Philippians 2, John Lasken

John 5:39 and the Call to Know the God of the Bible

Welcome you this morning as we gather together. If you're in the sanctuary, go ahead and find a seat. If you're in the hallway, come on up and join us. It's awesome to be together this morning. I gather the temperature still hasn't gotten too high, has it?

No? Okay. I want to start us out by considering John 5 .39. John 5 .39. It says, you search the scriptures, for in them you think you find eternal life. This is a good thing. This is a good thing for us to spend time in the Word, to spend time understanding the Word.

In fact, we are exhorted to be prepared to give an apology in season and out of season. So spending time seeing what the Word has, even memorizing the Word, knowing the Word is a good calling. It's a good spiritual discipline.

Let me finish that verse for you. You search the scriptures, for then in them you think you find eternal life, but they are they which testify of me. The real power of that verse is, okay, study the scriptures and this is a good thing, but the real power of that verse is how well do you know God?

How well do you know the Creator? How well do you know the Son of God? What is your relationship with Jesus Christ? You search the scriptures, for in them you think you find eternal life, but they are they which testify of me.

We gather together. We're going to open up the Word of God. We're going to study the Word of God. We're going to hear what the Word of God has to say. All scripture is given by inspiration and is profitable for adoption, for reproof, for correction, instruction, and righteousness.

This is all good stuff, but I think that then when you take it to that next step and you use that time spent in scripture to know God and to have a closer relationship with him, it comes so much more deeply alive in your heart.

This is where we're going to be going today as we turn into the book of Philippians, so be ready for that. I have some announcements. This is now almost the end of June. Not to get you all excited, but Pride Month ends today.

You can put your rainbow up because God gave us the rainbow. You put it already up? I love it. Thank you. All the time. But we got lots of stuff going on, so let me give you a quick rundown on what's happening.

After second service, if you are like me, technically challenged, I don't even know how to spell app, much less use it. But if you would like to know how to use your technology, getting on the church app and stuff like that, there's going to be a technical exchange this afternoon after second service.

So if you want to learn what can you actually do with the app, what are these things all about? Drew, help me out. I'm floundering here. Okay, so lots of opportunities to be able to be, I guess, encouraged and given extra stuff through the technology instead of being afraid of it.

Also, tomorrow morning, gentlemen, is our first Monday of the month breakfast. So I encourage you to assign, set up your clock early and join us six o 'clock for our time of fellowship with the men. Again, prayer meeting tonight at six o 'clock here.

We have an activity called Trail Mix. Now, Trail Mix is a ministry that we're launching here. It's kind of comes off of something called Trail Life. It is a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts. Then there's another one for the girls.

What's that called? Anybody know? What's that? What's the girls Trail Life called? That's the youth pastor's wife. She doesn't know. There is something for the girls, but they don't do it together. The girls have theirs, the guys have theirs.

We're launching something where the girls and the guys will be together at the appropriate age group. So we're calling it Trail Mix. Now you get it. Okay. The actual Trail Mix is probably going to launch sometime in the fall, but we're having an early event.

This will be more of a family event. It's on the 24th. That's a Wednesday. Be leaving here, the church building early in the morning and going up to some Mount in North Jersey. It's not Mount Sinai. What Mount is it?

Am I making you feel uncomfortable? Okay. Anyway, there will be some sort of an outdoors event for the family. It's on the 24th. The very next day on the 25th, the DiMenna family will be here in the church at seven o 'clock for an update on their missions and their missions ministry.

So it's open to the whole church. That's on Thursday, the 25th. We have some classes coming up. These are look aheads for the fall time. There will be a Marriage Matters class, which will be launched.

We've had many of them. They're very, very powerful. If you're at all interested, you can see Bill and Janice Biddle about it. I don't know, Drew, if you could help out with that too. Is that what that is?

Okay. So there's a Marriage Matters class coming up. There will also be a Financial Stewardship class coming up sometime in the fall. Also in the fall, we are going to have another baptism. If you were just so encouraged by the baptism that we just had out here a few weeks ago, we are going to be having another baptism in the fall down the shore.

