The Death of Jesus

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We are still in section 347, if you want to turn there, page 321, the death of Jesus.
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Those of you visiting, we have been studying the
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Synoptic Gospels for nearly a decade. And we are going to finish.
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We are going to finish. We are only pages, literally.
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We're on page 321 and we've got 17 pages left to go.
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That's it. We're going to make it. And then, as we have announced, the next major study will be
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Church History, again. But, what do we have to cover before we do
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Church History? I announced it a few weeks ago, remember? Let's see how many people...
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Huh? Yeah! One person was awake. Yay! Yeah. We need to...
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I mentioned on a Sunday morning that I just... Do not possess the skills to, in any way, shape, or form, somehow make a sermon out of a study of slavery.
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I just... no. There's too much. There's too many references to look at. Too much history.
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It just doesn't fit. So we'll need to work that in there some way. Or we may start the history thing and step out of it for a moment.
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I don't know. But we'll see. It's obviously not an enjoyable, but it is a necessary topic to address at some point.
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If we're going to continue and finish up our study of the Law, which we will continue today. For those of you interested, we'll be in Deuteronomy 19 and 20.
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Alright. We'll go ahead and get started. Last week, we noted in Matthew 27,
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Mark 15, and Luke 23, the presence of the centurion.
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And I mentioned to you at that time the importance of noting him.
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Because, you will note, in section 350,
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Mark 15, 44, and Pilate wondered if he were already dead. And he summoned the centurion.
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And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph.
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Now only Mark makes reference of this, which is interesting. Both Matthew and Luke do not.
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But Mark makes a specific, unique reference to the summoning of the centurion, who was in charge of the execution to verify the death of Jesus.
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Now, obviously, you know, no one at the time would have been imagining what would be developing in our day.
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But, as I mentioned to you briefly last week, it's amazing how many conspiracy books are out there that attempt to make the argument that Jesus did not actually die.
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And that there are actually some Muslims who have picked up on that, and will repeat that, the old swoon theory, etc.,
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etc. But, no one simply reading the words that we read last week
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Yielded up his spirit, breathed his last, breathed his last, bowed his head and gave up his spirit. These are all phrases that, without any meaningful question, without any doubt, would indicate to us the reality of the fact that Jesus had died.
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Now, I think there is, I think we should recognize that there is a supernatural element to the timing.
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In other words, this is not a simple situation where someone is trying to postpone death as long as possible and then their body just finally gives out.
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Jesus gave up his spirit, Matthew says, yielded up his spirit.
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There is a sense in which Jesus is in control of all these things, but the language is very plain that this is a physical death.
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Now, briefly, I suppose I would like to just mention that there are, in many of the debates
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I've been involved in, listening to others debating this issue, there is a struggle on the part of our
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Muslim friends and a struggle on the part of a lot of Christians to understand the nature of the death of Christ.
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The Muslims can have an extremely shallow objection. Well, if you believe
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Jesus was God, then God died, and who was running the universe, etc.,
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etc. There are some who actually really have that shallow a level of understanding of the topic and hence say, you know, you can't explain this.
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Even though Muslims themselves do not believe that death means non -existence, the spirit survives death in Islamic theology, so why they assume that there is non -existence, from the
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Christian perspective, knowing that we believe the same thing, I've not quite figured that out, but that's something you'll run into very often.
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And sometimes when you encounter a really bad objection, the flesh wants to mock the bad objection.
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Remember, you cannot assume that the person you're talking to has ever heard a good response.
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A lot of these folks come from lands where there aren't too many Christians who really know their stuff and hence have been able to give them a meaningful response, so keep that in mind when you respond to that.
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But there is still a lot of question on the part of a lot of people. What did this mean?
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How does the God -man die? And are you only talking about Jesus, who is, you know, the hypostatic union, one person, two natures?
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How do we understand that? How do we understand the relationship? And what is death?
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And so on and so forth. And I think it's important to see that the one person gave up his life.
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That did not mean that that person ceases to exist. We don't believe in annihilation. But there was the giving of a perfect life voluntarily there on the cross.
