37 - Jerome

Okay, well, I think this is like the 37th church history lesson and we pretty much finished up Augustine.

I actually have had some other quotes that I could have given you from Augustine on the

Plagian controversy and his views on faith and, well,

I will go ahead and give you a couple of quotes here just to sort of finish up Augustine before we move on to Jerome.

As I mentioned last week, the reformers would quote from Augustine regularly, primarily in the

Doctrine of Salvation, which, of course, I do want to make sure before the 500th anniversary of the

Reformation that everybody in the class, we all know the date of the

Council of Nicaea, 325, and we know the date where Alaric the

Visigoth sacked Rome, 410, okay, which prompted the writing of what?

City of God by Augustine, which was one of the most important of the early medieval, late, early period, depending on where you want to divide things up, literary works.

But, skipping sort of ahead to where we won't be until next year sometime, at the time of the

Reformation, and I hope you realize, when we talk about, for example, the five solas,

I would imagine most of us could name the five solas, right?

I'm getting some worried looks from some people. What are the five solas?

Sola, you got Sola Deo Gloria, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, we already got that one,

Sola Christus, Sola Gratia, okay. Okay, so, which of the five was the, there's, we have what's called the material principle and the formal principle.

Now, the material principle is that which made up the substance of the, or the matter of the proclamation of the

Reformation. The formal principle is that which gives the grounds or the basis or the form of the foundation of the proclamation of the material principle.

In Luther's experience, he came to understand the material principle and then when he started pronouncing that, once resistance came, he was forced to think through foundational issues and came to understand the formal principle.

So, which do you think is the material principle of the Reformation? Sola Fide, justification by faith alone is the fundamental preaching,

Sola Fide, justification by faith alone without works of the law was the primary preaching message of the

Reformation. When Luther is attacked for that and is likened to a heretic who had been burned at the

Council of Constance in 1415 whose name was Jan Hus.

Hus means goose. So, Jan Hus, once he is challenged on that, then that's when he has to think through the foundation by which he's come to understand

Sola Fide which has been his study of scripture and hence the formal principle is

Sola Scriptura. So, I think it's important that since we're not going to get the

Reformation before the 500th anniversary by any stretch of the imagination, we'll be lucky to get to it by the 501st anniversary at the speed we're going.

I think it is important to know these two as the material and formal principles of the

Reformation and they remain very, very important today as well.

These remain very much under attack. Well, in the proclamation of Sola Fide, the

Reformers would make appeal to the fact that from their perspective this was not some new innovation that they had only come up with.

That was certainly what they were attacked with back then and even to this day you'll find many Roman Catholic apologists saying the same things.

They, therefore, would make reference to Augustine and so in his book on grace and free will, section 29,

Augustine said, now if faith is simply of free will and is not given by God, why do we pray for those who will not believe that they may believe?

This, it would be absolutely useless to do unless we believe with perfect propriety that almighty God is able to turn the belief wills that are perverse and opposed to faith.

Man's free will is addressed when it is said today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, but if God were not able to remove from the human heart even its obstinacy and hardness, he would not say through the prophet,

I will take away from them their heart of stone and will give them a heart of flesh. If that sounds familiar, it's pretty much the same thing you would read in Calvin or in any of the

Westminster divines or things like that. Then chapter 16 on the predestination of the saints from Augustine, faith then as well in its beginning as in its completion is

God's gift and let no one have any doubt whatever unless he desires to resist the plainest sacred writings, that this gift is given to some while to some it is not given.

But why it is not given to all ought not to disturb the believer who believes that from one all have gone into a condemnation, which undoubtedly is most righteous.

So that even if none were delivered therefrom, there would be no just cause for finding fault with God. Whence it is plain that it is a great grace for many to be delivered and to acknowledge in those that are not delivered what they would be due to themselves so that he that may glory not in his own merits, which he sees to be equaled in those that are condemned, but in the

Lord. But why he delivers one rather than another, his judgments are unsearchable, his ways past finding out, for it is better in this case for us to hear or to say,

O man, who art thou that replyest against God? Sounds familiar. Then to dare to speak as if we could know what he has chosen to be kept secret, since moreover he could not will anything unrighteous.

So again, very similar language. It was self -conscious on the part of the reformers to utilize the same language and categories as Paul and as Augustine.