So if you are interested in it, we would like to be able to work with you. We will have baptism classes sometime. We have to find out when the date is, and then there'll be three weeks of classes sometime before that.

You can contact me, Jeff, any one of the elders, so that we can make sure we can get you involved in that. And so right now, Drew, I'm supposed to ask you to come up.

I'm here because I have the right shirt on. This is the VBS shirt for this year. VBS is August 5th through the 9th. It's six o 'clock to 8 .15 at night, and approximate ages of children are four to 12.

And we're hoping you're going to register soon. And that was also up here right now with the QR code, and you'll see it's flipping by with other things that we can sign up for. But it's also on the church app and on the website.

And importantly, right after church today, there's a VBS staff meeting. So if you're interested in helping out with crafts, music, snacks, all of those things, please come to the meeting right after church.

And by the way, if you are on staff, you're going to get a t-shirt today because all the t-shirts are here. So please come if you're interested in serving. Thank you.

Thank you, Drew. And be in prayer. This is an opportunity for the children of our church and the children of our community to come into this activity where the gospel message is given. So be in prayer for the children that will be receiving it.

Prayer, Worship, and the Opening Scripture of Philippians 2

Let's turn to prayer. Father, we come to you knowing that you are the God of all. You are the creator. You are the supreme God. We come to you wanting to know you better. We thank you, Lord, that we can open your word and see what your word has.

It teaches, it instructs us, it perfects us. And I pray as we spend time in your word that our hearts would be opened to know you better and better. In Jesus' name. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. Today we gather to worship and honor. Please rise. Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And as we reflect on the beauty and majesty of Jesus, let us be reminded of the opening hymn, Fairest Lord Jesus, which exalts him as the ruler of all nature and the source of our soul's glory, joy, and crown.

In Colossians chapter one, verses 16 through 17, we read, for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible. Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

He is before all things and in him all things hold.

Together. This next song is called Less of Ourselves. To reflect his love and grace,.

It echoes the call and the scripture that we're going to study today. Philippians chapter two, verses five through seven. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,.

But emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. During first service, I came up here.

Not knowing it, so it was really kind of cool this time. Elliot, thank you for picking that song. You basically preached my sermon. We are dismissed. Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, night unto night showeth forth knowledge. I love that passage. I love that psalm. The reality of the general revelation of God is evidence to all who would just have eyes to see.

And then it goes on in the second verse and it says the day and today utter a speech. Creation even speaks to us about the majesty of who God is. Night unto night standeth forth knowledge. The question I want to ask you is what knowledge?

My family had the privilege this past week of going out to Kentucky and we spent one day in the Creation Museum and the second day in the Ark Encounter. Anybody here that has done that, been there? Oh my goodness, more than first service.

You guys win. I found it absolutely intriguing and fascinating. I want to speak more about the Creation Museum, but it's similar to the Ark. You see, you can go through these exhibits and especially in the Creation Museum, there are a lot of aspects that take us through the walk of creation.

And on these exhibits, they will have two explanations. They will have the worldview explanation and then they will have the biblical explanation. And clearly, one is a old earth, one is a new earth. Clearly, one starts out by accident and continues on by accident.

And clearly, the other has God as the creator in his design and in his timing, creating the world. Six days. Now the book of Genesis, in the Hebrew, the word for day is yom. And I think Jeff mentioned this maybe a couple of weeks ago.

In the Hebrew, if yom is attached to a cardinal number, like first, second, third, it invariably all the time refers to a 24-hour time period. More than that, if yom is used in conjunction with a descriptor in the morning and it was evening, it emphasizes the fact that we are talking about a 24-hour period.

And so the Creation Museum, without any apology, it just says, on one, they're making suppositions based on what we see today, projecting it as what it would have been like. So what is today always was, okay?

The other one has an eyewitness account. That would be God. And they speak much about this. One of the things that is evidenced and is emphasized is this phrase that, if you tell a lie often enough and loud enough, people will believe it's true.

