Exploring Faith: Gratitude, Worship, and Holistic Salvation

"During college and seminary, I set myself to become a Greek scholar. My original desire was to be a professor at college and teach, university level. I did that. I had 29 years of doing that at Roberts Wesleyan as an adjunct. I did youth ministries. When my Greek professor, Stan McGill, had a heart attack on my daughter's second birthday, actually, October 16, 1984, he could not teach from that day. He was doing all the beginning and all the advanced Greek plus Bible courses. I had already been teaching there for a year. They asked me if I would take over the Greek department, so I did that for five years. My dream was fulfilled. I realized I really hate collegiate level politics and all that stuff. I was so glad I was a pastor and not a university professor." [00:47:30] (53 seconds)


"Today is Open Questions Week. We determined quite a long time ago that if there was a fifth Sunday in a month, that only occurs four times a week, if there's a fifth Sunday, we would make that open questions. Ask anything you want. We did that for quite a few years. As time went by, we had fewer and fewer people asking any questions that were good questions. We didn't do it. We've done it on occasion. Some of you remember that. Some of you don't. Today is a fifth Sunday. It's my last week. Josh is gone. Everybody was here for Christmas last week. Now the faithful and diligent people came back. And the people had nothing else to do in life. So all you losers are here today." [01:08:80] (46 seconds)


"The psalms are sung to music. And if you read the part that doesn't have a verse number, we call them by numbers. They didn't call them that. They call them by the first line of the psalm. So if you look at the underneath the number, let me just flip open to one just for fun. Psalm 106. It doesn't have one. It has a reference to there. So Psalm 81. And then below it, above verse 1, it says, for the director of music, according to Gittith. And you all know Gittith, right? They knew what it meant back then. It could be according to a syncopation. It's four -four time. It's, seven, eight. I mean, who knows what that meant? But they knew what Gittith was." [03:36:66] (52 seconds)


"And then it says, a song of Asaph. So Asaph may have been the actual guy who crafted it. He could have been an amanuensis to David. And then when David said things or he wrote the music, Asaph was the one that recorded that and kept that straight. So it's likely that after they were in the crisis, moment, David has time as king of Israel with reflection and a whole staff that he can write down what it is. What's interesting in English, it's really hard to look at a psalm and remember all of those words. But in Hebrew, it's very clear and very simple. Hebrew also only has 7,000 words in a vocabulary. I think English has something like 168,000 words." [04:24:28] (55 seconds)


"And where English makes a poem by rhyming words, you do various counts of the endings of the words. Hebrew does it by concepts. So it'll make a statement, make the opposite statement, make the same statement, make the opposite statement in a double negative. And then like the whole psalm is that way. So it's kind of easy to remember how those pieces fit into a storyline. But then it's also possible that afterwards David says, let me reflect what I was really thinking in that moment. And there is a lot of emotional content and the emotion sets up how they're going to act, what they're going, why are they going to do what they do." [05:26:80] (52 seconds)


"The challenge with things like from Talmud, Talmud is a theological reflection, written by people, and I don't mean this meanly, but it was written to prove a point. So, if you didn't have any support for what you believed, there would be a rabbi who would write it down. It would become part of Talmudic teaching, and you say, okay, so rabbi so-and-so said, and that proves it. He said, well, he said it, so it would prove it. But that's how it worked." [11:52:24] (34 seconds)


"And so, when you have something like the... I've never heard the thing about the ribbon turning white or red, and the scapegoat. Jesus probably was crucified in the year 29 to 32, somewhere in there, 29 to 32. We do know that the Romans came in, and they had had enough of Jewish rebellion. That they came in in 70 A.D., the summer of 70 A.D., and eliminated Jerusalem, scraped it off the top of the hill. It was gone. Here, we build our villages near water, because nobody really liked fetching water from a really far distance away." [12:26:32] (42 seconds)


"When the Romans came in, they had had enough of Jewish rebellion. It had been going on since 165, when the Maccabeans revolted and all that stuff going on. And so, they came in with a gigantic army and a whole bunch of slaves, and they just wiped the entire... They dismantled every building, they burned everything burnable. And they... Just destroyed the city. But what they couldn't do is when Solomon built the temple and the platform on which the temple sat, they put the foundation stones so deep in the ground, there was no way they could pull them out. It just was not possible. So, they took the building down, threw it into the valley or crushed it, and then left the base of the temple." [14:55:26] (52 seconds)


"And now, that's the Wailing Wall that has been uncovered, and you can go to that and touch those stones. And those stones are six, seven, eight, nine feet tall and massive. And what Solomon did was he built this foundation and then built the wall up on that. So, then everything was enclosed. So, when the temple was gone in 70 AD, there's about 36 years, 35, 36 years. The scapegoat was done once a year at the Day of Atonement. And so, what happened and how that happened and what the... It's not biblical. It's a Talmudic teaching that there's this ribbon and the scapegoat. The scapegoat is biblical, but even though it was written in Scripture, they did not do what the Scripture required frequently." [15:46:78] (55 seconds)


"And in Jeremiah 7, God says to Judah, who is hedging on blasphemy and outright idolatrous sin, He says to them, Look at Shiloh and look at what I did there. I'm going to do that to your temple in Jerusalem because you're worse than they were. That's what Jeremiah's prophecy is. And so, He says, Look at what happened to them and I'm going to do the same thing to you. That was in 590 BC. It had been 150 years since Shiloh was obliterated from the earth. And the temple was damaged and destroyed in 586, but rebuilt after the exile. And the one that was rebuilt, Zerubbabel's temple, Herod was adjusting it. That's the one that was destroyed in 780 and has never come back." [17:10:70] (59 seconds)


"So the question is about the lepers that were healed by Jesus. Ten of them were healed and only one came. And they came back to say thank you. And so the question, what did you say? What chapter did you say? Anybody have their technology open that can find the ten lepers? See, if I was really good, I would know the answer to this. Luke 17, chapter 17? A beggar. 17 what? Oh, Jesus heals ten men with leprosy. On his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. And as he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, Jesus, Master, have pity on us. When he saw them, he said, go show yourselves to the priests." [20:09:34] (75 seconds)


"And as they went, they were cleansed. Is that the first word? One of them came back and when he saw that he was healed, came back praising God in a loud voice, he threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan, which adds a whole different layer of controversy to the story. Jesus said, we're not all ten, we're not all ten cleansed. Is that the same? That's the same word that was used at the beginning. Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner? Then he said to him, rise and go, your faith has made you well. So that's it." [21:24:46] (44 seconds)