Synoptics Section 347

All right, we are in, we are pressing on in our synoptic study. We are, we're close, we're close, we're close. I mean, if I wanted to just simply skip over the surface, we could probably get done today.

But obviously, we, that would be a disappointment, I think, to many people who have been following along over the course of the past decade if we bounce through all that kind of stuff. So, that would not be overly fair.

I had us marked N347, yeah, we did, yes, because I do specifically recall going over the Truly I Say To You Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise issue a couple weeks ago. Hopefully you remember that when the Jehovah's Witnesses show up at your door, their quote translation, unquote, will mistranslate Luke 23, 43, well, it will mispunctuate Luke 23, 43 would be the way to put it.

And he said to him, Truly I Say To You Today, comma, You Will Be With Me In Paradise. And we went over that last time and why they believe what they believe about that and why they render it that way and why they make Jesus say something irrelevant from the cross, but that's how it works.

They don't believe that there's a spiritual nature to man and therefore that's how they render that particular text. And then I think we started, if I recall correctly, dealing with the reality of the timing of the death of Christ.

The Timing of Jesus’ Death and Jewish Reckoning of Time

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it was now about the sixth hour and there's darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. Now, there are, you know, just because we were raised with one particular way of telling time doesn't mean it's always how mankind told time until you had such things as clocks and astronomical observation.

Obviously, man's always been fascinated with the issue of time. Many of the ancient, you know, Stonehenge and things like that are designed to tell time and movement of planets and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

I mean, hey, until there was ESPN, what did you do at night anyways? You know, you just stare up at the sky and there wasn't any light poisoning. You could actually see everything up there and light pollution.

So, you know, that's what people did. And so there were different ways of telling time. Obviously, one of the most common ways was when the sun comes up, that's the start of the day. When it goes down, that's the end of the day.

Well, you know, but people pretty well figured out this 24-hour thing early on and so when do you start that 24 hours? And some people, you know, like us, we start it in the middle of the night, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense when you think about it, but why not?

And then others, of course, would start it at 6 o 'clock in the morning, sort of an average time for sunrise, though obviously that's going to change where you are, you know, depending on where you are and what time of the year and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

The point being that Matthew, Mark, and Luke utilize the Jewish reckoning of time and so they're all saying the same thing. Sixth hour would be noon, ninth hour would be 3 p .m. in the afternoon. But the Roman time, how Romans kept time is different in that it's the same as we utilize starting in the middle of the night and hence the hours are different.

And in all probability, John utilizes a Roman time probably because he's writing in a later period of time, which might be one of those indications, one of those indicators that it's good to keep our eyes open for in regards to the timing of the writing of these books.

If you're writing to an audience that is still going to be in Israel where before the destruction of the temple, then you might want to utilize the time system that they utilize. If you're no longer there, if you're writing in another place, if you're writing primarily for a non-Jewish audience that's in a non-Jewish area, you might want to utilize the time system that they utilize.

Keeping track of those things helps us to recognize that when people say, well, there's contradictions, there's errors, normally it's because they're not paying attention. Then we also, I think, did deal a little bit with the use of Psalm 22.

Psalm 22 and the Cry of Dereliction

And I think I recall saying to you, I really enjoy when the Muslims ask about Jesus' statement from the cross, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I mentioned last time, much to the chagrin of some I would imagine, because there's been some real stem-winder sermons preached down through the years about the Father turning his back upon the Son and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

I don't see it. I don't get it. I don't think there's a biblical basis for that. Just somebody saying, well, God can't look upon the Son. That's not a sufficient basis to say that the very point of His greatest obedience, the Father turns His back upon the Son.

Now, there would be some who would say, well, but the Son was made sin in our place. Got to be careful about that one. Because when you think about the great exchange in 2 Corinthians 5, He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become righteous to God in Him.

What's the big debate between ourselves and Rome as to the nature of righteousness? There was a, what, about two weeks ago now, there was a video that came out. A bunch of people asked me to comment on it.

I did not. But I at least listened to it. Where one of the political candidates had explained his understanding of the Christian faith. And my understanding is he comes from a Roman Catholic background.

