A New Testament Wide Survey of Thanksgiving

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday, Tuesday of first Christmas. That's also known as Thanksgiving. And it's actually gonna only be in the 70s here in Phoenix, so I'm all bundled up, because after the summer we had, where it frequently didn't get anywhere near the 70s at the coolest part of the day, then this is like, oh, Arctic, it's great, it's wonderful.

I would, I'm really hoping, please, please, just one good winter storm before Christmas, you know, or the dark skies and windy and rainy, I mean, rain, that would be, just any would be nice. We are in the middle of a drought.

That's unbelievable. But anyways, we want to be upbeat as much as we can today. I almost didn't have a computer to use today. Some of you know that Mac OS Big Sur came out and this, you gotta give this laptop, this particular one, some real kudos.

I mean, it has been sitting here for a very, very long time. It was my main unit for a long time, then it came in here. I don't even know what year it actually is, but it has done a great job. This is, why doesn't it say, it normally says, right?

Oh, there it is, there it is, late 2013. Okay, late 2013 in computer life is like really, really ancient. And so an hour ago, I decided I'll go ahead, I'll install it. It said, I think it said 29 minutes.

It took an hour, cause it's old and it's tired, but it did a great job. I'm still very thankful for this particular unit. It's done great. Anyways, so I've got this funky background that I've never seen before for Big Sur on it, and that's different.

But anyway, as long as it's working. Hey, before we jump into a Bible study today, primarily, I want to focus on that. Two things, let me offend the easily offendable. I just listened to, I think yesterday's blog and Mayblog from Doug Wilson and really enjoyed it.

And I'd recommend it to you. And I would also recommend to you the Canon Press app, which I just got on my phone, which is really, really nice. And we should take a look at that, Rich, because it automatically brings the blog and Mayblog thing in and stuff like that.

And apps are nice. So someday we'll catch up with everybody and get an app out there and be able to do the same thing with the dividing line. But check it out, listen to it. And then I saw this thread on Twitter, and I just wanted to read it to you, cause it is fascinating for those of you who love, like I do, church history.

And that is from Dirk Jonkund. He wrote, we all know the order of the books of the New Testament by heart. When the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, this is my Tyndale House Greek New Testament, my Jeffrey Rice version of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament.

Probably the nicest, I'll bet you Dirk Jonkund, I'll bet Dirk Jonkund does not have as nice an edition of his Greek New Testament as I do. That's a good thought. Anyway, somebody else will end up with it someday anyways.

But anyway, when the Tyndale House Greek New Testament was published, we changed the order and put James through Jude between Acts and Romans. Now let me tell you something, the first time you open it up and try to, you know, you're trying to find something, you know, Acts takes you all the way.

Okay, this is, I'll show you here. Here's the end of Acts. All right, so you're over halfway through and there's James right after Acts. And you're like, and there's first Peter and there's second Peter and there's first John.

And so you, and then there's Romans for, well, there's second, third, and then there's Romans. And you're like, you're thumbing through stuff going, what happened here? Has the canon been messed with?

Well, okay.

In the Greek manuscript tradition, Acts and James to Jude go together with few exceptions. But where are this normal versus modern order of gospel Acts, Romans come from? I always thought, this is Dirk Jongen speaking, this was due to Latin influence, but it wasn't.

Also in Vulgate manuscripts, James to Jude go with Acts according to Carrer 2020. The correct answer surprised me. Our current order, ready? Is solely an innovation by Erasmus. How stunning that one man's decision has such an enormous and largely unacknowledged influence on our Bibles.

And then there's a reference to the study from this M. Carrer on the subject of Codex Roikland and so on and so forth, you can look up. So what he's saying is the order that we have in our modern New Testaments, where you go Acts, Romans, so on and so forth, which I'll be honest with you, makes more sense, really, when you think about it.

Lengthwise, things like that, I think that makes sense to go from the story of Paul directly into the epistles of Paul, also makes sense. Obviously, if you place a tremendous amount of weight upon the traditions of the early church, I don't think that anyone really has any idea as to why the ancient manuscripts had the order that they did or why that would necessarily have some kind of, I don't know, theological significance to it.

Man, there are a lot of evangelicals that do think, however, that the order of the canon as it exists today, well, which didn't exist back then, but as it exists thanks to Erasmus, that that has some theological significance to it.

