Update on Israel Trip

Welcome to the Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity at the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well welcome to another edition of the Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the

Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

Go check out all the other podcasts at christianpodcastcommunity .org.

And I actually have with me an award -winning podcaster himself,

Eric Johnson, who when we were giving awards, he had gotten one for his viewpoint on Mormonism Show.

If the name doesn't sound familiar, you're going to have him introduce himself and we're going to talk about the ministry. He's with Mormonism Research Ministry just a bit.

It's been a while since you've been on, Eric, so let me welcome you and ask if you could just briefly give some background on Mormonism Research Ministry, how you came out of Mormonism.

Oh wait, no you didn't. And then what you guys do there. And then

I'm going to ask you some questions about what happened this past weekend. Before we start talking about that, let me just let folks know right from the get -go, this episode is going to be talking about our trip to Israel.

Eric led this trip. I'm going to get into why I asked Eric to lead this trip and organize it for us.

And this is an episode that I will say right up front, we're going to go longer. And I'm going to put a link to the video that we'll put out in the show notes.

The reason I'm going to do that is so you can see the pictures as well. I will try to describe them as best

I can. But yeah, words don't always capture what a picture does. And so if you want to watch the video, you can watch the video.

I encourage you to listen to this as well so that you see what, you know, hear what we're talking about.

But with the video, we're going to show some pictures. We're going to go longer. And I'm not going to do the editing on this because there's a video attached to it.

So the reason I'm not going to do the editing that I would typically do is so that if you find something in here where we refer to a picture and you do want to go see it, you can mark that time and know that it's going to be right there in the video.

So if I did any editing, editing out any ums and likes and things like that, then, well, the timing wouldn't be the same.

So with that, Eric, if you could introduce yourself and a little bit about what you and Bill do in ministry.

Well, that's a lot of pressure, Andrew. No editing. I can't say um or I can't cough, but okay, well, that's how we'll do it today.

Yeah, I will be coughing, but I have a mute button. I'm not with that privilege, but yeah.

So again, my name is Eric Johnson. I work with Bill McKeever, the founder of Mormonism Research Ministry.

He founded it in 1979. We have a website, mrm .org.

That's a lot of what we do is right on that website. We have a couple of thousand hits a day, usually about a thousand or plus visitors.

We also have the podcast you mentioned, Viewpoint on Mormonism. That's Bill as the host.

I'm the co -host and kind of the color guy, I guess you would say. And we do a lot of writing.

I've written a number of books. I think in the last 10 years, I've written six books. So the last one was in last fall.

It was called Introducing Christianity to Mormons with Harvest House, and I really am liking that book a lot.

A lot of people have benefited from that. We've sold about 3 ,000 copies, so excited about that.

And in fact, from March 28th to, I think, April 11th, it's going to go on sale, $2 .99

on Kindle. So anybody who wants to get that book, it's available for a really reasonable price.

But yeah, I never was a Mormon, a Latter -day Saint. In fact, nobody from our ministry was. Sharon Lindblom, Bill McKeever, Aaron Shafovaloff, myself, all of us have roles at the ministry.

Not one of us has been a Latter -day Saint, but I would say that actually, I think, gives us a strength because we're called to the

LDS people. That's our calling, and we don't have a vendetta. I think that can help a lot when we're talking to former

LDS, nicknamed Mormon, of course. And they will sometimes get really angry with us, and they'll say, yeah, you just hate the church because you left it.

No, we never left it. We don't hate anybody in the church. We just want people to know the other side.

Yeah, to know the truth. And folks, you often hear me refer to a book that we have called

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. Well, Eric is the editor, is his brainchild to come up with the idea of all these different tactics of how to evangelize to Mormons.

And I've always said, Eric, on this show and on Apologetics Live show, that the brilliance,

I think, of the book is you got 24 different authors writing 24 different tactics of how to share the gospel specifically with Mormons, but a lot of them aren't or could be used in any event.

And so, you know, the one you had me write is on open air evangelism. That's not only the song you do with Mormons.

And because each chapter is like six pages, it's really easy to just read any chapter in any order, get lots of ideas for evangelism, whether it's to Mormons or not.

But there's also some of them, you know, like Bill's way of doing it with the gold plates really helps you learn more about Mormonism.

And now that one specific, that would only work on witnessing to Mormons. But, you know, I think

I can't remember if it was Sharon, who you'll know, who wrote the article, the chapter on, you know, the newspapers that you do at...

That was Sharon. It was Sharon. OK, that's what I thought. Who had, you know, she goes and talks about how she creates a newspaper for the temple openings.

And it's actually a way to share the gospel specifically for an event. And so that gave me the idea of doing some things like that for specific events that we go and evangelize.

So I recommended it for people that want to learn different ideas to evangelize. And then also it teaches you about Mormonism.

So it's kind of a twofer in that way. And because each chapter was written, we didn't read anyone else's chapter.

You did, but we didn't until the book was out. And so that was really good to be able to just know that I can read any chapter in any order and it's not going to conflict.

And so we, I will say that we are running a sale on that still. You can get it at strivingforeturning .org

in our store, sharing the good news with Mormons, 35 % off if you use the coupon code

LDS, that stands for Latter -day Saints. So now this weekend, what happened this weekend?

Something big. Yeah. A woman named Sandra Tanner, who was the head of Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake City, she and her husband, who passed away over a decade ago,

Gerald Tanner, were really the godparents of apologetics to Latter -day

Saints from a Christian worldview. She was a Latter -day Saint with her husband, and they ended up discovering that Joseph Smith was not true.

They still held on to the Book of Mormon, but then they found out the Book of Mormon, which is a unique scripture in Mormonism, is not true either.

So they ended up believing. They wanted to go to the truth. They ended up becoming Christians back in the early 1960s.

She retired this past weekend. We had a celebration for her on the Friday night.

We had probably around 200 people who came to this event. And I was talking off air with you before we started.

I was the introductory speaker, and I kind of tried to set the tone for the night, a little humor, because she has a really dry sense of humor, having a little bit of fun.

But I had her stand up and turn around, and I had the audience wave to her, and she waved back.

Then I asked five questions. The first question had to do with, how many of you believe that Sandra and Gerald were, at one time, you thought that they were the antichrist, of the devil?

And I probably had about six or seven hands raised. I thought there would be more, because that's very common. She has had a lot of Mormons come to her in recent years and say they wanted to ask for forgiveness, because they said terribly mean things about her.

And then later they realized she was telling the truth, and they ended up getting out of Mormonism. I asked a few other questions, but the fifth question was the one that just was incredible.

I asked how many people there had left Mormonism partly or fully as a result of the work that she did.

She's written a number of books. Mormonism, Shadow to Reality is a classic. It's no longer in print, but it's like 550 pages full of research.

And so I was shocked when I saw, and I was telling you, I couldn't, from the front,

I couldn't see all the hands, but 40 or 50 hands went in the air, and then everybody just gasped.

And then there was a big applause. And I think she was kind of shocked how many people were there. I'm going to say a third, a quarter of all the people there had left

Mormonism partly or fully as a result of her work. Now, obviously,

Jesus should get the credit because he's the one who's in production. Sandra was only in sales, but she presented a really good product with integrity.

And so it was a lot of fun to see all these people that really appreciated the work that she had done. Yeah, you know,

I've shared this before, but when you organized a apologetics cruise, and that was the first time you and I met,

I don't get starstruck. I just, you know, I've met a lot of well -known

Christian speakers, and I guess I kind of got used to that. But as you remember,

I had someone that worked for our ministry that was going on that trip, and she was by herself, and Sandra was by herself.

And so, you know, the question was, would she and Sandra share a room? And so I went to ask her, and I'm trying to explain, she didn't know who

Sandra was. And I'm explaining to her, and she goes, Andrew, you're almost acting starstruck.

I've never seen you do that with anybody. I've seen you meet all these people, and you never get starstruck.

And I actually did. I remember when we met on the ship that first moment, and I just stared.

And it was funny, because I have benefited so much from the work that she and her husband did early on in my

Christian life, when I was working with a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, and trying to evangelize my co -worker, and just didn't know where to turn.

And it was, you know, Gerald and Sandra, their work that I turned to. And so it was like probably the only person

I know that I got starstruck with. But she has retired, and with that sold her house, which was right next to the bookstore that she had.

And with that, that has opened up an opportunity for you guys at Mormonism Research Ministry.

Let's talk about that before we talk about Israel, just briefly, because I want people to know about an opportunity that they could get behind, they could help, and a vision that you guys have.

Yeah, well, for 50 years plus, she's been in the Salt Lake City area, and had made her home available in the beginning to have people come and purchase the books that they were printing.

