The I AM of Scripture: Dr. James White on Who Jesus Truly Is

I want to take a moment to thank each one of you who came out yesterday and made the little mini conference a success. I'm quite pleased with the turnout yesterday, but your presence and your attention and your support means a lot to me and I'm just grateful for you.

I especially want to extend my thanks to Dr. White for being willing to participate. Thank you for your faithful witness and love for the church and the church body. And he's going to be preaching again this morning in just a moment.

I want to thank everyone who prayed and participated in this too, and all the other ones who attended. You know, events like that don't just happen, right? They actually are a reflection of a church body who loves the truth and loves one another and loves to serve, so thank you for doing that.

And I want to thank my wife, Julia, too, because she entertains all my ideas and lets me do all these things, and especially yesterday, it was her birthday. She let me have a conference here, so thank you.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer now. Father, you are gracious, you are sovereign, and we come before you this morning as your people who are humbled. We are in awe of who you are. You are holy. You are the Lord of hosts.

You are holy, holy, holy, and the whole earth is full of your glory. You're the creator, you're the sustainer of all things, and we praise you. We praise you for who you are. We praise you for your majesty, for your mercy, and for the gift of redemption in your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Father, we confess that we often sin against you. We know we fall short of your glory, but we have sinned against you. We do so time and time again in thought and word and deed. We've not loved you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we fail to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Forgive us, Lord. We ask that you would forgive us, and we do thank you for the forgiveness that we have in Jesus Christ. We thank you for the Holy Spirit who indwells us, sanctifies us, and empowers us to walk in newness of life.

We thank you for the truth of your word. Thank you for the fellowship of the saints, for the hope of eternal glory. We thank you for the faithful time that we've had together as a church body, especially yesterday as a church family at the Biblical Ethics Conference.

May the truths that we heard bear lasting fruit in our lives and in our witness. Father, we pray for our local church body. We pray that you would unite us in the gospel, that you would deepen our love for one another, that you would protect us from division, and that you would make us a light in our area.

May our doctrine be sound. May our hearts be humble. May our hearts be eager to serve. Father, we pray for our nation. Father, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy. But bring repentance where there is pride, and that you would bring healing where there is division, and most of all, bring righteousness.

We pray for our leaders, federal, state, local level, that they would hear you, that they would govern justly, and that they would uphold truth. We ask the same for our state of Colorado. Raise up righteous leaders.

Restrain evil, and give us the courage to stand firm in the public square with grace and with truth. Help us to stand for the truth. And Father, this morning as we typically do as we pray for churches around the world, we want to pray for the church in Somalia.

You know each one of them by name. You see their suffering. See their faith. Father, sustain them. Give them courage. Give them protection. Give them endurance. And we pray for bold gospel witness among the Somalis, both inside the country and outside the country.

Many, especially those who are young, who are disillusioned with Islam, they turn to Christ. They trust in Christ as Savior and King. Strengthen Somali believers to plant churches and to proclaim your word and to persevere under pressure, all for the glory of King Jesus.

Father, this morning as we now turn to your word, we ask that you would give us ears to hear, would give us minds to understand. Speak to us through the scriptures. Let your truth pierce our hearts and shape our lives.

And we pray for Dr. White this morning as he brings your word. Grant him clarity of thought, faithfulness to the text, and power in the Holy Spirit. Use him. Use him as your vessel to proclaim what is true, what is beautiful, and what is life giving.

And let your word just run swiftly among us. And we ask that you be honored. And may your word bear truth in our lives, all for the glory of Jesus Christ, whose name we pray. Amen. Please.

Thanksgiving for the Conference and Opening Prayer

Welcome Dr. White to the pulpit. Well, it's always good to get to preach. The pastor forgets.

To tell you when you're supposed to be done, so you just figure you just go as long as you need to go. And you might say, well, you preached here last year. And I'm like, yeah, well, I've slept since then, so there's no way I'm going to remember that.

But I will sort of look around and go, how long do you normally go? Okay, I don't trust him. A little bit shorter than that. Okay, all right, all right. I'll figure it out. It's easy to tell when the old timers start looking at their watches and, you know, doing this number, you know, that type of thing.

There's subtle ways of communicating to the guest that we would like to beat the Methodists to the cafeteria. So that's, it was aiming over there someplace. That was, it's a powerful prayer. Just move the microphone right out of the way.