For example, how many times you heard somebody quote from the book of Revelation and quote Revelation 22 and say, hey, it says don't add or take away from the words of this book. And then I've actually heard people say, and I'm sure God knew, no matter when Revelation was written, I'm sure God knew it would be the last book of the New Testament.

And therefore, they will read into that warning a pan-canonical aspect because the warning is about the book of Revelation. I mean, that's just, you've got to be fair. And lots of evangelicals try to expand that out and say, see, this is about Revelation, ends right there, last book written, all that kind of stuff.

And it's just not a defensible position, but people do it. And it's because, and I've often pointed out to people, the Jews did not have the same order of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, the Tanakh that we have.

That's why people miss Jesus' statement in Matthew when he says, the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, slain before the altar will be held against this generation. They're like, who?

I remember Abel. I was still awake when we got to Abel in Sunday school, but this other poor dude, no earthly idea. And that's because his story is found in a section of the Bible that a lot of Christians have never read.

And that's in 2 Chronicles, but everybody in Jesus' day knew exactly what he was talking about because 2 Chronicles was the last book in the Hebrew canon. The Hebrew canon was the same as what we have today as Protestants, but in the order in which it's found.

So you grab your Biblio-Hebraica Stuttgartensia back there, and you start looking for books and you have the same thing you run into here. It's like, why is the canon order different? And that's part of, that's one of the reasons you study church history.

So I thought that was an interesting thread and it happened to pop back up on my feed, right, as we were getting started. I saw it this morning. I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I thought I would share that with you at that particular point in time.

But it is Tuesday, November 24th, 2020. And we have, at least for the moment, in most countries, a greater or lesser freedom to engage in the celebration of what in the United States is called Thanksgiving.

I know there's a Canadian Thanksgiving, it's different, it's earlier, it's not the same time. I realize that many of you in our audiences overseas, whether it be in Deutschland or in France or down in South Africa or Zambia, or you poor, poor people in Australia, even if we're still allowed on in New Zealand, which I'm not really sure we are, wherever you might be, Thanksgiving here in the United States is one of the last vestiges of the fact that this was founded as a nation filled with people who professed the Christian faith.

You may be aware of the fact that our constitution does not establish religion, but in fact says there is to be freedom of religion. But that establishment had a context. That establishment was the fact that there were a number of the colonies that came together as the states that formed the initial union that already had established religions.

And all that was saying, that was not saying that those states could not do that. And that was not saying that there would not be an acknowledgement of the Christian God in the United States, which continued for a very long part of our history.

Up through World War II, I have, I purchased, I think I've shown it to you on the dividing line before, I have found on eBay, you can find almost anything on eBay, some things you shouldn't find on eBay, but anyway, I've brought in a New Testament that was handed out to soldiers in the army in World War II with a note from the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, printed in the front, recommending the reading of this to the members of the military.

So this was not, the modern secular mythology concerning the history of the United States is just that. It's a mythology. There was never an intention to be neutral toward the fact that our entire legal system is based upon the idea that God created man in his image and therefore inalienable rights flow from God's creative purpose.

So we had, have had established, we not only had in God we trust on our money and things like this, but the holiday of Thanksgiving really is uniquely American. And we love to share it with others. And as Americans go overseas, they share these things.

And so we know that there are people overseas who likewise observe something similar to this. And I think it's wise and wonderful, but as a nation, there was a time when there was a recognition of Thanksgiving.

And we all know inherently that that has changed. And we all know that the whole concept of Thanksgiving is so completely out of step with the emptiness of the secular worldview. Because Thanksgiving requires the giving of thanks to someone.

The Secular Worldview Cannot Account for Thanksgiving

Our website or with, are we not streaming?

No, we're streaming just fine.

Oh, okay.

We're trying to get it.

Oh, okay, all right. All right, I had to get Rich's attention there because Rich was busy with technical, he claims with technical things. Now, you gotta understand, I've taught so many times in seminary classrooms and things like that.

And I'm a peripatetic professor. I like to walk around the room and I have caught people playing solitaire so many times on their computers as I walked around behind them that I've just become somewhat of a skeptic when someone says, oh, I'm having technical issues here.

It's like, okay, all right. But I believe that Rich probably is having technical issues with the tags right now.

Huh?