They actually run their own printing press. Gerald ran it for years, and then they actually had somebody all the way to the very end,

February 28th, whose name is Tony, and he printed everything that they put out.

But the thing about this store, and it's hard to explain,

Andrew, because we're in the internet age, and everything can be done, you know, via the internet,

YouTube. Why would people want to go to a store when they could buy everything online?

No, people came in to talk, and I'm a testimony of that, because I talked to hundreds of people in the last 10 years that I helped her on Saturdays.

Bill and I would volunteer on Saturdays, took over the bookstore. We'd have people come in, and I did more evangelism in that store, and more opportunities to be able to talk to people, and then encourage

Christians and help them in their attempt to try to share their faith with Latter -day Saints. So we want to do the same thing at Mormonism Research Ministry.

Again, we have a website, we do a podcast, we do evangelism. I like to go to temple open house events that the church puts on and do evangelism there.

We go downtown and other places, do evangelism, but we're looking to create our own bookstore.

It wouldn't just be a bookstore. The store, it's not going to be like a Lifeway that's going to have all the paraphernalia and all the books, all the commentaries.

It's not going to be that, but it's going to have major books on Mormonism, both from a Christian worldview as well as a scholarly worldview, and to try to understand what

Mormonism is. We'd like to reprint some of her books. We also want to have apologetic works that people would be able to use to counter atheism, agnosticism, and all the other skeptical things that are out there, to be able to give them reasons why the

Bible is true, etc. So we would like to do a bookstore. We also would like to put together a library of LDS materials.

We have a lot in our arsenal, and Sandra's giving us a lot of her stuff.

I mean, we're talking, we have all the magazines going back decades, all the research you'd ever want to do to look at the

Journal of Discourses or the History of the Church or these other books. We want to make a place where Mormons or even former

Mormons could come in and they could take a look and see these for themselves, open up the books. I think there's power in that than just looking at something on the internet.

And then we want to have a Bible museum, and that would include old copies of the

Bible. We have King James versions. For instance, I have two, 1630 and 1633.

I've got several other older versions of Bibles that are incredible, but I also have archaeology such as pottery, coins, spearheads, things like that that come from Israel that date from the time of literally

Abraham all the way to the time of Jesus. And to be able to, it's mainly my collection that I've collected over the years going to Israel, and to be able to long -term loan that to the museum and make it so that it would be a place where you could really have confidence that the

Bible is about real places and real people. Describing real events as you got a chance to see on your

Israel trip, this is not make -believe. Book of Mormon has nothing compared to what the Bible has. We also want to use some of the things we have in Mormonism.

We have some LDS materials that are incredible, as well as a display. For instance, we're going to have the lead plates that imitate the gold plates that Joseph Smith supposedly carried for three miles.

People don't realize that gold, that would have been a six of a cubit foot, which is what the gold plates would have been, six by eight by six.

Gold weighs 2 ,000, excuse me, 1 ,200 pounds per cubit foot. So that would be 200 pounds.

Well, we have lead plates that weigh 118 pounds, and you should see people trying to lift those and realize that's impossible.

So we're going to have that kind of a display. And then finally, we're going to have a classroom, a classroom that would have, we'd like to have 50 chairs and to be able to do things throughout the week and on Saturdays, because a lot of people won't go to a church that's not their own to be able to go to any kind of a conference or apologetics lecture.

And so we'd like to have a neutral place where not only Christians could go, but Latter -day Saints could go.

I did a class at the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore back in 2019, and I wanted to do an experiment to see how the class would work.

It was on the Gospels. I had 20 people the first day and including a Mormon, and the

Mormon went to every class all the way to the end. Now, he didn't leave Mormonism, but man, oh man, he had a whole new appreciation for the

Gospels. So with all that said, that's our dream, Andrew. And we have just decided in the past couple of weeks that we are going to do this.

We are already looking at properties. I don't know where the faith comes from because we're not charismatic, but we believe that God has a desire for us to do this.

And we're not scared about raising money. We want to pay cash for a store that would be within five minutes of the

I -15 freeway, somewhere in the middle between Ogden and Provo.

And Salt Lake City is also in there as well. A place where people could come. Provo is where BYU is.

Ogden is up north. And then Salt Lake City is about maybe 20 minutes away from where we would like this store to be.

15 to 20 minutes. And have a place where people could come to ask questions.

So we're in the process right now. We're in our main newsletter and we're going to do it on our podcast as well. We're going to talk about how we're going to try to raise this money.

And we have about a quarter of it without even having asked yet. We already have a quarter.

And then somebody has told us they're going to give us a $100 ,000 grant matching funds.

You know how that goes. So we think we're going to need seven to eight hundred thousand dollars to get a 2 ,500 square foot facility that would be retail.

It would be with parking and all the rest. And if people want to learn more, they can go to UtahChristianBookstore .com,

a website domain that we bought just so that we could tell people what that is.

And if people want to find out more, we have an email. We haven't sent the first one out yet, but we're going to be doing that here in the next week.

And they can send me an email. Eric, E -R -I -C at M -R -M dot org.

That's Mormonism Research Ministry. Eric at M -R -M dot org. Send me an email. Ask to be on the bookstore email and you'll be the first to know any information being on that group email.

And what was the website for the bookstore? UtahChristianBookstore .com. One word,

UtahChristianBookstore .com. We believe that God does not want this to end because Sandra ran that store,

I think 1986 is when they bought the house next door, turned it into a bookstore. It was a farmhouse from the 19th century.

They turned it into a bookstore and a meeting room. They actually built onto it. Well, now it's gone.

They've sold it. It's going to be destroyed to make apartments. There's nowhere for people to go to see a face.

And this is going to change the trajectory of our ministry. That's for sure. It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of time.

Obviously, we're going to be at a store now that we could work from our homes before. But we think that this is something that God wants, not just for now, but in the future, because Bill and I are in our 60s and, you know,

I don't know how much time we have left, but we're not retiring anytime soon. But then to bring in the younger generation, we want to have a place where Christianity can be described in a rational way so that people can take a look at the evidence of Mormonism and then come in and talk to us.

And we're going to go to the inference of the best explanation. Let's lay out all the evidence and let's see where it lands.

I think a lot of Latter -day Saints are finding out that the church has nothing, but too many are leaving the church and they're going to atheism, agnosticism or nothing at all.

And that's not what we desire. We want them to leave Mormonism, but we want them to come into a relationship with Jesus Christ.

That's right. Yeah. So, you know, you're going to have all this archaeological evidence for the

Bible. And my understanding is you're going to have a whole room devoted to the archaeological evidence for the

Book of Mormon, right? It's going to be an empty storage room. Well, we've talked about that.

One thing I've thought about doing, remember we were at Yad Vashem, the

Holocaust Memorial, and they had this one exhibit. I was taking some pictures in there, even though I wasn't supposed to, just for examples of what we could do.

And I was doing that in the Israeli Museum as well. But they have like a drawer and you pull it out and you can see, you know, whatever it was.

Actually, it was with some of the people who were heroes that were helping the

Jews. They had Oscar Schindler. And so you pull this out and they had some of the things that he owned in there.

And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun on one side to say, okay, here are some of the coins of the Bible. So here's a shekel, here's a denarius, here's a widow's mite.

And then on the other side, put a shiblam. They have names for their coins, actually, in the

Book of Mormon and just have the names there. I don't know if that would be too rude or not, but they have nothing.

They don't know. They don't even know where these events took place. Did they take place in North America or in Central America?

You have a big division within Mormonism. They don't even know where it is. Here, we're standing at Caesarea.

We go to Caesarea Philippi. We're at these places where, I mean, Lachish, you can still see the ramp that the

Assyrians built to get up there to destroy Lachish. You can go through Hezekiah's tunnel on the same day, you know, built 2 ,700 years ago by King Hezekiah.

Those are the kinds of things that you can do when you go to the Holy Land. And so these are coins that are real coins and nobody disputes them.

Atheists believe that these are from Tiberius and Augustus and Pontius Pilate.

So this is the kind of the fun stuff we're hoping to be able to do. Yeah, so let's get into discussing

Israel. So for folks to know, I reached out to you because, well,

I saw how you organized the Apologetics cruise, and this was actually four years in planning, right?

Because this was, what was that thing called that disrupted it? COVID. Yeah, that little thing.

We actually had it planned. We were going to go to Israel.

I think it originally was going to be in 2023. No, 2021. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, we had to cancel that trip, wasn't it? And then we tried to extend it to 2022 and it didn't work because, well, they did not get rid of the vaccine until March.

And that was something for that trip we weren't going to go if they required a vaccine. And then it got, so it got canceled twice or postponed,

I guess you would say. Well, it got postponed and then eventually canceled. And then you had, well, you had a trip planned before all the cancellations.