And everybody was jumping up and down because, see, see, he got it wrong. Well, he's Roman Catholic. He actually got it right for a Roman Catholic, but what do you expect? The issue, remember Luther's dunghill?

Anybody remember Luther's dunghill? Some of you don't remember Luther's dunghill. We, it is, it is, almost anybody will, in fact it's called Luther's dunghill, will tell you that it has become a church history legend that Luther used as an illustration of the nature of what justification means, the concept of a dunghill.

Now, we can't actually find where he did that. It doesn't mean he didn't, but there are extensive number of sources for Luther's actual words, including his table talks, things like that. It fits Luther.

I mean, Luther and dung go together. I mean, that was just the way, he was a rather earthy fellow. He had, for example, digestive issues and hence found ways of making theological significance out of flatulence.

So that's just the way Luther was. And so a dunghill probably fits. If it wasn't him, it was somebody who was doing their best to imitate him. Anyway, the illustration that he utilized was that we in our sin are like a dunghill.

And you go, what is a dunghill? Well, you got to remember, you couldn't go to your local feed store and buy fertilizer back in those days. You used the dung of your farm animals and spread it out on the fields as your fertilizer.

They knew that, wow, you do that and things grow better. And so they had figured that out. And so you didn't dispose of it, bury it or whatever. You piled it up and kept it over the winter. And then come spring, you spread it all out.

I mean, talk about fresh country air. This was fresh country air. And so, you know, it would collect flies. And once you had Indian summer and it got warm, oh, it would be bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. But then what would happen, the first snow of winter would come.

And this doesn't work real well for Phoenicians because we don't get that. And I was mentioning to Summer, I think she was 13 or 14 years old before she ever even saw snow. Obviously, she had seen it, you know, in movies and things like that.

But, hey, Hollywood can do all sorts of things. And so I think she was 13 or 14 years old before she actually saw snow for the first time. But that first snow that comes, it's really beautiful. You know, you go to bed, you wake up the next morning, you look out and the world is beautiful.

You know, it's before, you know, by March, it isn't beautiful anymore, okay? You've got snow piles that are dirty and dark and it's not enough. But that first one, everything is smooth and no one's walked through it yet.

And the snow plows haven't come. And, you know, it's really nice. And, of course, what it does is it also covers over the dunghill. And the dunghill doesn't smell anymore. It doesn't look bad anymore.

It just looks like a mound, like anything else. Of course, jumping on it might not be a good idea. But the point is it's a fence that's been taken away. The smell goes away. The look goes away. It's all covered over.

And his illustration was that's what the righteousness of Christ is. That's what justification is. It's an alien righteousness. It's not our own. It covers over the dunghill. The dunghill is still dung.

It's changed to something else by sanctification, but not by justification. Because he was talking about the imputation of an alien righteousness over against Rome's idea that what happens is grace is infused into you and it changes you.

So, from Rome's perspective, grace comes down and changes you in baptism through the sacraments. And what happens is the pile of dung becomes a pile of gold. And see, gold, God likes gold. Not sure why he didn't make more of it, but God likes gold.

And so the gold gets to go to heaven because God likes gold. And so you become intrinsically pleasing to God. Your soul is changed and justified and made intrinsically pleasing and meritorious in God's sight.

That's why you go to heaven. And so, from Rome's perspective, pile of dung, baptism, pile of gold. Luther says, no. It stays a pile of dung covered over by the righteousness of Christ. And then it's the work of the Spirit of God and the Word of God over time to change that pile of dung into that which is pleasing to God.

But that's not why that ever goes to heaven. The only reason that any of that ever goes to heaven is because of the righteousness of Christ. Well, I never read any place where Luther brought this out, but I certainly, many, many, many years ago, some of you will recall my first book, The Fatal Flaw, came out right after we started attending this church.

And I do mean only some of you. And I discussed this in that book. And that is, when you think about it, if you just stop there, the Roman Catholic view would probably have a little more attraction to some people.

Gold. Sounds good. I like that gold thing. I don't want this slow process thing. But here's the problem. As soon as you commit a venial sin in Roman Catholic theology, all of a sudden flecks of dung start appearing on the surface of the gold.