He says, don't make me push buttons. Okay, fine. Well, given how everything is spliced together over there right now with all the cables leading into other rooms and things like that, pushing buttons might be a very bad thing to do.

We're all fine here now. Yes, that's right.

All right.

Thanksgiving has really come to lose its meaning within a secular world for obvious reasons. There is no place for it. Ugly bags of mostly water, fizzing chemicals, meat bags, whatever terms you want to use.

What is the worldview that can make sense of giving thanks? Giving thanks to a merciless, unpurposeful system of laws that just happened to take the form that it did in a universe that is intent upon our ultimate destruction, because we go against the laws of nature.

We are highly organized systems of energy, and entropy doesn't like that. And anybody who knows standard physics theory knows that we're heading toward what's called heat death. The universe expands out and dies.

Because once the mass is spread out over such a massive area that gravity is basically nullified, everything dies. And of course, we die long before that, as the sun starts to expand and eventually consumes Mercury, and then Venus, and then the Earth.

It doesn't go supernova. It's not big enough to go supernova, but it expands and cools as it expands and eats the Earth anyways. So that's the good news of the secular worldview is that someday Earth will be within the orbit of the size of the sun.

Yay, whoa, hoo-hoo. There's some transcendent meaning for you. And then even if we manage to get off the planet by then, eventually you have heat death and it all comes to an end anyhow, and that's it.

So what is there to give thanks to? There is nothing out there to give thanks to. And if you give thanks to the natural order, the natural order is going to eat you anyways. So this is a holiday. This is an observance that the modern secular mind looks back at the pilgrims and just simply has to go, what foolish people.

They left the comforts of England many of them died of horrible diseases over here. They died of starvation. They brought diseases with them that then killed Indians, the native population, which by the way, we're busily killing each other before we got here, just in case you're confused about that, but that's another story.

And so they look at this whole thing and they go,.

Why?

There is no basis or foundation for any of this. And they find our giving of thanks to God to be one of the most incomprehensible acts that we engage in as human beings. It makes no sense to them. There's no foundation for it.

And so keeping that in mind, it is interesting to look at the appearances of the term in the New Testament and make some observations. It's sometimes it's just really helpful. Could you drop it down a degree or so, kick the fan out or something like that?

Cause that's, I know I'm wearing a, I'm wearing a, you're perfectly fine in there.

You want the heat up.

Yeah, yeah, we're just going, you want the heat up. It's like gonna be a short program. Sometimes it's really interesting to just use the wonderful now you could do this with certain kinds of concordances back in the paper book days, which we may be going back to before long.

Don't throw out your paper books. But it is interesting to look up the lexeme, the root form of a particular term and look at its distribution in the books of the New Testament. And see how it's used.

Thanksgiving as a New Testament Lexical Study

And so you're probably aware of the fact that the term thanksgiving, the giving of thanks, eucharisto is the verbal form. And then it is used as a noun for thanksgiving, the giving of thanks. And it's interesting that, for example, it's only found twice in Matthew.

And it is found both times, interestingly enough, in regards to the giving of thanks in the eating of food. So the seven loaves and fishes, remember that particular miracle in Matthew chapter 15, he took the seven loaves and the fish and giving thanks, he broke them and started giving them to disciples, disciples in turn to the multitudes.

And so one of the things you see immediately by looking at Matthew, Mark, and Luke is this repetitive element of the giving of thanks in the reception of food. Again, something that is distinctly theistic minimally, but completely out of place in the secular world view.

You're the one that paid for other people to gather the food. The idea of giving thanks to a pitiless, merciless, naturalistic system that we have to game to get us food does not make sense to the secular mind.

But Jesus gives thanks and breaks the bread. And the same thing in Matthew 26, 27. And when he had taken a cup and given thanks, and of course, this is in the Eucharist itself, the establishment of that thanksgiving meal.

And that's probably really the foundation of the utilization of that term, Eucharist, is there in Matthew 26, 27, when he had taken a cup and given thanks and gave it to them saying, drink from it, all of you.

So in Mark, same situation, exact same situation. Where he gives thanks in the giving of the breaking of the bread and the miracles. And then again, in Mark chapter 14, completely parallel with Matthew.

The same two incidents, giving thanks is what is given reference there. Now, there are a few more in Luke. For example, in Luke chapter 17, you have someone giving thanks to Jesus, the Samaritan that returns after being healed.