You had a trip planned with Matt Slick. We had a trip planned with Justin and I, Justin Peters and I.

You had a trip planned with Justin's old pastor, which is Jim Osmond.

Right. And out of that, and actually with the trip that we were doing, we were adding a friend of mine,

David Cunningham. And when everything got kind of rearranged, we ended up doing where Justin went with Jim and that was one trip.

And then Matt and I ended up doing the other trip and David's doing it with just with his church. Right.

So, but the reason I reached out to you was because of the way I knew that the detail you put into things, the organizing that you do.

I knew that what we were going to be able to do for Striving for Eternity and people that came with us, there wasn't going to be anything left undone.

We were going to see a lot. I knew you would be detailed enough to explain to everybody exactly what was going to happen and what they need to do so that we wouldn't have the problems

I've heard about with other trips where people just don't know that things happen and information just isn't known.

I knew that wouldn't happen with you. And so that's why I had reached out to you. And so we did, it was mostly, we had mostly

Matt and I doing most of the devotions, but not all of them. We had a couple other people that came along and we asked them if they would do some of the devotions.

We started off and I'm going to, like I said, I'm going to show some pictures because I think it's going to be helpful for folks.

But we started off with this guy right here, Matt Slick.

And this was neat because this was, Matt was in this picture, you'll see that we're in an amphitheater.

And this was, if I remember correctly, Caesarea? This is definitely Caesarea, the theater that's described in the

Bible where Herod Agrippa I died of worms right here in this theater. In fact, right below where Matt is standing, that's an area right down there.

So isn't that kind of fun? Yeah. So this was a really neat to, I could see, it's just beautiful overlooking the water.

That was really neat to have. You could see how many people this would have sat, but the neat thing,

I mean, your voice carries in this, in theaters. And that's something, we didn't do it in this theater because there were people, but there was a different theater that you took us to and there was nobody there.

And you turned to me and said, okay, Andrew, you want to do some open air preaching? And so I just did a short little open air.

And it was funny because some of the folks in our group were up at the top. And afterwards, when

I came back through, some of those people were still there. And so they shouted down to me, hey, just use your natural voice.

I just want to hear how it is. And just using a natural voice at the top of that theater, they said they could hear me fine.

So what was it like when I was doing that open air? They were like, dude, you were so loud.

Yeah. It really, you don't appreciate how in these theaters with the way they designed it, you really can't, your voice can carry, you can reach out to speaking to many, many people.

There was a spot that we got to see where it would have been that whoever actually, whoever was in charge, the leader,

Herod, in this case, would have been sitting just off actually to the right of where Matt is.

It was really neat. And we're right in that area where we saw where Paul had been, where he would have been to be able to go where Paul was, was really neat.

Yeah. I mean, you got to see where Herod had his palace. You saw his swimming pool. You saw mosaics still on the beach.

We're talking 2000 years ago. You can still see the harbor that Herod, an ingenious man built using ash from volcanoes and it would harden into concrete.

That's how he built the harbor there. That was the main harbor to get out. And that's how Paul got out of Israel to be able to go to Rome.

That's where he left there, but he had been in prison and you actually got to see,

Andrew, that was the first time I had seen the digging that they did underneath the area where Paul would have been.

And according to our guide, Andre, very likely this is where the prison would have been. And here you're seeing it not far from where the palace is.

Oh, wow. I mean, how much more clear can you get when it comes to archaeology and understanding how important Caesarea was?

And by the way, that theater that you pointed to, those seats have been recreated. So those were not original.

But in 1961, an Italian team was digging there and they found a pavement stone that was being used just to hold something up.

And they pulled it out and they actually saw the name of Pontius Pilate on there. You can go to the

Israel Museum today. It was the first archaeological evidence that there was ever man named by the name of Pontius Pilate.

Anybody who would have doubted it, and I don't know if anybody did before 1961, but here is evidence that he was the procurator of this area.

This is where he would have lived most of the year. The only reason he was in Jerusalem during the trial of Jesus is because he went there for every

Passover to make sure the peace was kept. But he put his name in tribute to Caesar Tiberius.

That stone today is, like I say, found in the Israel Museum. And we found it something else just a few years ago, actually.

We found it at the Herodium, where Herod spent a lot of time, and where he was eventually buried.

They found a ring. They found it, I think, 20 years ago, but it was only three or four or five years ago that they were looking closer at the things they had.

And the ring has Pontius Pilate's name on it. Now, was it Pontius Pilate's or somebody who worked for him?

We don't know for sure. But another piece of evidence, archaeology has a way of digging out the truthfulness of the

Bible. Yeah. And one of the advantages of going with you and with Andre, who guided us, is we came across this.

This is basically three tombs that are literally just on the side of the road.

In the picture, people can see the guardrail. We stopped in the bus so we could take pictures of it.

But what this was helpful for was to see this is what the tombs would look like. You can see the size of the stone, the size of the hole.

You can end up realizing that when people say, oh, Jesus would have, you know, he could have just gotten up and moved the stone.

No, you weren't going to lift that thing. And that was some of the neat stuff that we could see.

And I'm probably going to write a couple articles for, you know, blog articles. I'm striving for turning down a couple of things.

The first one that really made an impression on me was water. The importance of water.

We take for granted because, look, Eric, you and I both, and you who's listening probably, especially if you're here in America, you just turn the faucet on and there's water.

But you took us down into a cistern, several of them. I want to show this one because the neat thing with this picture is you're seeing people walking down a flight of stairs and it's many stairs, but this is a cistern.

This is where people would walk down to get water. They try to fill this thing with water because it would be so important.

The thing that blew me away, maybe I'll show this picture later, but where we went into Masada and Masada, they dug this cistern.

This was like Herod's summer home. We don't know if he actually was there, but it's his summer home.

They dug out this huge cistern and then had to carry water up this mountain to get it in.

Now, folks, we were doing that at a fast pace, some of us, to go up the...

Now, I have a friend of mine. Now, we had some folks that did it in about a little over 20 minutes and they were booking.

I had friends of mine that weren't on our trip, but they were on a different trip.

They just happened to be there at the same time. One of my friends, his brother, did the trip, did that same run.

He did it in just under 20 minutes and he was running. So, I just want you to know, we talk about Masada and it's huge, but to get this water up, water is so important.

They were carrying it up this long. I mean, they had a way of getting rainwater, but let me show this picture to give you another view of a cistern that we ended up going.

I want you to see just how deep this cistern is.

I mean, you could see it goes around and around. The stairs are going around and around and around to get down and then the cistern's under that caged area.

So, what you end up seeing is that water was so important. We had

Joel Kramer that was on our trip with us for several days and helping.

He has done archaeology in Jordan, in Israel, in different areas. So, this is what he does, archaeology.

He's an archaeologist and such insight that he provided. I'm just going to say this folks, having

Joel Kramer is a reason that we went with Eric because no one else gets

Joel Kramer to go and do these things where you get these, you know, giving all the background on the archaeology.

And one of the things Joel said is we know we found an archaeological location when we find water.

We find a cistern or a well. And you and I take water for granted.

But when that was one of the things that amazed me was how important water is.

These cisterns, I mean, you took us to several cisterns, Eric. They're just these huge caverns for them to collect water.

And I realized water was far more important. But I'm going to say this, there's something else that I ended up realizing.

And I was joking with our friend Matt Slick, who's Presbyterian. And there was another guy on the trip that was

Presbyterian. And so, it was funny to talk with them. But the number of ritual baths that we found,

I mean, when you think about how important water is, and then you get like to Temple Steps and you see all of these ritual baths covered with ritual baths.

And the joke that I was doing was that, you know, these baths were big enough for submersion, not sprinkling, right?

And so, because you'd wash yourself before doing something holy.

And so, these synagogues, the temple would have all these ritual baths and start to realize, you know, water is so important.

And here they're making sure that there's water for their spiritual cleansing. And you end up seeing so many of those everywhere that we would see a

Jewish community. That's something I was a little surprised by, I wasn't ready for.

You know, let me see real quick, Eric, if I could pull up the picture that we're at with Masada.

And while I look for that, maybe you can explain some of what goes into these cisterns, why they would, you know, either why they would build them or the process they had for trying to build these things.

Well, if you're talking about cisterns in Masada, I mean, they've got, I think, like 12 different cisterns.

Most of them are being filled up when there's a monsoon, which happens, you know, it happens in the desert.

And so, when it rains, it would run off the mountain. And I think I showed you the one where they had the channels that would take it into that cistern.

But the one that you saw was on top of the ground, and there's a hole at the top. And the way that they actually filled that one up was by literally taking the water and putting it in there.

