April 5, 2023 Show with Andreas Köstenberger on “The Final Days of Jesus”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this fifth day of April, 2023, the last April before Easter, and I am thrilled to have a returning guest.

He was actually just with us on March 31st, was the last time he was with us to discuss his book, Biblical Theology, A Canonical Thematic and Ethical Approach, but today he is going to be discussing a book that is very timely for this time of year, but is obviously of infinite value any time of year, The Final Days of Jesus.

Andreas Kastenberger is a leading evangelical scholar and prolific writer, author, editor, or translator of close to 50 books, including God, Marriage, and Family, A Theology of John's Gospel, Excellence, a commentary on 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, and the Biblical Theology for Christian Proclamation series, and he's also an editor of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and a visiting fellow at St. Edmund's College in Cambridge, England.

He is also the co-founder of Biblical Foundations, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Andreas Kastenberger.

Terrific to be with you again, I really appreciate it.

For the sake of our listeners who have not heard you on the program before, perhaps they missed your March 31st interview, or perhaps they heard you and just don't remember the details behind Biblical Foundations, please share that information with our listeners.

Yes, thank you so very much. Well, my wife and I have been married for 33 years, and we have four grown children, and we've so much enjoyed our journey in our marriage and also as parents, and so Biblical Foundations is primarily seeking to be a resource for couples and for families on how to have a good marriage, how to be good parents, and as you mentioned, the storefront is the BiblicalFoundations .org website where we have just a lot of helpful resources, and we've written several books on marriage and the family as well, including Equipping for Life and Parenting Essentials.

Well, if anybody wants more details on Biblical Foundations, go to BiblicalFoundations .org, BiblicalFoundations .org. Well, as I said, this book that you have written, The Final Days of Jesus, is obviously very timely, and as we approach Good Friday and commemorate the death of Jesus Christ on Golgotha's cross, who paid the perfect payment and paid the perfect sacrifice for the sins of his people and satisfied the wrath of his Father on that cross through his perpetuatory death, and obviously subsequent to that, the glorious resurrection of our Lord and the ascension into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father.

As we approach these days coming up, there are obviously, you know as well as I do, many books that have been written by great Christian minds throughout the centuries, including even some contemporary authors who have written on the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

What made you say to yourself, I've got to add something to the volumes that are already available in The Final Days of Jesus?

Well, I need to give credit to Justin Taylor, who is the publisher of Crossway, who approached me with the idea for this project because he wanted to have an aid for the family and for people in the church how to follow Jesus along on his journey in this final week of his earthly ministry, and as the subtitle of our book says, it's the most important week of the most important person who ever lived, and so I think that by itself already justifies devoting a book to it.

The book essentially reproduces the text that referred to Jesus' final week in the ESV, English Standard Version, translation, and then we provide a brief commentary, you know, day by day.

Now, perhaps you could let us know your thoughts on what Christians, and we'll include genuine Bible-believing Christians, and also non-believers, or at least perhaps nominal Christians who are not truly regenerate, but what does humanity that is aware of this story, I mean, it's a very globally known story for two millennia that, you know, even even those that bear no resemblance to Christianity, they may be atheists, they may be orthodox Jews, they may be Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, most people know something about this story, but what is it that you think universally many of us, including genuine Christians, get wrong about this?

That's a great question. You know, when I was working on the book, it was really a devotional experience. What a privilege to work on a book on the final days of Jesus, and what really struck me increasingly is that, you know, we sometimes think of the gospel as more like an abstract story where we affirm certain key doctrines, such as the crucifixion, burial, resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, but tracing Jesus' steps in his final week on earth made me realize this is not just an abstract set of affirmations.

This is actually a story of a historical person who was living and breathing, and who is dying for us, and who rose again, and who sustained a set of relationships with his close followers, and who antagonized the authorities, and so this is the story of all stories, the true story that shows God's Son dying on the cross for our sins, and so I think as C .S. Lewis once said, Christianity is the true myth, the one that is actually real, and true, and historical, and explains everything else, all the other stories.

Now, when it comes to something that people may be getting wrong about this story, do you think that far too often, and perhaps we even as not only Christians, but theologically Reformed Christians, sometime when we hear the story, either read from the scriptures, preached from a pulpit, perhaps we are even seeing a movie that involves the resurrection, and I know that there's a huge debate, especially amongst Reformed Christians, on whether that's even appropriate, especially if the person of Jesus is depicted in a film by an actor, but sometimes do you think that we forget that there was something far more excruciating, and tormenting, and horrible, and unthinkably painful that Jesus was awaiting, that in actuality, and I'm not saying this to undermine the significance of the physical torture he experienced, but sometimes we just look at this as only the execution of a man, and what a man would be going through, through his own emotions, his own fears, and so on, and of course Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, not to ever undermine or diminish either of those aspects, but isn't the fact that he was awaiting to actually have his father's wrath poured upon him something that is even more infinitely terrifying than any of those physical things that he experienced, the scourging at the pillar, and the all kinds of torment, the mocking, the being nailed to the cross, and so on.