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It is a real death. That's why there had to be a real incarnation. Hopefully, we all have given some thought to that over the past couple of days for some strange and odd reason.
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There had to be a real incarnation so there could be a real giving of a real physical life.
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And it was done voluntarily on the part of the
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Son of God. He voluntarily made himself of no reputation in the incarnation.
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He receives from the Father the authority to give up his life, to take it back again.
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These are all biblical phrases that describe for us what happens here. Jesus gives his life voluntarily.
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And he truly does. An innocent man who never sinned gives his life.
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That's why substitution can take place. But because he's the God -man, it's not just a one -to -one, one -person type of substitution.
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But it is considered in the Father's sight to be sufficient for all who are united with Jesus Christ.
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And so, if someone were to ask, well, what does that mean that he died? Did God die?
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Well, if what you mean by did God die, did deity cease to exist?
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Did deity become mutable, changeable? No, of course not. Did the
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God -man give up his life voluntarily? Yes. Did he cease to exist?
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No. Remember, we mentioned just a couple of weeks ago the issue in Luke 23 where the
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Jehovah's Witnesses mis -punctuate the phrase, today you will be with me in paradise.
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They change it to, I tell you today, comma, you will be with me in paradise. Must be way down the road someplace type of a situation.
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There is the continued spiritual existence of the human spirit of Christ as well as divinity cannot die.
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I mean, it's just definitional. So, it is the giving of life. There is the death.
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It is purposeful. It is intentional. It is exactly when God intended it to take place.
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Which, deal with it as you may. I cannot begin to understand how open theists can actually understand any of this stuff.
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But this was when God intended this to take place. And it is exactly what his intentions were.
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Now, so we have the centurion verifying these things. By the way, there is a question.
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When the centurion says, truly this man was the son of God, the phrase son of God in the original language is anarthorist.
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It does not have an article. And so there are some that would argue that a more contextual translation would be a son of God.
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Because, I mean, a centurion is not going to have, at least the assumption is, a centurion is not going to have a background in Judaism, a background to be able to go, hey,
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I know there is only one true son of God or something along those lines. And so there are some who translate it in that way, taking into consideration the background of the centurion.
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But, of course, I really doubt that he had been in that area for only a few days or something.
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And so I don't know that you necessarily have to go that direction. But I mention it in case you encounter a translation that has that.
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It just doesn't have the definite article. There are some that would say, a centurion would say, this man was a son of God, a godly man.
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And there are others who would say, no, evidently he had had some encounter with Judaism, had some background, whichever it may be,
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I just mention it for you so that you're not taken aback by it when you encounter something like that.
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Now, notice that both Matthew and Mark record for us the tearing of the curtain in the temple.
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Mark simply says, the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom. No more discussion.
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No more description. Matthew has a section that has, especially over the past couple of years, become scandalous.
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How could a passage of scripture become scandalous? There are many who are troubled and in some ways scandalized, embarrassed by Matthew's statements in verses 51 through 53.
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Not the tearing of the curtain in the temple, which, to be honest with you, is,
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I would say, the most miraculous of the events that are narrated there in that particular little section.
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When you think about what the curtain in the temple was, as you may know, it was a woven structure that was incredibly weighty and thick.
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It was over a man's width of the hand, mine is a very big hand, in thickness, woven.
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Can you imagine not only how heavy that is, but how impossible it is to tear?
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I mean, did anyone have any issues getting any presents open? I mean, what is this plastic stuff?
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It's that thick, and I'm going at it with knives and scissors and cutting myself into pieces.
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I love those Amazon things where, please rate our packaging for ease of opening.
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It killed me! But anyway, we make sure it's in plastic.
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You can see it, you just can't have it. So, anyway, if you think that's tough to get through, can you imagine if it's six inches across, woven fabric.
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I mean, this was a massively heavy structure. And, of course, we understand the symbolism of it.
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We understand the idea of it being the representation of what separates the people from the presence of God and the tearing of that.
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But isn't it fascinating that you have just this tantalizing little statement in verse 38 of Mark.
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There's no expansion. There's no discussion of it. I think that's what lies in the background of the discussion in Hebrews.
