Peter's Pattern for Preaching - Part 1

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and this episode is going to be a little bit out of sequence. We had some technical difficulties on a previous episode over Acts 2, so if this feels out of sequence or we’ve released these out of order or if you’re wondering if you missed something, you didn’t. We did, so we’re going back for it now. We’ll be in Acts 2 and the kerygma of Simon Peter at Pentecost.

I’ve never heard anyone pronounce that word out loud before.

I’m guessing because I’ve only read it, but I was homeschooled so I do that a lot. What do Strunk & White say? “Say it loudly with authority.” In my Greek class I was just assigned the verb kerusso that comes from “to herald or preach” so there we go.

Is that like the Italian tenor?

No, very different – completely different, I dare say.

Okay. We’re in Acts, when the Day of Pentecost was fully come. Pentecost is the second step in the harvest feasts. At the original Passover in the exodus God reset the calendar, so what had been the seventh month became the first month. In the Old Testament it’s called Abib and in the in-between literature it’s called Nissan. It’s basically March/April. Passover fell on the 14th. The 14th blends into the 15th, which is the Passover Sabbath. The day after that, which at least in our Lord’s day was Sunday, marked the beginning of barley harvest.

They would then take the very first barley sheaf that came to them, and I assume there was a whole process for selecting who got to bring what and who did it and all that, but they would take the very first of the first-fruits and they would wave it before the Lord – not burn it, not eat it, just wave it as a sign of what was to come. The very first thing is given to God, then 50 days later the rest of barley harvest comes in, and all the farmers then have to bring their first crops and bring them to the Lord.

Since it came seven weeks plus a day, it’s called the Feast of Weeks. It’s called Pentecost – the ‘pente’ referring to 50 in this case, so 50 days later – but it’s also called First Fruits. When you’re reading the Old Testament, sometimes you have to be very careful because First Fruits may mean the Day of Pentecost, but it may also mean the waving of the First Fruits sheaf, and there’s an organic and theological connection between the two.

Pentecost also celebrated the giving of the law, and if you go back to the exodus and count the days – and it’s a little challenging – from the crossing of the Red Sea to the arrival at Mount Sinai, there are indeed 50 days.

This is where I always tell the story that I for years couldn’t figure out how to make that work because you get there, and here we’re at Sinai, it’s too early, and Moses goes up into the mountain, and up into the mountain, and still we don’t have enough days here. At some point I realized, “Wait. Going up and down a mountain, that’s a day.”

I’ve climbed Mt Lassen twice. I’m never doing it again. I’m too old, for one thing, but I wouldn’t do it if I were young. It’s tall. It’s long. You go up and you sit there for a while panting, then you come down again and you don’t go back up again the same day. So each of those times that Moses climbs the mountain to talk to God, that’s another day, and when you factor that in, yes indeed, it’s not a figment of human imagination or Jewish tradition, there really are 50 days from the crossing of the Red Sea, or at least the Passover proper, to the giving of the law at Sinai. So that’s something to keep in the background.

We’re looking backward to the giving of the Law. We’re celebrating the current harvest and the bringing in of the barley first fruits, but we’re also looking forward to a different kind of harvest. Throughout scripture, particularly in our Lord’s parables, seed and harvest and all of that speaks to the harvest of souls, and we’re going to see that played out in some measure here.

Jesus has risen. He’s ascended. We’re going to see the pouring out of the Spirit, and we’re going to see that he was the first fruit of the resurrection. Now we’re going to see the first fruits of Israel gathered in, and after that the long march, the seventh month, Tabernacles, ingathering, when the full harvest is brought in and that speaks of the harvest of the Gentiles reaching to the end of the world and the final resurrection. So there’s a bit of biblical theology for you.

Because of the nature of Pentecost, there’s the Sabbath and then there’s the Day of Pentecost proper, which again is a Sunday.

Is this one of the big feasts that all the Jews would be in Jerusalem for?