There have been martyrs, countless millions of martyrs throughout the centuries who were only men, and not God as well as what we have in the case of Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man. But we have to realize that this execution of Jesus, which he voluntarily participated in at the orchestration of his own father, even though it was done by the sinful hands of wicked men, this is a unique experience that no one will ever encounter.

So even though the fact there have been many martyrs, this is a very.

Unique situation, isn't it? Yes, Chris, that is so true. You know, we look at the crucifixion actually from a human point of view, and indeed Jesus met our needs for salvation, and we can be eternally grateful for that.

But especially John's Gospel presents Jesus' death and suffering from the vantage point of the Holy Trinity, the relationship that Jesus as the Son had with God the Father. And I think John makes the point that Jesus first and foremost died not for humanity but for the Father, because it was the Father's will for him to give his life for sinful humanity to provide salvation.

And so in the end you have Jesus' so-called night priestly prayer in John 17, which is directed to the Father, and Jesus tells the Father that he has accomplished the mission that the Father has given to him.

And so that is just a beautiful picture. I think like you like you described it, of the Trinity jointly working together on behalf of humanity's salvation, but it is not just an anthropocentric act. It is a theocentric act.

It's a transaction that first and foremost occurs among the persons of the Holy Trinity.

So your book is laid out from the Sunday prior to Easter Sunday, the week before, all the way through that glorious resurrection day. What can you tell us, obviously in summary form, about that Sunday one week before the the resurrection of Christ?

Yes, so we follow the traditional biblical progression starting with Palm Sunday. Of course we just celebrated Palm Sunday a few days ago, and so we see here Jesus triumphantly entering the city of Jerusalem.

He was mounted humbly on a donkey in keeping with the way Solomon entered Jerusalem, son of David, and also in keeping with prophetic messianic predictions such as Zechariah chapter 9. And the crowds are hailing him as Messiah and Deliverer, and they wave palm branches, hence the name Palm Sunday.

But one suspects that they did not fully understand that Jesus would have to be crucified and would have to suffer. So there's a certain element of misunderstanding at Palm Sunday, but that triumphal entry is the main event that happens on that first day of the final week of Jesus.

Now I'm assuming that those who were giving honor to Christ as he was riding that donkey must have had some kind of a familiarity with the Old Testament prophecies that would give that picture that Jesus fulfilled.

Otherwise it would have been a somewhat of a comical picture. I don't mean any obviously blasphemy or disrespect to our Lord, but you would think that if this was a book, meaning the scriptures, if it was written by your average novelist, let's say, Jesus would have been riding in on a white stallion or something like that.

Here you have him riding in on a donkey with his feet probably nearly dragging on the ground. It is a humorous picture, even though it's a very important and solemn event.

That's very interesting because, of course, in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is indeed portrayed as the rider on a white horse where he returns triumphantly. But at his first coming, you're exactly right.

He corrects expectations to some extent, and he sends a message, I think, by his manner of entry that he is not going to be that national hero that some people were expecting. So it all has to do with managing expectations.

And for those with eyes to see, they should have recognized that this was not the kind of Messiah that the zealots were expecting or that others in Jewish life were expecting, who were hoping that the Messiah would overthrow the Romans and would reestablish Israel's political control over their own territory.

So, because of the fact we do have seven days to go through here, tell us about the significance of the Monday after Palm Sunday.

Yes, that's right. Now, on Monday, we...

By the way, correction, there's eight days. I said seven.

Right. So on Monday, we see that Jesus engages in a fairly enigmatic action, which is he, when he was on his way into the city of Jerusalem, and he typically stayed outside the city in Bethany, and then entered the city, short walk with his disciples the following morning, he curses a fig tree.

And of course, the fig tree symbolized Israel. And Jesus, of course, was very disappointed, shall we say, with Israel for Israel's failure to bear spiritual fruit. And so the curse on the fig tree symbolizes God's judgment on Israel.

And then, continuing on that note of judgment, Jesus enters the temple and cleanses it, the famous cleansing of the temple, which again, in prophetic fashion, acted out God's judgment on Israel. Matthew presents that in this intercalated form, some people call that a Markan sandwich, where he starts with the cursing of the fig tree, then moves to the cleansing of the temple, and then returns to the story of the fig tree.

And so the bookends, the cursing of the fig tree, interpret what's in the heart of that section, which is the cleansing of the temple. So it's all about God's impending judgment on Israel, and especially its corrupt worship at the temple.

