55 - The Apocrypha

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. If you do not watch this class live on Monday nights at 8 o 'clock, well, you would know what just happened if you were watching live.

And if you don't watch live, well, you miss out on some fun things, I think. Yes, many make fun of what happens for the live stuff. So you are only wondering what we were laughing at. So welcome to our School of Systematic Theology.

We are in book number three. Book number three of the School of Systematic Theology is the book that God speaks to the world. It is the Doctrine of the Bible. We are in lesson number five. This is dealing with the Apocrypha.

We have been going through the Bible and now we get to this lesson. We dealt with canonicity and now we get to the Apocrypha. And some of you are going, what in the world is the Apocrypha? If you grew up Roman Catholic, you know maybe, maybe, what the Apocrypha is.

But we are going to discuss this in today's lesson. There are many who have been brought up in Roman Catholicism, will be familiar with the Catholic translations of the Bible that have a couple of extra books.

Some translations will include these books that were known as the Apocrypha. I remember when I graduated from college, being raised Jewish, we really don't make too much distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism so much.

And I remember my sister bought me a Bible and sent it to me, which was a pretty cool gift for her to get for me, considering that, you know, she knew my background. She knew that I had converted to Christianity.

It was really neat that I had gotten this Bible. And she said to me, I got it for you. It has the Jewish part and the Catholic part. I got all excited because I didn't have a Bible that had the Apocrypha in it.

And I was so excited. I was like, cool, I got this Bible. I was looking for the Apocrypha because I hadn't seen the Apocrypha at that point and was excited to read what these debated books are that are in the Apocrypha, only to realize that I got a normal New Testament and Old Testament.

But she didn't know that because she just kind of considered anything of the New Testament, well that's the Catholic part. But we're going to deal with these books that are in a Catholic translation, a Roman Catholic translation of the Bible that are not in a Protestant translation.

We're going to explain how those books got in there and why we don't accept them as Protestants and why they were, well, never accepted. And these translations will have many things, or these books will have many things that are kind of questionable in them.

We're going to go through that. And so, let us start with what the Apocrypha is. Now, the Apocrypha of the Old Testament is a group of about 13 to 15 books, depending on who named them and how they're included.

They were written about 300 BC to 100 AD, so they're in this intertestimonial time. And we're going to go through in your syllabus, did I even mention, I didn't mention the syllabus. Okay, let's mention the syllabus that you can get at strivingforeternity .org at the website.

I will mention that we should have a brand new website up today, tonight maybe. Completely new with a new store, so you could check that out. But let's first look at these books that we have. So, let's look at the books of the Apocrypha.

This is kind of adapted from Doug Bookman's notes on Bibliology, so I'm going to kind of stick more to my notes than I typically do, only because I don't really do a whole lot of reading on the Apocrypha, and reading the Apocrypha books I did have to for seminary, but I really focus on God's Word and not a bunch of mysticism that others have written.

So, I'm going to rely a little bit more on my notes than I typically do, all right? With that said, the books I'm going to start with, if you have a syllabus you can read along, is the Wisdom Literature.

And actually, I should state how some of these books got into the Bible that we know of, so that we could bring this up. Basically, what happened is that in the intertestimonial period, there were books that were still being written, just like there are spiritual books being written today.

Some of these books were good historical works, and because of that, many Jewish people kept them along with the Bible in areas where they kept their libraries. Now, some have made the assumption that because many of these works were kept, that that must mean that they were accepted as Scripture as well.

We're going to see later that the Jewish people never accepted these as Scripture. Think of in your own Bible. Maybe you have a Bible that has study notes, or maybe it has, you know, in the back it has some notes of information, or maybe it has archaeological notes or maps or a concordance.

And what we have to realize is that those things are helpful, but they're not Scripture. And the works that we're talking of were scrolls at one point. When they started to write books, they would include these in with the Bible as they would as study notes or helpful information at the back of the book.

Then slowly in the 1500s, they worked their way into the middle, or chronologically where they belong, because much of the Roman Catholic doctrine had become developed from these books. And during the Reformation, when there was a battle going on, much of this battle, the Roman Catholics could only resolve by accepting these books as canonical.

And we talked about the canon last lesson. So what ended up happening was that these books became canonical, basically became the Bible by the Catholic Church in the 1500s, which would cause you to question, why wasn't it ever accepted before that, right?

Even Roman Catholicism didn't accept them before that. So what changed? Why were they never accepted? So that'd be one thing. A historical note for those who may be believing that the King James Bible was inspired.