The other one that you just showed, the previous picture, that was from Hatsor. That was destroyed by Joshua.

And in fact, that was kind of the fun thing. You got to see a lot of places that Joshua went and destroyed. You saw

Ai and you saw Jericho. And so, it's fun to go to these places where you would see burn layers.

We don't know as far as if Herod had ever been there, but he built that like he did Macarius.

He built these as Macarius would be on the Jordan side. And in case he had to get away because he was a hated ruler, people did not like him because he was so brutal.

And yet, he was ingenious in how he designed Masada. I mean, when the

Romans came to take over Masada, they knew that the thousand rebels that were up there that were

Jewish rebels after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, they knew that they had years and years worth of food, the storehouses.

You got to see some of the storehouses. And then the water, they would have had plenty of water because every year it's going to rain and they're going to get more water in the other cisterns that they would have access to.

And it's easy to defend a high ground like that because, and the Romans knew that, so they had to build actually a ramp.

And you can still see that ramp today on the other side of where the snake trail is where they had a battering ram break down the walls, but the

Jewish people did not want to be captured. So they ended up murdering each other. And the last man committed suicide, all described by Josephus from some women and children who hid out in one of the cisterns, probably the one that we went into,

I bet they hid out there and the Roman soldiers are the ones who found them. But just amazing.

The mikveh you're talking about, as far as these are ceremonial baths, they're everywhere.

And we were at Magdala, for instance, on the Sea of Galilee that was recently discovered. We're talking in the last 15 years, 2009,

I think is when that was discovered. And that did not become a place you could visit until 2015, I think it was.

So we're only eight years to see a synagogue where Jesus definitely was, first century, but right next to it, what's there?

Well, there's mikvehs in homes and for ceremonial cleansing. So yeah, everywhere you're going to have any kind of a

Jewish person, there's going to be water, mikveh. You saw how they did it up at Qumran, where the

Essenes lived, who put together the Dead Sea Scrolls. They had the water running off of the mountain and they channeled it over.

And so you have to understand a mikveh has to come by, not by you pouring it in, it has to come naturally, a mikveh, and their plural would be mikveyot.

Well, at Qumran, they've got plenty of mikveyot because these Jewish people were copying the scriptures.

But every time they go into their scriptorium, they would want to be to be able to properly write down God's word.

Well, that's to our advantage that many of those people were probably up at Masada and ended up dying because they left behind their books of the

Bible. One quarter of all of the manuscripts found, about 230 were Bible scrolls.

We have the whole scroll of Isaiah from cave one, and you got to go inside of cave one. That is an amazing thing to have the entire scroll, the great scroll of Isaiah.

Around 125 BC is when scholars think that was. And wow. I mean, we have these scrolls that help identify the

Old Testament a thousand years before the Masoretic text had ever been put together.

I want to get into discussing the Isaiah scroll in more detail, but what you mentioned with the mikvehs, for Peale to So this is where many of us think that John the

Baptist got the concept of what we call baptism. It was a

Jewish ritual that would be where someone is fully submerged in water.

It's a cleansing. And as Eric just mentioned, when the scribes were writing scripture, one of the things they would do is before they write any scripture, they would wash themselves.

But then if they're going to write the name that we would call Jehovah or Yahweh, they would go wash before writing that, and then write that.

Because it's a holy thing. And so, let me share this. This is the one

I was talking about up in a picture. You can see, this is to give you an idea of the height.

That's our group that went into, that came up the snake trail, snake path, up to Masada.

And you could see, I mean, we got some guys that are six feet tall.

And you could just see from that, that just up to where that window is, is got to be about 30 feet, 40 feet.

Oh, more than that. Yeah. At least. Well, to the bottom of that, at least. I mean, and this is a whole cave that's there.

And so, this is a huge cistern. Yeah. And because water was really important.

That was probably one of the first takeaways I had was the importance of water and the ritual baths that we had there.

And, you know, that was great. Now, I can't not present a picture like this. This is looking over the

Sea of Galilee. This was sunrise over the sea. And just because, well, it's a great looking picture.

You took that from your window, I think. I took that from the window of our hotel. And I should say, we stayed at some great hotels, which was a nice thing.

You know, one of the other things that struck me, Eric, with being there, and this is something that you see when you go, when you can actually be there.

We read in the Bible about the high places, right? And so, as we talk about that, you know, let me just put one, and I forget, where was the first place that I did my first devotion?

I forget. I'm not remembering, but did you do it in Dan? I don't.

Well, here's the picture from it. I got to go back. Oh, this is Mount Carmel, isn't it?

Yeah, Mount Carmel. So, we talk about the high places. And so,

I'm going to show two pictures. And what you're seeing here, I mean, you can see how, I mean, you see such a huge amount of the landscaping here.

And this is, let me give you another angle of it as well, because what

I want to do is just show how we read about high places.

And I didn't quite realize the value of the high places, because when you look in this valley and you see a huge valley there, this is where we have the you know, the priests of Baal and Isaiah, sorry,

Elijah, and you have this battle that goes on. And so, what you end up seeing is why did they always go to the high places?

Well, you can see here, everybody can see it. Everybody can look up and see.

And this is one of the things that was really neat is there was one time where, and I forget the locations now, because I mean,

I will admit, I got to go back just because when you go the first time, and Eric, you warned me of this, you go the first time and you see so much so quickly, you can't remember everything.

And it's just drinking from a fire hose. And so, going back a second time really helps.

I mean, I went when I was 16 years old, 38 years ago. But I didn't remember it.

I had just become a Christian. So, it was very different. But here, there was one of the times where we're sitting there and Joel is pointing out these different high places where they could signal to one another, where they could look at,

I think it was, I'm forgetting actually where. Laquish, Laquish. That's where I was thinking.

Okay, good. Laquish, where you could see the signal and they could see, okay, hey, the signal light went out.

Well, you could see that because it was a high place. So, when you had all this worship to pagan deities and they would do it at the high place, then you would see these, as we'd go to these different places, huge palaces or ziggurats or things that would be built on these high mountains.

It's so that when everyone looks up, they see, they'll see the temple to a deity.

They see whatever is on up there. And it really helped to appreciate when we see that all these false deities being on the high places.

You read about Solomon and how he was influenced by his wives and they ended up building all these places on the high places.

Same with Jezebel and with Baal worship. And it was all on the high places.

And you start to realize, yeah, it's what everybody who lives in the valley looks up to that and can see it.

And everybody can see that. And really, you know, from mountain peak to mountain peak, they can see the whole valley.

And then they could see in the far distance these other mountain peaks. And so, that's something that I really,

I walked away with a greater appreciation for where the

Bible talks about these high places. And maybe next time you go and read in your Bible about the high places, you'll get a better appreciation for it.

You know, these are some of the things that when you're there, you notice.

You know, one of the other things I picked up on, Eric, is the importance of walls. Everywhere had walls.

Every city had walls for protection. You know, they didn't have, you know, they'd have a neighboring country come in and just attack.

And you get an appreciation for the fact that it would take years to be able to, you know, build up these, to create these walls.

I mean, this wasn't like a small thing that they could do. And it would take years to develop and years to build so that, you know, here you're going to be, you're going to be able to live in some kind of, you know, some kind of ability to live where you're not going to be attacked, where you're not going to be threatened.

And so that becomes a big thing. You know, one of the spots,

I showed a picture from the Sea of Galilee, but I want to show, and Eric, you allowed me to do what usually you don't do on the

Sea of Galilee, and that was to do a short devotional. And you were like, you got five minutes.

Yeah, because you saw how short of a time we had up there and all the things that we got to do up there, from dancing to singing the national anthem to just having the

Christian music so people can meditate. But yeah, you did a great job in a short time. And I want to give a little bit of that here because, you know, we read about the, you know, these storms that are on the

Sea of Galilee, and it's hard to really appreciate this unless you're there, you're on the sea and you can see this.

But one of the things, and I'm just going to go through a couple of pictures here to show that when you're in that sea, there's a mountain range all around you.

I mean, everywhere you go is mountain. And so when you end up looking at this, it helps you to realize that this mountain range that's all around means that this

Sea of Galilee, where most of the disciples would have been used to being, some of them, at least four of them, fishermen here on this sea.

And they would have been in an area where they would not see storms coming because they're in a valley.

I mean, you're not going to see a storm coming over these mountain ranges until it's right upon you. And you go, well, Andrew, what's the importance of that?

Well, when you see that these people were scared in a thunderstorm, there's this, as it says in Mark, the way

Mark describes it, a mega hurricane. They're on the boat and they're scared because there's this mega hurricane.

And these are guys that are used to being at sea here. And all of a sudden a storm comes up.