Now, there seems to be a disagreement amongst Christian scholars even, even those that would be in agreement with us on many matters of theology, if not most, as to whether or not when Jesus was in the temple, cleansing the temple by chasing out the money changers after he had fashioned a whip, there are some who say there was no way that Jesus actually ever made contact with any of those individuals with that whip, and that he was just frightening them to run out.

And others have said that they believe he wouldn't have fashioned the whip unless he intended to use it for the reasons a whip is used. What is.

Your opinion on that? I'm agnostic on this. I've been asked that question before, and I looked very closely at the synoptic accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and I think it is simply left to inference, and so I understand that different people draw different inferences from that, but it doesn't clearly say whether or not Jesus actually literally struck anybody with that whip, and so it's simply up to our logic of whether or not, you know, how we construe the background to him fashioning that whip and driving out the money changers.

Now, do you think that there's anything.

In the scriptures about the descriptions of Christ that would negate us going with the one option that he did actually whip individuals? He obviously couldn't have time to whip every single one of them, but is there anything that would defy the character of Christ if he indeed.

Did physically hurt people by whipping them? Well, probably. I would think that whole debate, to my mind, kind of misses the main point why Jesus fashioned in the first place, which is just to corrupt the temple, to basically expel those who are corrupting worship, and so his purpose was not, you know, so much to literally whip anybody, but more it was a symbolic prophetic signs act, and I think the reality that he sought to convey there was that God's wrath was pertained to the corruption of Jewish worship.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break right now. If you have a question for Andreas Kostenberger, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages with more of Dr. Andreas Kostenberger.

And our discussion of the final days of Jesus. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here. I'm.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Always mention Chris Arnson of Iron Shoppin's Iron Radio. We're now back with Andreas Kostenberger, who is a co-founder of Biblical Foundations. We are discussing one of his very timely books, The Final Days of Jesus, and our email address, if you care to join us on the air, is chrisarnson at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com, and give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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We understand that, that those would be reasons to remain anonymous, but if it's just a general question, please give us your first name, at least, city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

And we have a question for you. It's actually a first-time questioner who sent in this question. Joel, from right here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I'm curious how Dr. Kostenberger explains the three days from Jesus's death till resurrection.

How we get three days and three nights, like Jesus said, of Jonah in Matthew 1240, from Friday till dawn on Sunday. I am often asked by new Christians and would love to hear how he explains it. That actually came up recently when I interviewed one of those rare advocates of a Thursday crucifixion, Dr. Andreas, I'm sorry, not Dr. Kostenberger, Dr. A .M. Brewster.

A .M. Brewster, I'm sorry, biblical counselor A .M. Brewster. And there are even advocates of a Wednesday crucifixion, and perhaps you can correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Kostenberger, but I think that Lorraine Bettner may have held to a Wednesday crucifixion.

But that would, a Wednesday crucifixion would allow for three little literal 24-hour days, which the traditional Friday day of the.

Crucifixion does not. But if you could explain that. Well, I'll try. I get that question quite a bit as well. And, you know, there's multiple reasons why people might ask that question. And I don't know the person who wrote in, you know, it could be that there's a genuine question, or it could be that, you know, in some cases, detractors of the Christian faith think that here they finally have an error in Scripture, because clearly, literally, Jesus was not in the tomb for three days and three nights, right?

He was only the tomb for parts of three days and two nights. And so if you press that, you know, some people might to a literalistic level, there would be an error in Scripture. I don't think so, though, because there's plenty of evidence that for Jewish people, they would use a day and a night as a shorthand for a day.

And so, you know, for Jonah to be in the belly of the big fish for three days and three nights, essentially, he was in the belly of the big fish for three days. So how do you get three days then for Jesus to be in the tomb for three days?

Well, by inclusive reckoning, because what Jewish people did in the first century is that even a partial day, they would count as a day or a full day. And so if you count that way, then Jesus was in the tomb for a little bit on Friday, what we call Friday, then on the entire day, Saturday, and then for part of a day, Sunday.

So even though you could say, well, there's only one full day and two partial days, the Jews would still count that as three full days. So that is the best I can do. I think that's completely satisfactory.

But I understand that I would probably not convince a hardcore fundamentalist with that answer. Well, some might equate the literal.

Six-day creation view, which is my view, the young earth creationist view, they may equate the importance of that with three days in the tomb of Christ. So I don't know what your thoughts on the differences between those two scenarios are.

Yeah, I would just say that the big story here is that Jesus rose from the dead. Amen.

Well, thank you, Joel. And you have won a free copy of the very book we are addressing today, The Final Days of Jesus, the most important week of the most important person who ever lived. Since you live right here in Carlisle, might I suggest that you go to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service rather than having them mail it to you.

And it's right on Rittner Highway in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And tell them that you are a listener of Iron Trip and Zion Radio and that you won The Final Days of Jesus by Andreas Kastenberger. And again, for the sake of time, we have to move along if we're going to try to cover each of these eight days that we already addressed.

