Synoptic Gospels: 267-269

Okay, we were in 267 last time.

We were going to do, and that's what I thought.

But I'm glad you're here, George, so that we have certainty. The great keeper of the notes. You're hiding back here, Mr. Callahan. You don't got one of your fancy ties on. You're hiding in the corner.

I don't know what's going on back here. I know what it's like. I got to carry my pillow with me now when I travel. That takes up a little space and luggage. I got a back roller thing I take and my pillow.

Oh, man, getting old stinks. It really does. But it's helped a lot, believe you me. Oh, man, hotel pillows. Designed by a chiropractor to get them as much business as possible. It's ugly. All right, we are going to press on in our synoptic study for the most part of a decade.

That's what we've been doing. I was informed a couple times ago it was over eight years that we've been hacking away at this. But, hey, it's worth it. We're getting into the meat of the matter. Just a couple things to finish up in Section 267, which is the anointing of Jesus.

We'll just mention the plot against Lazarus, and then as we look at the triumphal entry, that will give us the basis for doing the review that I said we need to do as far as stuff we talked about eight years ago.

And that is to remind ourselves of some of the most important elements of understanding of why the synoptic Gospels take the form they do, especially as we get into the passion narratives and things like that.

That's where a lot of the big issues are, and so I think it's important to address those things. You may recall last time that we had looked at the anointing of Jesus, and we had determined, we had come to the conclusion anyways, that the Lucan parallel is too early and is a different story than we have in Matthew, Mark, and John.

And we were looking at the issue of Judas specifically, as told to us in John Chapter 12, as the one who voiced, it wasn't just his idea. I mean, I suppose today it would be similar to someone somehow lavishing on Jesus something made out of platinum or gold, which has become exceptionally expensive of late.

The ointment and the alabaster box it was in was extremely expensive. It was like someone's life savings. And so Judas had given voice to the statement, why was this ointment not sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor?

This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief and he had the money box, he used to take what was put into it. And in the process, Jesus' response, this is important to note, not necessarily for us so much in the sense that I really doubt there would be too many of us that would have too many questions on this subject.

But in Jesus' response, you'll notice he says, leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing for me. And notice Jesus' words in John 12, let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial.

This is repeated in Matthew 26, 12, in pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. Mark 14, 8, she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. Now, this is another reason why not to include Luke as one of the parallels because there's nothing there.

The reason I mention this is, I forget how many years ago it was now, but I recall an argument being made by a, again, my apologies, a Muslim. And I had never heard this argument before and it left me, sometimes when you don't hear an argument, the first time you hear it, it may not be a good argument, but if you've never even heard it before, sometimes it causes you to stumble.

But the argument that was being made, again, remembering that Muslims do not believe that Jesus died upon a cross and was not buried and hence was not resurrected. We're trying to make the argument that the Gospel of Mark actually secretly communicates this to us, that Jesus was not crucified, despite the fact that it narrates the entire crucifixion.

But anyway, and so I was thinking, you know, they made the argument, well there's, Mark doesn't talk about, because if you don't have the longer ending of Mark 16, 9 -20, well where does Mark talk about, you know, Jesus talking about his own crucifixion burial?

And here's a section, very clearly, that answers that question. Mark chapter 14, she has anointed my body beforehand for burying, for my burial. And so the idea that this is a later idea stuck into the Gospels, first of all, it's in the very first Gospel, even from the perspective of, quote unquote, modern New Testament scholarship that marks the first.

But it's also found, outside of the synoptics in John, it's also found in Matthew. So, it's not some kind of oddity, it's not some strange thing added at a later point. Here, as we're moving toward Passion Week, what we saw back in Matthew chapter 16, it is necessary that I go to Jerusalem, get behind me Satan, he says to Peter.

Peter has long idea what the Messiah is to be about, but when he specifically begins to press his own identity, then he presses that part of that identity that must be understood is the suffering Messiah.

The inevitability of the cross, the necessity of the cross. And his burial, and then his resurrection, and this comes up here. Now, obviously, I don't think very many people would argue that Mary is aware of the entirety of her actions in the sense of, certainly, Jesus had said to her in the preceding chapter in John 11.