Most people are not aware of the King James history. Why did King James, the king, he commissioned a Bible to be translated. Why? Well, at the time, there was this battle going on in England where Protestants were in control, so they'd kill the Catholics, and the Catholics would get in control, they'd kill the Protestants.

Bloody Mary got her name bloody because she was killing all these Protestants to try to force Catholicism back in. And when James became king, he wanted to bring peace. And the way that he chose to bring peace, one of the ways is between Catholicism and Protestants, was to commission a new Bible.

Now, see, the Protestants had the Bible in English, Tyndale, for example, which, you know, is a lot of the King James was based off of Tyndale, but the Tyndale Bible was out. There were other Bible translations that were out, but what was different with the King James 1611 translation was, see, the Catholics believed it had to be, the Bible had to be in Latin, the Protestants in English, so the people could read the language themselves.

That was one of the arguments. The Catholics said it had to include the Apocrypha, the Protestants said it did not. Now, there was one, the issue being that there was a state Bible in England. And so the state Bible, when the Catholics were in charge, was a Catholic translation, the Latin Vulgate.

When the Protestants were in charge, well, you had the Reformers, the Geneva Bible, and different ones like that that would be in the state Bible. King James chose to do an English translation that included these books known as the Apocrypha Apocrypha meaning hidden.

It's the idea of these hidden books. And so this was the idea that there was this idea of trying to bring unity between the two by having the Apocrypha books included in an English translation. So for those who say that in the King James Bible was a inspired work in 1611, then they must be accepting the Apocrypha as well.

This is also something that some, not all, but some Seven Day Adventists hold to as well. They believe the 1611 King James Bible was inspired. So they would have this dilemma as well if they hold to that position.

But what are these books? And as we go through these books, you'll see why we don't accept some of these. So let's take a look at this. The first is the Wisdom Literature. Wisdom Literature is the, there's two books there, the Wisdom of Solomon and I don't know if I can pronounce it correctly, but Ecclesiasticus.

Ecclesiasticus is the wisdom of Jesus, son of Serach. So let's start with the Wisdom. The Wisdom of Solomon is a treatise, a treatise in praise of righteousness and wisdom and the denunciation of iniquity and idolatry written by an Alexandrian Jew around the time of 150 BC to 50 BC.

That's your blanks there, 150 BC to 50 BC. So this has some merit to it as far as trying to lift up righteousness and, you know, denounce idolatry. Ecclesiasticus is a long ethical treatise which contains general instruction in morality and practical godliness.

It follows in the model of Proverbs. That's your blank there, Proverbs. So that is the Wisdom Literature books. There's several historical books that we see that are accepted in here. First is, first, and again, I'm not going to get the names right, but it's the Greek name for Ezra, but it's Eratus, I think, Asdorus.

I didn't grow up Catholic, so I don't get, I don't have all the pronunciations perfect. Sorry about that. But it is a free narrative of the last days of Judah in exile of Babylon and the return. Long sections of work are, you know, basically all fairy tale, but there is some historical stuff there.

And that's why this was considered merited because it had good history, even though there's whole long sections that are fairy tale. First Maccabees, second Maccabees, let's start with first Maccabees.

Again, historical works, a valuable historical narrative which covers about 40 years, that's the Maccabean War and the Jewish noble struggle for independence. So if you don't know about the Maccabean War, we don't have time to go into that here, but there was a war basically during the period before Christ.

Jacob Maccabeus, known as the Hammer, came and really started a war with the Romans to try to free Israel from Roman occupation, which is kind of funny when you think about the fact that when Jesus came and the Jews said that they're not slaves and they've never been slaves.

And meanwhile, a hero of theirs, Judas Maccabeus, was trying to free them from being enslaved. I mean, it's just one of those things, you know, how quickly they forget. But over a period of 40 years where he ruled and he had tried to bring in, bring a war that would free them and give them their own independence.

It ended in them going to Masada, if you've ever heard of Masada, where they held out for several years against the Romans. And that was, you know, just sad, to say the least. There are sections, basically, at a time where they basically ended up killing themselves to prevent from letting the Romans get them, but they held out for a long time.

But again, just like first Eratus, there's large sections that are very fabulous, very good because they're very good history. And so we got to, you know, we take the history that's there. But again, in first Maccabees, not as much in second Maccabees, second Maccabees, a little bit more, we get some of these fairy tale things, things that just are not right.