And you've got to go to the priest, and you've got to do penance, and you've got to be sacramentally cleansed of these flecks of dung. Or, when you die, the pile of gold is still pleasing to God, but it has to be cleansed before it goes into God's presence.

And so that's why you have purgatory. And so you go to purgatory to be cleansed of those flecks of dung that are on your soul, on that gold. And that's not by the righteousness of Christ. That's not by anything other than your own suffering there in purgatory.

Or, the transfer of merit from the treasury of merit, which is made up of the excess merit of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, which is a whole other long story that we don't have time to get into right now, but will obviously be relevant when we get to church history and the origins of the Reformation.

And the other thing is that if you commit a mortal sin, remember I said venial sins, flecks of dung, end up on the gold. You commit a mortal sin, you're a pile of dung again. So, a pile of gold. Can you sort of see this and how Hollywood would do this?

You know, back and forth, back and forth. And the scary part is, you're never really sure which one you are. As Ludwig Gott said in his book, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, the reason for the uncertainty of the state of grace lies in just this, that no one without a supernatural revelation from God can know whether they have fulfilled all the conditions which are necessary for obtaining justification.

So, you may think you're a pile of gold when you're actually just a pile of dung. And I remember years ago, we had some relative die. And I don't remember if the relative was a Seventh-day Adventist.

I think they were Seventh-day Adventists. They might have been Roman Catholic. I forget which one it was. And I remember my mom coming back from the funeral. She'd had to travel tonight. I didn't go to the funeral.

I was just kidding. And whichever group it was, they both had the same problem. And that is, you could commit a sin right before you died, and you're lost. And I remember her saying just how sad it was that everybody there was going, I hope he didn't have an evil thought or anything right before he died.

Because I guess he was killed in a car accident or something. And so there was a possibility that maybe he might have gotten angry if this idiot just hit him in the car or something. And you think of that, and then, oh, no, and you're gone.

A pile of gold gets hit. Pile of dung. And the point was, it just illustrates the man-centeredness and the fact that there can never be a meaningful basis of assurance or hope or joy or confidence or anything in those particular systems.

At all. And so, this difference between the imputation of the righteousness of Christ and the infusion of grace that leads to something becoming intrinsically pleasing to God. Fundamental, basic difference between a man-centered gospel and a God-centered gospel, really.

Because it's vital for Rome's position to maintain this because you have to keep the sacraments as a mechanism for the channeling of God's grace because then the church can control God's grace that way.

And that has always been a huge controlling factor. Very, very important thing. I have no idea how I got into this subject either. Is that what your question is?

No. Okay. I was going to ask, would you say Islam is closer to Roman Catholicism than Roman Catholicism is to Christianity in that sense? They have that infusion.

Well, no. Only because the categories are just way too dissimilar. Islam's understanding of sin is so fundamentally different than either Rome or biblical Christianity is concerned. Certainly, Rome is infected with a form of semi-Pelagianism that sometimes blows into full-size Pelagianism and hence does not have a truly biblical doctrine of man's sin.

But Islam is even farther away at that point because there just is no... Some of the Sufi writers have stumbled onto some insights concerning man's depravity and sinfulness and things like that. But Sunni, the Shiites do, believe it or not, the Shiites, because of their origination, actually have a parallel to the concept of substitutionary sacrifice.

So there's actually a little more way into the Shiite mind from that perspective. But Sunnis make up 90 of the world's Muslims and there just isn't a really meaningful doctrine of sin at that point.

So the idea of imputation, righteousness... They'll talk about a righteous man, but the righteous man is a righteous man because he is and chooses to be that way totally within himself and everybody has the power, capacity, and ability to do that in and of themselves.

There is no such thing as a fallen nature. There is no such thing as original sin. There is no such... You can argue that Muhammad actually did believe that we fell in Adam in some sense, but no idea of our nature therefore being negatively impacted.

If Muhammad believed anything like that, it didn't transfer down past him in any meaningful sense. So that is one of the major differences. Anthropologically, we have very, very different views of man.