I talked to her about resurrection, life, Lazarus, and all the rest of these things. It was there, but what she has done, Jesus interprets as part of the anointing of his body for burial. So, I mentioned last time the idea that wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

Which strikes me as, again, for us, we go, well, duh, Jesus knows the gospels are going to be written. But, again, you need to realize that for a lot of folks who take the view that, well, no one really thought there was going to be more scripture written, and Jesus really didn't know what was going to happen in the future, and so on and so forth.

They look at things like this and they see this as later reflections. So, if you were to go over, I know Brother Callahan has had to go out to ASU and take classes out there and stuff like that. If you were to listen to the religion professors and things like that out there.

Part of what makes some of us, from our background, sometimes feel like we're aliens on another planet when we go into those classes. And when we interact and dialogue with those people is these beginning presuppositions.

And we have them and they have them. Just generally, my experience is, amongst conservative Bible believers, we spend more time thinking about them than they spend time thinking about their presuppositions.

They don't listen to what we have to say. They don't think we have anything worthwhile to say. And so your average, well, I'll pick on the United Methodists. There's a church down the road. And the average United Methodist lives in a very, very liberal world today.

I mean, the Claremont Graduate School, back even in the 90s, there was a man, eminently qualified, that applied to teach there. But he was not hired because he dared to mention, during the interview period, that he did actually believe in the deity of Christ.

And you couldn't be hired there if you actually believed in the deity of Christ. Because, well, that's just, who really believes anything like that anymore? So, the average person who has heard that kind of preaching and teaching has been so deeply infected with the idea that these are just human stories.

And they developed in a very human fashion. That there is nothing supernatural. We need to examine them in the exact same way we would examine the archives of the Arizona Republic, or something like that.

These individuals will find it rather difficult, I think, to really see these texts in the context that they should be seen. And so, when we hear Gia saying this, when the Gospels preach in the whole world what she has done, that excites me.

And I'm odd, and you all know that, but that excites me. Because it isn't just people down the road having gone, you know what, we're going to come up with a new religion, and we're going to call it Christianity, or whatever else they might want to think of, and so on and so forth.

Here is clear evidence that Jesus intended his Gospel to go out through the whole world. And this is one of the texts, by the way, if you are taking notes. I wondered how long it would take before you looked up.

You're starting to make your notes. That's good. That's a good thing. This is one of the references, if you're taking notes, that I also use. Because, once again, my Muslim friends say, Jesus was never sent to the whole world.

And where do you think they'd go? What do you think they base that on? When they say Jesus was not sent to the whole world. That he was sent only to the Jewish people. Where do they get that from? No, that they would actually use as part of the reason why they identify the Jews as coffers, as unbelievers.

Because they rejected Jesus as their Messiah. And he did come to be their Messiah. But the whole point is, he came only to be their Messiah. I was listening to Muhammad al-Sharif over the past couple of, about two weeks while writing, and it was amazing.

I mean, here's a tremendous speaker, you know, knows his own stuff real well. But then when he started talking about Christianity, it was just sort of like, wow, this is really bad. Very, very shallow.

But one of the things, with great confidence, he said to his audience is, well, the Bible's very clear. Jesus wasn't sent to the whole world. He was only sent as a Messiah for the Jewish people. Where do you think they get that from?

Simple, straightforward. I've almost quoted it. Matthew chapter 10. I've only been sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Remember, not going out to the Gentiles. Remember the woman and the, you know, but master, even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from the master's table.

And they look at that, and they look at the section where Jesus sends the disciples only to the people of Israel. And they take that, and they isolate that from its context. The context being the Messianic identity of Jesus, the ministry of the apostles.

It's all before the cross. They ignore the rest of Matthew that talks about, go ye therefore and teach all nations, and all the rest of that stuff. And they ignore stuff like this. Even in Mark, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

So they take just that one thing. And I can't, I don't blame Muhammad al-Sharif. He's never, not only has he never read the Bible, but it was fascinating. A couple weeks ago, I was listening to one of the Hadith, one of the traditions.

And one of the companions of Muhammad, Muhammad asked him what he was reading. And he said, well, I'm reading the Torah, the scriptures of the Jews. And according to the Hadith, Muhammad's face became red with anger.

