Thanksgiving First Half, Tradition Over Time Second Half

And greetings! Welcome to The Dividing Line on the Monday of Thanksgiving week. I don't know where 2022 went, but it passed very, very quickly, and here we are. Wonderful, really definitionally Christian holiday.

It truly, truly is. And for many years, I have commented on the fact that the secular world recognizes, because they're made in the image of God, they recognize the goodness of giving thanks. But in a secular worldview, who do you give thanks to?

And for what? That's the question. And yet, man being made in the memory of what Romans 1 says, the extent of natural revelation is not Trinitarian issues and all the rest of that stuff. Natural revelation reveals to man that God exists, that we're his creatures, that we're to glorify him and give thanks to him.

And only a regenerate Christian is going to be able to do what Betsy Ten Boom did in Ravensbrück when she gave thanks for the fleas that infested the decaying straw in which she had to sleep at night, which then gave them the opportunity of being able to have open Bible studies and help these women in the midst of living in hell without interference from guards, because the guards wouldn't come in because of the fleas.

So if you know the story in The Hiding Place, if you've not read The Hiding Place, shame on you. If you have watched anything on Netflix recently and have not read The Hiding Place, shame on you. You need to read it.

But if you know the story, then I'm with Corrie. Corrie was at the end of her rope. She had gone through so much, and she just says to Betsy, I can't give thanks for these fleas. And Betsy said, we have to give thanks to the fleas.

And so they gave thanks to the fleas, and it wasn't long before they found out what a blessing they were. Thanksgiving. You want some of the toughest? That's interesting. When you get to texts like this, in our day, we're being told about how we are supposed to...

We'll talk a little bit later about how we're supposed to read the Psalms in an allegorical sense like Augustine did, and we're supposed to see these deeper meanings, these substructures, and all the rest of this stuff.

If a plain old person just reading the Bible can understand it, that's not enough. You got to go for the deeper stuff. And yet, when you get to direct and simple commands like Philippians 4, 6 -7, there's really no argumentation about the exegetical method you're supposed to use, because there's no question about the meaning of the text.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication. It's prayer with request. It's asking for something. With thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God, and the peace of God, which passes all comprehension, all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Now, look, I get the fact that modern, naturalistic, unbelieving theology does not believe these words are the words of men speaking from God as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit. They don't believe that there is a unified, consistent whole of Scripture that we can trust it's God speaking from Genesis 1 -1 to the end of Revelation.

And so I get the reaction against the sterile, empty forms of religion that we see in liberalism today, and have for 200 years. I get all that. I'm a Fuller grad, remember? But that doesn't change, and so I get that the liberals, they look at these texts and they make them say things because they really can't allow the text to speak for itself.

Okay, I get that. But that doesn't mean that we then abandon the only meaningful and objective mechanism that's been given to us to be able to understand what Scripture is saying. Paul's writing to the Philippians.

So we learn about Paul, we learn about the Philippians, we recognize what language he's writing in, we look at what words meant in that day, and these all provide us with insights and with foundations.

You know, like I just mentioned in passing, there's a difference between prosuche, prayer, and deesai, which has the idea of supplication, asking. It can, in some contexts, be begging, really, but it's communication with the idea of seeking to receive something.

So we can not only look at other uses of these terms within the canon of Scripture, but we can look at other uses of these terms in that time period, and that's how... where is it? Oh, there it is. That's how the Bauer, Dunker, Arndt, Gingrich used to be BDAG and BADG, and it's gone through various incarnations down there.

That's how lexical sources work, is they will give us what are called semantic domains, ranges of meaning. Well, how is that derived? Well, it should be derived, I hate to tell you that even our modern lexical resources are being impacted by wokeness and all the other insanity out there, but they should be derived from usage, from being able to say, hey, here's someone contemporaneous to the New Testament, here's how they use this term, and that's what you'll find in a full lexicon, is you will find all those other uses that are contemporaneous within a certain number of centuries one way or the other in regards to the New Testament usage.

