foreshadowed a greater judgment—likeJerusalem's fall to Rome in AD 70. Jesus' warning was clear: repent now, orperish. Today, we're tempted to judge others' misfortunes—“They had itcoming”—while dodging our own guilt. But Jesus cuts through: “Unless yourepent.” We're all in the same boat—one death per person. “Now is the day ofsalvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). As Jesus neared the cross, He urged thecrowd—and us—to wake up, stop pointing fingers, and turn to Him. He didn'tpromise a life free of towers or tyrants, but a way to stand forgiven beforeGod. ClosingChallengeHaveyou truly repented—changed your mind about sin, owning your guilt before God?This week, pick one area needing a turn—maybe a hidden sin, a bitter attitude,or a neglected faith. Confess it, turn from it, and trust Jesus to transformyou. Don't delay; the time to repent is now. PrayerLordJesus, thank You for Your urgent call to repentance, preached from Your firstwords to Your last. Forgive us for judging others instead of facing our ownsin. Stir our hearts with metanoia—a true change toward You. Help us turn fromsin, place our faith in You, and live as Your children. Give us courage to acttoday, trusting Your mercy. Bless us as we follow You to the cross and beyond.Amen.

In Luke 13 the enemies of the Lord maliciously attack him by drawing his attention to the Galileans, who Pilate had slaughtered as they were sacrificing in Jerusalem. Jesus tells his audience of Judeans of a recent event where a wall in Siloam – Jerusalem's backyard – fell on many Judeans. Did it happen because they were bad sinners? No, on both counts – but both tragedies provided opportunities for reflection and repentance. This is followed in chapter 13 by the parable of the barren fig tree which represents Israel's failure to bring forth fruit to God. Jesus next, on the Sabbath day heals a woman with an unclean spirit. The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven come next in the record. Then the record speaks of the parable of the narrow door, through which every disciple must strive to enter. Our Lord Jesus Christ laments over Jerusalem – to be torn down stone by stone as the leprous house. He will be welcomed in the Kingdom, when they would say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Psalm 118 verse 26). Chapter 14 of Luke begins with Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath day. That man had clearly been planted as a test for Jesus. Would he heal on the Sabbath day? The Lord was invited to speak at a dinner for Pharisees and Jesus gives advice in the parable of the wedding feast. Then came another parable about the great banquet to which each invited class found excuses not to attend. These people who were called by the gospel to come to the wedding feast of the Son of God all adjudged themselves unworthy of eternal life in the kingdom. As a result of their rejection we have graciously been offered a place. Two parables follow which tell us that as disciples of Jesus we must about count the cost of discipleship and wholeheartedly pursue that goal. Every disciple of our Lord must accept the peace that our Sovereign offers to us through the emissaries of the gospel and then make peace with Him: Ephesians 2 verses 11 to 22. The chapter concludes with the need for zest and salt among our Master's disciples. Salt speaks of sincerity in Christ's disciples as we are told in 1 Corinthians 5 verses 6 to 8.

In this episode we explain how the deity-of-Christ interpretation of John's Gospel is wrong. Three, Yea verily Four Keys to Understanding John's Gospel 1.       The Purpose statement of the author, John 20:30-31 “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”   The original target audience of the Gospel of John was Israelites in the Diaspora. John wrote to convince and help them to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  See more below.   2.      In John's Gospel, Jesus declares that he is a man who told the truth which he heard from God. John 8:40, “but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.” Jesus differentiates himself from God. Jesus is a man, not a god-man, not one person of God who is incarnated in a human nature.  Jesus states that he is a human being, a man who declares the truth that heard from someone else, specifically, from God.    3.      In John's Gospel, Jesus declared that the Father is the only true God. John 17:1-3 “Father… this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. The God that was speaking and working in and through the man Jesus was the Father. Christology of John is agency, not incarnation.  Jesus as God's unique human son was sent by God and as such represented God, is to be regarded as the very presence of God (the Father) who sent him.   4.      John is an Israelite, writing to Israelites. He is not writing originally to Gentiles. a.      Metaphors, figurative language. John 10:6 (context is the thief vs. the shepherd), “This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.”   John 16:25, "I have said these things to you in figures of speech.”   Come into the world, come down from heaven, “This is the bread that has come down from heaven” (6:50) “the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (Joh 6:51) Jesus' flesh literally descended from heaven?   “The baptism of John, was it from heaven or from man” (Mar 11:30) means “Was John's baptism of heavenly or of human origin?”  (Mar 11:30) b.      “Jews” means “Judeans”. “He came to his own, but his own received him not”. Samaritans, and Israelites in Galilee and Perea accepted him. c.      “world” does not mean planet earth, but the Israelite world. The world that God loved (John 3:16), is Israel.   Resources: In the Gospel of John the “Jews” are Judeans, Not All “Jews” https://landandbible.blogspot.com/2022/02/in-gospel-of-john-jews-are-judeans-not.html   The “Greeks” in John's Gospel are Greek Speaking Israelites, not Gentiles https://landandbible.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-greeks-hellenists-in-gospel-of-john.html What About John 1:1? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw44JRTIiV0