He gives thanks to Jesus. And then in the story of the Pharisee and the tax gatherer, the Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, God, I thank thee that I am not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, even like this tax gatherer.

So you have Eucharist used inappropriately in the giving of thanks by the Pharisee when he didn't really understand his own sinfulness. But then you also have in Luke 22, you have the taking the cup and giving thanks.

And then interestingly enough in Luke, two verses later, when he had taken some bread and given thanks. And so there seems to be in the Lukan narrative, a little more detail that there are two incidents of giving thanks in both the reception of the bread and of the wine.

So that's an interesting aspect to it. The gospel of John has only two, and it's not the two that you would expect. You do have the John chapter six incident of the 5 ,000, but what's interesting, it's only said that there came other small boats from Tiberias near to the place where they ate the bread after the Lord had given thanks.

And isn't that interesting?

I found that fascinating that you would identify a location along the shore of the Sea of Galilee based upon where the Lord had given thanks after they ate the bread and the Lord had given thanks. And it did make me wonder and I don't know why I think about things like this, but it did make me wonder if there wasn't a time later in life after the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, that some of the people who were at those miracles were in situations where they heard Jesus pray, went back to those places and said, this is where the one who rose from the dead prayed.

And he said this, or I heard him say that or something along those lines. And so here is a place along the shoreline where they ate the bread and the Lord had given thanks. There's a recollection of that.

You have Jesus giving thanks at the resurrection of Lazarus. So they removed the stone and Jesus raised his eyes and said, father, I thank you that you heard me. I give thanks to you that you heard me.

But those are the only two places in John, is John 6, 23 and 11, 41. And then in Acts, only two places as well. Acts 27, 35, and having said this, he took bread and gave thanks to God in the presence of all and he broke it and began to eat.

And Acts 28, 15, and the brethren they heard about us came from there as far as the market of Appius and Threons to meet us. When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage. So I think we can very fairly say that in the historical and narrative portions of the Gospels and Acts, the giving of thanks is mentioned in passing.

There is not a emphasis upon that particular action that is laid out for us, emphasized in any meaningfully strong way. It is, however, when you get into not only, not only just into Paul, but into Paul's epistles that are specifically addressed to churches and that his purpose is to help them to mature in Christ.

So, cause see, there are some Pauline epistles that are dealing with doctrinal issues that are dealing with the Jew-Gentile issue. And those are, as we'll see, different in how often the term appears and the centrality of that term.

So it's common in Paul's greetings, Romans 1 .8, first, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, because your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world. So there is the giving of thanks to God for the Roman church.

There is, interestingly enough, just in passing in Romans 1 .21, for even though they knew God, they did not honor his God or give thanks. Now that, we could stop and camp on that one for a while, because what that means is there is a creaturely necessity of thanksgiving to God.

And in fact, it is a sign of rebellion and fallenness when men do not give thanks to God for simple existence. For though, even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks. Those are the extent of general revelation in creation is to hold men accountable, to honor him as God and give thanks.

They are to be thankful. But like I said, we could camp there for a while, but I'll just mention that in passing. Then in Romans 14 .6, he observes, the day observes of the Lord and he who eats does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God.

There is one theme that has now been firmly established throughout the gospels, Acts and in the Romans, and we're using the Erasmian order of the books of the New Testament. Some people think you shouldn't use Erasmian pronunciation.

I will make this argument for those of you who are all into this, you should only do modern Greek pronunciation stuff and you're against Erasmus, then why are you using Erasmus' canon order? I think you need to rebind your King James versions and go back to the pre-Erasmian canon order.

How's that? Romans 14 .6, he who observes, the day observes of the Lord, he who eats does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God. So here's your establishment. I mean, so far all the way through, what is giving thanks normally so far associated with?

Well, one thing we can establish is from the perspective of the scripture writers, when you partake of food, you give thanks to God for the life that you have and the sustenance he provides to you. And that's not the same thing, I went to a Southern Baptist church for a long time.

Well, my youth from sophomore year in high school was at a Southern Baptist church. And a lot of the kids that had grown up in those types of churches felt it was a part of their maturity to not have to give thanks when they ate because they consider that to be legalism.

Well, it wasn't legalism. There is a clear biblical pattern of a recognition of one's creatureliness and one's dependence upon God for sustenance that has already been established. And we haven't gotten into the key utilizations of Eucharist at this particular point in time.