So let's look at that. Second Maccabees, a work that covers a portion of a period of first Maccabees, but is very inaccurate and almost mythical. And so when you have first Maccabees is more historic and more trusted, fabulous as far as it goes with some of the history.

We get in a lot of history from there. But second Maccabees, though it has some good history, it has some wackiness as well, which actually you see that in Jewish writings. You will see in Jewish writings that there is a mysticism that's often that you see in Judaism.

And so first, where first Maccabees is more historical. Second is more mythical. And that's actually kind of common in Judaism. And so we'll see some of those got rejected for that. The third category is the religious romance.

And there's two. There's Tabith and Judith. OK, so let's start with Tabith is a moral fiction around 200 B .C. That's your blank there. 200 B .C. It is a tale of a very pious neophyte named Tabith, whose son named Tobias.

And Tobias is directed by an angel to marry a widow. She is yet a virgin, though married before to seven men who were killed by a demon named Osmedes on the day of their marriage. And Tabith escapes death by burning the innards of a fish, the smoke of which exorcised the demon.

And Tabith was healed of his father's, healed his father's blindness and anointed his eyes with the gall of the fish. And we go, wow, that sounds like Greek mythology. Yeah, it's a little out there. Some do think that it is this writing that caused the question that the Jews asked of Jesus, that if you have a man who married, that he married seven women, who would he be married to?

And the idea that some have had is that here you have a case of a woman married to seven men. Who would she be married to? That's some of the thought there. I don't see that connection, but hey, if you're making stuff up, you can make anything up.

Right. Judith is a tale of a rich, beautiful Jewish widow who, through seduction and deceit, beguiled the Babylonian general and thus saved her own city from destruction. The book is is plate. I can't even read my own.

The book is patently immoral. OK, that's your blank there, immoral, as it teaches that Judith's ends justify the treacherous means. OK, that the ends that she justify her treachery that she employed. And the book was written about 100 B .C.

That's your second blank there, 100 B .C. The issue with this book is that it teaches the ends justify the means which would not be the case. And that would be one reason we would end up rejecting this.

Again, throughout this, remember what I said. None of these books were accepted as canon that we have any historical evidence of until 1500s. And so the Jewish people, even in 70 A .D., when the Council of Jamnia, when the when the Jewish rabbis met to discuss specifically some of these books as whether they were in or out of the canon, all of these books were rejected.

OK, so we got to keep that in mind. There's some prophetic literature. So Barak is this is with the epistle of Jeremiah. So some would include this in there. It's a book of prayers and confessions of Jews from the days of Jeremiah.

That's your blank there from the days of Jeremiah, along with the promise of restoration supposedly made to Barak, where basically Jeremiah had said that, you know, Israel would be enslaved to Babylon for 70 years.

And so this is imitating the style of Jeremiah. And you see that common that someone would take on a style of another writer and try to pass it off as that writer. Second, we saw first, well, Ezra is how we say it in Hebrew.

But as as there is, however, how this is the second book of as is, you know, OK, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, E-S-D-R-A-S. But this is now the second of those books. And this is a more of a prophetic book of religious treaties recording seven, that's your blank there, seven revelations supposedly given to Ezra in Babylon.

So Ezra supposedly got these seven revelations and this book records that. And they're more, you know, going to be more, you know, end times related. There's also legendary additions. And so we have here the prayer of Manasseh, a deeply penitent supposed prayer of Manasseh, the wicked king of Judah who was carried to Babylon and supposedly there repented.

You also have the rest of Esther, the rest meaning more of that book they added to it. So this has visions and letters and prayers supposedly to be interjected in various parts of the book of Esther. That's your blank there.

So this is why this is just called the rest of Esther because it's kind of throughout that book they add these in there. These are intended to explain the perceived difficulties with canonical book of Esther.

And so they include these additions because they see difficulties with the book of Esther. And so this is supposed to satisfy that. Another is the song of three Hebrew children. This is a petition of Azariah, an account of the deliverance along with a psalm of praise.

This is included after Daniel 3. And this is why I said some of these books are kind of throughout the Old Testament. So these are included after Daniel. Then there's the history of Susanna. I had to write a paper on that for seminary.

This is the tale of a rich Jewish woman in Babylon who is exonerated of charges of two immoral men by the wisdom of Daniel. And that's your blank there, Daniel. So basically what that is, is the idea there was that there was this woman who was charged with being immoral with two different men brought to Daniel to figure out, OK, you know, show us your wisdom.