But what's interesting, as I mentioned briefly last week, that because of the self contradiction in Augustine's theology, because the

Donatist controversy and the Pelagian controversy, he had this what seems to us to be strange concept of non -elect

Christians, that is people who could be a part of the church, who could in some sense be true

Christians, but are not given the gift of perseverance of faith, and they will fall away.

So where did that come from? Well, it came from his ecclesiology and the idea of the

Donatist controversy and ex opera operato sacramentalism. And then later in his life, he deals with the

Pelagian controversy, comes to the right conclusions about grace, but now you've got to try to put this stuff together. And in the process, we see what happens.

So just some examples of where that comes from. As most of you know,

I've been doing a lot of having to do a lot of reading of Luther over the past number of months, because next month

Kelly and I and some other folks are going to be going over to Germany and going to be visiting all the big places,

Worms and the Wartburg Castle and Erfurt, where Luther went to school, and of course

Wittenberg as well. In fact, I was looking at some pictures of Dr. Al Mohler. They're over there right now.

And Dr. Mohler was preaching in the castle church in Wittenberg yesterday, the day before yesterday.

And that just made me nervous. Well, actually, he delivered a lecture on Luther's irascibility, basically, well, right above Luther's tomb, which

I found rather gutsy. If you start hearing noises from down there, you say, hmm,

OK. But actually, I'll be preaching there myself in September.

And it's not going to be a lecture. It's actually going to be a sermon. And I was noticing where the pulpit is.

And you're way up above everybody in those pulpits. You literally climb up the pulpit. And I'm hoping the stairs aren't see -through.

But yay. Anything I can fall off of, I don't really like very much.

But in reading Luther, back in July, I was reading through his table talk.

And this week, I finished up a whole series of his letters, which almost felt like Wiki Leaks or something,

Reformation Wiki Leaks, reading someone's inbox, because there's a huge collection of Luther's letters.

I'm not even sure that all of it's actually in English. It still amazes me the amount of literature that was produced by people who were sitting there with a quill and ink.

Even when we have fountain pens or ballpoint pens, we wouldn't get anywhere close to what they did.

And we have computers. My goodness. We can sit there and just talk at the thing and produce literature now.

Not that most of it's really worth keeping for a long period of time. But reading his letters, that's a really good way to get to know somebody.

Because you read his letters to Elector Frederick, which are very flowery, written to his electoral grace, and so on and so forth.

And then his letters to Spolaten, and Staupitz, and Karlstadt, and things like that.

And you just sort of get the measure of the man a little bit. And a couple of things that struck me was, you're always nastiest to those who are the closest to you.

And I just remember a statement from the table talk where Luther was saying, there's no hope.

Ulrich Zwingli. Zwinglius, as he referred to him in Latin. He's beyond hope.

He's not a Christian. He's lost. And it was all because of, they agreed on 14 out of 15 things in the

Marburg Colloquy. The one thing they disagreed on was the nature of the supper. And that was enough for Luther.

He's gone. And to contrast that with other people with whom

Luther was significantly more liberal in his willingness to see someone as a

Christian, it was very interesting. But all of that to say, one guy that Luther did not like in the early church was

Jerome. He just did not like Jerome.

And says a lot of nasty stuff about Jerome. Well, there certainly are lots of things for us to disagree with in regards to Jerome.

But you cannot, I think, help but recognize that he was truly an incredible influence in the late early church or the early medieval church.

Again, depending on how you want to divide the calendar up. He was born in Jerome.

He was not born in Jerome. That's just up the road here. There wasn't anybody up in Jerome at this time.

So Jerome was born in 340

AD. And he was born in Dalmatia.

Dies in 420. So 80 years of age.

He was educated in Rome. Very much steeped in the classical world and classical learning.

Had a very large classical library. Which again, in those days, a lot more people have large libraries today than back then.

Given that everything was handwritten. He's baptized in 370.

So at the age of 30. And he renounced the classics after his baptism.

You'll find a lot. There's just a lot in history about... Remember Tertullian.

What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? And that kind of attitude and that kind of thinking.

We get to the Reformation. We'll find Ulrich Zwingli getting rid of instrumental music in the church.

Even though he's an incredibly accomplished musician on numerous instruments. Over against Luther.

Who also is an accomplished musician. Not as accomplished as Zwingli.

But who writes many, many hymns. Not just...