They would be desensitized to storms because they're not going to see a storm that's coming over that mountain range until it's upon them.

So they would be used to it. But this is a storm that scared guys that are used to being in storms, used to being at this sea, and they're scared.

And they refer to it as a mega hurricane. And when Jesus says, be calm.

And I'll tell you this, my bride was nervous being on a boat because she gets seasick very easily.

And we told her, you're not going to have that because this mountain range blocks a lot of the wind.

So if there's no storm, you don't have that problem. And you could see in the picture how the water's just, there's little ripples, very, very little.

But see when Jesus said, be calm, it's described as a mega calm.

That water just instantly stopped. The ripples and all just gone.

So that's why the disciples were, the thing that scared them more of being in the center of a mega hurricane is realizing that God is in the center of your boat, right?

And so they realized, wait, this was a miracle that happened.

This was not normal. And they knew that because these guys were used to being in storms.

How do I know that? Because you can look at that and though we had great weather, Eric, you said you've never been on a trip.

We had no rain on a single day. It was great weather. But to see, to just be able to see the water and realize how calm it could be there was really something that you see, they realized that was not normal.

That was not a normal storm. And then they realized that was not normal what Jesus did. Yeah. I have a story in 1990.

It was the first time I had ever been on the Sea of Galilee. And so we were on a very similar boat that you had been on. And we went out and as we're going, all of a sudden,

I mean, it was as calm as could be. And then all of a sudden, our boat started to go back and forth.

And the wind came. In fact, I had a single lens reflex camera, the old 35 millimeter, and it had a camera lens on it, or a camera cap on it that I did not have attached.

And it literally was snapped on. And that wind took my cap and it went up in the air.

I'm going to guess maybe 15 feet and landed in the water. Who knows where it is today? It's in a fish belly somewhere, but I'm going to say that was a scary time.

That boat was moving for literally two or three minutes. And then all of a sudden it was gone.

And I'll never forget the guy that I went with was my Old Testament professor, Ronald Youngblood, a translator of the

NIV. When in the Old Testament, he was on the main committees and was a very important player.

He says, everybody take out your Bible. And we read that passage that you just referred to.

Wow. Those are the kinds of things that Israel going there for yourself can change your view.

For me, I'll never read that story. Every time I read that story, I'm reminded of the time

I was on the Sea of Galilee where it was calm and now there was a storm. And I have never been on the Sea of Galilee ever again.

And I've been on there another 15 times or so where we had that kind of wind.

But it can happen because it's like a bowl shape and those winds come with force. See, and that's where looking at when

I teach my Bible interpretation at Easy Seminar in churches, I talk about this. I talk about looking at the geography because it helps you to understand your

Bible. Let me share this picture and Eric, you'll be able to name where this was when we saw the waterfalls here.

I forget the name of the location, but where we had, say again.

This is in Getty where David and Saul met. And that's, you're at David's waterfall right there.

Yeah. And so what I'm pointing out, the reason I want to point this out is, you know, it was interesting because David hid out here for a while.

I mean, for months we saw looking for him. And it was one of those things I always went, how could he do that?

How could he, you know, not find him? And there's all these waterfalls, which I ended up realizing the waterfall itself masked noise.

We couldn't hear people walking around. We were, you know, it was, you heard noises sometimes, but then the sound of the waterfalls, and there's a couple of them, but the sound would mask what he'd do.

And there was plant life, there was wildlife, so there's stuff to be eaten. But then the other thing in was, there was, there were places to hide.

I mean, you can see here, you know, all the little caves that are there.

And so you had, you could see the location. It just, it kind of blew me away with,

I didn't appreciate how many places there were to hide there. Like how many caves

Saul would have, even if Saul knew David was there. I didn't appreciate how hard it would be for Saul and his army to go through every cave that's there, because there's caves that are hidden.

There's caves that are within the greenery, not just up in the rocks that were clearly to see. It was, it was, you start to realize that David with his small army had plenty of places to go to eat.

He had water, he had things to sustain him for months, even if the, you know,

Saul's army is completely around that area. And so that was something that, you know, going there,

I, it just, I never thought of it. It's a desert oasis out in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, the Dead Sea is to the east there. If you're, you know, you're, you're there and it's a lot of desert land, but here's this oasis with plenty of water and wild animals.

And it was, it was, it was a beautiful, lush garden area that the

Bible tells us that this was the way it was. And there it is, even today, it's that way.

Yeah. You know, here, I just found a picture. This is, this is the cistern. This is the waterway that they built in Masada for the cistern.

So you could see how they had it for the rainwater would come in, it would go into the cistern and capture it.

And so, but, you know, even Masada, I got to tell you that, you know, you went there, you brought us down to the library, which is just, you know, granted our friend,

Matt Slick could not do this. He's, he has a fear of heights. And I just got to tell you, it's,

Masada was just, you're like, I mean, we're walking down the edge there. And it was freaky to think about the fact that we had good stairs that we were walking down, modern, not modern day stairs.

They were going down in the, in stairs that they cut in the rock. And it's just off to the edge, you know, there's nothing keeping you from falling.

And, you know, you get down to these different spots that you took us to, like the library. And it was just, it's literally,

I mean, the view, I could see why Herod would want to make this. The view was amazing.

Well, and that's why he built, it was a three tiered palace and on top was the big palace where he would have been.

But then you go down to the second level, like you mentioned, that would have been where the library was, but the bottom level would be the triclinium, the place where he would have, he would host parties.

There was even a bathroom down there. And so he wanted to entertain people. If he had ever been there, we don't know.

You made a good point. We don't have that evidence, but this was what it was made for. And it would have been spectacular.

He wanted his guests to be wowed. Yeah. Well, here's just to kind of wow those who may be looking on video.

I mean, here's a picture of us climbing up it. We're not even at the top yet. And this is the view that you have there of the

Dead Sea all the way out there. And it's just amazing to be able to see that.

It was just, it was an incredible view that they had. And one of the things you end up seeing if you, the story of Masada is not in the

Bible, but you can, you could read about it. You know, Josephus speaks about it. Here's, here what they end up uncovering was where the army would have been.

This is their fort. And you notice the walls that they would have had, that they had built up.

And you know, it was funny because Eric, you pointed out to us as we were walking up, oh, there it is.

And we just saw like we're at floor level. It just looked like a bunch of rocks. Right.

And I couldn't really see that there was a wall. Let me show the picture that I took before that.

And you start to see it as we climb. And you start to see, oh, look, there's, there's, there's the rubble of a, yeah, that's camp

D. No, let's see. Is it camp, camp D or camp F? It's the main one where they're, they had a

Roman legion there plus other men. They had probably 10 ,000 men that were there to take over.

And yeah, that's where their living quarters would have been. They had six or seven different camps, but that was the biggest one there.

Oh, I found, I found the picture that I was looking for. So I'll put it up. This is the cistern in Masada. And so to give you a view, you know, of how big this is, you're seeing that we're, we're, you can see the distance between some of us and it is huge because they would have needed a lot of water to,

I mean, they, they had enough to live up there for, for what, four years. Yeah. It would have been a long time for sure.

I mean, you saw that was just one cistern and they had, they had many more there. Yeah. And so that is one of the things that really, when we, when we were there, we were really amazed with just the amount of work that would go into something like that.

It's, it really is a lot. You know, I meant to mention this earlier, the ritual baths, cause I'm just looking at some of my notes.

You know, there, one of the, one of the, the Presbyterians on that trip had made the comment and I know, you know,

Matt even makes, makes a comment. He says that they're, they couldn't have baptized enough people in, you know, 3000 people couldn't have been baptized by immersion in the waters, you know, after, after Pentecost.

And the argument like Matt has is that it was 12 people. They would have been in the water for eight hours.

He believes that it would have been hypothermia. And one of the things I pointed out was to, to one of the other

Presbyterians, I said, do you notice how, how many mikvahs there are here? I mean, they, they would have, before a

Passover, when everyone comes to Jerusalem, they would have bathed everybody before that, 3 million people.

So 3000 wouldn't have been much. And they wouldn't have had 12, would have 120 people doing it.

Right. But they had enough places to do that. They, you know, it was something that, you know, the one, the one guy said, you know what, you're right.

Like just looking at all the ritual baths, he was like, it wouldn't have been hard to find the water to do it, you know?

And so this was, this was one of things I, I, I really picked up on that, that struck me with it.

And then we got to do places like, you took us to Gethsemane, you know, and we, we got to go there.

I know my wife took some olive branches from a thousand -year -old olive tree, which is really kind of neat.

And they, they said, I believe that there were some of the trees there that may have been since Jesus's time. Well, not, not that they would have been there since his time, but the root systems would have been, because all of, all of roots go far.