And if you could move on to the significance of the.

Resurrection of Christ.

The Tuesday before the resurrection of Christ.

Absolutely. I think one thing that really strikes me, and that is, I think, so admirable is that in many ways Jesus did in the final week of his life what he did during his entire ministry, which is he went and taught in the temple.

And, you know, like he would later defend himself, he said he taught publicly. And so his teaching is a matter of public record. And so that's what he did on Tuesday. And he's promptly accosted and, you know, challenged by the authorities who ask him, you know, what makes you think that you can cleanse the temple and drive out the money changers and disrupt the commerce there?

And so he says, well, I'm going to answer that question if you answer one of my questions, which is, was the baptism of John from heaven or was it from man? And make a long story short, they refused to answer because he had them either way.

And so he says, well, neither will I answer your question. And so for the rest of the day, you see him engage in various interchanges with the Jewish authorities who try to trick him and trap him. And he masterfully parries all their attacks.

And clearly, you know, his wisdom is far superior to that of the Jewish authorities.

Okay, now let's move on before the midway break to the significance of the Wednesday prior to.

The resurrection of Christ. Yes, and that is a short answer because we hardly have any record of anything happening on Wednesday. It's very intriguing. This is the quiet, the calm before the storm. All we hear is that the authorities continue to plot against Jesus and try to find an inconspicuous way to get rid of him without antagonizing the Roman authorities or causing disruption of the festival.

Remember, there were probably hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in the holy city that week. And so they are struggling to decide how to best proceed in their persecution of Jesus. But that's pretty much all that we know that happened on Wednesday.

Now, this plotting, this scheming of the Pharisees and the Sadducees to bring about the execution of Christ, which obviously they could have never done without the orchestration of this event by the Father, by God himself, and through the voluntarily laying down of his life by Jesus Christ himself.

But one of the things that is interesting whenever I consider this, do you, I mean, I don't know if there's enough information in the scriptures to come to a conclusion with certainty, but it would seem to me that the Pharisees especially, not necessarily the Jews in the crowds crying out for Barabbas to be spared, that were just ordinary men and women.

But when you consider the Pharisees and their knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures calling out for the death of Christ, and even having an increase in their fury against him and their hatred of him when they saw him doing miracles, when he was actually doing things that should have led them to say, this is truly the Son of God, this is truly the Messiah, this is not an ordinary man.

And yet they did not do that and they cried out for his death. Were these people conscious of the fact that yes, this is the Messiah, but he is intruding into our religion and we want him dead? Or is this just a case of unregenerate people who, even though they know the scriptures well, they just didn't see Jesus in those scriptures?

It's a fascinating question and, you know, it would take us quite a while to adequately address that question, but I think the most important thing to say here is that I think John's gospel is very clear that ultimately Jesus was crucified on the charge of blasphemy.

And so I think the Pharisees were rigid monotheists. They believed there was one and only one God, and Jesus violated their rigid understanding of monotheism by claiming to be God. And so by their simple logic is there could only be one God, and so there could not be a second God.

And so they were convinced that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy and therefore had to be, you know, stoned or crucified. Well, let's now move in to the next day, the Thursday before the resurrection of Christ.

Yes, of course, that is the day of the famous Last Supper in the upper room, where Jesus gathered with his 12 apostles to celebrate the Jewish Passover, and where he also instituted the new covenant in his body and his blood.

And, of course, John's gospel gives us a priceless treasure in form of the so-called farewell or upper room discourse, where we have five wonderful chapters of Jesus engaging in an act of humble servitude by washing his disciples' feet, and then by instructing them about the coming of the Holy Spirit and about the implications of his impending crucifixion.

We actually have a listener who is asking about something that you just mentioned. We have Christopher in Western Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who asks, why is it that during the Last Supper we have Jesus Christ washing the feet of his disciples, and yet very, very few denominations today continue that practice when they observe the Lord's Supper?

Because they understand that Jesus tried to set an example of humble servanthood, which in that culture took on the form of washing feet, because what you had is a custom of ancient hospitality that if somebody had you over for dinner, and you arrived walking the dusty roads in your sandals, your feet were dirty.

And so they provided typically a household servant with a basin full of water to wash your feet upon entering to the house, so that when you ate dinner and your feet were actually right beside the face of the person next to you, hygiene was properly served.

Now, of course, in our case, we typically don't walk to a dinner invitation in our sandals and so have no need for someone to wash our feet. First, Timothy 5, I think it's verse 18, is very helpful here, because there Paul mentions that widows qualified for church support if they have washed the feet of the saints.

And quite transparently, he didn't mean literally washed feet, but it is used as a metaphor or as a symbol of serving the needs of others. Now, perhaps this is more of a pastoral question,.