23,000 EAGER AND ITCHING EARS III

 Our mystery pastor who speaks to 23,000 pairs of listening ears every Sunday morning turned flippant the other Lord's day to tell his massive congregation, "Jesus never claimed to be God." The way he put it was, "Jesus never said, Hey, guys, I'm God." Really? Is that true? Let's look at the Bible for the answer.

John 10:30: "I and the Father are one.”

John 10 :33: "The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” 

John 5:18: "This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God"

John 14:9: Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 

John 8:24: "I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am [a claim to deity understood by the Israelites based on Exodus 3] you will die in your sins.” 

Mark 14:61-64: "But He kept silent and did not answer. Again the high priest was questioning Him, and saying to Him, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” ⁶² And Jesus said, “I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” ⁶³ Tearing his clothes, the high priest *said, “What further need do we have of witnesses? ⁶⁴ You have heard the blasphemy; how does it seem to you?” And they all condemned Him to be deserving of death."

We could include verses in which Jesus accepted worship as God and never one time corrected those who knelt before Him. A case in point would be the doubter Thomas who declared to the risen Christ, "My Lord and my God!! 

Case closed. 

23.000 EAGER AND ITCHING EARS PART II

The pastor of last week's blog stands before his 23,000 member congregation. He has another myth to teach today. (This is a real pastor of a real church, name to be revealed later.) Last week, he taught the congregation that the church didn't have a Bible for four hundred years, give or take, yet they turned the world upside down. The point of the blog last week can be summed  up: "Really? Yes. They did." 

This week, we need to take a look at the rest of the story because the pastor didn't stop there; he added another sentence to the above myth, and said, "If the early church had had a Bible, they couldn't have read it anyway." He added to that sentence saying that when Peter was called up on charges and entered the chamber, "He couldn't have read what was on the walls there," What he was saying was that the early church consisted of illiterates and the disciples, Peter as the example, also illiterate. 

To examine this widely circulated myth, let's go back the the Old Testament and the Jewish culture because the early church was made up, for a while. of Jewish converts to Christianity because we'll find some answers there. 

Deuteronomy 11:18-20 commanded the Jews: “You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. ¹⁹ You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. ²⁰ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates," There it is, "write." 

Then there's the Mishnah (the oral law in Judaism which was handed down generation after generation and then collected and committed to writing about AD 200). In the Mishnah we find this: "At 5 years old, one is fit for the Scriptures; at 13, for the Commandments." By this we see the Jewish passion for education, and this would be the atmosphere in which Peter, James, John, and the other disciples were raised.  

Let's look at a another disciple. Matthew the tax collector who maintained an office in Galilee would have been required to be literate and keep records for Rome, as would have been the case for Zacchaeus, also a collector.

When the religious leaders described Peter and John as "unlearned," they didn't mean illiterate; they were referring to the fact that they hadn't matriculated in the training of the scribes. 

This directive from the Mishnah would have been the guideline for Timothy's mother and grandmother who produced a boy of whom Paul wrote, "And that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." 

When Paul sent an epistle to a church, the practice was to have it read, copy it, and pass it on (Colossians 4:1:16-18: "When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea." I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.^{" It has been estimated that it would take two days to copy the Epistle to the Romans which consists of 7,111 words.}

Six times we hear Christ asking the religious leaders, "Have you not read . . .? From the Jewish leaders to the common man to a youth such as Timothy, the Jewish culture produced literacy. 

Let's leave the Israelite culture and move into the 1st century AD Roman Empire's Gentile culture. We see a chariot and an Ethiopian riding in it doing what travelers do-- reading reading a book, his choice is the scroll of Isaiah. 

In the ancient world there was a library that would boggle the mind, the one in Alexandria, Egypt. "It is said  that the Library had 200,000 volumes, in the early second century it would reach 500,000! 

Then there was this: "Across the Greco-Roman world, there were many collections of scrolls, some kept by private individuals in personal libraries. One such library that, whose impressive ruins still stand today, is the Library of Celsus in Ephesus. The Library of Celsus [built in 117 AD] was the third largest library in classical antiquity. It is known for its striking architecture and for the fact that it once held 12,000 scrolls containing a wealth of knowledge from the ancient world. Sadly, none of them survived the library’s destruction in 262 AD."

The library in Pergamum, the city mentioned in the book of Revelation, housed 200,000 volumes.

If you ever have the privilege of going to Pompeii as I did, you would see graffiti written on public and private walls. You go up to the entryway of a home and see on the well-preserved floor the famous mosaic of a dog and below the canine are the famous words, "CAVE CANEM," "BEWARE THE DOG."

Then there's been the discovery in the Empire of 1/2 million documents written on papyrus which include personal letters, business accounts, and of course, fragments of the New Testament, all written in the Koine Greek.  

The pastor said, "If the early church had a Bible, they couldn't read it." 

Really?  

 

 

23,000 EAGER AND ITCHING EARS PART I

 A pastor with a worldwide ministry stands before his 23,000 member church, a number which includes satellite branches. He's teaching that massive number of listeners a myth. But this pastor's influence isn't limited to that number: hundreds of pastors eagerly attend his conferences to learn his message and his methods of church growth.(One of those methods is, "Do not preach verse by verse through a book in the Bible."

He's instructing the 23,000 with a myth he believes is true and he's warning them so they won't continue, as he puts it, to base their faith on the Bible. (!) He doesn't believe that what he's teaching is a myth; he believes that it's the gospel truth and the assembled pastors and his congregation need to know this "truth" so they can instruct their flocks not to base their faith on what they believe to be an infallible Book. As he said,"Good luck with basing your faith on the Bible!"