And so as we go into our schools today, it is no longer the theory of evolution, it is evolution. It is no longer the theory of how things came to be, it is how things came to be. They have said it loud enough and often enough, so now that it's just presumed to be true.

Much of the decisions about the age of stuff uses something called carbon dating. There are a set of sedimentary lava rocks that have gone through carbon dating and have found to have been 340 ,000 years old.

We believe that the earth, based on God's eyewitness account, is 6 ,000 years old. But these rocks are found by carbon dating to be 3 ,400 years old. Here's the rub. Those rocks came from Mount St. Helens in 1980.

My math says they're 43 years old. But by carbon dating, see, they take things that they consider can't be changed, it's unchangeable, and so they take what they understand now and they backdate things and they come up with dates.

Now as you go through the Creation Museum, you do see much of this. And as I go through this Creation Museum, I can go through it, in fact I did for quite a bit, go through it looking for information.

I'm going to be leaving Saturday, Sunday I report in for six weeks up in Cooperstown, New York. I umpire 12-year-old baseball. And there will be hundreds of people there, umpires, coaches, parents. And I like to go equipped because I don't hide my faith, I get into conversations.

And I like to be equipped with the logic behind it. I am an engineer, I'm a scientist, I like, I do like logic. And so going through the different displays and reading them for information, that was okay until I realized what I really was missing was the best reason of all to be going through that creation.

It was to fall more and more in love with the Creator. Isn't falling in love with the Creator better than building a mindful of information? There's a phrase that's called, it is better to know the God of the Bible than it is to know the Bible of the God.

We'll explain that more as we go, but see here's the difference. If I, if I know the God of the Bible, I am spending my emotions and my thoughts on something that is immutable, unchangeable, it is eternal, it is God.

But if I'm spending my time on the Bible of the God, then I'm looking at words, I'm looking at phrases, and that really was how critical thinking came to be, was taking a look at what was stated in words and phrases in the Bible and determining it if by reason I can accept them or reject them.

And that's critical thinking. More on that later. Today we're in the book of Philippians. I get the chance when I'm in the pulpit, Tim is following after me. We're preaching exegetically through the book of Philippians.

Pastor Jeff, of course, right now is preaching through the book of Romans. We love to preach, where does the Bible take us next? That's where we take. So today we are in chapter two, verses five through 11.

Let me read these for you. So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, that's the beginning, that's Chad's verse one. Let me start at five. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equity with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men.

Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Now the book of Philippians is going to talk a lot about joy, about how we live life enjoyment, how we live life to the fullness through a relationship with Jesus Christ, through the power of God. So why is this teaching on Christology, and that's what I'm going to call it, in the middle of this letter?

How does this passage impact who you are? I'm going to come out with a statement that where your worldview is founded will impact how you see things and how you react to things. What do I mean? If your worldview is the world naturalistic view, then you're free to make suppositions like the carbon dating effort at Mount St. Helens.

You're going to be using scientific reason, logic, and everything else. But if your worldview is God, then you're going to see things through a lens that understands the truth is found in God. There are a couple of scientists that are on display at the Creation Museum.

One of them is a gentleman by the name of Charles Layell. He's a Scottish geologist. He was known for natural causes, explaining everything about Earth's history. He didn't need God. This was his quote.

The goal is to free science from Moses. Did you get that? The goal is to free science from God's given word to Moses recorded in the Pentateuch. Science can have nothing to do with that. You see, science explains everything.

We don't need to go to this myth, to this irrelevant book. We need to free science from Moses. And then Richard Lewontin, who was an evolutionary biologist in the 20th century, around 1980, he said, materialism is absolute.

Do you get this? If you tell a lie often enough and loud enough, people believe that it's true. Materialism is absolute. We cannot allow even a foot of the divine in the door. Materialism is absolute, and any of this stuff about God is just fabrication.