Yes. There were three required feasts. One was Passover, the next was Pentecost, and last is Tabernacles. You have to come to Passover or you’re going to be excommunicated, or you excommunicate yourself by not coming. Interestingly enough, though, in the New Testament the emphasis seems to be on Pentecost, at least for people who live far away. How they reconcile that in their thinking I don’t know, or maybe it’s just the way it’s being described, but we see a couple times where Paul is dating things around Pentecost or wants to get back to Jerusalem by Pentecost. For him, Passover doesn’t matter but Pentecost is still a big deal.

There’s an old hymn, and I don’t remember the name of it. It’s in the Trinity hymnal. It speaks of light being given at creation, which is the first day of the week, the light of Jesus’ resurrection on the first day of the week, and the light of the gospel being poured out with the Spirit on the first day of the week. The phrase I remember is “a three-fold light was given.”

The argument in hymn form for why we worship on the Lord’s day, on the first day of the week, is there’s Old Testament precedent, but there’s New Testament realities. If you weren’t there when Jesus rose from the dead and appeared on the first day of the week, you missed him, so next time you better be with God’s people on the first day of the week if you want to meet with Jesus. Oh, and guess when the Spirit is poured out? On the first day of the week. If you want the Spirit of God to keep on working in your life, maybe you should be with God’s people on the first day of the week.

We’ve been told earlier the number of disciples at this point, those who were actually present. This isn’t the total sum of everyone who was walking with Jesus, but the ones in Jerusalem were 120 – 12 x 10. It says they were together with one accord in one place.

Our Pentecostal friends who believe in the baptism of the Spirit as the second work of grace often look here and in the previous chapter to find the conditions for receiving baptism with the Holy Spirit, and they will, for instance, latch onto these things. “Well, if you want to receive the baptism of the Spirit you have to be praying, you have to be of one accord, you have to be seeking God,” and there tends to be a list, depending on who you are and what preacher you’re listening to. But honestly, they’re just waiting. Jesus said, “Wait.” They’re waiting. What do you think they’re going to do, play checkers or something?

But if you think about it from the other side, the fact that they’re together with one accord, which is not our natural sinful state, demonstrates that the Spirit is already working in their midst. The fact that they’re waiting for him is because he has caused them to wait.

I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of when the Spirit is at work. For one thing, we miss that he’s always at work in the world, that the world is upheld by him as much as it is by the other two persons of the trinity, but also anytime we see fruit like this, they’re fruits of the Spirit. What he’s about to do is an exceptional work, but it doesn’t mean he’s not already working.

Someone recently pointed out to me the distinction that I had never thought about before between the gifts of the Spirit associated with office in the church – preaching, giving, things like that – and the fruit of the Spirit. Those are two different things.

I found the hymn. Rather than use my brain and not come up with the answer, I used my resources – aka Google – and discovered “Oh Day of Rest and Gladness.”

You want to read the first few lines if you have it in front of you?

I have the second stanza, which has the line that you were talking about –

On Thee, at the creation,
The light first had its birth;
On Thee, for our salvation,
Christ rose from depths of earth;
On Thee, our Lord, victorious,
The Spirit sent from heaven,
And thus on Thee, most glorious,
A triple light was given.

Building on what Rachel said, there’s an old dispensational tendency to fasten on a verse in Christ’s upper room discourse where he says, “The Spirit is with you and will be in you.” I think the tendency is to yank that out of context and say, “Well, the Spirit was around, but he isn’t in you.” The extrapolation is that Old Testament saints didn’t have the Spirit. That’s not what that’s saying. On top of that, when Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples, he breathed on them and said, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit.”

You could say, “Well, that’s a type and a figure.” No, it’s a reality, too. It’s the beginnings of something. It’s not everything, and not all of his disciples were present, but the Spirit of God didn’t come into existence at Pentecost. He didn’t begin his work at Pentecost. He did not begin his work in believers at Pentecost. Careful reading of the Old Testament, particularly the psalms, will instruct you in that very quickly, so we commend to you a concordance and the word ‘spirit.’ Look at Old Testament references and exclude those that refer to men and animals, and see what the Spirit of God was actually doing and continues to do.