No two ways about it. Yes, sir. You said the Shiites were 90 Sunni. Sunni. Sunni are 90%. So are they considered to be... No. The Sunnis and the Shiites blow each other up fairly regularly, as you may have noticed.

If you follow the news, when you hear a mosque being blown up, it's almost always a Shiite mosque being blown up by Sunnis or a Sunni mosque being blown up by Shiites. Iraq, for example, is three different nations.

It's a Shiite section, a Sunni section, and a Kurdish section. The only reason that it was ever one nation is because Hussein was strong enough and nasty enough to keep everybody playing without blowing each other up.

The Shiites, the only reason you hear a lot about the Shiites is they sit on almost half of the oil that Muslims own. That's where the advantage comes from. But they're only about 9 or 10 of the world's Muslims.

The Sunni make up 90%. Remember, only 16 to 20 of the world's Muslims are Arabic. Indonesia, largest Muslim country in the world. So you've got to keep that in mind. Most Muslims are Asian. The Sunnis are divided into all sorts of different groups.

And so your moderate Muslims would be primarily Sunnis and, well, Shiites and both Sunnis and Shiites. But the primary source for the best-known, most active ISIS, ISIS, Boko Haram, so on and so forth, they are all out of what's called the Salafi or Wahhabi Sunni Muslims.

So Salafi, the Salaf were the first. We're really going astray here. The Salaf were the first followers after Muhammad. So they believed that Muhammad and that first generation were the most righteous, and so they're the greatest example.

Salafi would almost translate to our use of the term fundamentalist. Now, just because you're Salafi doesn't mean that you're a jihadi. But they are the ones that make the best jihadis. The line is very easy to step over at that point.

Once you're in the Salafi camp, it doesn't take much more to convince you that you need to go farther than that. You have suicide bombers from Shiism as well as from the Sunni, but most come from the Sunni, the majority group.

How on earth did I get to where we are? Sometimes you pull into a cul-de-sac and you go, how did I get here? I have no earthly idea. And you have to look at your phone. Do you remember? No. Oh, okay.

I thought you were going to help me here. I would like to take an exception to that. I do happen to be one of the few people actually doing that. Believe me, I have been taking massive heat over the past couple of months.

There are people coming after me with pitchforks because I've dared to point out that when I first heard it, I just figured Islamophobia was the same thing as homophobia. It's just a word you throw out there just for the fun of it.

No, it's not. I've met numerous Islamophobes recently that just simply go, I don't care what that guy you've talked to said, and I don't care what that guy, they're just all the same. And you just nuke them all.

I mean, I've been encountering a lot of quote-unquote Christians who say nuke them till they glow and leave it to God. And it's just like, I can tell you're really trying to reach out to your Muslim neighbor.

But I'm taking a lot of heat for that because I recognize the differences between Muslims and try to keep those avenues open. And we don't want to be broad-brushed. We don't want people holding us accountable for the Pope.

Muslims do that to me all the time. Well, the Pope said, not mine. And if I'm going to do that, then I better not be holding them accountable for everything that every other Muslim in the world has ever done.

The same thing with Westboro Baptist Church. You're all Baptists, right? Well, no, there are differences. Well, you're all Muslims, right? So since I talk all the time about trying to be consistent, then I have to be consistent here.

And it's not winning me much in the way of brownie points right now, I can assure you. Though I did get some really encouraging notes from Muslims this week from around the world. It's really weird. There are a lot of Muslims who watch the Divine Line.

And I actually got two notes. They both basically said around the same thing. And that was, you know, really appreciate the fact that you try to be consistent. You try to be accurate. Still disagree with you, but you're not like a lot of the Christians.

And one said, and Muslims, who don't care anything about what the other side says. They just, you know. So it was a little bit encouraging along those sides. But, yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, right now I'm seeing some really troubling things.

Really, really troubling. But anyways, we're not going to get very far at this pace. Someone explains to me. How did I get on to Luther? I know, but where did that come from from here? Psalm 22. Yeah, but what was the connection?