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What is the veil in Hebrews? Anyone remember? What does it liken to?
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It's likened to His flesh. So the breaking of His flesh becomes synonymous with the tearing of the veil.
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And so we have an anchor that goes into the holy place, a sure hope, which is
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Jesus, who has gone into that holy place for us. These are all tied together. And it is just simply mentioned by Mark and by Matthew.
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No theological explanation is added other than both say from top to bottom.
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Because how would men do it? The only way men could do it would be from bottom to top. So it's torn from the top to bottom.
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It is indicated to be a divine act. Now, of course, of course. What you're going to get if you go to...
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And what is the single most dangerous place a Christian can go spiritually?
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Christian bookstore. Thank you very much. I've said that many times. There are serpents wound, sitting on every bookshelf, just waiting to get you.
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And if you go and endure that and actually end up with one of those books, what you're going to hear is, well, clearly there is no historical evidence that this happened.
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Now, just stop one second. Let's say... Because I didn't go looking for it, but I bet if I went on YouTube someplace, well, of course,
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I think you could find someone saying almost anything on YouTube. Don't you think?
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I mean, no matter how stupid it might be, it's found on YouTube. YouTube is now the cosmic garbage collection area of the universe, basically.
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But this time of year, it would be fairly easy, well, especially come
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March, April. I'm not sure when Resurrection Sunday is this year, but March, April. You'll find frequently someone with an accent from Britain, you know, who is going to tell you that, well, we know there's no historical evidence of this.
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And I want you, every time you hear someone say that, aside from remembering that higher education has been pretty poisoned to the
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Christian worldview for decades now, OK, and really isn't designed to create people who think with fairness anymore, or who do what used to be serious good scholarship, but now it's the promotion of a perspective, an agenda that is celebrated.
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I mean, just look at Duke, for crying out loud. Look at Yale. Look at all of them. Anyways. But when you hear someone say that, what
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I want you to think about is what evidence would you expect to exist of this event?
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What evidence would you expect to exist of this event? First of all, who are the only people that are going to know about it on a natural level?
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The Jewish leadership. Now, you think they're going to call the reporters from the
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Jewish Gazette to come out and cover that? Do you really think that at that time they are going to say, hey, an amazing thing happened
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Friday evening, right at sunset. The veil in the temple.
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I mean, top to bottom. We had to call emergency sewers and weavers, and we've got it back up.
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It's sort of a, we're going to have to do some more work on it later on, but do you really think that they were going to put this out, tell anybody about it?
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Who else is going to know? The Romans ain't going to care. No one else is going to know. So when they say there's no historical evidence for this, you just want to go, there's a difference between history and historiography, and thinking seriously about what could be recorded historically and what simply would not be recorded historically.
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And there is a naive, there's a tremendous amount of naivete in modern thinkers about history.
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We are so accustomed, you know, Facebook, Facebook's scary. You know,
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Facebook knows that I love seeing stuff about World War II.
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And so there's always this thing over on the side about B -17s or, you know, something is over there on the right -hand side.
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And, you know, but have you noticed there's not nearly as much stuff like that about World War I?
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And that's because they didn't have the kind of coverage of World War I.
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Can you tell us? No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Just so I don't wake Ray up there.
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Yeah, I was going to say, could you tell us some stuff about World War I? The reason, obviously, being for us, if we can see it, if there is recordings, if there is movies, but that is so modern.
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There were no MP3 recorders, there were no video cameras, et cetera, et cetera. And so we naively import this modern idea of what history is into ancient history and the result's a mess.
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It doesn't make any sense. And so when you hear folks saying stuff like this, please,
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I'm not saying, well, actually I am saying, you need to be hyper -skeptical about almost anything that you hear anymore.
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But especially in this area, there needs to be some skepticism in regards to the process of thinking that results in someone saying, well, there's no historical evidence.
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What would be the nature of the historical evidence that you would accept? What would you need? And how many events in history could then be verified by the standards you yourself have now set forth?
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Almost nothing. We would know almost nothing about history at all from that perspective. And evidently nothing was going on in history either.