So, it's interesting that when we look at these verses, there's really not... there shouldn't be, amongst believers anyways, a whole lot of controversy as to how we understand what they're saying. The challenge, if we're honest with ourselves, is living this out.

Be anxious for nothing. Okay, Jesus said, can you by worrying really accomplish anything? No, but I still worry, I still think about the future, and I think about my kids and my grandkids, and yeah, I'm thinking about myself too.

And you see trends, and you see directions, and you know the evil of man, and it's very, very easy to worry. So, what is the answer for worry? Prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving. And this week, as we consider Thanksgiving, hopefully we have time to consider Thanksgiving.

Sometimes we get so busy doing Thanksgiving that we don't have time for giving of thanks. That happens a lot, let's just be honest. As believers, we should see that Thanksgiving is the... it's the context of this prayer and this supplication to God.

And there are so many of the afflicting sins of Christians that would be so effectively countered if we would just recognize that an attitude of Thanksgiving will change everything. And a redeemed sinner who knows the holiness of God and the depth of my own sin shouldn't... shouldn't the most basic attitude we have be that of Thanksgiving?

How could you ever be content? How could you ever experience contentment, which people in the West are actually actively encouraged not to experience? I mean, seriously, that's... a consumerist economy is based on you not being content with what you have.

So, advertising... all of advertising is meant to communicate to you that you should not be content with what you have now, but you will be when you get the new thing. We all know how that works, right?

And so, you... you can't be content without the spirit of Thanksgiving. In fact, as Paul expresses it when he writes the Corinthians, he says, you know, the work of the Spirit is producing thanksgiving toward God.

And this is considered something that is necessary and appropriate and right, because you're recognizing the source from which everything comes. That takes us full circle back to America and a secular experience of thanksgiving.

You cannot give thanks to an impersonal universe. There's no reason to do that. It's irrational. It makes no sense. And that's why Thanksgiving is just such a glowing testimony to the fact that there was once a broad Christian consensus in our nation, and that no longer exists.

And with all the arguments going on about Christian nationalism and all the rest of this stuff, from my perspective, when the only way that there will be appropriate thanksgiving expressed to God by the population of any nation, whether it be the United States or whatever nation or nations may someday inhabit this land, the only way that the peoples of this continent will express true thanksgiving to God is if there is a radical change of hearts and minds.

And the only way that happens is through the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's why I say Christendom without Christ is just dumb. And if you listened to the conversation that Doug Wilson and I had, I think he agreed with that.

I mean, he uses the term, but he uses it within a post-millennial context. So he said, yeah, without regeneration, none of this can happen. And the Bonson conference was this weekend. I wasn't invited to it personally.

But anyway, it was in California anyway, so that's why they did. He's not going to come to California. That's true. So I guess we should be happy about that. Anyway, Jeff was over there. He got back about three quarters of the way through my sermon last night, actually.

But hey, he did come. He showed up. So that was good. But anyways, the last speaker was Doug Wilson. And if you're interested, I don't know why they did it this way, but I think it was Branch of Hope Presbyterian Church.

I think that's what it was. I just looked up Bonson Conference 2022, and it popped up on YouTube. There's not separate presentations. It's a 10-hour long block. So you can just sort of fast forward through until the picture of who's speaking changes and go from there, I guess.

But anyway, Jeff mentioned to us. And so on the way home, my wife and I fired it up in the truck and listened to Doug's final presentation. Didn't get all the way through it, but he was starting to wrap up, I could tell.

And it was an apologetic, but a very personal and different approach apologetic for post-millennialism. But it was all about hope. He seemed to agree with me on the sweater vest dialogue that the only way you can have any of the things that we're talking about is if there is a work of the Spirit of God.

None of this stuff can be forced on anybody. And we've seen what has happened in the past with sacralism, with an externally mandated observance of some form of Christianity. It leads to some really bad stuff.