Jesus said to wait for the promise of the Father, which is a phrase he uses with regard to the Holy Spirit, or the gift of God, the phrase he uses with the woman at the well. Again, the issue is not whether the Holy Spirit is at work, but on what magnitude, to what degree, how far, with what hindrances, with what barriers dropped is the Spirit going to be working? We’re going to begin to see some of that as we go along.

How many hands does he have tied behind his back?

Yes. The gloves are off. So as they’re sitting there –

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

We can think of it just in terms of the visual imagery. You see a bunch of people standing with flames on top of their head, and they look an awful lot like lamps or candles. “You are the light of the world” and all that, but with an Old Testament background, wind or tempest and flame…

Not too long from here in another chapter we’re going to see the room shaken (earthquake) and these are the phenomena that accompany the coming of the Lord at Mount Sinai, so we should be ready for covenant-shaping action, but at Sinai the people were kept far away from it. In fact, they ran away from it once they heard the voice of God.

And God said, “Good idea.”

Yes. Here it’s very personal. God comes not as a roaring cloud of glory and fire that terrifies us. He comes, as it were, such that his power and Spirit sits on our heads and fills our hearts. It’s a nice sound around us but it doesn’t knock us over with its force. Of course, we can tie that to the tongues they’re about to begin speaking in. The word of God becomes a flame of fire in their mouths.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost…

Again it’s emphasized in the New Testament, but it’s not absent in the Old. It doesn’t mean a metaphysical filling. This is not incarnation. This is not God becoming man a 3rd, 4th, 5th or 100th time. This is a different working of God whereby he works in our hearts by his word and the power of his Spirit.

…and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Other tongues means languages, and we’re going to have a list of some of those languages here in a bit. So those who think that these were unknown languages, or not languages at all, no, they’re languages with proper grammar and syntax.

We know because people were shocked that they could understand.

“Wow, what are those guys doing?”

The languages were selective in that it was the particular languages of the people that were there, because the point of the Spirit filling them is not so they can feel holy and special, but his goal is always to proclaim Christ to others. So when he fills us it’s to give us words to speak, and it’s not just random words either, but the words for the people that are directly in front of us.

Yes. See 1 Corinthians 14 in this context. “I would rather speak five words that people can understand than 1,000 words in an unknown language.” Good point, Rachel. I never thought about that, but no one here is speaking Chinese. Is that because God is going to ignore China? No, it’s because there was no one from China here. If there had been, then someone would have been speaking it.

They also didn’t speak English.

There was no English, not even Elizabethan English.

What will become clear is that this is Spirit-inspired, that is divinely inspired, inspired by inspiration. This is prophecy. They are prophesying. It’s going to be called prophecy before too long, so this is a special kind of thing.

There’s nothing here that suggests that every generation should expect this to happen, or that it is anything other than foundational, to which I recommend my late pastor Jim West’s book, The Glorious Foundation of Christ. It discusses the idea of the miraculous gifts as foundational gifts, prophetic gifts, and plays upon the passage in Ephesians that the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.

Prophets are foundational. You don’t put a foundation on the third floor, let alone at the penthouse. Foundations go at the bottom. They go where you start the building project. So we are looking at foundational gifts, and that perhaps will become clearer as we go along. If you want a further argument, read 1 Corinthians 14, which is Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts, and you can read Pastor West’s book if you like.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

That’s limited by context. It’s from throughout the Roman empire. It doesn’t mean that people made their way all the way from Mesoamerica to come here, or from China, but of every nation that they knew of there was some representative. Again, this was a very popular feast and they were supposed to come if they could, and many did. Some came for Passover and just stayed for the 50 days.

Apparently, when the disciples begin speaking in other languages, they decide that speaking to one another is rather pointless so they go out in the streets, probably into the temple area where they would run into lots and lots of people.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

It’s a funny echo of Babel here also.