And, and so the root systems was certainly have been there. Yeah. And so that was, that was a really neat thing to be able to do.

One of the things we got to do is Hezekiah's tunnel. And so with that, now there's an interesting story that, that I'll tell with this, but first let me ask you,

Eric, what's the importance of Hezekiah's tunnel? Well, I was telling you about Lachish, and that was the last city that King Sennacherib from Assyria had destroyed.

He, he, in fact, that's all documented in his palace. He talked about how he flayed the enemies and, and they didn't have a chance there.

That was the last stronghold left. It's gone. Now he goes to Jerusalem.

Well, Hezekiah knew that Sennacherib was doing this. And so he actually built what's called the broad wall.

I don't know if you got a chance to see the broad wall, but it's over on the Jewish quarter.

And that wall is literally about 25 feet wide and probably about, oh, 30 or 40 feet high.

That's how big this wall was. He built that. He also needed to get water into the city.

And the water source was outside the, the, the Siloam, the pool of Siloam was, or excuse me, the, the, the, the, the source of the water was outside the wall.

He had to find a way to not let the enemy have that water because before it was just being channeled into the city, but now an enemy is going to be able to divert that water, make a dam, and they're not going to have their water.

There's no other water that's on this mound. Jerusalem is on a high hill. So he ended up having this tunnel built from both ends, from where this pool was, from where the spring was,

I'm sorry, Gihon spring. I'm messing up the name of it. The Gihon spring is where it starts.

And today you can go in and you can still walk through this tunnel that's 1 ,768 feet.

And you saw, it was pretty wide for a man to walk through. Most of the times it was plenty big enough.

You didn't have to crouch down a few times, you know, for a few hundred feet, you'd have to crouch down, but it was chiseled 2 ,700 years ago.

They found an inscription there at the end of that tunnel. And it's not no longer marked there.

This is the first time they took it out. It's called the Pool of Siloam inscription.

That inscription is found at the museum in Istanbul, the archaeological museum.

And what it said, written 2 ,700 years ago, how they built this.

And they chiseled this out until both ends, both of them met in the middle. They can't figure out how they did this.

When you were walking in that tunnel, it was pretty straight. But then all of a sudden, Andrew, you had to take a 90 degree left and you went for a little ways that way.

And then you had to turn around again, like they're trying to find where do we need to go on this? And you saw some false starts happening.

They just, you know, they're trying to figure this out, but that was not limestone. That was hard stone to be picking through.

And yet they must've been doing this 24 hours a day. Can you imagine one guy holding the light so a guy could be picking like crazy?

And then other guys who were carting it out of there and they had to do it in record time to get that ready.

Sure enough, when Sennacherib does get to Jerusalem, they had their water, they had their wall, but despite all that they did, what does the

Bible say? This is the really cool thing. All this work that they did, which they needed to do, they needed to be smart about that.

But then God came through and destroyed 185 ,000 men.

And so Sennacherib goes home in disgrace. To me, that's amazing where God does the hard work, even though he wanted them to be prepared.

And yet there was no destruction. There's no evidence that Jerusalem was ever destroyed by the

Assyrians. Yeah. And, you know, you can still see the pickaxe marks. You could see,

I mean, there was one spot where you could see someone dug about two feet and then realized, oh, that false star led wrong spot.

And they had to turn a 90 degree angle. And let me just show you, this is you,

Eric, all the way in the back with the light on, Matt Slick, and then a guy that works for CARM that does translating for CARM, David.

And so you see, that was one of the spots where it's a little bit wider and you get to appreciate, but Eric, your light there is the only light, well, actually

I had my light on too, but if you shut the light out, there's no light. I mean, it is,

I did for a second just to get an idea and it is completely dark. And I mean, this one, you could see

David in front of me and you could see David is a thin guy and you could see how he barely has any room.

I mean, I was concerned that some people might not make it through. And one of the things that was really funny is every person that came through, as they came out, thought the same thing

I did. About halfway through, they thought, what if there's a medical emergency here?

What if someone has to turn around? If someone can't fit, because you go about three quarters of the way and it gets so narrow that I really got concerned.

And I'm like, there is no way, like you're not, the only way to get help is to walk through the tunnel.

You can't turn around and go back. If you got like, hey, I can't fit, I got to turn around, go back.

Well, everyone behind you then has to turn around and go back. Because there's no room in this whole tunnel where you can kind of get around a person.

That's not going to happen. So, you know, for an army to go through this, you would have, you'd only be one way, single file, that's it.

Now, the funny story is that what we wanted to do with this is to be able to go to a spot most people don't visit.

And this, Eric, again, the advantage of going with you with, you know, Joel Kramer and knowing spots that are the actual archaeological spots versus ones that people claim.

We wanted to get to King David's tomb, the actual tomb and not the one that they try to claim is his tomb.

And so, but to do that, when you come to Hezekiah's tunnel, you have to go through the Canaanite tunnel, the dry tunnel.

And there's a way to turn from there to get up to David's tomb. And so my bride didn't want to get, go through the water.

And she was the only one. And Joel was going to go to make sure that we could get to David's tomb.

So, you need someone to be there. So, Joel went with my bride. So, my bride ended up saying afterwards, she goes,

I guess I could say I had a private tour with Joel Kramer because she was the only one as they're going through and he's, you know, giving, you know, lecturing her as they're walking through.

And then he left her up in, there was actually a playground there. And it was funny because this is more of the funny side of it.

I come out of Hezekiah's tunnel and I'm one of the first ones out. And there's

Joel, he's there. And he goes, oh, hey, I left your wife up the hill there to open the gate.

And so that she's going to open the gate for us to be able to go see David's tomb. And I'm like, well, I don't want her being left alone.

So, I walk up to the gate and I see some people coming out of the gate from the dry tunnel and the gate can only be opened on the other side.

And so, I rush up to try to get to go through the gate so I can go be with my bride. And the gate closes.

Not only does the gate close, but I'm calling for her and she's not answering.

And I'm freaking out. Joel Kramer just left my bride and she's gone.

And I go back down the hill and so, Joel, he's explaining things to people.

And so, then he goes, well, we're going to go up to David's tomb and I'm running up the hill.

And he even comments on the little headsets that we all had. And he goes, you notice

Andrew's up there and leading. He's in a rush to get to his wife there. And I get to that gate that I was at before and he goes, oh, no,

Andrew, make a left. Oh, I was so relieved. And so, we go up and we go around and we get this other gate and there's my wife just sitting on a swing going, oh, you're finally here.

She was just waiting for like an hour for us. But we got to see David's tomb.

Yeah, you can go to Expedition Bible on YouTube. There's a two -part. He has an incredible YouTube page.

In fact, it just started less than a year ago. And he has over 170 ,000 subscribers. Quality videos.

He's got at least 30 of them, 20 or 30 of these videos. But I would go and see David's tomb.

That video was shot by a pastor and I back in 2022. So, you'll see me in there and some of the people on my group, but we've given him all of that video to be able to utilize.

And if you watch both parts, you'll get the same lecture that we got there at David's tomb.

And the neat thing, my bride and I started going through all the videos again, because we've noticed it is so different after being there to watch those videos.

But this is King David's tomb. You'll see a couple of the younger girls who were adventurous.

There's one family that was the family that ran up the snake path. They wanted to climb into the tomb.

There were a couple of us, some that were a little bit younger and maybe a couple of us that weren't so young, that weren't going to let just the girls by themselves go up there.

So, here we are in one of the tombs. There's a couple of tombs up there. Actually, I think this was not

David's tomb that we were in. It was one of the other ones that was there, but there's Jake there. Jake and I climbed up.

We weren't going to let just these young teenagers go by themselves, but Jake himself is in his 20s.

So, we were climbing up there and listening to him explain, having

Joel explain all of this, why this area was the real area for David's tomb and not where people say, here's a picture of our whole group from that angle that you just saw me at.

That's our group and you could see where everyone is. You could see the couch even that we jumped down onto.

Yeah, it's gotten really trashy since I first started visiting there, unfortunately. But you're probably having some people who have been to Israel before hearing you right now,

Andrew, and they're going, what are you talking about David's tomb? That's in the city of Zion near Science Gate.

You got a chance to go there as well. You went in with a yarmulke or a hat on and you went and saw that.

But that's a medieval invention. The archaeologists 70, 60, 70, 80 years ago were all pointing to this.

In fact, there's good evidence that that's where the tourists used to go. But unfortunately, people like Catherine Kenyon, who was a secular archaeologist, biblical archaeologist, but very secular and did not like Christianity.