So in all of this, as I said, the only way we'll ever see any kind of serious giving of thanks by this nation again, is if there's a massive change. Because my goodness, if you wander outside the little stream of stuff that you follow in social media, you will very quickly discover the level of astonishing animosity being expressed toward the Christian faith right now.

I was looking a little bit, it's going to be a busy week for me, I pull out, we start a road trip the day after Thanksgiving, so I basically have to have everything ready to roll on Wednesday. Because Thursdays can be busy with Thanksgiving, and then I've got a long first leg, and so I've got to get ready to roll fairly early Friday morning.

And so I haven't had really time to dig into it, but the David French thing, where he has, at first he wrote this article, again in support of the Disrespect for Marriage Act. I'm not going to call it what the communists call it, that's living according to lies.

I try to do what Solzhenitsyn told us to do, don't live according to lies. And using the faux language descriptors that the left uses, they're not showing respect for marriage. They are showing disrespect for marriage by redefining it in a rebellious fashion.

Anyway, he has written an article in support of this as a quote-unquote Christian, and it was only earlier, I think this year, that he spoke at Southern Seminary. And so a lot of people were pointing that out.

And so today, Dr. Moeller comes out with an article going after David French, and I think even before that, I had seen people posting quotes from, I think, 2015, when Obergefell came out, where David French was talking about our black-robed high priests.

And now, seven years later, seven and a half years later, he's now on the side of the an article now explaining why we sometimes have to change our perspectives. So when Moeller tweeted the link to his article, I happened to follow some of the comments.

It's only the grace of God that's keeping these people from seeking to lock us up right now. I mean, you give these folks that power, and they will soon have it, and they will be gleeful to close down our institutions, silence us, and if need be, disappear us.

I mean, the level of hatred and irrationality. I mean, it's obvious they don't have any kind of consistent worldview, and don't care to have any kind of consistent worldview. But that's what we're looking at, and that has to change.

There has to be a Great Awakening 3 in Western culture for any of that type of stuff to change. And the result of that will be the giving of Thanksgiving to God. The giving of Thanksgiving to God. So, till then, for those of us who may well be called by God to walk through some very, very dark times, those dark times, you know, we think about what it was like for the disciples between Friday and Sunday morning.

And we think of those dark hours of confusion and unbelief that they experienced. Disappointment, despair, and yet they were standing on the brink of the resurrection and the fundamental changing of everything in this world, in this cosmos.

But they didn't know that. And it was necessary that they go through that time. It was needful that they go through that time. We may well be standing on the precipice of a very, very dark period of time ourselves.

And it'll be more than a day and a half as we count time, not as the Jews counted time back then. It was three days. And as I think about this a lot, it seems to me that the greatest preparation that you and I can make, there's a lot of things we can be doing.

We've got to be investing in our children, our grandchildren, and all that stuff we've talked about many times before. But personally, it seems to me that the greatest thing we could be doing to prepare our own hearts and minds is to cultivate this attitude of thanksgiving leading to contentment.

And we can talk about being thankful for all the stuff God's given to us because he's given to us so much. But will we be thankful for bare subsistence food, for flea-infested straw, for merely the presence of other people around us?

Or is that thanksgiving completely dependent upon the quality of the kingly existence that we have experienced our entire lives in the West? We literally possess more than kings and queens did in the past.

We have greater opportunities, greater options in our lives. And the result is, we think that we are owed these things, and if they're taken away, then we get mad at God. And so, it would seem to me that one of the most important things we could be doing right now to make sure that when the rubber meets the road, when the real hard times start, that we will be amongst those who stand firm and respond in the way that will glorify Christ, is to be specifically seeking to live in thanksgiving and have a contentment with the providence of God in our lives, whatever that involves.

I can't think of any other attitude that will provide more long-term faithfulness and stability in the Christian life when walking through the dark valleys. And so, just as people long ago recognized that even the food that they had, which they were concerned wasn't going to make it through the winter, had been given to them as a gift from God.