This is sort of in the thinking of the wisdom of Solomon. Daniel pulled one man aside, asked for him to explain what happened without the other one present, took the other man aside, asked him what happened, found that the stories didn't even come close to matching and realized they were lying.

Another is Bel and the dragon. OK, this is another made up story, quite melodramatic, of a tale of how Daniel destroyed two objects of Babylonian worship, Bel and also a dragon, and how Daniel escapes the lion's den.

This is, again, in the book of Daniel. Had to write a paper on that as well. And so now those are all the books. And so you see some of them are kind of included in other books like Daniel and Esther.

But what's the background of these books? All right. Let's let us look at the background of these books. So some of the background. So at first we see that, excuse me, throat is dried up a little. So see, usually we put slides up so I could drink in between.

And this is one of these classes where we don't have a lot of slides. So my throat dries up. So sorry, I'm going to drink a little water. Oh, we have a slide we could put up. Yeah, but it just says the background, right?

So, OK, sorry about that. So the Jews rejected the apocryphal books as part of the canon because they were written after 400 B .C. So your blank there is the Jews rejected the apocryphal books as part of the canon because they were written after 400 B .C. beyond the time when the canon was closed, according to the coming of the Messiah.

So what you see there is that the these books were never included after 400 B .C. Many accepted, even the Jewish people, that the canon was then closed. Some of the manuscripts of the Spituagin. Now, Spituagin is, if you ever hear people talk about that, that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

So the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. They translated it into Greek, and that's often what we think Jesus would have been quoting. So when you see, sometimes maybe you have someone that will say, hey, this Greek word in the New Testament is the same word used in the Spituagin.

And then they go to the Old Testament. And what you have there is a case where someone's making an argument for the same word that it would be in the Hebrew from the Old Testament in the Spituagin. That's what the Spituagin is.

So the Spituagin, the Greek translation of Hebrew, included the Apocryphal Books as an addendum to the Old Testament. Remember what I said, they were at the back of it. So they weren't intermixed. They were something that were seen as helpful, but not inspired.

At the Council of Carnath in 397, they were included in the Old Testament books that could be read in the church, though not accepted as scripture. So by 400 AD, they were included, again, helpful books, you could read from them in the church, you were not to take them as scripture.

It was for this reason that Jerome reluctantly included them in his Latin translation of Vulgate. And so when you read up on how, on Jerome, he didn't want to include them because they weren't scripture.

But because they were being read in the church, he included them. So that tells you even by Jerome's time, not seen as scripture, but many people had a tradition of using them and didn't want to have that out.

Since they were included in the Vulgate, the Roman Catholics, that's your blank there, the Roman Catholics accepted them as scripture. You see, they eventually claimed that the Vulgate was the inspired translation, kind of like the King James only people do sometimes, they'll say that the King James Bible was, 1611, was inspired.

Well, they got that from the Catholics, I guess, because the Catholics kind of did that with the Vulgate, with the Latin Vulgate. Even about, it was about 1540, when Martin Luther translated the Apocrypha into German, but set them apart from scripture, he wrote his foreword that they were not to be regarded as sacred scripture, even though they could be read with profit.

In other words, these are profitable books, they're helpful books, they just weren't scripture. So you even see, by Martin Luther, I mean, now, at this point, the Roman Catholic Church is starting to disagree, right?

The Roman Catholic Church quickly responded to Martin Luther at the Council of Trent, that's your blank there, Trent, the Council of Trent, which was 1546. So, all this time, they've never been accepted as scripture until 1546, when the Catholic Church declared all the Apocrypha except 1 and 2, figures, the ones that have the hardest time, right?

1 and 2 Ezra, 1 and 2 Ezra, and the prayer of Manasseh as canonical. So, basically, most of the books, they said, these are now canon, these are all scripture. They further declared that every person who rejected these books as scripture were anathema, or cursed.

So, when people say, hey, I'm Roman Catholic like you, not according to Trent, Council of Trent says, the fact that I reject these books, I'm cursed. Yeah. So, when the Catholics try to say that they're just like me as a Christian, no, you're not.

Catholicism is not Christianity, because you call Christianity a cursed. And the Catholics will say, well, I don't do that. Yeah, but Roman Catholicism does. Council of Trent says that over and over about, you know, doctrine, believing in, you know, justification of faith alone, that would curse you to hell, yikes.

So, the question that could be asked is, oh, thank you, that helps me to take a sip of water. The rejection of the Apocrypha. Why do we reject the Apocrypha as canon? Well, let's go through this in the time that we have remaining.