It's mythology. We can't even let him get a foot in the door. So that's the degree to which it's gone. So my question to you this morning is, what's your view of scripture? We go to scripture and we study scripture, and this is an important thing.

I quoted John 5 .39 at the opening. You study scripture, for in them you think you find eternal life. There is value to going to scripture and spending time in scripture, because you learn truth. You learn it from the very word of God inspired.

It's profitable. That verse goes on, but they are they which testify of me. Is your view of scripture to gain intellectual knowledge so that you can win an argument, or is your view of scripture to learn about the creator?

Are you seeking the God of the Bible, or are you satisfied with the Bible of the God? Let's pray. Father, we are in your very, very presence this morning, and we are seeking in your word what you have given to us, which you have taught us.

I pray that our time together, spent together, will encourage us to know these words, but also more important, to know you, that we would have a foundation for life in Jesus' name. Amen. So I strongly want to encourage you to understand that how you perceive the Lord Jesus Christ is actually going to impact how you live your life, how you respond to life, how you see things occurring.

And there are two influences that are of importance, and the first one is going to be responding to God's desire to have a relationship with you. Did you know that God desires to have a relationship with you?

I do like how the Westminster Confession of Faith starts out by saying the chief goal of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. It does not say that the chief goal of man is to learn everything that they can about God.

Not that that's a bad thing, to use God's revelation to learn him, but the chief goal of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. See, God has spent so far throughout creation the emphasis on revealing himself to man.

It started out in the garden, Genesis 2 and 3. God created man, said it was very good. God created Eve. Man said, whoa, man, that was woman. That was supposed to be a joke. Anyway, thank you. But he did walk in the garden in the cool of the day with Adam and Eve.

He spent time in relationship with them until the fall. Then Genesis 12, God comes to Abram and he gives him a covenant promise on how things will be done. In Exodus, God encourages them to build a tabernacle that would go with them as they wandered through the wilderness.

And they would set it up, and they would set up a holy of holies in the inside. And when that was set up, the Shekinah glory came down into the holy of holies and abided in the midst of the camp. God would reveal himself.

Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. And we know that at the end of time, nobody is going to be able to deny. He is going to reveal himself to everybody. Every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess.

Even those who in life have chosen to deny him, every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess. Everybody does get a chance to see and will see. The second half of this relationship then is man's response to God.

God expresses his desire for man to worship him. The Ten Commandments, I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt love me with all thine heart and all thy soul and all thy mind.

Deuteronomy 6 .5 is one of three passages in what's called the Shema of Israel. And the Jews were to, in the morning and the evening, recite these three passages. And all three of them emphasize, love the Lord your God with all your heart.

God is setting up a desire, an expressed desire, for man to respond to him in worship. In Mark 12, when challenged, Jesus said the first and the greatest commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.

The second is like love your neighbor as yourself. But you see, God expects, he desires, that man will respond. He has revealed and he seeks this response. But there's a second influence in the world and that's Satan, prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience, among whom also we had our conversation in time past.

Ephesians 2, 2 and 3. Satan is in a battle for man's heart. God proclaimed to Moses, I am. Peter proclaimed when challenged, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus said, blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

Man gets the opportunity to hear, to see, to know, but you see, Satan, and we know this when he was Lucifer from the book of Isaiah, when he was in heaven as one of the highest angels, perhaps the one that led worship up there, wasn't satisfied.

I will make myself like the most high God and God banishes him down. And from that time on, Satan has been doing everything he can to deny God so that he can be elevated into that position of being God.

That's Satan's agenda. I will make myself like the most high God. It started out in the first phase before the Messiah actually came. Satan understood that there was a Messiah to come. Now he's not omniscient, but he is quick.

He's a quick learner. And so he knew that there was a Messiah to be prophesied and he had to stop that Messiah. And so in the time of Esther, the decree that all Jews would be killed, it would stop the line.

It didn't happen. Every time Satan tried something, God protected his people. Messiah, I got news for you. Messiah came right when God ordained that he would come. Satan couldn't stop it. So now he's in phase two of his agenda.