And everyone was afraid because, well, when the prophet gets angry, you need to be afraid. And he said, I have brought to you a perfect religion. And the companion said, I will never read from it again.

And so there is a tendency amongst the Salafi Muslims, the Muslims that look at the first few generations as the real example of what they should be. They want to become an expert on Christianity. No reason to do that.

We have a perfect religion. All I need to know about your religion, I can find out from mine. And that creates a huge problem because the Koran doesn't understand our religion to begin with. So it does cause a problem.

But anyway, that's one of the texts I would go to in demonstration of the fact that the Gospel is going to go to the entirety of the world. All right, one last thing real quickly, just three little verses, John 12, 9 -11, the plot against Lazarus.

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he, that is, Lazarus, was there, they came not only, I'm sorry, that Jesus was there. Not only kind of Jesus, but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.

So the chief priest planned to put Lazarus also to death because on account of him, many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus. Yes, sir? The one thing that's quite interesting to me, well, first of all, you have Simon the leper and the other Simon's a Pharisee.

So those two wouldn't go together. Secondly, one of the things I learned in writing the book on the Talpiot tomb story a few years ago was, well, what's the most popular name of boys in England as of now?

What's the new births over the past, what's the most popular name? Muhammad. And certainly in the Arabic world, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, places like that, what's the most popular name? Muhammad. In Eastern cultures, there's not nearly the range of names that we have.

It would just be represented by just the first names that we have in this room. Because in our culture, what do names represent? Well, what mom and dad think sounds cool. It's very rarely has any kind that does name have any meaning.

I mean, at least for us, a lot of times we'll go to the biblical name. I mean, my son's name is Joshua Daniel. And then Summer, Kelly came up with that. And that was my mom's, took a name from my mom and her mom and put them together.

So the grandmas got involved with that one. But still, it wasn't like, I mean, Summer was born in January. So she's had to explain that her entire life. And by the way, never use any seasonal humor with Summer.

The funniness of that wore off when she was five. So anyway, so we just have this massive wide variety of names. And in fact, I was listening to, again, Muhammad al-Sharif. And he was saying, you know, we can get our Muslim women together.

And we can talk about their names and how their names represent great Muslim women of the past. Christians can't do that. Because their names don't mean anything. This was supposedly an evidence of the superiority of Islam to Christianity.

But the only reason that that actually works for them is because it has such a narrow range of names that are actually used. And when I was doing that Taupia tomb book, it was amazing to look at the list of names that we have seen from archaeology and see that the range was very small.

That names like John and especially Mary, oh, my goodness. I mean, if you yelled out Mary, Miriam, in a crowded place, a third of the women would stop and look at you. It's as bad as Muhammad, you know, in some places.

So names like Simon, I mean, there's even Simon Peter, you know, son of Simon, et cetera, et cetera, were extremely common. So when you have an addition that identifies Simon the Pharisee, Simon the Pharisee and Simon the leper ain't going to be the same guy.

They're going to be quite different. But having multiple Simons, not unusual at all. Especially, you know, John and those are incredibly common names that have come up in funerary items and things like that over and over again.

So, yeah, it is interesting. OK, just one comment real quickly on the plot against Lazarus, I guess, would be what are these people thinking? I mean, have you ever thought about how silly this is? This man's been raised from the dead, so let's kill him.

You know, when we sit, when we stand back and we think about it, we go, how blind can you be? I mean, sickness didn't get him the first time. I mean, you'd have to get rid of Jesus at the same time. Someone who can see a miracle with their own eyes and yet act in this way.

We just, we have to step back and go, wow, that's depravity. That is the unpardonable sin. What was the unpardonable sin? Remember, we already went through it. The unpardonable sin was seeing the light and calling it darkness.

You cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons. So they're calling white black and black white, light, darkness and darkness light. And the only people that I find any evidence in the Gospels that ever do this are religious people.

It's almost like the kind of blindness that is described here is the blindness that comes from overexposure to the light. Remember that terrible thing that some of the Native American Indians would do?

They would take one of their enemies and they would sew their eyelids open and then they'd tie them to a rock in the middle of the summer and just leave them there. Because even if they managed to get untied, after just a few hours of that, you're blind.