The Apocrypha was neither part of the Hebrew, that's your blank there, it was neither part of the Hebrew canon, nor ever accepted by the Jews, that's your second blank, as Scripture. So, it was never in the Hebrew canon, and it was rejected by the Jewish people as Scripture.

One of the things to remember from when we talked about the canon is that the canon was always seen as being the canon. It was always seen as being Scripture when it was written, not many years later.

So, the fact that these books were never accepted as part of the canon, as part of Scripture until 1546 gives reason to kind of say we're not going to focus on that. Although the Apocrypha was included in the Spituagint, it was an addendum not to be accepted as Scripture.

So, we see that it was included in some of the translations, but it was never seen as Scripture. It was kind of in the back of the book in something that just sat there. Letter C there is that neither Jesus, that's your first blank, neither Jesus, nor any of the Apostles ever quoted from these 14 books.

Now, just because, if they would have quoted from one of the books, does that suddenly mean it's Scripture? No. We see other writings, writers of the Bible, who quote things that are not Scripture. Paul quotes a poet from Crete, I think it's Jude that quotes a Gnostic work.

Some try to argue that, see, that must be the Bible because it's quoted. It just means that he quoted it because it was known literature at the time. But it does help the fact that you don't see people quoting from the Apocrypha.

Either Jesus, the Apostles, even the early Church Fathers, you don't see much. It's something to think about with the early Church Fathers is within 100 years of the death of Christ, you can recreate all of the New Testament just from quotations of the New Testament.

Except for I think like 14 verses, I think it is. But you can't do that with the Apocrypha, alright? They just wouldn't quote from that. Much of the Old Testament you could recreate within the first 100 years as well.

Number four, or letter D I should say, the content, the content, that's your blank there, the content of these books is very questionable. Okay, the content of these books is very questionable. So what do I mean by that?

I've kind of hinted to some of these things as we've gone through, but let's look at number one there is that they abound in historical and geographical inaccuracies. Okay? And just not proper history.

Let me give you, let me just, I have a couple, so why don't we just look at the one. This is kind of a long one. But this is from 2nd Ezra, I don't even know how to say it. Let's actually, you know, so this is one, I'm not going to go through this because it's rather long, but basically if you go to 2nd Ezra 642 to following that long passage, or even much of 2nd Maccabees, you're going to see that there's inaccuracies historically or archaeologically.

If it's the Bible, because it was too small print, that's why I didn't, I know I made this slide, yes. But it's too hard to read. But if you want you can go and get a Catholic, you know, look it up at a local library, the Catholic Apocrypha Bible, you know.

But much of 2nd Maccabees as well, and if it's going to be Scripture, this is one of the arguments I make with the Koran, why the Koran cannot be written by God. Because the Koran has inaccuracies, I mean clear ones.

Like it says you can trust the Bible, that the Bible, speaking of what they call the New Testament, it cannot change and then they say it got corrupted. Well, which one's right? It can't be that both are true.

In the Koran it says that we worship Mary as God, and you know, speaking of the Trinity, like it's Father, Mother, and Son, and that's not the case. So what you have there is you have a case where, you know, you have a case where histories, if it's from God, it should be accurate.

What's, oh, oh, that's right, yeah, well hold it, I got, someone's saying they sent me reading glasses. I have those here, wait, here we go, would this help me? Here, someone sent me reading glasses so I could look smart.

You know, does this help me look smart? I don't know, but it doesn't help me read much. But I keep them right here with other things that were sent from us, like our little whale, our beluga whale that I had to transition to the gospel once with and I had no idea what a beluga whale was, so that was sent to us.

I keep these things right here. That's right, I do have something else here that I forgot to mention earlier. But we will later, hopefully, if I remember. So, if it's going to be written by God, it can't be historically inaccurate, okay?

The history, the geography must match reality. Second, they teach doctrines which are false practices and false practices which are variants with inspired scripture. So, for example, we won't look at it, but 2 Maccabees 12, 39 -45, Judith.

These things teach things that are such as like that there's a resting place where you can work off your sin called purgatory, okay? That's in Maccabees, but we don't see that matching with the rest of scripture.

And so that's why this book had to be included in the Catholic canon because they built this whole doctrine around one verse or one passage. And so they had to include that, but it's inaccurate to the rest of doctrine.

This, by the way, is why Luther had such a problem with the book of James because he couldn't get out of his head the Roman Catholic way of interpreting James and so he thought it had inaccuracies. He just needed to have that clarified.