Come on, man, focus. I got a squirrel somewhere, and I chased it. So far that I need a helicopter to come get me now, because I am totally. Imputation. Yeah, I know it was imputation. But how do I get that from where we are in section 347?

Normally, when I stop and publicly admit that I'm completely lost, then all of a sudden it comes back to me. Oh, you were talking about this, and you thought about that. Then you went there. And this time, I don't have a.

I disagree with those people who teach the idea that at the very point of Jesus' greatest obedience to the Father, the Father turned his back, as he could not look upon sin. And evidently, somewhere in my mind, I started thinking about how you can.

Okay, all right. Well, hopefully that interesting diversion was interesting to someone and useful to someone in the audience. You never know. We record these things, and I actually have people. Did all of you see the video documenting my demon possession?

Yeah. Kelly saw it. Kelly saw it. And you saw it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. Only two? Well, we don't need to watch it. We've got the real thing. If you were not the keeper of Codex Ricketonius. George is the one.

Well, I'm the demonized one. No, seriously. The connection here is this is all being recorded, and so someone could probably end up posting this about how I can't remember what in the world I'm doing for only five minutes and wander around everywhere and things like that.

But some uber Roman Catholics, some Sede Vacantists. How many in the room know what a Sede Vacantist is? Okay, well, somebody does then, right? What's a Sede? Anybody want to guess what a Sede Vacantist is?

Do you know what a Sede Vacantist is? Sede means seat. Vacant means no one in the seat. So a Sede Vacantist is a person who believes there is no proper pope today. There is no one sitting in the seat of Peter.

And so Mel Gibson is a Sede Vacantist. Some people say Sede Vacantist, whatever. I guess if you want to do Latin or whatever. He claims to be more Catholic than the pope. Exactly. The idea is that basically there was an apostasy sometime right before Vatican II, and so there's no more valid priests, and so you can't have a valid pope if you don't have valid priests.

And Jerry Matitix, remember good old Jerry? He's a Sede Vacantist today. So there is a Sede Vacantist monastery in upstate Fillmore, New York, wherever Fillmore, New York is. And I engaged these guys back in the 90s, and they are ultra traditionalists.

I mean, they are literally more Catholic than the pope. And to be honest with you, with this pope, I'm not sure that's all that difficult to do in many ways. But these guys are, wow, okay. Well, they put out a video just a few weeks ago, and they watch every dividing line I do, and they probably listen to everything we post on Sermon Audio.

And they literally had gone through my videos in ultra slow motion to find every place I had ever done this, instead of doing that. And they found a picture of Anton LaVey doing that, and their theory is that it's...

And then they went through my debate on infant baptism from March with Greg Strawbridge in ultra slow motion. And I was where... I didn't have these glasses then. These are absolutely featherweight glasses.

I love them. But they're progressive lenses. How many have progressive lenses? Okay, what do you have to do with progressive lenses? You gotta aim, right? Well, I had my black Oakley ones, if you remember, and they're much heavier.

And so they'd slip a little bit as I'd be moving around. And I've got an iPad here, and I'm controlling the presentation on the screens from my iPad. So I think three, maybe four times, going ultra slow-mo, they caught me doing this.

Because I was moving my... I was doing that to move my glasses back up so I could have the focal range where I needed it to be. Freeze frame demon face. This is their evidence that I have a demon and that it manifests itself primarily when I'm speaking against the truth, which, of course, I was debating infant baptism.

And so I'm not sure how that works when I'm lecturing on the Trinity. But anyway, we won't get into consistency. But they literally... I mean, I don't even know how long. It's like a 20-minute video or something like that.

And I'm like, you actually spend your life online watching videos in slow motion. That's a life, man. That's really attracting to other folks. It's good stuff. So when I say this may end up on the web someplace, I'm not making that up.

Everything I do, anything I say, it's likely to end up out there. Some of you are going to have to go back and watch last week's dividing. The week before, I think it was right before I went to St. Charles, I played those sections on the dividing line.

And you're going to have to go back and look and go, wow. I thought when you're in a monastery, you're supposed to be doing stuff like feeding the poor and doing stuff like that. They surf the web, so it's a great thing there.