That's how you go. For those of you visiting or not familiar with me, my name is James White. I'm from Phoenix, Arizona, and it is normally much hotter down there than it is up here. But we have tons and tons and tons of air conditioning on our buildings, so that's another reason to not go overly long as well, because it is summertime and we've been actually having a beautiful summer in Phoenix.

I think it hit 117 or 118 once. For us, that's not a big deal. It's when it's 117 for three weeks that it starts getting to wear on you just a little bit. And so I think yesterday it didn't break 100, which for us is just the end of global warming.

Okay, that's just utter and complete refutation of that entire scam. But anyway, it is great to be up here in the high altitude here, and we had a wonderful time yesterday. But what I want to do with you for a while is to share with you, if you don't know who I am, it takes far too long to explain what I do to even bother to try, but I have had the opportunity, especially since 2006, so coming up on 20 years, of engaging in many public dialogues and debates with leading Muslim apologists and scholars around the world.

I used to travel around the world all the time until 2020. Now I travel in an RV, which means I don't get to go to South Africa and places like that much too long of a drive, I can assure you. And it's not fully waterproof, so that wouldn't be a good idea.

But I never expected to be doing that when Alpha Omega Ministries started. We were focused on apologetics pretty much closer to home, dealing with Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses. For many, many years, we were very, very active in doing debates with Roman Catholic apologists and doing that again.

We've done a number over the past couple of years in that subject. I'm trying very hard right now to set up a formal debate on a topic that I'm sure you all will be talking about all during lunch today, and that is the perpetual virginity of Mary.

And it's hard to—I've done a couple over the years, but it's now time to do another one. And so those are the areas defending the historicity of the Bible, the transmission of the text of Scripture over time.

That's something that's been very important to me. But starting in 2006, I had my first, what I consider to be my first Islamic debate because I had actually started studying Islam. I had done one debate with a Muslim before that just defending the Trinity in 1999, but I don't consider that a Muslim debate because it was only going one direction, shall we say.

And so I started studying Islam, and I had a debate with a man by the name of Shabbir Ali at Biola University on the trustworthiness of the Gospels, and that's what started the many, many 40-plus debates that have happened since then.

That's not how to make your ministry grow big and rich and fat. I could tell from the beginning that if we're going to continue doing that kind of work, the Lord is going to have to open up some people's hearts to support us in it because the reality is most Christians in the West know about Islam primarily from Fox News.

Okay, progressivist Christians in the West know about Islam from MSNBC, but most evangelicals know about Islam from Fox News, and guess what? Neither one of them is a good source for accurate knowledge about Islam.

And as I had grown up, I had no knowledge of Islam. I had no knowledge of what Muslims were like. And of course, after 9 -11, everybody was writing a book about Islam, even if they didn't know anything about it.

I mean, I don't know if you remember, but in the days after 9 -11, reporters were running into Barnes Noble bookstores. They used to have bookstores before Amazon came along, and they were great stuff, great places, lots of fun to go to, and they smelled wonderful.

New books, old books, doesn't matter. It just smells great. But they're sort of past going the way of the dodo bird, and they'd run into Barnes Noble, and they'd buy the Qur 'an, and they're sitting there, and they're trying to find something to put into their report.

They're about to go on the air, and they want to find some juicy thing to quote from the Qur 'an, and they find nothing. They can't figure out what the world is saying. And the vast majority of people who attempt to read the Qur 'an, especially if you don't read it in chronological order, if you read it straight through, you will be completely lost.

It provides you no historical context for anything. You're jumping back and forth between different times in Muhammad's life when you read it that way, and it will make no sense to you at all. I'm not saying you shouldn't read the Qur 'an.

I'm saying you should probably buy my book on the Qur 'an first. And find the chart, I think on page 54, that gives you our best guess as to the order in which the various chapters of the Qur 'an were written.

Then at least you have some way of sort of following things along. Anyway, I certainly understood back in those days when, because as I said, I'm not as active in dealing with Islam right now because I'm not traveling overseas, and there are, interestingly enough, not a whole lot of Islamic apologists in the U .S.

We're trying to arrange something in Dallas in February that would be very helpful in this subject. But I understood back then, and I've come to understand even more over the past couple of years, that not too many of my fellow Christians share with me any kind of passionate desire to see Muslims come to know Christ.

I have seen online expressions of detestation and hatred where Christians are not making any differentiation between Islam and Muslims. It'd be similar to maybe someone who grew up in Utah and had a lot of negative experiences around Mormons saying, I detest Mormonism.