As he progresses through his sermon, he confidently declares that the church didn't have a Bible for first 400 years of church history. He tells the congregation, "The first century Christians turned the world upside down and they didn't even have a Bible." (You can see how such a statement would downgrade the Bible in the  eager and itching ears of the 23,000.) 

That sounds good to those eager ears who would, if they believed that declaration, conclude that we don't need the Bible either since they did what they did without one. Summary: they didn't need THE Book, so neither do we and we shouldn't base our faith on what it says.

"They didn't have a Bible?" Really? This pastor is a dynamic speaker, there's never a verbal slip of the tongue or a moment's pause; he can rivet the attention of thousands. So, with his eloquent mastery of the English language and oratorical skills, he is persuading literally thousands of the myth that the early church was bereft of the Word of God and was in that state for 400 years.

Let's examine this myth. The truth is that they did have a Bible and there's a name for that Bible; we call it "The Old Testament." all 39 books. If you go by my large print Bible, they had 1,498 pages of the Bible. 

There's something else we need to add: Christ and the Apostles incessantly referred to those 1, 498 pages as the ultimate authority. Jesus quoted from the first 5 books of the Old Testament over 64 times. No need to stop there; if you look at His quoting the Old Testament in Matthew - John you would find that it's 74 times. Then if you combine His direct quotes with His allusions to the Old Testament, the estimate is somewhere between 250-400 times!

He chastised the religious leaders by asking them, "Have you not read . . ." referring to a quotation in one of those 39 books. In Luke 4, Jesus went into a synagogue and read from the scroll of Isaiah, then announcing to the congregation, "This day this Scripture is fulfilled!" 

At the Incarnation, Herod the Great wanted to know where the Messiah would be born, the scribes turned in their Bibles to Micah 5:2 and found the answer: Bethlehem. 

Fast forward to the Apostles' preaching after the Ascension and we hear them citing the Old Testament in sermon after sermon, so many times that if we take the total number of Old Testament citations found from Matthew 1:1 to the last verse in Revelation, the total is an astounding 845 times! In their preaching, the Apostles would make a declaration and then to prove it, they would quote their Bible, the Old Testament. They would quote the Psalms, Isaiah, Joel et al.

We turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls dated  from the third century BC to the first century CE. They contain every book in the Old Testament except Esther and Nehemiah. The scrolls contain almost the complete book of Isaiah!

So, yes, the church did have a Bible all those 400 years. 

Another factor in refuting the myth is that during the first century, the Apostles were writing and circulating the inspired books of the New Testament, passing them along from church to church as Paul required in Colossians 4:6. 

Then when we look at the writings of the church fathers, we find that they are quoting from various epistles. For example, "The letters of Ignatius, written very close to 107 A.D., quote from several New Testament books. He uses quotes from the Old and the New Testament books. 

"Below are some Old and New Testament quotations of Ignatius. For each letter, the chapter is given, followed by the New Testament reference. This is not at all an exhaustive list, just representative of books Ignatius uses.

Letter of Ignatius to the Ephesians in which he quotes from:

2 – John 8:29 3 – John 17:11-12 5 – James 4:6 6 – names Onesimus, as in Philemon 6 – John 1:14 7 - 1 Tim 4:10 8 – 1 Pet 2:9 9 – Matt 5:2, 2 Tim 2:24-25, Luke 23:34 11 – Rom 2:4 12 – Matt 23:35, Acts 9:15 13 – Eph 6:16, 6:12 14 – Luke 10:27, Matt 12:33 15 – 1 Cor 4:20, Rom 10:10, 2 Cor 8:18 16 – 2 Cor 6:14-16 18 – 1 Cor 1:20   Therefore, in the words of Sherlock Holmes: CASE CLOSED.

THEY ARE LINING UP

Zechariah 12:3: "It will come about in that day that I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured. And all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it."

In a future day, the campaign of Armageddon, the Bible tells us that ALL the nations will come against Israel. The operative word in the prediction is ALL, and, to state the obvious, "all" means "all." 

Therefore, although America is not mentioned in prophecy, "all" will include the United States. The alignment against Israel today is an apparent setting of the stage for the eventual fulfillment of Zechariah's prediction. 

According to "The Times of Israel," The United Nations General Assembly passed more resolutions critical of Israel than against all other nations combined in 2022, contributing to what observers call an ongoing lopsided focus on the Jewish state at the world body. President Joe Biden has restored hundreds of millions of dollars of UN funding that was cut under President Donald Trump." (From "The Council of Foreign Relations") This means that this Jew-hating body would not exist without American taxpayers. 

As of this writing, Jew-hatred has reached a fevered pitch in Amsterdam: "There has been at least one attempt at kidnapping an Israeli, and many have barricaded themselves in stores and buildings.

"Multiple videos showed Israelis jumping into canals to avoid the protesters. Multiple outlets are reporting that anti-Israel mobs are chasing down Israelis and savagely beating them on the streets of Amsterdam Thursday following a soccer game. Dozens of extremely disturbing videos are being posted to X depicting violent beatings as individuals are surrounded and then pummeled."

Zechariah 12:3 expresses a timeless truth: Israel is a heavy stone; all who lift it will be severely injured. The attackers will find the stone so heavy, it cannot be moved. America included. The nations are aligning themselves against Israel, the immovable object.