They were not owed that. We have to flush the, I am owed that because I'm an American citizen, attitude right out of our minds. Because, by the way, our enemies will use that to our own degradation. They really will.

I'm preaching to myself, as every preacher must do so. You can't avoid doing that. But hopefully, it is useful to others as well, because we want the peace of God, the irene tutheu, the peace of God. And I would understand that as the peace that comes from God, as its origin and source.

God, the peace of God, that which is surpassing all understanding or thinking. It's not, see, when Corey looked at Betsy and Betsy bowed her head to give thanks to the fleas, that was beyond Corey's comprehension.

It went against everything, but that's what the peace of God does. It goes beyond what anything we see could communicate to us. So, how about us? How much do we even want the peace of God? Think of all the stuff in your life you pursue, and the energy you're willing to put out to pursue those things.

And then ask yourself, where is Christ-likeness, holiness, peace of God in the list of things? If it's not something that you treasure now, once everything else is taken away, you may, through all of that, learn to treasure it highly.

But the time to start treasuring it highly is now, not then. A little late then. A little late then. Peace of God can't happen without thanksgiving. Not the holiday, the attitude, which results in contentment.

Nothing that I've said today comes even close to the level of beautiful expression that you will find amongst the Puritans, who address so many of these things as well. And at the same time, though, there's nothing you're going to look at in the world's media and anything else today that's going to direct you that direction.

Everything in the world is going to tell you to go the other way. Go the other way. So, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? So, I noticed...I wasn't going to address this, and I didn't even pull this up, but before I left the house, something from Cameron Bertuzzi scrolled by, and I didn't know whether...I did not know enough about the gentleman to know whether he was married or not, but evidently his new decisions are causing problems.

His wife is not going with him on this journey, and it's interesting. I'm thinking about the one really rather well-known individual that I spoke to years ago who converted and then started the Drunk Ex-Pastors podcast thing, and it seems that wives tend to have more common sense than husbands in certain things, and that was the case there, too.

And I just have to sit back, and he's saying, please leave her alone. Don't send her messages. I guess Catholics have been sending her messages, and Protestants have been sending her messages, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

I didn't even know he was married, so I didn't have anything to do with that. And it's almost like you're going, so you didn't realize this decision would have huge ramifications on other aspects of your life?

A couple days ago, I saw something about, you know, this ministry really needs your support, because you might have to shut down. It's like, you didn't realize that maybe most of the people that were supporting you before aren't going to support you anymore?

And it's pretty crowded over on the Catholic side. I'm not sure you're going to pick up much there, to be honest with you. But honestly, you can literally sit there and talk about Eliakim, and that this establishes a papacy based upon statistical analysis, and you don't realize that it's got real important ramifications to all this stuff?

I don't even know what to say. It doesn't accomplish anything for me to say. I called it two and a half years ago, but we did, and there was a reason for that. The foundations were missing. And I'll lay this at the feet of the church, in a sense.

Maybe he wasn't in a church where there were elders who would say, you know, there are some more basic and foundational things you need to understand first before you get involved in doing apologetics and things like that.

I've got to give credit. I think it was Bill Williams. I think it was. Who back when I was maybe hadn't turned 20 yet, because they got married young, I remember in a Bible study class at a very, very, very, very, very large Southern Baptist church, where Rich and I met, and where Rich scared me the first time that I saw him.

You know, you would scare yourself now. If you met yourself back then, oh yes, you'd hit yourself in the head? Okay, all right. But I'm going to tell you, the look in your eyes when you're wearing that members only jacket.

How'd we get on this? Okay, yeah, all right. Bill, yeah, yeah, that guy. Anyway, we were at a very, very large church, and I mentioned, I think during prayer requests or something in this small group, that I was going to be meeting with some more missionaries.