Too much light. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, we, you know, I have real light sensitivity. I had it before, but especially since LASIK. I'm always, you know, even my regular prescription glasses are the type that darken because it's like, oh man, it's bright out here, you know.

Can you imagine what it would be like if you couldn't get out of it? That's the kind of blindness that is part of this unpardonable sin is overexposure to light. These are people who quote the Word of God.

They are religious leaders and yet they are so, because on account of him, many Jews were going away and believing in Jesus. We're losing our followers. And they were so focused upon that that they would even be willing to try to put a man to death who had been raised from the dead.

What kind of depravity does that illustrate? Well, it certainly tells us that when our atheist friends tell us that, well, we're having our atheist convention. Once again, we've sent out engraved invitations to God to show up.

And if he diswills, then we'll all cease being atheists. Well, I'm not so certain about that. You can see miracles and you can not respond to them. It is not within the natural capacity of man to bring about his own spiritual resurrection.

So with that, we turn to 269. We see that now we enter into the Passion Week, the triumphal entry. And immediately, looking at this very first pericope, as they are called, we encounter an issue. It's the issue of the fulfillment listed by Matthew of the text from Zechariah 9 .9.

Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass. And you will notice that Matthew has a different rendering of the story than Mark or Luke.

Mark, go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find a colt tied in which no one has ever sat, Untie it. There you go. Untie it. A little dyslexia there. Untie it and bring it.

Luke has go into the village opposite where on entering you will find a colt tied in which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. Now, you'll note what the difference is. The difference is that Matthew says you'll find an ass tied and a colt with her.

Untie them and bring them to me. This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet saying. Now we've already seen that Matthew is very much focused upon a particular audience and hence upon the fulfillment of prophecy.

But here's the argument. The argument that again you will hear over at ASU and places like that. And Glendale Community College, believe you me. As my daughter found out. The argument is that when you read Zechariah 9 .9, Behold your king is coming to you humble and mounted on an ass and on a colt, the foal of an ass.

That's just simply Hebrew parallelism. What's Hebrew parallelism? Well, find it all the time. Almost guarantee you that on Wednesday night when we go back to the Psalter. I think we're around 121, one of my favorite Psalms.

You will find Hebrew parallelism where you will have a statement and then a very similar statement in synonymous terms right afterwards. It's not saying something new. It's expanding the first statement by repeating it.

So the idea is, Behold your king is coming to you humble and mounted on an ass and on a colt, the foal of an ass. It's not two different animals. In Hebrew parallelism it would just simply be renaming the first.

And so the argument is Matthew didn't understand Hebrew parallelism. Even though he was Hebrew. But anyway, he didn't understand Hebrew parallelism and he was just confused. And so he changes the story.

So instead of just one animal, now you have to have two animals. So that he has a wooden, literalistic, fundamentalistic, read stupid, naive fulfillment that is not found in Mark and Luke. There's your argument.

And again, if you go over to your local Christian bookstore, you will find almost any commentary you buy. We'll have discussions of this. So, what do you do with something like this? Well, once again, I use this as sort of the stepping stone to give us pause and moments to once again lay the foundations we need to have to engage in the rest of the study.

And it's not going to be easy. In fact, I think you all should be highly commended. For those of you who have stuck it out so long. Maybe you just show up hoping that Mr. Callahan will be speaking and I'll be gone anyways.

I know somebody was surprised I was here earlier. Which might indicate that, oh man, him again. We thought you were teaching someplace else. Somebody else would be afflicted with you. But I do commend you because this is not the normal kind of Sunday school lesson in the vast majority of evangelical churches.

Where everybody sits around very often and says, read the verse, and how do you feel about that? We don't do the feeling thing a whole lot. We let the feeling thing, that's for you and your study and not necessarily here.

These types of things are uncomfortable for people. I mean, there's lots of folks that will read through these stories, but not necessarily in parallel. So you don't see these types of things. You don't raise these types of things.

But that's not how we do it. And you'll be able to look somebody in the eye someday and say, actually we've worked all the way through the Synoptic Gospels. And we looked at it in parallel. And we worked through these things.