Number three there is they resort to literary types and display an artificial or artificially subject matter that's contrary to the rest of the canon. So, you have things that don't line up with what we see in the rest of scripture, alright?

And whether it be literary types or things that are subject matters that just are not matching. And so if there's contradiction, remember we said when we talked last week, last class on canon, canon can't have things that are not, that are contrary.

And number four is that they lack the distinctive elements which typify the rest of the canon, okay? What were some of those when we looked at those last week? I mean, they weren't accepted immediately as canon.

They did not, they were not accepted. They were not seen as canon. They weren't quoted as canon. So, there are things that they would not have those distinctives. Some of these works were not even recognized until many years later as being even helpful.

So, lastly, letter E, they were rejected by virtually all of Christendom until 1546 at the Council of Trent. And so that's pretty, that's to me the strongest argument, is that no one in Christendom really recognized them.

There were some fringe groups, I understand that, and they were out there. But on the whole, they were rejected from the beginning and not seen as being part of the canon. And it's for that reason that we wouldn't accept that they were part of the canon.

So, that would be the reason that we would look at these books and say, well, these don't belong as part of Scripture. And this is the thing that we have to realize. If you're talking to a Roman Catholic, this lesson will be helpful for you to understand a little bit more of the books that they may quote from.

And help you in understanding why we wouldn't accept them. But I think the strongest argument to make is going to be the fact that virtually no one accepted these historically as Scripture until Council of Trent in 1546.

So that might be a good date to memorize and a good, you know, that Council of Trent in 1546. And the reason is because it shows that from the writing of the Old Testament to 1546, you have a span of about 3 ,000 years.

Now, these were written in 400, like about 400 BC. So even if you do that, add that to this, you're still at almost 2 ,000 years that these books were rejected. And all of a sudden, when disputing with Martin Luther and the Reformers over the issue of the Reformation, over sola scriptura, Scripture alone, that salvation is by faith alone, through Christ alone, justification alone, all these alones, all the solas.

When we look at those things, the arguments that the Roman Catholic Church was making, they had to make out of books that were not seen as Scripture. So they were left with only one of two choices. Reject their doctrines or make this Scripture.

Unfortunately, they chose the wrong way. They chose to take these books that were never accepted as Scripture and declare them as Scripture. And we see that commonly when someone in a political realm is fighting over something.

They could say the most ridiculous things just to try to make their case. And they might not even believe it themselves. I don't know whether intellectually those early people that were at the council really believed what they were saying.

I don't know. But it's helpful to understand a little bit of background because you will come amongst different people, different Roman Catholics, and they will talk about their Bible having some extra books.

They may quote from them. I just wanted to give you guys, as we talk about canon, this issue comes up because we reject these as not part of the canon. And so we include this lesson because of that. Alright?

So with that being said, next class we will look at the preservation and translation. Preservation and translation, we talked a little bit about some of that with the King James Bible. We're going to get into that in more detail next class.

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Then we have Jersey Fire. We just got done with Ohio Fire. It's time for Jersey Fire. Jersey Fire, July 10th and 11th, 2015. Again, on July 9th, Thursday night, we're going to have a pre-conference. I think it's $20 or $25 to attend that.

You get an outreach with the guys from Cross Country Evangelism. Mike Stockwell, Robert Gray. Great guys to be out with. They're going to do a lot of hands-on training. Get dinner with them. You also get to enjoy some special training from Hearts for the Lost.

They will be doing a training on Friday, so you can come and join that. That's going to be, again, July. It's always the second weekend in July. Go to jerseyfire .org. You can register now. If you'd like us to come to your church, we can come to your church and train people how to interpret the Bible.

We're really excited about our new seminar. And we would love to come to your church and teach people in six sessions, eight hours, how to interpret the Bible. This is a really exciting course. If you want us to come to you, we will come to you, train you.

It's basically our biblical hermeneutics class in just six sessions. I speak really, really, really fast. If you're part of the live show and you tune in at 8 o 'clock, you saw some of the stuff we talk about before class.

And with that, maybe you're going to be able to guess who the Brother of Encouragement is. Why do we do this, actually? We want to encourage you to encourage others. Even if you don't know those people, try to get to know those people.

Just send them an encouraging note. Hey, just want to encourage you this week, praying for you. Just send them a message each day, just to encourage them. And so the brother this week is Isaiah. He's a dear friend of mine, but his wife is pregnant.