Mormonism is false doctrine. It teaches that God was once a man who lived on another planet and circumstantially in Kolob and all the rest of this kind of stuff, which is true. But then not being able to differentiate between detesting a false system of theology with the people who hold that false system of theology.

And as I said, when I first met Shabir Ali, when I first started doing debates with Muslims, I was a little frightened of them. I mean, we see things on television, and I didn't know really how to approach them in a caring way.

And then sometime, I was in Dublin, Ireland, doing two debates with a big, tall Pakistani Muslim by the name of Adnan Rashid. And I had already debated Adnan a few times in London. They were always extremely animated debates, with me even engaging the young Muslims in the audience during the course of the debates.

And Adnan was always very aggressive. And that was because he went to a place called Speaker's Corner. I don't know if you ever heard of Speaker's Corner in London. But there's a place called Speaker's Corner in London where you go, and basically what happens anymore is Christians yell at Muslims, and Muslims yell at Christians.

And that's all he thought this was about. And then between the two debates we did in Dublin, we did a debate one night, and then the next afternoon, I had lunch with Adnan at a local restaurant. You have to find a restaurant that's halal, which, given my narrow tastes, it's hard to find someplace where you can get something to eat.

But we had lunch together, and I was able to express to Adnan why I do what I do, and express to him my concern for him, and basically to just help him to understand that there are Christians who do this because we actually love the truth, and we love Muslims, and we want Muslims to know the truth.

Changed everything. The debate that night was of a completely different character than the debate the night before. And I started making it a practice as best I could, even when traveling and doing debates in Birmingham, you know, other places in London, South Africa, to have lunch or dinner with my opponent before the debate actually took place.

To try to get them to understand that I am a Christian that will not compromise. I'm not going to roll over and play dead during the debate, and I believe that Islam is wrong in much of what it says. But I care about my opponent as an individual.

I care about Muslims as people, and they don't know what to do with that. They don't know what to do with people who will not compromise, but who care about them. For them, it's easier to debate with a Christian that they're assuming hates them, so they can sort of just return the feelings.

And I have certainly felt over the past couple of years, I have felt like a complete failure in communicating to my own cadre of people, the people who would normally go, yeah, I like what that guy does.

You know, he debates with the Mormons and, you know, defends the veracity of Scripture and all that kind of stuff. I feel like I've failed utterly when I recognize that so many of my fellow believers have absolutely no passionate desire to be used of God to bring the gospel to individuals who've been given a false Jesus and a false hope.

You know what the amazing thing is? We will bend over backwards. We will take classes on how to get secularists to give us five minutes of their time to try to get a little message in to them. The Muslim wants to talk to you about Jesus.

Isn't that weird? Most people don't realize that. The vast majority of Muslims, I know there are some wild-eyed, crazy, radical people, but the vast majority of Muslims, especially that come from a Muslim-predominated country, have no idea who the historical Jesus was.

Most of us, how many of us in this room have actually read the Quran? All of it? I always have to say that because normally what people do is like this, which means parts. I've read parts of the Quran, but I've not read all the Quran.

And from an Islamic perspective, if you can't read Arabic, you've never read the Quran anyways, because the Quran only exists in Arabic. But a similar percentage, very small, of Muslims have ever read the New Testament or the Bible as a whole.

Now the Quran is only, is less, right at half the length of the New Testament, so it's not a long book. But, and the Bible is much, much longer, obviously. But still, we don't know their holy book, they don't know ours, and yet we think that we know what the other side believes.

And so the Muslim who comes from a majority Muslim country have no earthly idea who the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, anything like that. Jesus is mentioned a number of times in the Quran, but only once in a historical place, and that is speaking from his cradle, testifying that he was a prophet of God.

That's the only time. Other than that, Jesus is a disembodied voice just speaking out of nowhere in the Quran. A liberal Muslim, I think, put it very, very right, very correctly when he said that the Jesus of the Quran is not a person, he's an argument.

And that's true. The Jesus of the Quran is just pointing you toward monotheism and following Prophet Muhammad, and that's it. You could not love the Jesus of the Quran if you tried, because he's not a person.

And yet, Muslims have been told that they are part of the second largest religion in the world that teaches you to love Jesus, and they'll tell you, we love Jesus. He is a great prophet of God, but that's all he was.

He wasn't the son of God, he wasn't the greatest prophet of God. But they've been told, we love him, but what do you mean you love him? If he's not really a person who didn't really do anything, how can you actually say that's love?