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I remember 99 .9 % of everyone who lived before the year 1900, we don't know anything about them.
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They have passed from history. We don't know they ever existed. We don't know their names. We don't know their lives. We know nothing about them.
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Doesn't mean they weren't there, because we're here. Something had to happen. Somebody built all that stuff back then.
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You know? So keep that. But for the vast majority of us, we turn to dust.
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And that's the end of that. But then we have the rest of Matthew's story.
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Mark will be forgiven for talking about the curtain the temple was torn in two. But Matthew gives us this odd little story.
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And I still have two sermons left to go this morning. This is great. I forgot to bring my cool cough drops.
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Oh, good. Ooh, left -handed. Left -handed.
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Impressive. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.
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The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
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Atheists will refer to this as the ancient zombie apocalypse. Serious.
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They do. Unfortunately, a lot of evangelicals seemingly sort of go along with it.
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How many of you know why this has become an interesting story over the past four years? You don't remember?
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Nobody. Okay. Well, you're about to find out. There was a huge conflict that blew up.
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Man, with the speed that time goes by anymore, my estimates of time become less and less accurate with the passage of time.
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But sometimes over the past three or four years, Mike Lycona, a
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Christian scholar, apologist, wrote a huge tome, about 700 -some odd pages, on the resurrection.
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And when he came to this particular passage, he suggested that this was
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Jewish Pesher interpretation. That it was mythological. This didn't happen historically.
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That this was a theological point being made by Matthew that Jesus is the first fruits of the resurrection and therefore that's how this is to be understood.
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And it didn't really... If you had been walking the streets of Jerusalem, you wouldn't see people going, which of course is not what
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I would expect was going on either, but that's sort of how it was stated. As a result,
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Dr. Norman Geisler came down on Mike Lycona like a ton of bricks saying, you deny inerrancy, you're denying the inspiration of scripture, and they came to fisticuffs, not literally, but verbally.
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And it was interesting to watch various people lining up on both sides of that particular issue.
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It once again, I think, illustrated rather plainly the fissures, the cracks, the divisions that exist within the broad scale of what is anymore called evangelicalism or even conservative evangelicalism.
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So, there are many people who were defending Lycona and saying, look, you know, you have to look at the genre of the literature, does this fit within that genre, etc.,
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etc. I commented at the time that I certainly could sympathize with what
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Dr. Geisler was saying, despite the fact that Dr. Geisler does not like me and hasn't for, wow, about 16 years now.
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But, well, 15 years. Give it an extra year there. Anyways, but at the same time,
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I was quite troubled by what a lot of people were saying about this text.
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First of all, this idea of a zombie apocalypse, I don't know where that comes from. Please know something.
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In coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. There's nothing here that would even begin to suggest that Matthew is engaging in some kind of mythological, allegorical, spiritualizing of anything.
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If you're going to say they went into the holy city and appeared to many, when Jesus rises from the dead and appears to many, are you going to allegorize that?
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A lot of people do. A lot of people do. But that's how you get rid of the resurrection and the entire central aspect of the
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Christian faith in the process. You would have to, likewise, take the tearing of the curtain, metaphorically and allegorically as well.
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I don't see how you could avoid that. And yet most of the people who want to get rid of this story don't want to go there.
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Someone like an N .T. Wright, yes, I don't know whatever is being referred to in Daniel chapter 12.
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I don't... If there was an Old Testament antecedent or prophecy, especially
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Matthew would have said something about it. I doubt it. I doubt it. Yeah.
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Yeah, I would doubt there's any connection to any prophetic issue here.
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I think that what you have going on here, first of all, how did anybody in the
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Holy City know who these people were? What worried me, to be honest with you, what concerned me was that almost no one who...
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I've got this sweater on. Almost no one who objected to this ever allowed the text to really speak in a historical context at all.
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How would anyone in Jerusalem have known who these people were? Well, they're dressed in grave clothes.
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I don't get the feeling that these were zombies. These people were recognized. Which means they could not have...
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They could not have died all that long ago or who would have recognized them? If David came walking in here right now, would any of us recognize him?