Mighty Fortress is not the only hymn that Luther wrote by any stretch of the imagination. But he renounced the classics after his baptism.

Obviously sold his library on eBay. I'm just making sure everybody's still awake.

Because there'll be some folks going, I'm not sure he would have done that.

Well, there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. Had a dream in Antioch in 374.

Where he is called before the judgment seat. He was berated in this dream for his love of the classics.

He is ordered to be scourged. The angels plead for him. He wakes up and finds welts on his back.

So as a result of this, he becomes a hermit near Antioch. Remember, we can go back to the

Desert Fathers in AD 250. So it's been going on for 150 years. You've got the beginnings of...

Remember the pillar saints and stuff like that. He becomes a hermit near Antioch. Because he was trained in Rome.

He is tortured by dreams of Roman banquets and dancing girls. So food and women torture him.

To get rid of these thoughts. I love this. To get rid of these thoughts, he studied

Hebrew for 10 years. That'll do it to anybody. I'm going to tell you. Hebrew was pretty tough for me too.

And that'll kill a lot of brain cells. But what's important, of course, is we have noted how few of the early church fathers knew both

Greek and Hebrew. And we mentioned there were two that were completely proficient. And that was Origen and Jerome.

So that's important. So he studies Hebrew for 10 years. In 382, he goes to Rome and becomes secretary to Damasus, who is the bishop of Rome.

And Damasus is the one who challenged Jerome to make a new translation in the

Latin language. There were numerous Latin translations at this point in time.

But they were fragmentary and of varying qualities. Because Latin was the language of theology in the

West, numerous people had translated portions. And they were of varying levels of accuracy, varying levels of the quality of the manuscripts that were used from Greek or Hebrew, that type of thing.

And so while he's in Rome, there is an understanding that there needs to sort of a standardized, well -done

Latin translation of the Bible, both Old and New Testament.

And so Damasus challenges Jerome to do this. He goes to Bethlehem in 386.

And he settles into the monastic life and works on what will eventually be called the

Latin Vulgate, which takes him about a little over 20 years to do the

Latin Vulgate. It replaced the old Italic or the old Latin versions that were circulating around.

He began with the Gospels, then the rest of the New Testament, then the Psalter, the history, the prophets, the poetic books.

And at the insistence of Damasus, he did what we call the apocryphal books, even though Jerome himself did not believe.

That the apocryphal books were canon scripture. And the reason he did not believe this is he was living in Bethlehem and had learned

Hebrew from Jews. And so he had knowledge of the

Jewish canon and of the Jewish people and their beliefs. And here is a rule for you.

If you ever get into a conversation with one of our Roman Catholic friends that's saying that Luther took books out of the

Bible like the Apocrypha because he didn't like what they taught. Here's the rule of history all the way up to 1546, which is the beginning of the

Council of Trent when the Council of Trent defined those books as canon scripture. The more a writer in that time period knew of Judaism, Hebrew, and the

Old Testament, the less likely they are to believe the apocryphal books are scripture. So the more they know of the

Old Testament, the less likely they are to believe those books are scripture. The less they know of Hebrew, Jewish history,

Jewish beliefs, the more likely they are to believe that those books are canon scripture. Most, well, all of the

Christian produced copies of the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, contain the apocryphal books.

And so Jerome and Augustine have an ongoing correspondence argument over these books.

Jerome's right, Augustine's wrong. And we know Augustine's wrong because we can tell from Augustine's writings that he thought that the

Jews accepted the apocryphal books as scripture. They never did.

There are some people today, for example, who will say, well, the Jews had two different canons.

You had the Palestinian canon, the Palestinian Jews. Then you had the Alexandrian canon, down in Alexandria, Egypt.

It's just not true. It's commonly stated. It's just not true.

There's no evidence of it. The Jews had one canon. And as early as 200 years before Christ, the

Jews would lay up in the temple the holy books. The books were considered holy if they made your hands unclean.

And we know what books they laid up, and they never laid up the apocryphal books. Not only that, they couldn't have.

Half those books are still being written at that point in time. But the other books, including even little

Obadiah, which we just got done reading in one shot, were laid up in the temple, even 200 years before Christ.

And in light of the fact that Romans chapter 3, verses 1 and 2, says it was to the

Jews that the oracles of God were committed, then it's a very important element of discussion to recognize that the

Jews never accepted those books as canon scripture. We don't know.