And so, when I had, and we're going to get to John 8, turn to John 8, trust me, we're going to get there. I'm just giving you a background here as to why, to be honest with you, my heart is broken over the past couple of years by the number of people in positions of Christian leadership that have said things like, we didn't get the job done in Afghanistan, we need to go back and finish it up.

What they mean by that is literally, we need to kill more infidels, turn the Muslim countries into glass with nuclear weapons, stuff like that. And when I try to reason with them, don't get very far. I don't get very far at all.

When I would travel overseas, very often over there, you end up in a cab or in an Uber. Every single one but one of my cab drivers overseas were Muslims. So, we end up having lots of fascinating conversations in the car.

Even in 2019, in January 2019, I was teaching in Samara, Russia, and we were driving to the church where I was going to be teaching. Thankfully, my translator, Nick, was with me, and our Islamic cab driver, a doctor, was driving us through snow that was higher than the car, and it was 28 degrees below zero.

So much fun, and especially some from Arizona. And we started a conversation through my translator, and when my translator told the guy who was driving, well, the professor behind me, he has read the Quran, he's studied Arabic, and he's read all the Muslim Hadith.

He was stunned. He was shocked. Now, the Hadith, by the way, are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected 250 to 300 years after Muhammad. And they really form the matrix out of which Sharia law is derived, and it's also how the Muslims interpret the Quran itself.

Since the Quran doesn't give you any context, you sort of have to provide the context, and the Hadith do that, sort of, since the Hadith are not consistent with themselves. That's one of the reasons we have so many different Muslim groups.

Anyway, he had never met a Christian scholar that had actually read all of Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim. These are six, seven volumes apiece for each one of these collections. And so we started a conversation, and I asked him, have you ever read the Gospel of Mark?

And he said he had not. One of the greatest things you could ever do would be to get a Muslim to read one of the Gospels. The Jesus that they will encounter there will blow them away. And notice I said Mark, I didn't say John.

Why? Because almost every Muslim that I've ever met has been poisoned against the historical accuracy of John. They've been told that John is the most corrupted of the Gospels, and Mark is the least corrupted of the Gospels.

So I'm more than happy to go with Mark, because the Jesus of Mark is still the Jesus of John. But here is, there were a number of times we'd get to the airport. I remember this guy was taking me, a Muslim was taking me to the Glasgow airport in Scotland.

And he gets out, not to help me with my bag, but to ask, how do you spell your name? Because he wanted to find me on YouTube. He wanted to watch the debates that I'd just been telling him that I was doing with Muslims.

And so what an opportunity. These people want to talk about their faith, but they don't know what you believe. And what they find is that Christians don't want to talk about their faith. I did two dialogues with Dr. Yasir Qadhi in Memphis, 2017, somewhere around there, as I recall.

And one of the things he said to me, because he said, I'm not going to do a debate with you, James. You study Islam and Christianity. I only study Islam. That wouldn't be fair. But we'll have a conversation.

And the reason that happened is I had listened to his 16-CD series on Islamic theology multiple times and had written to him with questions. And he even told the people, when he introduced me in his own mosque and then asked me a series of questions, he told them, he says, I have never met a Christian that knows more about Islam than this man.

He says, I wish my own students would listen to me as carefully as he does. Okay. That led to great conversations, by the way. But one of the things that Dr. Qadhi said to me, he's the gentleman that we're hoping to have a dialogue with again in Dallas next year.

He's in a lot of trouble right now for a bunch of stuff, but I'm not going to get into that this morning. Anyway, one of the things he said to me was, since James, I understand the difference between liberal Christians and conservative Christians.

And I understand the liberal Christians don't really believe much. And conservative Christians do believe a lot. He says, but I cannot get a conservative Christian to talk to me. They're afraid of me.

And you know what? He's right. It's not that he doesn't want to talk to them, but they won't. They won't. Perfect love casts out all fear. So if we're praying that God would fill our hearts with love for the lost, when was the last time you prayed that God would fill your heart with love for the Muslims?

And they might say, we don't have any around here. That's not the case anymore, almost anywhere. There was a time when, you know, most Americans could honestly say, I don't know a Muslim anywhere. But that's changing rapidly.

And if you travel at all, you're going to have the opportunity of running into people who've come from Muslim nations, and they will be open to having a conversation with you. Some people would say, why even bother?