And I think it was Bill Williams happened to be sitting in that day, and he was very concerned. You know, he wanted to know whether I really had a foundation to be able to be doing this. And that's a good thing.

That's an appropriate thing. And somebody should have been, there's somebody who fell down the job with Cameron. No, no, no, no toys about it. Because I could tell when he had that first dialogue in 2020, this guy's got no foundation at all, theologically, biblically.

And really, I'll be honest with you, he was just a philosophy guy. And I'm like, seeing too many of those guys, just because that's not the foundation. That's not going to last. And so, you know, to find out after you've made the public announcement that, wow, this thing really has a lot of ramifications.

Really? Yeah, that Eliakim argument just ain't good enough, no, it's not. Not to make that kind of a decision. At the same time, I ran across a tweet. I'm not sure if it was responding to somebody else or what.

But this is from, this is literally the account name. I didn't know you could have one this long. Mine's Whitebeard. Doesn't take much space up, does it? But the name is Holy Apostle St. Jude Thaddeus Pray For Us.

That gives you an idea of where this one's coming from, right? Holy Apostle St. Jude Thaddeus Pray For Us. Here's what it says. The denial of the perpetual virginity of Mary is a whole separate branch of uncharted Protestantism.

How somebody could confess to be a Christian, yet deny what every single other Christian has affirmed, from the ancient church to the Reformation and beyond, is baffling. Now, what's interesting in that kind of a statement is you can feel the force if the foundation of the argument was sound, which it's not, but if the foundation argument was you'd feel the force of how do you think you're so smart if every other Christian for 1 ,500 years all believed the same thing?

This is the argument of tradition. Now, the reality is that not only is it not an issue in the most primitive writings we have, they're not even talking about it, but once it appears, and once you start getting discussions about it, there's argumentation.

I mean, people had a Bible, and the Bible talked about the brothers and sisters of Jesus, okay? I mean, it's right there. The theological, there had to be a context that developed over time to allow for the reinterpretation of the clear, plain texts of Scripture to turn the brothers and sisters of Jesus into cousins or offspring of Joseph from a previous marriage or something that would explain why Mary is running around Galilee with a bunch of men that aren't actually related to her, and so when you study church history, you know, I was just, I'm continuing to teach church history for our dear brothers and sisters in Frankfurt, and we had another class on Friday, and we started covering a little monasticism, the, you know, Anthony and the Desert Fathers and Simon Stilotes, Simon the Stylite.

What a guy. What a life. You know, build up your, build up a pillar to live on. You just, you live on a pillar. You build it up over time. This one got to six stories tall, and you have disciples who climb up and down and bring you food and take your waist down for you.

And you're out there in the sun and the wind and the rain. It was near Antioch, so probably fairly moderate weather, but that's what you do, and that's considered to be exceedingly spiritual. So people come from far and near to inquire of you, and so you get the Desert Fathers who demonstrated their spirituality by letting their teeth rot, and then they would allow bugs to crawl in and out of their teeth, and they were so in charge of their body there, so mortified the desires of the flesh, that they could literally stand there and talk to you while bugs are crawling in and out of their teeth, and that was a sign of self-control.

And some people in the audience are going, what did he just say? Could we roll that back? It's more than some? Okay, yeah, well, yeah, these are the Desert Fathers, and this was the beginning of monasticism.

Eventually, they were the anchorite monks, then you get the cenobitic communities begin to develop, and that's where you get the monasteries and stuff like that later on. Anyway, so we haven't even gotten to the Council of Nicaea yet, with my poor friends there.

But the point is, there were things that developed in certain areas of the church at certain times that then spread to other parts of the church at later times, and so by the time Jerome and Helvidius are arguing about the perpetual virginity of Mary, you already have, for example, Jerome and Paula.

Let me, hold on a second here, I wasn't going to do this, you can sort of tell, when I all of a sudden start going, hey, let's look this up. And there it is. I want to be able to give you the specifics, so let me scroll down here real quick.