She did everything she could to take away from the historicity of the

Bible. So, she had a role at Jericho saying that Jericho had nothing to do with what the

Bible talks about, the destruction of Jericho when the people went around the city seven times. She said that was around 1550

BC. But no, the pottery and the fallen wall and the burnt layer, you went to Jericho very clearly.

You can watch Joel Kramer's Jericho on Earth, go to Expedition Bible on YouTube, you'll see that video.

But she also said, nah, this isn't true. But there's a synagogue there that was built there because of why?

Why would they have built a synagogue there? Because of David's tomb. It just all makes sense. And Joel has the goods.

So, when you watch those videos, I encourage people who did not get to go with us to Israel and who may have gone to Israel before and only have seen what's in the

Jewish quarter, go watch those two videos. You're going to be amazed. And Joel does a great job with the videos from on top because he gets drones and he takes these great pictures to show you kind of where you got a chance to go.

And the thing is that he explained to us the politics of it, right?

I mean, some of these areas where they were digging at the time were in Jordan, and there was this debate, right?

They're trying to claim that these sites are not giving arguments that Israel ever was here, right?

Because that was the whole thing going on was they were trying to say Israel had no right to the land because they were never here.

And so, you have all these archaeological places that show that they were there. Well, that's not going to be good for the government.

So, if you want to do the digging and the archaeology in those areas, the problem is the government's not going to let you say what you actually find.

So, they have to do that. And Joel even showed how when you look at the archaeological digs and the documentation, they'll say things to make you realize that the biblical record is right, but they can't say that.

And so, they'll make excuses for why they see what...

Everybody leaves... I think it was AI. Everyone just disappeared. It wasn't...

They vanished. What? Or, oh, here you have the...

Oh, where was the place that we went where the claim was that mice ate the bowstrings? Oh, that was

Lachish. Yeah, Lachish. Yeah. And Lachish, I think if I remember correctly, Lachish is where it was overlooking where David Goliath fought?

That would be the Valley of Elah and Azekah. We got a chance to go up to Azekah and then look down, and you could see the

Valley of Elah, and you could see where the Philistines were, where the Israelites were.

It gives you quite... And so, what did he do? He just got out his Bible and starts reading, and boom, boom, man.

I mean, it's really powerful when you actually get a chance to be there and see it. And I think the thing that I walked away with the most, the most striking thing that I walked away with,

I want to talk about that. It had to do with David's... With what we just mentioned with David and as far as his tomb.

But before I do, I do need to give a word for our sponsors, and our sponsor would be

MyPillow. Many of you know I use

MyPillow. I brought MyPillow to Israel. I was traveling even there with MyPillow.

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American -made. One of our listeners sent me a picture of the slippers, and I went and checked it myself.

And it is not all of it's made here in America. So, that was not correct.

But the thing that was interesting was that even recently they came out with a new

MyPillow 2 .0, which I have now used. And I got their 2 .0 mattress topper.

Now, this is supposed to keep you... I'm one of these ones where I end up getting very hot when

I sleep. And so, I end up sweating a lot where my wife is very cool. And so, that has always been an issue for us.

And so, we're trying out their MyPillow 2 .0. MyPillow 2 .0 is supposed to keep us from having that temperature change as much.

So, I'll let you know in the future how it goes. But so far, it seems to be good. I still like it just as much as the 1 .0.

And I just haven't noticed whether it's... I did have one night where I tried it out, the second night that I tried it, and I dressed a whole lot.

So, it might've been me overdressing in a heavy down blanket that I was sweating.

So, I figured maybe that's not a good test. I should wear my normal stuff. But I will say, if you want to get a great night of sleep,

I was just talking to someone today that may help us out with podcast editing.

And so, when I mentioned to our sponsors, MyPillow, she was like, oh, I love

MyPillow. I was like, have you tried the mattress topper? She goes, no. I'm like, oh, this will change your sleep.

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I've loved everything that I've tried from them. And I've tried a lot. Their slippers, their robe, their towels, the mattress topper, the pillows, even their travel pillow.

I'm getting now a new thing that lets me take a full -size pillow, roll it up into it. It's a pillowcase that lets you roll it up and tuck it in so you can easily pack it in a suitcase.

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And so, with that, the last place that we went to, Eric, was the thing that I think really struck me the most.

And that is we went to the place where the upper room would have been. Now, you and Joel took us to the actual location where Jesus would have been put on trial, crucified.

We got to see those. We got to see David's tomb. And one of the things that really struck me, as we were up in the upper room, this is where Jesus would have had the

Last Supper. And from that location, you can see the Mount of Olives right there.

You could see it's not a very long walk. And you can see, just like almost a stone throw away, you can see

Caiaphas' house. And just sitting there thinking, here's the Last Supper, Jesus looking out the window, knowing what was going to happen.

He could see Caiaphas' house from that location.

He could see the very spot where he would be crucified later in just a few hours from then.

He could see that from the place where he had that Last Supper. I'm just picturing as he's talking to the disciples and explaining to the disciples what's going to happen to him.

And to realize everything is so close. I mean, we live in cities or we live in towns where everything is so far.

It's so spread out. And we don't appreciate, when you're in Israel, how everything is so close to one another.

It's right on top of one another. And so you don't realize all of this that we take for granted or we don't realize.

Jesus could have been looking right out that window as he's saying to the disciples, one of you will betray me this evening.

And he can look to the Mount of Olives and know where he was going to be betrayed. He could look and see

Caiaphas' house and be able to see there's where I'm going to be put on trial.

He can look and see the very place where he's going to be crucified. Be able to look up the mountain to see, oh, there's where I'm going to be taken to Pilate.

He would be able to see all that from that location. And later, after he's crucified, you have in Acts chapter 2, and we had this,

Joel read this for us, and it was really neat to be sitting or standing in that spot of the upper room and thinking, here's what

Peter said in this location, speaking of David, and you could see

David's tomb from the location. And you could sit there and point out, as Peter says, but God raised him up, putting an end to the death of agony, since it was impossible for him to be held in by its power.

For David said, I saw the Lord continually before me, because he is at my right hand, so that he should be shaken.

Therefore, my heart is glad and my tongue is exalted. Moreover, my flesh will live in hope, because you will not forsake the soul to Hades, nor give the

Holy One to corruption. You've made known to me the way of life and make full gladness.

And Peter would go on to say in Acts 2 .29, men, brothers,

I confidently say to you regarding the patriarch David, and he could point right out the window at David's tomb where he was buried, and they would know that our patriarch

David, that both died and was buried in his tomb, is with us to this day.

He could say that pointing out the window to the tomb of David, and they could have looked and seen that.

And he could say, and so, because he was a prophet and knew, God had sworn to him an oath to set one of the fruit of his body on his throne, and looked ahead and spoke of the resurrection of Christ, that he was neither forsaken to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.

And at that point, he could be pointing to the very place where Jesus was judged and crucified, and they could look out the window and see that, see where Jesus was crucified and then buried and rose from the dead.

Peter could have been giving that sermon in Acts 2 and point out the window to all of those locations.

They could have seen all of that right from where Peter was standing.

He could be pointing to them the tomb that we have today. There's David.

That's where David's buried. And they would have known that. That blew my mind.

I didn't appreciate or know, just to think about how close everything is.

It's right there. And it was something that I never even thought of twice.

And I'll tell you now, I can't unthink it, because I was there, because I went to Israel.

And so I want to encourage you, those who are listening, watching, I know many people said,

I'd love to go. I can't afford it. It's something I'm going to tell you. Save up.

Start saving up now. Maybe by the time I say this, it's going to be too late.

Eric has a trip he's working on for 2025. Okay. You can contact him.

Eric at mrm .org. It stands for Mormon Research Ministry. Eric at mrm .org.

And say, hey, Eric, I heard you on the rap report talking about this, and I got to go to Israel.

I'm going to tell you that Eric does one of the best trips. Okay. He is extremely organized, and you're going to see a lot of things, and you're going to get a great tour.

And so I'm going to encourage you, if you want to go on his trip in 2025, contact him now.

It's going to fill up. His trips do. I do plan to try to return and do another trip.

And Eric and I will talk about this and figure out a time that we can do another trip to Israel and find a way that we can maybe make it a little bit more cost efficient.

But I want to encourage you to do one of these trips. You will not regret it.

It will change the way you read your Bible. Yeah. It's not going to be a pleasure cruise.

In fact, didn't Andre tell you regularly, this is not a vacation. And my trips,

I'm going to have you seen as much as I possibly can. And some people might say, oh, we're too busy.

Well, when you get home, you can sort it all out. Hopefully you took some notes and you took your pictures and you can sort it all out then.

But you're only there for a short time. Our trip was 13 days, and three of that was travel. So we had 10 days, boots on the ground.