So, what are the foundational things? Well, once again, when we look at these four Gospels, and once we get into this period, John's going to be entering more into the story than in other places. But still, it's primarily Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

There's still going to be places where Mark's not going to have anything, and Matthew and Luke give part of the teaching of Jesus in the temple and things like that. Things we've seen all along. We need to remember a few things.

When you wrote a book, there was no Internet back then. You had to keep in mind, you know, some of you know I just signed a contract with Bethany House and back into book writing mode, and I've announced the title of the book, Whatever a Christian Needs to Know About the Quran.

That cannot be 498 pages long. No one's going to pick it up if it's 498 pages long. It has to be accessible. It has to be, I have a limitation on size. Sometimes I wish there were people out in the blogosphere that likewise realize that they need to have a limitation on size.

I don't know if any of you saw it, but yesterday, John Piper, he was on a sabbatical from, I think, March to the end of December. Well, December's past, so January, he posted a report to his church on his sabbatical.

And it was a pretty lengthy document, and as he said when he posted it, I realize this is a lengthy document. The only thing I can say in my defense is I cut out 263 pages. Okay, all right. So, there are just some people like that.

And on the Internet, who cares? I mean, anymore, you know, I remember my first hard drive was a 20 megabyte hard drive. I didn't figure I'd ever fill that baby up. I mean, who could ever come up with enough to fill up 20 megabytes?

And now, in this bag, I've got these little teeny tiny jump drives, 16 gig, 32 gig, 64 gig. Those are gigabytes. And I still fill them up. We produce lots and lots of stuff anymore, but that's a rather modern phenomenon.

You had to keep in mind who your audience was and the fact that any type of literary work could only be so big until it started becoming very expensive to reproduce or to get into people's hands. And especially if you wanted your book to be widely distributed, disseminated, read, as in the early church, it wasn't they were trying to replace the preaching of the gospel.

They were trying to supplement it. They weren't trying to say, oh, you know, all you're going to need is this. I especially think that's the case of Mark, where he goes past so much of the teaching elements and gives you the actions of Jesus.

I think probably assuming that anybody would have it would hear the teaching part within the church. But anyway, you have to pick and choose what you're going to include. What that also means is that each writer is going to make decisions about how in-depth to go in relating any particular incident.

And if your particular audience is not going to be benefited by a bunch of extra data and information, then you're not going to include it. Now, we all know how this works. We've seen it over and over again already.

But like I said, this is review. This is reiteration so that we can see this, that we're not just sort of making things up as we're going along. But if Matthew is writing for a Jewish audience and Luke is not, or Mark's writing for a more Roman audience, well, if you can assume that your audience has read Zechariah 9 -9, then you might find it useful to include the fulfillment of Zechariah 9 -9.

But if you don't think that your audience is going to find that to be useful, compelling, edifying, or anything else, then you're not going to include it. You're not going to include any of the extra information that goes around that either.

And so we have to keep that in mind. We have to give the authors the freedom to do what we would demand ourselves if we were writing the story of Jesus and Jesus administered in our day. Now, once again, in modern times, it used to be, not so much anymore, but it used to be that there were standards of journalism where a reporter was supposed to be a reporter and not an advocate.

Remember those days? I've sort of forgotten them. They don't really exist anymore. We live in a day of such massive, open, embraced bias when it comes to the media that certain outlets should be branded political parties.

But the reality is that back in the olden days, you were supposed to just get the story, and you weren't supposed to spin it or any of the rest of this type of stuff. And that was part of the canons of journalism.

That's what I was taught when I was in school anyways. Well, then today, back in the olden days, you'd have people would come up and they'd have their little pads, and they're writing down what you're saying, which was always frightening.

I've been interviewed a few times and have been amazed at what ended up coming out the other end. But now, they're sticking something in your face. We have these little MP3 recorders. My phone can do that.

I can just hit an app and record what's going on and all the iPhones and iPads, all that stuff. And they've got little MP3 recorders that'll run for days on end. And you can record what anybody is saying.

So there's no reason for misquotation any longer, though it still happens with an amazing frequency. But the modern concept of reporting these events would in essence be to create a video version of the ministry of Jesus in his last week on earth.

Well, his last week before his crucifixion and resurrection, anyways. But that would only tell one story. I mean, if you just had a camera following along, you wouldn't need to have four, but that kind of technology did not exist.