The geography of first-century Israel plays a crucial role in understanding Jesus's ministry and the biblical text's context. When John writes that "Jesus went into Galilee," have you ever wondered where Jesus was before that? What was happening geographically when John the Baptist was baptizing and when Jesus called His first disciples? In this lesson, we'll explore the three major regions of first-century Israel: Judea in the south, Galilee in the north, and Samaria in the middle. These areas weren't just names on a map—they were home to distinct cultural and religious dynamics that deeply influenced the message and mission of Jesus. We'll also tackle a critical misunderstanding in John's Gospel. When John speaks of those who opposed Jesus, he uses a term that is often translated as "the Jews" in English. But does this refer to all Jewish people, or is he specifically pointing to the Judeans—those in the south near Jerusalem and the Temple authorities? This distinction has significant implications, especially given how the text has been misread throughout church history. Join us as we delve into the geographical, cultural, and theological layers of the Gospel of John to gain fresh insights into Jesus' ministry and message. ----------------------------------- www.figtreeteaching.com Support Fig Tree Ministries: https://donorbox.org/support-figtree-ministries Fig Tree Amazon Portal: https://amzn.to/3USMelI Lesson Handout: https://www.figtreeteaching.com/blog/the-jews-or-judeans-john-pt-16 Explore my digital notes on the Gospel of John, now available at the links below: Notes on John 1:43-52: https://www.figtreeteaching.com/blog/notes-on-john-143-52 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7mh4v8e7FDwOoPhQd7bz7Y YouTube: https://youtu.be/4FUOf3_IxCY Learn about the Zealots: Introduction to the Zealots: https://youtu.be/I5l47CP64KQ Politics that drove the Zealots: https://youtu.be/cp-yXWuFop0 The Zealous Disciples: https://youtu.be/Zlwcw6R_euQ

Elitist intellectuals are drawn to the concept of a psychological trap because others' suffering entertains them and because their perception of another's supposed trap reinforces their sense of self-importance and permanence. Poor Sartre, poor DNC, poor duopoly.“The fool says in his heart, There is no Judge.”I agree, Jean-Paul: for your spiritual children, there can be “No Exit.”The local Judean elders, who should be hearing and repeating Jesus's words, are more concerned with manipulating the goodwill of their Roman occupiers to further their political agenda. In turn, the Roman servant, manipulated by the elders, shows zeal for the Torah. Still, his life remains in disrepair because the people of the Synagogue love their “nation” and their shiny new Synagogue more than the words—the debarim—of Isaiah.What right do the Judeans have to call anyone “worthy” or good? Their human judgment, assessment, and feedback “build” a house that Jesus does not enter and a Synagogue that ultimately rejects him.Is there an exit from Sartre's hell? Yes. Clearly. French existentialism, like postmodernism, is silly.There is only one Judge.Stop listening to the people of Capernaum and start following Jesus. Imitate the obedience of the Centurion, who did not accept accolades from the people of Judaea but received instead the one vote that counts.This week, I discuss Luke 7:1-10. Show Notesי-ק-ר (yod-qof-resh) / و-ق-ر (waw-qaf-ra)ἔντιμος (éntimos) “precious,” “honored,” “honorable in rank” (Luke 7:2) aligns with יקר (yāqār) in Hebrew, which can function as “heavy,” “valuable,” “honored,” “dignified,” “dear,” or—relevant to Luke 7:2, 1 Peter 2:4 and 1 Peter 2:6—“precious.” The Arabic root و-ق-ر (waw-qaf-ra) implies dignity, and can funtion as “to honor.”وَقَار (waqār) — Dignity or solemnity. This word is often used to describe a person's respectful or dignified demeanor.وَقِرَ (waqira) — To be weighty or important. In this form, it implies something substantial or of significant value.وَقَّرَ (waqqara) — To honor or respect. This is the form II verb (with shadda on the middle letter), meaning “to show respect or honor,” often used in contexts where someone honors or reveres another.تَوْقِير (tawqīr) — Reverence or high regard. This noun, derived from form II of the root, refers to the act of showing respect or esteem, often used in formal or respectful contexts.مُتَوَقِّر (mutawaqqir) — Dignified or solemn person. This adjective describes a person who carries themselves with dignity, calmness, and respectability.وَقُور (waqūr) — A dignified or composed person. This adjective describes someone who possesses an aura of respect, often used for people who are calm, collected, and reverent.The Hebrew root רפא (rafa) is rich in function related to healing, repairing, and recovering, extending across various Semitic languages. Arabic uses the verb رفع, (rafa‘a) “to mend or repair,” with a similar connotation. "And say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, Just so will I break this people and this city, even as one breaks a potter's vessel, which cannot again be repaired (לְהֵרָפֵא, leheraphe) and they will bury in Topheth because there is no other place for burial.'" (Jeremiah 19:11 )ח-ו-ר (ḥet-waw-resh) / ح-ر-ر (ḥāʾ-rāʾ-rāʾ)ἔντιμος (éntimos) also aligns to חֹר (ḥor), “free,” or “noble” حُرّ (ḥurr) freebornحرية (ḥurriya) “freedom” or “libertyحرر (ḥarrara): To liberate or set freeἔντιμος appears only in Luke 7:2, 1 Peter 2:4, 1 Peter 2:6 and Philippians 2:29.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★