Anyway, all right. So we've looked at Psalm 22, and we've talked about that. Then we have the sponge full of vinegar on the reed. It's also said soldiers also mocked him coming up and offering him vinegar, which is not exactly something that you want to use to slake your thirst with, or anything along those lines.

Some interpreted his words inappropriately, or maybe even in some type of an odd apocalyptic fashion in regards to calling for Elijah. But then I want you to notice Matthew 27 .50, And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.

Mark 15 .37, Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. Luke has a specific content included. And I hope you realize when we see things like the seven last words of Jesus or something, those are put together from the Gospels themselves.

And do not represent any one gospel in and of itself. And so Luke has, then Jesus crying with a loud voice, said, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit. And having said this, he breathed his last.

And then even John, when Jesus received the vinegar, he said, It is finished. Tetelestai. He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Now, we'll talk about the different sayings here in a moment. But the point is that, and this is going to sound like really you're emphasizing this.

The point is, it's painfully obvious that it is the intention of the gospel writers to say that Jesus died. Not that he swooned. Not that he passed out. But that he died. Now you say, there are people that argue that?

Oh yeah, there are. There are. Not only have you had the swoon theory propounded down through the years, but various writers today who recognize that most people today don't read much in the way of history, write books resurrecting old silly dead stuff and make lots of money on it.

My Muslim friends seem to love to drag these people out of their New Age Gnostic closets and rehabilitate them in their debates on this issue. Because as you know, the orthodox understanding of Islam as a whole, based on Surah 4, verse 57, is that Jesus did not die.

He was not crucified. It was only made to appear to the Jews that they had successfully had Jesus killed. But that they failed in that. Jesus did not die. The majority of Muslims believe someone else was put on the cross in the place of Jesus.

And so they will grab hold of anything to try to cast doubt upon the validity of the resurrection. A couple of times I've actually debated Muslims on this subject. Well, one guy was just weird, so we won't include him.

But when I debated Sami Zatari on this subject in London a few years ago, really the only way you could address it would be to attack the resurrection, tie the two of them close together, and if the resurrection is not historical, then the crucifixion wasn't either.

But they just can't deal with the reality of the crucifixion itself from a historical perspective. And so sometimes you actually have to be able to answer someone who's trying to say that the Gospels are not actually intending to communicate that Jesus actually died.

Part of this is because of Ahmed Didat. I've mentioned Didat to you before. He's still the most listened to Muslim in the world, though he's been dead for nine years. And he actually tries to get this little verse here and that little verse there and cobble something together to where the New Testament writers are actually denying that Jesus actually died.

It is unquestionable. Yielded up his spirit, breathed his last, breathed his last, and gave up his spirit. I mean, these are all very, very, very clearly intended to communicate the reality of the death of Jesus.

And it does seem in each one that there is a level of control that Jesus has. I mean, it comes out most in Luke and John, but in all of these Gospels, Jesus had said this was coming. He had talked about its purpose, so on and so forth.

Now, if I recall correctly, did we or did we not mention the issue relating to one of the key statements from the cross? I'm trying to remember what I talked about here. We haven't talked about, Father, forgive them if they know not what they do.

Yes, no, maybe? No. Okay, where was that? Yeah, there it is, page 317. Yeah, we didn't talk about this under the crucifixion under Luke 23. All right, that's section 344. All right, I will try to make a note because we do not have time to even mention it right now.

But I will try to make a note. We do need to discuss that. Yeah, I may have accidentally skipped over it. But we do need to address it because we addressed textual reliability within the past number of months.

And so at least we'll have a foundation for addressing that textual variant. And it is a major textual variant. It's a major textual variant in the New Testament. And so we will make a note, oh great keeper of the notes, that we need to look at, what is it, Luke 24, 43?

Or 39, 43? 34. There you go. Luke 23, 34 is where we need to start next time. All right, let's close Word of Prayer. Father, we do thank you for this time. We thank you once again for a place to meet together for the fellowship of the saints.

And we thank you for the opportunity of considering your truth and your gospel. We would ask that you would be with us now as we go into worship. May you guide and direct, and may all things be done to your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.