Each one had different authors. There's a fair amount of question as to how many of them were even written in a

Semitic language. There are some that give evidence of having been written in Greek. They're so late as far as their origin is concerned.

So we don't know who wrote those books. They're written during the intertestamental period.

And many of them recognize, a couple of those books actually recognize the threefold canon that already existed, the law of prophets and writings.

So you've got books referring to the laws of prophets and writings that Rome says are actually part of the law of prophets and writings, which doesn't make any sense.

And one of the books that Rome has accepted contains just wildly egregious historical errors, puts

Nebuchadnezzar 100 years out of where he actually was in history, in the wrong country, and just all sorts of stuff like this.

And when I asked a Roman Catholic apologist that was debating on this subject a number of years ago, and Gary Machuda in New York, we've put just this clip online, his response was, well,

James, I believe in inerrancy, and I'm just offended that you would actually question the inerrancy of scripture. And it's like,

Gary, I don't think that's scripture. So why don't you answer the question? But yeah, it was a really bad response.

Yes, sir. The Talmud?

Well, you have what's called the Mishnah, which is a collection of the traditions of the

Jews, which is formalized around 250 years after Christ. And then between 250 and 700, you have what the development was called the

Gemara, which is the commentary on the Mishnah. You put the Mishnah and the Gemara together, and that's the

Talmud. I'm not sure what you mean by movement.

Oh, they started developing that long before Christ. Yeah, the

Talmud is the Mishnah and the Gemara put together. It's about 700 years after Christ, but Gemara.

Thanks. You're welcome. So Jerome received opposition for his translation from traditionalists and old -timers.

It is always fascinating to me to see this cycle.

So basically when, well, it's a fascinating story, but when

Jerome translated the book of Jonah, he came to the name of the gourd or the plant that grew up over Jonah and gave him shade.

Remember? And living in Bethlehem, he was able to go to Jewish sources that had more information about the flora and the fauna of the

Old Testament and came to the conclusion that what was being referred to there was a castor oil plant.

And so that's how he translated it in Latin, which was different than the Greek Septuagint. Now, the Greek Septuagint was the

Bible of the early church. And so in Carthage, the first time that Jonah was read in public from Jerome's translation, there was a riot because people simply could not accept that he changed the word of God.

He's altered the word of God. People don't ask the question generally, is that a more accurate translation?

I wonder why he did it that way. I wonder what the background was. Could we inquire of brother

Jerome as to his purposes here? No, no, no, no, no. That's far too rational and sane a response.

When you change the Bible, burn it. And so the irony is, of course, is that the

Septuagint had become the traditional translation. And then the Vulgate comes along and it's resisted.

But it eventually, over 1 ,100 years, becomes the traditional translation.

So that when Erasmus comes along and alters the Vulgate, he's attacked because he's attacking the word of God.

And that's exactly what's happened over the past 60, 70, 80 years in regards to King James Onlyism.

A movement grows up and you're attacking the word of God if you have anything different than what's in the King James blah, blah, blah, blah.

It just has happened over and over and over again. And just to give you an illustration, and we'll get to this guy later on.

Again, it'll be next year and most of you will have forgotten, except George will have written it down. So he'll be the only one that remembers because he reviews his notes every day before going to work.

But I've mentioned to you the concept of anachronism before. And it's the mindset that developed during the medieval period where everything's always been the way it is now.

And when people didn't move more than seven miles in any one direction from where they were born, the world became a very small place.

And so the idea of cultural development, change in history, you didn't travel to see the ruins in Rome or whatever else.

And so you start getting art where David's riding a horse with armor and lives in a medieval castle and stuff like that because that's just the way things have always been.

And a fellow in the 1400s as the Renaissance is just starting to kick into swing by the name of Lorenzo Valla started recognizing the issue of anachronism.

And he started reasoning that, you know, when we look at the Vulgate and then

I look at Jerome's commentaries, which he wrote on the various books of the Bible, I know that there are differences between the text of Vulgate we use in church and the text that's found in Jerome's commentaries.

Now Jerome came up with both of them. So why would there be differences between them? And he reasoned that the

Vulgate has been copied many, many more times since the days of Jerome than Jerome's commentaries.