I mean, Roman Catholicism, teaches that Muslims together with us adore the one true God. They are a part of God's plan of salvation. You could actually make a good argument from Vatican II onward that at least one interpretation of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church will be that by following what is good in their religion, that they can become inheritors of eternal life.

That's an internal argument within Roman Catholicism, because that's clearly not what Roman Catholicism thought during the Crusades, okay? And so if you recall after the death of Francis, you know, you've got all these folks on TV talking about, it's the unchanging church of 2 ,000 years, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

No, it's not. It's changed a lot. It's changed a lot just in the past 100 years. That's very clear. But is there really a pressing need for us as believers to be prepared and ready to speak to Muslims, to others who have a deficient or false view of who Jesus is?

What about those Jehovah's Witnesses that come to your door? They just wake you up on a Saturday morning and make you angry? In John chapter 8, we have, and I'll encourage you, we don't have time this morning, but I'll encourage you to read all of John chapter 8.

In fact, one of my challenges to all of you believers would be to, in being a student of the Word, one of your goals, I think, with major books of the Bible—before Gospels, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, so on and so forth—would be to, if someone says John chapter 8, you should strive to get to the point where you have an outline of the gospel of John in your mind.

So you'll know, you know, John chapter 3, Nicodemus, John chapter 2, the wedding, King of Galilee, woman at the well, John chapter 5, the relationship of the Father and the Son, John chapter 6, feeding the 5 ,000, then eat my flesh, drink my blood in the synagogue in Capernaum, John chapter 7, unbelieving brothers.

Then you have John chapter 8, John chapter 9, where we get the man born blind, John chapter 10, Jesus is a good shepherd. Nowhere in a book, and in the argument of a book, you are. So in John chapter 8, you know that you have sort of two parts to the chapter where you have Jesus, first of all, speaking to the Jews and saying He's from above, they are from below.

And then some of the Jews like what He's saying, and it says they believed in Him. And then Jesus turns to them and says to the ones who had believed in Him—and by the way, John uses a different tense of the verb believed in John 8.

Every time the gospel of John's saving faith is being referred to, it's a present tense, ongoing thing. This is an eros. It's not an ongoing thing. And so He says to the ones who had believed in Him, if you continue in My word, then you're My disciples indeed.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And as soon as He says they need to be set free, they get angry, and the rest of the chapter is these people who had believed in Him getting ready to pick up stones to stone Him.

And that leads to the amazing situation of Jesus saying Abraham saw My day and rejoiced to see it, was glad. Who do you make yourself out to be? You're not even yet 50 years old. And Jesus says to them, before Abraham was, I am.

And they pick up stones to stone Him because they know the divine name from the Old Testament. They know that that very phrase, ego, I am, was used throughout Isaiah, for example, as a second way of referring to Yahweh, Jehovah, as we slaughter it in English.

So they pick up stones to stone Him. And so make that a challenge. Make that something, you know, put that on your list of things to be done to recognize that in John 8, we have this chapter, this is its focus, and there's that important part right in the middle where everything changes, where people who had believed get challenged, get told they need to be set free.

And as soon as you tell somebody they need to be set free, you'll find out what kind of faith they really have, what they're really believing in. And that's, by the way, that's the same thing today. Even with fellow Christians, when you talk about the need for God to set us free from the slavery to sin, man, you'll find out very quickly there's a lot of folks that don't like that.

They're the ones in charge of their salvation, not God. You find out very quickly. Now, it's in that context I want you to look at a specific verse. Verse 22, so the Jews were saying, surely He will not kill Himself since He says, where I am going, you cannot come.

And He was saying to them, you are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.

Now, in the gospel of John, I hope this will be one thing. By the way, we have some university football players at the back door. There will be a little quiz after the sermon. If you don't get a 100, you don't get to leave until you get it right.

Okay, so just so you're, in case you were starting to drift a little bit, you know, the blood sugar levels were dropping. You know, we didn't have electricity here when I got here, so some of you didn't get your coffee.

So your caffeine addiction is just not a little bit, hasn't been fully fulfilled and stuff like that. But this is one really helpful thing I want you to grab and understand. Then I'm going to make an application, and hopefully you'll remember that.

In the gospel of John, you have what are called the I Am Sayings of Jesus. Now, there's one in Mark, and there's some others, but John very purposefully includes a number of verses where Jesus uses this phrase, egoaimi in Greek.