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Yeah, I saw his picture up on the wall at the Christian bookstore. Doesn't work that way.
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So it seems to me that the only way that these people could have been recognized is the same way that Lazarus was recognized.
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And that is that the people who knew him were still alive. So these were people who had recently died.
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And that greatly limits the number of the saints. So when it says many of the bodies, it doesn't mean that there was this huge crowd of resurrected holy people rushing into Jerusalem and freaking the whole place out.
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Instead, you have a limitation on how many people this could have been.
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And what would be the purpose of God doing something like this?
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Well, I think that it's fairly straightforward that it's similar to what we have in the raising of Lazarus.
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You have the first fruits of them asleep. That's why, for example, N .T. Wright would, I'm sure, freak out about this because, well, you know what,
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I'll take that back. Maybe he doesn't. I've not heard him talk about this one. Remember, N .T. Wright freaks out about Lazarus because Jesus has to be the first one resurrected.
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So he might not freak out about this. He does not believe Lazarus died. Lazarus didn't die.
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He couldn't have died because the first fruits has to be Jesus. So he totally...
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Lazarus was only chilling out, literally, in there.
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So he's resuscitated but not resurrected. But he might not freak out about this because, you know what, he would because Jesus hasn't been resurrected yet.
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So I'm pretty certain he would put this in the realm of mythology as well. But, so you have a limited number of people and then the next question comes up.
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Well, why does only Matthew mention it? This is another real common thing you get from all sorts of folks.
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For example, Muslims will say, well, unfortunately, liberal Christians will say,
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Unitarians will say, Jesus never used the I Am sayings himself.
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Otherwise, Matthew, Mark, and Luke would have recorded them. Well, Mark actually has one, but it's not a major emphasis in the
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Synoptic Gospels, therefore it could not have happened. And we've seen already over the past nearly 10 years in our study of the
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Synoptic Gospels that this is an artificial argument, but it's difficult for people necessarily to respond to it, to people who are using it who have not really thought through the issues.
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Each of the authors chooses that material that is available to them in the oral tradition that is relevant to their audience.
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Matthew does seem to be focused upon a Jewish fulfillment. I think he is writing pre -70, before destruction.
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And I think he wants his book read there. And I think the reason that he specifically mentions it is because it would be relevant to the people there.
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Something tells me word got around. It would have been one of those, wow, that was the weirdest
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Passover we've ever had situations. And given all the other stuff that was going on, the rumors,
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I'm sure there were probably rumors about the veil. I mean, you don't keep something like that completely quiet. You put it all together, and they probably remembered, well, and then you've got the darkness thing, earthquakes, pretty unusual
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Passover. Yes, sir. Well, the giving of life, and from the
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Jewish perspective, they believe in resurrection. Remember John chapter 11, when
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Jesus says, I am the resurrection of life, your brother will live again, what's the response? We know that he will rise again in the day of resurrection.
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They believe that there will be a resurrection of the dead, but that that ushers in the final days. And so a non -full resurrection, but a resurrection all the same, at this particular point in time, certainly to the
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Jewish people, who recognize that, they recognize, remember,
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Anna, Simeon, they know that prophetically, they are at that point where Messiah is to come.
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I've mentioned to you before that during the intertestamental period, you can find
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Jewish sources where they specifically confess that the bath kol, the voice of God, has ceased.
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They recognize there have been no prophets, that's why there is not an open canon, that's why 200 years before Christ, the canon of Old Testament books, which we possess today, have been laid up in the temple.
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Only those books made the hands unclean, because they recognized
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God is not speaking with a prophetic voice any longer, which means, whatever the prophecies are pointing for, that's the next thing, that's what's going to happen.
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And so, at the death of Christ, you have these supernatural manifestations, and though only
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Matthew records this, it would have still communicated, even decades later.
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Let's say Matthew writes this, 55 -60, somewhere around there, this is still before the destruction of the temple, and still going to be read by people in that area, and there are going to be people who are going to remember,
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I remember that one, that was the most amazing Passover season we ever had.