Yet, we very often assume under the umbrella of inspiration that inspiration means that the writers of Scripture turn into MP3 recorders. They turn into video cameras or iPhones or droids or whatever else we're using today.

And it's like the disciples were walking around like this, you know. That's tourism now. That's how, you know, the tourists used to be. Now it's a whole new thing, you know. No one actually looks at the Grand Canyon anymore.

It's all grown up. It's a really weird thing, and then they all walk away. But that's the standard that we think comes from inspiration. That the purpose of these writers was never to summarize. It was never to put something together in a shorter or larger.

It wasn't meant to communicate to a particular audience. It's just going to be everything Jesus said. So you'd have in the video log of Jesus' last week in Jerusalem, you'd have Jesus sitting and eating with the disciples, and you'd have conversations about where we were going to go to get lunch that afternoon and conversations about the weather.

I'm sure Jesus and the disciples discussed the weather. I'm sure it rained, you know. You notice that we don't almost see any of that, but I'm certain that they've slogged along muddy roads after a rainstorm and had to stop and get stuff out of their sandals.

If they lived here on this earth, these things happen. But it's not recorded for us. There wouldn't be any reason to include these types of things in a written document that then would have to be distributed by handwriting.

And yet so much of the discussion today, even amongst scholars, is based upon these modern parameters of a reporter with his steno pad at least, if not his MP3 recorder and things like that. And so, for example, this example here assumes that Matthew is just basically a dolt.

I mean, it really is the assumption. Matthew had never read the Old Testament. He had never seen Hebrew parallelism. It just never struck him. And once you've got that in your mind, then when someone comes along and says, well, wait a minute, isn't it possible that Matthew's giving the full story because he sees in this the fulfillment of Zechariah 9 -9.

Mark and Luke don't think that their audience is going to need that, and so they don't give the whole story. The point simply is that Jesus' entry into Jerusalem was not like a conquering king in a white stallion.

Well, why then does Matthew have two animals involved? Well, maybe there were, and maybe the fact that both Mark and Luke mention one little factoid upon which no man has ever sat. That means this animal is not used to being an animal of burden, not used to having someone sitting on it.

No one's ever sat on it before. That means it's young, and that means it may not want to go, especially if its mama is still there. And so if its mama is still there, then you bring both of them, and what will the little one do?

It's going to follow mama. And so it doesn't require you to accuse somebody of stupidity to allow for the whole story to be recorded by only one individual. But you see, there's an implicit accusation of dishonesty in much of the writing out there.

That is, this didn't happen. Matthew had to make it up. It didn't really happen. Matthew's writing decades later, he says, yeah, you know, there's a Zechariah prophecy. I think I'll insert it someplace.

I think I'll lie about it. And then I like to use that kind of terminology, but that's basically what's being said. So while there's a perfectly logical understanding of how this could work, and why Mark and Luke wouldn't include all the information Matthew does, and it's not a contradiction, it's just Matthew gives a longer story.

The real problem is, well, you see, Matthew's trying to say this is a fulfillment of Scripture. And we know that prophecy thing doesn't happen. See? You've got to recognize the presuppositions. And when you really start digging down to it, I mean, this is why God put me through Fuller Seminary.

Okay? This is why I never had any teachers that were as conservative as me. So that I could hear this stuff over and over and over again, and go, so why did you say that? Okay, but why did you say that?

And just dig down to the bottom. Once you get down to the bottom, it's, well, you know, we know this prophecy thing really doesn't happen. That's an interesting place to start. It's going to end up interesting theology, but an interesting place to start.

You've got to look at the presuppositions. You've got to look at the foundation. So with that, we are completely out of time. So we will, I am not here the next two weeks, just for those of you who want to make sure you can show up the next two weeks.

So I will be in Kentucky and Alabama. I'll probably get some homestyle cooking down there in those two places at some point or another, I imagine. But we'll be gone for a little while. So let's close our time with the word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We do ask that you would help us to handle it correctly and to your honor, that we would think with the mind of Christ, that we would not imbibe of the humanism of our day.

Lord, that as we go into worship now, our hearts would be open to you, that you would be honored and glorified in all things. We pray in Christ's name.