I'm going to show you as much as I possibly can. I've had people ask me here in the last few weeks, well, don't you have anything earlier than 2025?

Well, I do have two other trips completely sold out. One in November, one in February. The one in February is with Joel.

I have like 15 people on the wait list. I'm not taking anybody else on that wait list because I'm not going to get all of them in.

But my next trip, as you mentioned, after that, I haven't even planned it yet, but people want to go to Israel.

So 2025, February, March, I think I'm going to do a 14 -day trip and we'll have four days with Joel Kramer.

And Joel's already agreed. He's a friend of mine and he's already agreed to do that. It works out great.

Whether you go on my trip or you go with somebody else, get over there and have your

Bible reading change from black and white to color 4D. I mean, it's going to completely radicalize your

Bible reading. You're going to see names that you never paid attention to before. I bet you learned a lot about Bethel and I.

Did you realize those were so close? And Bethel is a very important city. You're right.

That goes back to realizing how close things are. Bethel and AR, I would have been able to signal to one another because they're both on high places.

They're so close to one another. You could see them. That was one of the things that when we were there, it was a point of saying, hey, notice that here they would have heard, they would have seen what was going on at the other one.

They would have gotten news of it. And it's like, hey, we better do something. These Israelites are coming in. They're not far from us.

It really was quite interesting. And being at the valley there where David and Goliath would have fought and seeing, and we won't do it now.

I have the picture where here's where the camp would be for the Philistines.

Here's the camp where the Israelites would have been. And there's this valley in between them. And that's where Goliath would have been calling out to Israel going, come and fight.

And they would feel the security in the high places that they were, where they were wooded and all.

But in that valley, it was open field. And you could see the fear they would probably have with this huge monster of a man standing in a valley saying, come and fight me, come and fight me.

And who's going to walk into that? You walk into that field and you're exposed. In the

Israel Museum, you had a chance to visit. I don't know if you went to the part where the spears were. Did you go where the spears were?

And that one was probably about, gosh, I don't know, probably about three feet high.

And it must have weighed a bunch of weight. And who would be able to lift that? Well, it was found where Goliath lives.

I mean, they were giants in those days. And whether he was nine feet or seven feet, I'm not going to quibble.

He was a big dude. And this spearhead is humongous.

So that's the fun thing about going to museums and seeing this archaeology and seeing the proof that these were, again, real people.

In fact, over 80 people in the Bible have been identified through archaeology, real places.

They even call these places by the name of the Bible today. They still call it Bethel and they still call it, well, it's

Betin, but it's the root for Bethel. And you've got real events that took place.

And I was talking about how the Broad Wall and Hezekiah's Tunnel and Likish, all of these things, you come together and you go, yes,

I still have to have faith. I'm not a rationalist. By any means, I'm not. But at the same time,

I think I love having some evidence that I can use in the ministry that I do with Latter -day

Saints to say, I have good reasons to believe the Bible is true. What reasons do you have for believing the

Book of Mormon? Because they don't have all this that we've been talking about. No, they don't. They don't. And they don't have any of this archaeological evidence.

They can't find these locations. I mean, we would sit there with Lazarus' tomb, where Lazarus was.

And here's the reason why he would have been buried here. This is how we know. And again, if you watch

Joel's videos, Joel actually had right up the street that we were on when we went to Lazarus' tomb, and there was a funeral going right past there, up the stairs.

And he was filming there and just happened to catch that. Really neat to see.

And so I just want to encourage you guys, if you can in any way,

I know Striving Fraternity is going to try to work with Eric to find ways we could do it a little bit cheaper. We're thinking of trying to see if we could kind of subsidize some of it and help to lower the price.

But I'm going to say that's a hard and a tall ask for us, and I'm going to tell you why.

I want to end with kind of an appeal. We've had ever since COVID some rough years, and you guys know

I don't usually make appeals to you. I want to encourage you if you find value in these podcasts to share it with others, because we want to produce good quality things for you.

But value for value, we want to encourage you to let you know what's going on at Striving Fraternity.

Since from last year to the year before, our donors, our donations have been down by 25%, along with our book sales have been down 25%.

And yet with the travel expenses to be able to go to churches and help out these smaller churches that every other parachurch ministry ignores, because no one cares about the small churches because there's no money in it.

And yet those are the churches that need the help. They need people to come in, do weekend seminars, encourage them, train them, so they can then go out in their community and evangelize and do apologetics and know how to interpret the

Bible and these different things. Well, no one's going to do that to small churches. We are.

That's what we do. That's what makes us different. We're going to go to where the need is, not necessarily where the money is.

And so those expenses, the travel expenses have tripled. And we've tried to really keep it down and watch it, but our expenses have been up 25 % over the year before.

And so it's really hard when our book sales are down 25%, our donations are down 25%, but our expenses are up 25%.

And so my plea to you, my appeal to you is this. If you're getting value out of the podcast, if you're getting value over the different things that we do, whether it's the

Christian podcast community, the weekend seminars where we come into churches, the podcasts that Striving Fraternity produced, this one,

Apologetics Live and Theology Throwdown, the Wrap Report Daily, How to Be a

Podcaster, these that we put on, if it's the materials we put out on our website at strivingfraternity .org,

the books we produce, any of that, if you find value in that, would you consider helping us out? Just go to strivingfraternity .org

and you can donate there. There's a way to set up for monthly donations. Monthly helps us the most because we have monthly needs.

We're going to be looking to take some of our books and get them translated into Spanish and Portuguese. That's going to cost some money.

We're looking to try to see if we can get onto terrestrial radio, but we need support to be able to do that.

So these are some things we want to do because we want to help people understand the Bible that they have in their hands better.

And we think that podcasting, though it gets us thousands of listeners, we want to be able to get onto a radio where we can have tens of thousands of listeners and be able to have people better understand the

Bible and know how to handle it, know how to interpret things, know how to defend it. That's something we'd like to be able to do.

And you could be part of that. You can help us out. Just go to strivingfraternity .org and help support us there.

I think you could even go to strivingfraternity .org support, I think is the page, but the link will be on the main page on how to support us.

So I want to just encourage you guys to consider doing that. And if you've gotten some value from this podcast, if you wouldn't mind sharing it with folks, write us a review, let us know what you think.

I do want to mention, I want to do a giveaway. And so we talked previously with the authors of Purposeful and Persistent Parenting.

And so I have three copies of that book to give away. And I want to be able to give those away.

And then we have also what I'm going to be giving away is some DVDs, or CDs, it's going to be your choice.

We have from our different conferences that we used to do the Spreading the Fire conferences. So we have the

Jersey Fire in 2013, which was all about presuppositional apologetics. We have NorCal Fire 2013, which was about getting

Christianity right. That was with who I mentioned earlier, Matt Slick and I. We talk about different theological issues to get right.

And then in 2014, we did a combined between Jersey and Ohio, and we have talks on the family.

So we go through all these different talks about the family. And so those are six things we're giving away.

And we're going to be giving away to anybody who starts a monthly donation for over $25.

So if you start a monthly donation for over $25, the first six people to do that will be getting those six items.

Now, will we do another giveaway? Probably, but we'll see next month. So I hope that it would encourage you to maybe consider if you were on the fence with that, if you'd consider that.

And we're going to let the first one get to pick what they want out of those four items, and then the next one gets to pick out of what's left, and so on and so on.

So just to encourage you, go to strivingfortrinity .org and consider supporting us.

We would greatly appreciate it. I also want to encourage you to consider supporting Eric's, as we said at the bookstore, a really great opportunity there.

So go to utachristianbookstore .com, and that will get you to—actually, it's going to redirect you to Mormon Research Ministry's site, mrm .org.

And so don't be alarmed at that. And that's going to give you all the information with what they're doing with the bookstore.

Sign up so that you get the information early. Help support them in doing that. That's a greatly needed thing in Utah.

You don't understand how many people would come into Sandra Tanner's bookstore and just talk, just to get questions answered.

It wasn't so much about selling books. It was about evangelism. And that's what you're going to do, because when they set up this

Bible Museum there, there's going to be more to talk about, and they're going to be able to go and show people things.

So this is a unique opportunity to be able to support them as well. So I want to encourage you to consider doing both of those if you can.

Obviously, your local church comes first. But if you have after that, maybe cut out the

Starbucks coffee. You don't need that anyway. And for that, you could support

Daily Starbucks coffee. You could support both ministries with $25 each.

But Eric, thanks for coming on. Thanks for all that you do, both with ministry, with Mormonism Research Ministry, and also with your trips for Israel.

Your trips to Israel really do change lives. Thanks for having me on, and I hope that we get to travel again.

I sure hope so. And with that, folks, that's a wrap. This podcast is part of the

Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.