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Stuff happened, and we still don't understand to this day. And then, very shortly thereafter, you've got these
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Christians, and there are people receiving their sight, and now they've turned the whole world upside down, and so on and so forth.
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So, I only suggest that as a possibility as to why Matthew is the only one that records it. Just to demonstrate that the argument that says, well, nobody else recorded it, what is the weight to that argument?
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If your audience is not going to understand it, if it's not going to communicate anything to them, why are you going to mention it?
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Why are you going to put it in there? So, the point being, this has become almost a shibboleth.
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You know what a shibboleth is? Remember the story from the Old Testament? Certain people couldn't pronounce certain words.
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I can think of some friends down south, it's an understandable, it's a really understandable test. But, it's sort of become a shibboleth in New Testament studies.
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If you're open -minded, broad -minded, non -fundamentalist, then you'll allow for the mythological interpretation of Matthew 27, 52 through 53.
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If you're crusty, fundamentalist, closed -minded, then you won't.
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It's basically sort of how that's developed over time. So, there you go.
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There you go. This is why it has taken us 10 years. And may take us another 10 to get through the last 17 verses.
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Alright. Section 348. There were also many women there, looking on from afar, who had followed
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Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of Jesus and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.
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Now, a few years ago, I could have, and I suppose if you just absolutely demanded we,
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I could dig the notes up by next week, could have gone through,
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I mean, look at John. His mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
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How many Marys is that? We're not 100 % certain. We know that there were, from our perspective, way too many
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Marys in the first century. Okay? I mean, seriously.
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The driver's license bureau there had it easy, you know. They could almost pre -make most of the driver's licenses.
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Just stick a picture on there and we're good. We know, one of the most,
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I've mentioned it to you, I'll just be very brief, one of the most fascinating areas of study over the past, well, fascinating, okay, one of the most boring areas of study that's had the most fascinating results, it was undoubtedly extremely boring when it started, until people started going, hey, wait a minute, was the cataloging of names from ossuaries.
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Now, you start thinking about whoever thought of doing that? Now, there's a person you want to have over for your
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Super Bowl party, right? You know? What must he be like to eat dinner with?
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You know? Someone who digs up bones and records names. It's great. Here lied
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Mary. Okay. But what happened was, once you get enough of them, you start getting a database that represents what the reality on the street was at that time in history.
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And people started going, hey, hmm, I wonder what the Gospels look like in comparison to what we're digging up from the ground as far as the names are concerned.
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And lo and behold, the only documents, the only documents from the first century,
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Josephus is okay, but, oh, Josephus, the only documents that actually come from the first century that track properly with the databases that have been developed of the names of the people who died and who actually lived and died, we can record their names, is the
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New Testament. If you were writing this outside of Israel, outside of Jerusalem, outside of Galilee, outside of that area, you wouldn't get the names right.
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The other thing that has been attached to that then is the use of patronyms. That is, you know,
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Simon of Galilee, Simon of Judea, Simon of Nazareth, Jesus of Nazareth, et cetera, et cetera.
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Because there wasn't that wide a range of names, your origination was either where you were from or who your daddy was.
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Very, very important. Well, again, if you're trying to come up with some mythological book in Rome, good luck getting it right as far as names and locations.
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You can't Google this stuff, okay? You know? It's easy for us to think, well, I'll just look at a map.
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Doesn't work that way. Doesn't work that way. And so, a few years, well,
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I forget when it was I last debated geriatrics up at the University of Utah. It was really weird to debate geriatrics in Mormonville, but that's where we were.
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But we debated the Immaculate Conception? Yeah, Immaculate Conception.
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And one of the things you have to debate when you deal with that issue is the
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Roman Catholic claim that Mary had no other children. That those other guys running around with Mary were either
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Joses from a previous marriage or cousins or something.
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Whatever it is, it's really weird Mary's running around with these guys that are not her children. And one of the big issues is how many women and what were their names at the cross.
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And it is really complex. I'd have my notes someplace I could dig them up, but it is really, really, really complex.
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And it's all based on what you have here in these just few verses. Luke skips all of it, which is interesting.