In Hebrew, it would be anahu. We translate it as I am or I am he. And Unitarians, people who deny the deity of Christ, Jehovah's Witnesses, and people like that, they will say, oh, it's just an emphatic self-identification and stuff like that.

But if you just honestly ask, what is John communicating? And this is a book that begins with the assertion, in the beginning was the word, was with God, and the word was God. Not a God, as Jehovah's Witnesses would put it.

But it starts with that. It ends with Thomas's confession, my Lord and my God, clearly addressed to Jesus. And so in a book that begins that way and ends that way, to have these phrases used in the way that they are used is obviously very, very important.

So what I would challenge you to do is to at least know the references, if not then memorize all the I am sayings in John. There are not that many of them, so it's pretty easy to do. I'll tell you right now what they are.

We just read one, John 8 .24. John 8 .24, what does Jesus say? For unless you believe that egoaimi, I am, you will die in your sins. The next one is at the end of the chapter, John 8 .58, which I mentioned to you just now.

Who do you make yourself out to be? Abraham saw your day, you're not even 50 years old. And Jesus says, before Abraham was, egoaimi, I am. And they pick up stones to stone him. So, John 8 .24, John 8 .58.

Another one you probably can sort of guess if you just think through the story of Jesus. But John belabors the point in John 18, that when Jesus is arrested, and I don't, I'm just going off top of my head here.

But when Jesus is arrested, and I wish this program had a little bit better, this would be in verses, there we go, there it is. Verses, it's right at the beginning of the chapter. The cohort and officers, chief priests and Pharisees came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.

So Jesus, knowing all the things that were coming upon him, went forth and said to them, who do you seek? They answered, Jesus the Nazarene. He said to them, egoaimi. And Judas also, who was betraying him, was standing with them.

So when he said to them, egoaimi, notice John repeats it to make sure we know exactly what it was Jesus said, they drew back and fell to the ground. Now these are soldiers, and when Jesus says, I am, they fall down.

It's amazing to hear Unitarians try to explain this. Well, they had just never been confronted with such purity before. Right. That's why John repeats exactly what it was he said. They don't know what the context of that is.

Some may not even know who he is, and yet they still ended up on their butt. They fall down at his presence. Therefore, he again asked them, who do you seek? And they said, Jesus the Nazarene. He answered, I told you that, egoaimi, if you seek me, then let these go their way.

So at the very utterance of the name, the very utterance of the phrase egoaimi, they fall back upon the ground. Where else is it found in the Gospel of John? It's very, very interesting. This one, most people just read right past, and yet it is, in my opinion, the most important of them.

It's in John chapter 13, and it's in the betrayal, Jesus' prediction of the betrayal by Judas. So if you remember what happened, verse 16 of chapter 13, truly, truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than one who sent him.

If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. I do not speak about all of you. I know the ones I have chosen, but that the Scripture may be fulfilled, he who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me.

From now on, I am telling you before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe that egoaimi. Now, I think the reason that we miss this is because we're focused upon Judas and Jesus saying the Scripture needs to be fulfilled, he who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me, and we're sort of focused on all that kind of stuff.

But the result of that, and I wish, you know how your New Testament tells you that the Old Testament is being quoted? Most translations, I'm not sure what the ESV does, but most translations, well, some translations, the NASV, LSV, will use block quote.

It is, for example, the quotation, he who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me. What is that in the ESV? Is that in italics or something? It's just a footnote, but there's nothing different about the printing in the, okay, all right.

That's just another reason to adopt the LSV. But anyways, I'm sorry. We have an objection on the front row. So anyway, it's always really important to note when the Old Testament is being quoted. There you have, even in the translation, the English translation that I have here, he who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me.

It's in all caps because it's a quotation from the Old Testament. But then Jesus says, from now on, I am telling you before it occurs, so when it does occur, you may believe that I am. He's saying to the disciples, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen, so when it does happen, you'll believe that I am.

And unfortunately, not all reference Bibles, let me see if this one has it, 13, 19, no, it doesn't. It just gives you another I am passage. And let me see if this one does. 13, nope. Even the text references in the LSV don't give you the proper Old Testament.

Does anyone have, in your translation, a reference in verse 19 that takes you back to the book of Isaiah? Anybody? Because I haven't looked at all the different translations. There are so many translations out there these days.

I'm sorry? 19, 19. It's unfortunate. I'll tell you how I discovered this. There was a man who became somewhat, we became familiar with him in our ministry. And this guy knew Jehovah's Witnesses back and forth.