Then Romans 16, four, who for my life risked their own necks to whom not only do I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. And so there is the giving of thanks on his part to those who had risked themselves for, but again, so far not a deeply theological emphasis upon the giving of thanks.

First Corinthians, you have much more. You have, I thank my God always, verse four of chapter one, I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God was given you in Christ Jesus. Then later on in verse 14, interesting, completely different context.

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, which is an interesting text we won't get into today. First Corinthians 10, 30, if I partake with thankfulness, why am I slandered concerning that for which I gave thanks?

So there's two uses here within a text concerning again, eating of food, giving of thanks. The assumption is that that's a given for the Christian people. And then interesting enough, when Paul narrates the Lord's supper, he follows Matthew and Mark and Luke.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you, do this in remembrance of me. So the Eucharist prayer, the giving thanks central to the definition of the Lord's supper, things related to it.

First Corinthians 14, 17, for you are giving thanks well enough, but the man is not edified. And so there, that giving of thanks is in the worship service and in regards to speaking in tongues. So that's a whole nother area.

Second Corinthians chapter one, you also joining in helping us through your prayers that thanks may be given to many persons on our behalf for the favor bestowed upon us through the prayers of many. So thanks being given to people here rather than to God.

Normally thanks, if thanks, if the object is not mentioned, it's normally assumed to be God, but there are instances of giving thanks to others. So only once in second Corinthians, twice in Ephesians, Ephesians 1, 16, do not cease giving thanks for you while making mention of you in my prayers.

And Ephesians 5, 20, always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father. So you are getting a little bit more of the context there. And these are, again, primarily the verbal and participial forms that I'm looking at right now.

So things that are being done concept, but always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father. So there we're starting to get into more of the theological aspect of what that involves, always giving thanks for all things.

It was interesting. I don't think I mentioned the fact that I did, well, maybe I did. Yes, I guess it, I don't remember. I did listen to the Doug Wilson debate. Remember that on the subject of predestination election, and does God predestine all things, things like that.

And what was really interesting to me was the fact that one of Doug's primary arguments that he made was that we are to give thanks to God for all things. And if God therefore is not sovereign over all things, there would be no reason to give thanks to God for all things.

And so the all things that a Christian experiences must be from the hand of God, or there would be no reason to give thanks to God for all things. That was an interesting, somewhat roundabout approach.

Philippians 1 .3, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you. Colossians 1 .3, we give thanks to God, the Father, Ruler, Jesus Christ. Colossians 1 .12, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints and light.

That one is descriptive of the mindset, the way of thinking, the whole life of the Christian is one of giving thanks to the Father. And that, of course, is seen very clearly in Colossians 3 .17, which probably, I don't know, if you've memorized a verse that uses the verbal form of giving thanks, this is probably one of the ones that you've memorized or probably be the best candidate.

And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father. I mean, there is a, again, a multi-week sermon series verse, especially for Puritans, because there is so much application that would need to be made.

Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. I mean, there's so much, that's one of those verses, for example, where I've said many times, don't let those who deny the deity of Christ push you into position of only arguing key texts and not seeing the full-throated, full-bodied evidence of the deity of Christ.

This is a text that I would list as teaching the deity of Christ. And you go, I don't know that I've ever argued with a Jehovah's Witness about that one. And you probably haven't. And you know why? Because we don't think of the ramifications of the things that are said about Jesus in the New Testament.

So look at it again, giving thanks to the Father, who has, I'm sorry, and whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. Now, you see, the Unitarian hears that and sees the distinction between Jesus and God the Father, and says, see, since I'm Unitarian, God is the Father.

He's the only one who's God. And therefore, that makes Jesus different. Well, the point is, you're to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, all. Word or deed, all of life in Christ's name. And that this then is the context by which you then give thanks through him to God the Father.

Such, can you imagine any created being having that kind of status? The very idea that you would engage in every act and deed and word in the name of an archangel is just absurd to the picture of worship in the New Testament.

And yet that's what certain people believe. This is a Trinitarian text. It makes perfect sense that you do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. It's not confusing.

There's no division. It's John 5 all over again. It's balanced. It's beautiful. And there you have one of the key texts of giving thanks through him, through Christ, to God the Father. In 1 Thessalonians 1, we give thanks to God always for all of you, making mention of you in our prayers.