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Isn't it interesting? Luke's the only one that doesn't give any names here. And all his acquaintances, the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, saw these things.
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Luke, who has so much focus upon the women elsewhere, doesn't name them here. Maybe because they were still alive and he didn't want to endanger them.
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And he actually knew them. That's a possibility. Don't know. But, hopefully, and I believe that we did cover this.
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Yes, I'll just remind you. We covered this because, you'll notice under John 19, 25 -27, number 344, page 316, we referenced the huge amount of theology that Rome has piled upon the words of Jesus in John 19.
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When Jesus saw his mother and disciple whom he loved staying near, he said to his mother, Woman, behold your son. They said to the disciple,
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Behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. Remember, we talked about this a few weeks ago in regards to the
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Roman interpretation that by these words, Jesus makes
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Mary the mother of the church. John represents the church. And so, as Jerry Matitix used to like to say,
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I'm sure he still does, as he talks to the five or six people that gather to hear him talk about the
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Illuminati at Holiday Inn as he travels around. Seriously, that's what he does now. If you've accepted
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Jesus as your savior, then have you accepted Mary as your mother?
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That's the in that he would use. If Jesus is your savior, then you need to listen to what he said from the cross and accept
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Mary as your mother. That's the argument. But we already covered that.
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So we go to 349, because that will then bring us to the burial of Jesus. We're flying here.
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I mean, you need to come more often, Mike, because you're just making me move along at warp speed. Since it was the day of preparation, remember preparation is in Greek.
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Anyone remember what the word preparation is? What does it mean in Greek? We mentioned this.
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No. What? Friday. Who said that? Oh, there's Sean. Hi, Sean.
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It is for this day. Remember, he's not here today, but our Greek brother was here.
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And I asked him. I said, brother, what does paraskeway mean? He said, Friday. Paraskeway is the
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Greek word for Friday. And so when you say, since it was the day of preparation, that's all saying it was
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Friday. So when people say, well, there's preparation for a different Sabbath, now they're the ones making a special claim, and they should be the ones that have to bear the special burden of evidence, because the natural meaning of the word is
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Friday. Sabbath is coming. So, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the
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Sabbath, for that Sabbath was a high day, the Jews asked Pilate, their legs might be broken, and they might be taken away.
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And why would breaking legs be relevant? Because when you're crucified, the only way you can continue breathing is you're pushing against your legs to allow your diaphragm to move up and down.
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Once your legs are broken, you can't push against your legs anymore, and you die of suffocation. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and the other who had been crucified with him.
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When they came to Jesus, they saw that he was already dead. Now, they're sent by the governor. Okay?
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They have a job to do, and they know how to do their job. This is just an addition to the centurion issue. They did not break his legs, but one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.
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He who saw it has borne witness, his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth. That you also may believe, for these things took place, that the scripture might be fulfilled, not a bone of him shall be broken.
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And again, another scripture says, they shall look on him who they have pierced. So here is a section that, again, in most modern commentaries, will be dismissed as hagiography.
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It will be dismissed as hagiography for two reasons. A, it's only in John. B, it has scripture fulfillment.
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And the mindset of the liberal is, there is no such thing as a supernatural element of scripture fulfillment or prophecy.
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Therefore, this has to be made up. The idea being, looking back, the writers are ransacking the
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Old Testament to come up with stuff to fulfill. Michael, remember, John Dominick Crossan, the debate that we did in Seattle.
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And that's his whole perspective. Is that everything you have in the New Testament, these people looking back at the
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Old Testament, going, oh, I can put this together with this, together with this, and this will make a picture of this
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Jesus, type of a situation. And that's what they are doing, that's what they will do with John chapter 19, because they begin with a naturalistic premise to that section.
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I'll probably make a few more comments on that, but we, unfortunately, are out of time.
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Let's close with the Word of God. Our Father, we thank you for the freedom you give to us to study your
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Word. We, of course, in thinking about this great event of redemption, we thank you for the great price it was paid.
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We ask that we will always be filled with awe and amazement at the restraint of the very
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Son of God, who, though he called all things into existence, gave himself in our behalf.