The Bible gets read more often than Jerome's commentaries. And so if it's copied many more times, there's more of an opportunity for a change or alteration in a text that's been copied many times than one that's only copied very rarely.

And so he developed the idea from that, really of the beginning of textual critical study, of thinking through how do we get this text?

How many times has it been copied? What do copyists do when they make copies?

Is it possible when someone's copying from the Vulgate that if something's become popular in church, they might errantly remember it wrongly while they're copying?

And is it more likely that Jerome's commentaries would have the earliest text of Jerome? Well, Vala was right. And modern studies have demonstrated that in almost every instance where he pointed to a difference, the commentaries had the original reading of the

Vulgate, and as we've gotten more ancient manuscripts, we've been able to verify this. So he was sort of way ahead of his time, and he was so far ahead of his time that he did not publish his findings because he didn't want to die by being burnt at the stake as a heretic.

And so a fellow we'll run into later by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, the great

Dutch humanist scholar, runs into Vala's writings in the library, and Erasmus is far less timid than Vala was.

And so Erasmus publishes Vala's findings and expands upon them around the time of the

Reformation. And Vala is credited for being one of the first people to sort of break out of that mindset and start doing critical thinking about how the texts were transmitted to us over time.

And so, when you think of Jerome, there are, you know, we mentioned him once before in regards to a woman that he knew who was very pretty, so she defaced herself, dressed horribly, didn't clean herself.

Because by this point in time in the monastic movement, the idea of the woman as a temptation to man had very much developed.

There's a degradation at this time period in having a biblical view of man and womanhood, over -exaltation of a sacramental system, monasticism.

It's all beginning at this time period. And so, yeah, there are all sorts of things theologically that we can take umbrage with Jerome.

But at the same time, it's extremely important because you go from Melito Sardis, around 170, rejects the apocryphal books because he inquires of the

Jews, to Origen, early 200s, same thing, his student

Rufinus, same thing, to Jerome, same thing, to Pope Gregory the

Great, who in commenting on a quote from the Book of Maccabees says, but this isn't from canon scripture, even though Pope Gregory the

Great was extremely important in the development of the concept of purgatory, as we'll find out here in a moment. Well, maybe not today, but we're getting there.

All the way up to the time of the Reformation were Cardinal Cajetan, who interviewed

Luther in the early, what was that, 1519? I think it was around 1519.

1518, 1519, he interviewed Luther. Cajetan, in his commentaries, likewise, rejected the apocryphal books as scripture, hearkening back to Jerome and to this long, lengthy list of learned men who down through history had recognized that these books were not a part of the

Old Testament canon. So when people just blithely say, oh, you know,

Luther just threw those books out because they teach something he didn't like, that person has been listening to EWTN and not much more as far as what they're actually looking at.

So Jerome is a fascinating individual. Let's do a quick introduction.

I might have time to sneak this in if I go quickly, and then it'll be a nice break point for a few weeks because, let's see, next

Sunday, I'll be at Antioch Bible Church in Randberg, South Africa. And Sunday after that,

I think, is London. Yeah, I think it's gonna be in London, actually, with lots of places in between.

So your prayers appreciated. Tuesday night, by the way, please don't forget, debate in Birmingham. Not Alabama either.

The real one from which it's named on the subject of the crucifixion with Zakhar Hussein.

Yes. Well, he wouldn't have been as far off into the woods as Origen, but pretty much everybody after Origen is influenced by him.

He doesn't find in him a strong doctrine of the grace of Christ. He said similar things about Erasmus too, but he just didn't like Jerome at all.

Real quickly, don't have much time here. Purgatory, Purgatory. Does not come to its full doctrinal definition until the 15th century, but Purgatory is an excellent example of a belief that develops slowly over time and that requires a number of different strands to come together until you finally have your final theology.

And so what do you have before then? Well, you've got beginnings that not necessarily have been tied together, and it takes time for it all to end up coming together into your final form that you would have in classic

Roman Catholic theology. Purge, to cleanse by fire, is where the term

Purgatory comes from. Modern Roman Catholics will say, we've never actually said there's fire.

Well, the reality is you read the popes, you read the councils, you read what everybody, all the great saints, understood as the nature of Purgatory, and there's no question about it.