And 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, key text. For this reason, we also constantly thank God that when you receive from us the word of God's message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.

So we constantly thank God that when you receive from us the word of God's message, you accepted it not as the word of men. Now notice the thing, did you catch that? I know sometimes when people go through lists of verses, people just sort of tune out.

I get it.

But did you catch what's said there? I remember, I'm thankful my memories, my short-term memory, we're getting to that age where, well, actually, I think part of it, honestly, is cultural. And part of it is the computer stuff.

Because I've run into 20-year-olds who report the exact same thing I do. And that is, I walk down the hall, turn to my office, and I'm going there to do a particular thing. And by the time I sit down at my desk, use my fingerprint to unlock my computer, I'm just sitting there staring at it going, why am I here?

What did I come here to do? Who am I and why am I here? Yeah, no, but it's like, well, there's stuff to do. I'll just do that until it comes back to me, I guess. I don't know. But I'm not the only, young people, and so I think that may be more the massive influx of everything rather than just age, but it could be age, I suppose.

But I'm so thankful that we can remember things long in the past. And that sometimes, all of a sudden, a memory will come up that I can't remember having thought about, either since it happened or for many decades.

But one of the most precious things to me, my school years meant a lot to me. And that's meant a lot of school years for me, so, but my school years meant a lot to me. And it's amazing how much I can remember from, well, junior high, even grade school, junior high, high school.

But in Bible college, I was a double major, biology and Bible, minor in Greek. And so, I remember who was in my Greek class. Not everybody, I'll admit that. How we got down to, we got whittled down to 12 in our Greek class, and so everybody was wondering, who's gonna be Judas?

Who's gonna be, because Greek tend to whittle people down. It really, really did. There were a lot of folks who wanted to do it at the start, but, and having taught it many times myself now, yeah, that always happens.

Lots of folks come in that first week, just bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and about six weeks in, they ain't bright-eyed and bushy-tailed anymore, they've been skinned. But anyway, I remember the core group of guys that we had.

And we sort of stuck together through about three years, and got to know each other, and that's why the death of one of them has been so tragic in our little group a number of years ago. But I remember which books we translated in which year, and how we were studying Greek syntax, and which grammar we used, and stuff like that.

And I remember we translated this text, in 1 Thessalonians chapter two. It was in the year we were doing syntax. And this was a syntactically rich text, let's just put it that way. And for this reason, we also constantly thank God that when you received from us the word of God's message, you accepted it, not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.

One of the things you have to do in second year Greek is sentence diagramming. Now, that's why I say, if you ever decide to learn Greek, and it's wonderful to do so, learn English first. Because we pretty much talked my English teachers in high school and junior high school out of doing any of that.

They would much rather have read Shakespeare anyways. And so we pretty much talked about doing the grammar. Man, that was bad. That was not a good thing. But I did do some sentence diagramming in English.

But even to this day, any sentence diagramming I do is primarily, it's Greek acting as if it's English. And so I remember us sitting here. I don't remember who translated this particular text, but just look at the complexities here.

The overarching statement is, we are constantly giving thanks to God. For what? That when you received from us, so you can give thanks to God for the actions of others, and your own, because you accepted it, not as the word of men, but what it is really is the word of God.

So we were proclaiming it. So you have our actions. Then you have your reaction to our action. And that reveals the word of God to be that which performs its work in you who believe. And all of this, we give thanks to God for.

You can't put that together. You cannot put that together in a non-decretal synergistic world. Why are you giving thanks to God for these things? You should be giving thanks to them. That when you proclaim the word of God to them, they accepted it as the word of God, because that was their decision, wasn't it?

But Paul's giving thanks to God. Just things to notice, things to notice. 1 Thessalonians 5 .18, of course, another one of the key texts in giving thanks. In everything, give thanks. This is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

Everything? Everything? Again, a stopping place for a sermon. One of the texts that Doug Wilson used in the debate. How can you give thanks for everything? How can this be God's will for you in Christ Jesus?

If there are random things that happen that have no meaning, they have no purpose, because it's just how the world works and all God's sovereign over is, you know, tsunamis and floods and earthquakes and stuff like that.

But all that man stuff, man's sovereign over that.

Okay.

That's not how he understood it. And then 2 Thessalonians, we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brethren, as is only fitting, because your faith is greatly enlarged in love of each one of you toward one another goes ever greater.