He couldn't stop Messiah, but now what he's trying to do is he's trying to contaminate the gospel. We have the gospel. We go into all the world preaching. After that, I give you power. We are given the gospel message to give the world so that the world can hear the good news, so that the world can respond through his grace by faith.

But Satan's agenda now is to contaminate that gospel, making something less than it really is. There have been various stages of this. Shortly after Christ's death, the church is coming and the Judaizers came in to be.

You have to do certain works because just faith alone isn't enough. So they added works to faith. The Gnostics said there is special knowledge. If you have that special knowledge, you will be a Christian.

You have to have the special knowledge, the Gnostics. The Arians claimed that Jesus was nothing more than a created being. You see the contamination of the gospel message trying to influence the spread of something that was meaningless.

Jeff's book, War-Torn Church, it identified several of them. One of them was the downgrade conspiracy where they challenged that scripture was ever inspired and that the authority of scripture is not to be taken for granted.

The Babylonian captivity, there was a time where the church dogma and doctrine held individuals captive to the doctrine and dogma instead of truth. And then the Scopes Monkey Trial where evolution became the word of the day.

In the 18th century into the early 19th century, another of these attacks came to be. It's called the Canonic Theory. More on that one later. But what this is, is the challenge to the full deity of Christ.

And it comes out of Philippians 2, 7. True Christology, which is captured in this Philippians 2, 5 to 11, is what we should understand and hold on to about Jesus Christ without compromise. Now the book of Philippians is a book about joy.

It's about fulfilled life. Some of the verses that are important in it, and you can see how this book just encourages us to walk with him. I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ.

1, 6. For me to live is Christ, to die is gain. 1, 21. Complete my joy being of same mind and the same love and full accord and of one mind. 2, 2. For it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

2, 12. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassed worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. 3, 8. I can do all things through God who strengthens me, rejoice in the Lord. These are verses that are the message of having a fulfilled life, knowing joy because of who God is.

And so in the middle of this, now we have chapter 2. And chapter 2 has this little section in it, 5 through 11. And as I read this, it seems like it's a parentheses almost. So follow what I'm going to do.

I'm going to read the beginning of the chapter and then the end of the chapter. And you can see that in the middle, there's some teaching here that, why did he put it there? Here's a clue. If you're reading scripture and you come across the passage and you say, why is that there?

Stop right now and study that passage. Because if it doesn't seem to fit the flow, it's there for a reason. And it's there because all scripture has been given by God. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, starting in verse 3, but in humility of line, count one another's as more significant than yourselves.

Let each of you look not only on his own interests, but also on the interests of another's. Verse 4, jumping to 12. Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed. The therefore goes back to that beginning part.

This stuff in the middle is a special message. And it's a message on Christology. And it's a message for us because it's something God wants for us to see, to understand about Christ, so that we emulate who Christ is.

The therefore, as we go into chapter verse 5, therefore have this mind among yourselves, is taking us back into these two thoughts. In verse 3, count others more important than yourselves. In verse 4, look out for others.

These are not the way of the world. Having others as more important than yourselves, having your desire, your emphasis to look out for your brother, that's not what the world is trying to teach you. But here's the thing, we are now a new creation, so we can understand it.

We are able to think it. Ephesians 2, 1 to 3, you are dead in your trespasses and sins, culminates at verse 4 with, but God. We become something new. Second Corinthians 5 .17 says that we are a new creation.

Old things have passed away, all things have become new. And so although Adam and Eve lost the relationship, we are given a new relationship through Christ. But yet our response to that relationship is not guaranteed.

Romans 7, that which I know I shouldn't do, that which I do. Paul's confession of difficulty. Through all of this, scripture teaches that from all eternity, he knew every single one of you in this room.

His sovereign will was that you would be sitting here, that he has a plan for you, that he will bring it to completion. He says that in Philippians 1 .6. Our role is actually to make a choice. It says, have this mind.