There's absolutely zero question that from the middle 1400s through the time of the

Reformation, it was fully understood that Purgatory is a place of conscious existence, temporal existence, because time is very important there, and is a place of suffering and fire, and is a place of purging and cleansing only of souls that will eventually see

God. This isn't a second chance salvation. If you die outside the state of grace, you don't go to Purgatory, you go to hell, and they're not the same thing.

But it's a horrible place of suffering where you're being purged of the temporal punishments of your sins, which have not been atoned for on earth by your own penances, good works, so on and so forth.

And a number of passages are referred to, Matthew 12, 31, until, won't be let out of prison until he's paid the last farthing.

First Corinthians chapter three, verses 11 through 15, I will simply refer to you. Go to YouTube, put in James White, Peter Stravinskis, S.

Stravinskis. He does not like that this comes up. Stravinskis, but in my name is

Stravinskis, and watch the cross -examination from 2001, where I work through First Corinthians chapter three on the basis of the

Greek text, with Father Peter Stravinskis, has two PhDs from Ivy League schools, and that's why he didn't bother to do any study before the debate.

And just watch for yourself. I think it's absolutely clear as to what happens

First Corinthians chapter three. I also did a radio debate, well, actually, it was a dividing line with Tim Staples of Catholic Answers on this text.

I think it's pretty clear, pretty straightforward. Rome really struggles to have to work through the text directly in the presence of anybody who can actually read the text itself.

And in 2 Maccabees chapter 12, verses 39 through 45, that's where the apocryphal thing with Luther comes in, is they will refer to 2

Maccabees, which can't have anything to do with purgatory whatsoever, because it's a story about Jews who died in battle, and as they were caring for their bodies, found that they're all carrying these little idols under their clothing.

And prayers are said for them. And they say, see, you can pray for the dead. Problem is, idolatry is a mortal sin, and you can't pray for mortal sins, because you can't get, because someone who's committed mortal sin doesn't go to purgatory in the first place.

So it just, it can't have anything to do with purgatory, but people keep making reference to it, and so there you go.

It took many, many centuries of degradation from biblical categories for the various lines to develop that will eventually come together to form the concept of purgatory.

Clement of Alexandria, who we have met before, is not one of our favorite theologians, felt that after death, uncompleted penances would have to be completed, but he did not refer to a place called purgatory.

So you have the first idea, the idea of penances needing to be completed, where you get that, but, so you get that, but you don't have it, you don't have then the conclusion of that, and that's going to happen in such and such place as how it's supposed to happen.

It develops bit by bit. Origen, we know, felt that even the pains of hell would not be eternal, even

Satan's going to be redeemed in Origen's perspective, which lessened the necessity of dealing with specifics about purgatory.

Ambrose spoke of prayers to the dead. There were prayers to the dead in the early church, but initially, these prayers to the dead were for what's called refrigerium, for which we get refrigerator.

Refrigerium was a place of refreshment. So initially, prayers to the dead were not for the idea of them being released from suffering or something like that, but that they would have refreshment, that they would receive

God's grace. Augustine, likewise, had some idea of purgation after death, but the nature of it, it wasn't like there was a place.

Exactly how that worked, again, conflict of Adonis and Pelagian controversies. The actual term itself does not appear for the first 500, 600 years, but over time, it does eventually develop, but primarily under the influence of Gregory the

Great, the first great medieval pope, as we will meet in a few weeks. He really gets things started, even though even he does not have a fully developed doctrine of purgatory.

That really does not come into existence until the middle of the 15th century. It takes quite some time for that to come into existence.

So we see the beginnings of it in this time period, but it's in fragmentary illusions that are gonna have to come together under some interesting circumstances for it to end up having the form that it has taken in the modern period.

Okay? So we will start next time with the final fall of Rome, the impact of the fall of Rome, and then the rise of Islam.

I look at my notes on that and go, wow, I could do a whole lot more now than I could when

I taught this before, because we've obviously done a little more study on that subject, but we will try to remain calm, cool, and collected, and keep it to a reasonable amount of information and not to absolutely overwhelm you on that particular subject.

Okay? All right. Let's close our time with the Word of Prayer. Once again, Father, we do thank you for the time that we have to consider your work in the past.

May, once again, you be pleased to help us to gain perspective from this, to be able to look at ourselves in a more accurate way, to be reminded of the importance of constantly looking to your

Word, which does not change, to your truth, which is a light to our feet and a light to our path.