Yeah, we're getting close here. There we go. I want to tell you a story, this will help to give some context, believe it or not, to this one tweet. And believe me, Twitter doesn't provide a lot of context, especially to historical tweets.

I didn't say hysterical, historical, but there is a parallel. Sometimes, take time to look at, or I'll just explain to you now, the relationship between Jerome and Paula. Jerome and Paula. So, we're talking here at the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century, so late 300s, early 400s.

The Desert Fathers have been around for quite some time now. That's a mid-third century development. And Jerome, one of the, you know, probably the greatest Bible scholar of the late early period of the church.

Again, one of only a very few men who could read both Greek and Hebrew, with facility, anyway. Jerome encountered a woman named Paula. Paula entered the monastic life under the influence of Jerome after becoming a widow.

She had five children, one rather young, that she left to others to care for while making a pilgrimage to Palestine where she visited the recently rediscovered cross, the stone of the tomb, and the manger.

In other words, by this period of time, around 400-ish, you already have what will eventually be the very active trade and relics and things like that. But you can see with the early martyrs, when people start collecting bones, personal possessions, pieces of clothing, of particularly holy people, there's no foundation for that in Scripture.

But it is what we might call a natural element of man's religion. And this starts entering in. And so, that grows. The hagiolatry grows. So now you have physical things like the newly rediscovered cross.

And of course, Desiderius Erasmus got himself into a lot of trouble more than a thousand years later by joking about the fact that you could build an entire ship out of all the pieces and splinters of the genuine cross that were then floating around Europe.

And he was quite right about that. So anyway, she then went to Egypt and prostrated herself before the desert fathers. She returned to Bethlehem and founded there a monastery for Jerome, where she was abbess until 404 AD.

She was tremendously generous, giving away all her personal funds, and ending up indebting her daughter to a tremendous degree by the time of her death, having borrowed money at high rates of interest just to give it away.

Paula became an example of the perfect nun, and many followed in her footsteps. Physically attractive, she did everything she could to hide and deface her beauty. She said, I must disfigure my face, which I have often against the command of God adorned with paint.

Torment the body, which has participated in many idolatries and atoned for long laughing by constant weeping. She felt it was her duty to be as non-woman as possible, so as to not cause men to stumble.

Now, the point is, we look at this, and hopefully you can see the wildly unbiblical nature of womanhood that is inherent here. Clearly, extra-Christian, extra-biblical forces are at work here. Stuff is coming in, being borrowed from religion outside of Judaism and the Christian faith, because that's certainly not how women were viewed in God's law.

The result is going to be extremely negative. That's obvious. But the point is, you have men who gain stature, an Augustine, a Jerome, individuals like this, and once they adopt these perspectives, this starts building up tradition.

View of woman, view of marriage, celibacy becomes the great source of spiritual power, which of course will become a basis of utter mockery by the time you have the pornography in Rome in the 9th and 10th centuries.

By the time of Erasmus, Erasmus himself was the illegitimate son of a priest, so when he became a priest, he had to get a special dispensation because he was the son of a priest, but everybody knew that that was normative by then.

So you had the theology that said celibacy is the ideal, but everybody knew nobody was doing it, including the Pope. So you put all this stuff together, and this is how tradition builds up. This is how tradition becomes established.

And the great, you know, if you want to be a radical, you go, um, actually Jerome was wrong on the subject of the perpetual virginity of Mary. He was wrong in his biblical argumentation. He was just plain wrong.

How dare you? Heretic burned at the stake. And many people did, actually, even over stuff like that. But it's not like people woke up one morning. And so, you know, this says every single other Christian is affirmed from the ancient church, the Reformation.

That's just simply a lie. But I'm sure this guy believes it. I mean, look at these people. You see some of these zealots out there for these Marian dogmas. They will, they spend their lives reading everything they can get their hands on.

And if you find even the most basic, positive words about Mary in anybody, they will read into those words entire theologies of bodily assumption and immaculate conception. You know, if Mary is called pure, ah, there's someone who believes in immaculate conception.