That's an imperative. It's an action you need to do. It's a direction you have to take. It implies the fact that there is a choice. Have this mind, don't have this mind. It implies that there is a choice.

It implies that you can be aware of this choice. And so your choice, your command, your edict, is to choose the better. I want you to imagine that I had brought up on the platform here a box that had a thousand dollars in it, in nickels.

Twenty thousand nickels, ten thousand dollars. When we were at the Ark, we were listening to a gentleman by the name of Brian Osborne. Phenomenal guy, I want to get him here to the church. Phenomenal guy.

And he was talking about accepting just a little bit of contamination and how bad just a little bit of contamination can be. And he had the picture of a rat poison box. And he zoomed in on the ingredients.

99 .995 percent pure food. The rat would eat it because it tastes good. 99 .995 percent pure food. 0 .005 percent rat poison. That was enough to kill the rat. So here's my box of 20 ,000 nickels. I take one nickel.

And what's left is pure. I took one nickel and let that be contaminated. The rat poison only required one nickel to come out of that 10 ,000, that thousand dollar box to kill the rat. And the message there is if your gospel message is 99 .995 percent pure, it will kill you.

Taking one nickel out of that box is to compromise the truth of Christ. And when you take one nickel out of that box and you deny the deity of God, you deny the truth of God, you're defining that nickel.

And that's enough to kill you was the message there. So I want you to consider the two world views. On one, we're going to see about Jesus when you have a pure view of Jesus, how that impacts life. But here's the thing.

If your view of Jesus is anything short of pure, if you just take one nickel out of that box, you're walking down a bad path. So Philippians 2 is now going to give us a picture of true Christology. The sovereign humility of Jesus is found in the hypostatic union, fully God, fully man throughout all of eternity.

You must believe this without compromise or you're making Jesus to be something less than he really is. Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equity with God as a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.

Being born in the likeness of men, being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Christology demands that we see God as he really is.

In the beginning of this, there are four aspects to God that we cannot deviate from. One is that Jesus is fully God. He was fully God through all eternity. When Jesus came at the inception and for 33 years walked this earth, fully God.

And after his ascension up into heaven, fully God, no difference, 100 fully God, always was, always will be fully God. And that as he walked the earth, he knew that he was fully God. This is important when we consider the humility of Jesus.

He is fully God. He knew that he was fully God, but he did come to earth in the form of man. That song that you led us in is amazing. When you consider the extent of the creator of all, bringing himself down to be a man, to walk on the earth.

Now in the passage, it says, Jesus, though he was in the form of God, the Greek morphe, it connotes the essence of God, the attributes of God, the unchangeable nature of God, not to be impacted by circumstances in any way, shape, or form.

He is the morphe, the form, the essence of God. Even as man, he had righteousness, holiness, infinite, self-existent, immutable, faithful, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. This is Jesus. And if you find anything less than that, you've taken a nickel out of that box.

We cannot take a nickel out of that box. Philippians 2 is going to emphasize then his humility. You see, he is perfectly, fully, holy God, yet he humbly became a man. He's accepted the existence in the form of a created being.

We know he submits to the father's will, and we know about his obedience going to the cross. We know this to be our God. Considering these truths, we should become more awed by what he did. It can be almost nonchalant to consider that the creator of all came down and took on the form of a man.

We can almost nonchalantly accept that. Okay, fine. Don't. Be awed because he is the creator. All of these attributes, the morphe, never losing them, he comes to earth and takes on the form of man. Now, we know that the Bible is true.

We accept that the Bible is true. But critical analysis is going to take words and parse these words and consider these words because now it's more important for me to be able to evaluate the words that are given than to just be in humble obedience to God.

Satan could not prevent the coming of Messiah, but he can encourage man to use his cleverness and figure out what words may or may not mean. So the words of import here are etau ekenesson in the Greek.

Etau ekenesson. Etau, he himself. Ekenesson, emptied himself. That's the words that are now being challenged. That's the word that is going to create an attack by Satan. Etau, he himself. It was his doing.