See, it's happening all the time. YouTube has terabytes, terabytes of videos from these people. Believe you me, they're there. Nobody just woke up one morning and said, oh, I'm going to come up with a new doctrine.

And builds up the layer after layer after layer. If you look at any, that's why I've said, and you can go back and check these things, I've said this for decades, when you see these pamphlets and tracks and stuff like that, that say, such and such a doctrine, and it gives a date.

Well, like purgatory. When did purgatory start? There is no meaningful answer to that question. You can say this council in the 15th century dogmatizes it, fine. But that doesn't really mean anything because it was functioning before then, and there were disagreements.

And in reality, purgatory requires a number of different roots that had to develop first before they could all come together to give you the doctrine of purgatory. And that takes a lot of time. And one early church father over here might have one part of it, and one over here, another part, and another guy over here, another part.

And at any one particular point in time, you may have disparate levels of development on these things in different places in the church. So, be really careful when you see those this date this, this date that.

That's normally misleading and not true. Point is, once the tradition goes off the track, what can we do? What can we do? Let's talk about Augustine. When Augustine reads scripture and allegorizes it and imports Neoplatonic forms of thought to express his theology, do we just simply go, okay, it's Augustine.

I can't question Augustine. One of our guys provided me, and I have to do it on this because I don't think my, we got to fix my install on this unit. It's important. When you go back and read Augustine, and you read him on the Psalms or other places, there's a, Chris Wisson has a whole thread, and he's putting some more stuff together, of how Augustine handled the Psalms.

And if you've, if you've read any of Spurgeon's Treasury of David, that's not how Spurgeon did it, okay? Totally different way of doing things. As you work through these citations, you discover that for Augustine, the Psalms, their literal meaning is irrelevant.

What the psalmist was going through, historical setting, how this relates to the liturgical practices of ancient Israel, and how you relate, for example, the ones that are specifically identified with David to the historical books, and what's going on in his life, and Nathan, and all that stuff, that's irrelevant, because anybody can do that.

The idea of the early church, of many people in the early church, especially after Origen, but as early as Clement, was that the basic meaning, that's too simple. There has to be this, well, substructure.

We've heard that somewhere before as well. This deeper meaning that is only accessible to the spiritual, you see. And I'd forgotten where it was, but Chris found it for me. In his commentary, I believe, actually I think this is in Augustine's work on the Trinity, I think about it.

I'll double check that, I don't see the reference right at the bottom. And don't post it right now, because that'll make this scroll, and I'll lose where I am, if anybody happens to be listening. Right, it says right here, it's the Trinity, but I don't have the specific reference to it.

Here's Augustine, and not without reason is the number six understood to be put for a year in the building of the body of the Lord, as a figure of which he said that he would raise up in three days the temple destroyed by the Jews.

For they said forty and six years was this temple in building. Now remember when the Jews said that? It's in John, by the way, John chapter 19. Now, you and I, we read that in John, and we go, okay, this tells us that the Jews identified this year as the beginning of the building of the temple, and it was still ongoing at this time period.

This establishes the historical context and historical bona fide of the text. This wouldn't be something somebody in Rome would know. This would be something you have to be there to know about, so that's important stuff.

But, forty and six years was this temple in building, and six times forty-six makes two hundred and seventy-six. And this number of days completes nine months and six days, which are reckoned as it were ten months for the travail of women.

Not because all come to the sixth day after the ninth month, but because the perfection itself of the body of the Lord is found to have been brought in so many days to the birth, as the authority of the church maintains upon the tradition of the elders.

For he is believed to have been conceived on the twenty-fifth of March, upon which day he also suffered. There was a belief in the ancient world that great men die on the day in which they were conceived.

So, Jesus being the greatest man must be the same thing. So, the womb of the Virgin in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, there's Augustine with perpetual virginity, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before nor since.