Very much so, and there’s a side issue – actually it’s really a fundamental issue because at Babel God confused languages so people couldn’t understand each other and couldn’t cooperate without a lot of work, which has both its pluses and its minuses. But here God does not simply perform a miracle on the listeners and say, “All right, now you can all understand Hebrew,” or “I’m changing the language centers in your brain, so from now on once you become a Christian you’re going to know Hebrew.” It would save a lot of labor by pastors, but no. The Spirit himself translates the Word into these other languages.

Here is one basic argument for the validity of translating scripture into other languages. The Holy Spirit was the first one who did it, so if he can do it, that suggests it. I suppose you could reply, “Yeah, but he could do it infallibly.” Yes, and we do it fallibly, but we’ll see as we go through the New Testament that if an unbeliever comes into your sanctuary, he better be hearing a language he understands, so again the emphasis upon translation. So they start speaking in these languages and they’re out in the streets.

And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans?

Because they spoke with a Galilean accent. Just because you learn a language doesn’t mean that you pick up the accent right away. I remember a young lady who was asked by someone when she was pronouncing Greek words, “Who taught you to speak Greek?” She referenced a member of our denomination who was from the deep south. “Ah! You’re speaking Greek with a southern accent.”

Then we get a list –

And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

Someone has said, “Oh, it’s a hearing miracle.” No, we’ve already been told it’s a speaking miracle, but when someone speaks – consequence – you passively hear it, and we have a list.

Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome [that’s significant, the gospel reaches Rome before any of the apostles do], Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.

If you were to plot these on a map you would see that there’s kind of a spiraling in toward Judea as he mentions each one.

They were asking, “How is this happening? What does it mean?” and apparently some of the Judeans, who were monolingual apparently, said, “They’re just drunk. They’re full of new wine.” If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak one language, you’re American.

All the apostles are out there preaching, but we get Peter’s sermon. This is the first New Testament sermon, so it’s in some ways the pattern for all sermons, at least in terms of the kinds of things that need to be included, and what is required to bring people to Christ, as well as the basic fact that it’s Christ-centered. It’s not about morality or how short your hemlines should or shouldn’t be, or whether or not you should drink alcohol or not, or who you should vote for in the next election, or even when Jesus is coming back. It’s about Christ and his finished work, but there’s a historical context.

But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

It’s about 9 in the morning. “We’re good Jews. We don’t get drunk this early, so no, you’re wrong.”

But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel…

Notice the firmness. It’s “this is that” – not “this is kind of that or this is a prelude to that.”

Another expression that’s grown up in Pentecostal circles is to speak of the early and latter rains. This was an early rain, an early giving of the Spirit, but the fullness will come just before Jesus returns, which strangely enough turned out to be the 20th century. Oh wait, he didn’t come, did he? Okay, well….

No, Peter is saying this is the fulfillment, the filling of the prophecy unto fullness, although the prophecy has elements that go beyond the moment. Here he’s quoting from Joel 2. He does add something though.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God…

Joel didn’t say “the last days.” In the context of Joel’s prophecy it has to do with the time of Messiah and the outpouring of the Spirit, obviously, and Peter under divine inspiration says, “Yes, that’s what the prophets generally call the last days, the age of Messiah, the end of the Old Testament and beginning of the New, and all that.” So it’s not the end of the age, but the advent of Messiah and the age of the Spirit.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh…

There’s something that the apostles knew, and we’ll see them referencing it, and yet when Peter has to go to Cornelius, a Gentile, a Roman, he’s a little surprised, not so much that a Gentile should come to faith – they were used to looking for proselytes among the Gentiles – but that he should come uncircumcised. So they don’t yet understand the full weight. They say the right words, but that doesn’t mean that they even understood the full depth of all that they were saying, because this is by divine inspiration.

I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh…

Notice the absence of social distinction, gender distinction, and so on.

…your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

This is prophecy. Now, a superficial reading of this may lead you to think, “Oh, so everyone who came to Christ spoke in tongues in that day.” That’s not really what it’s saying. “And everyone who comes to Christ since then will speak in tongues.” No. “Okay, everyone spoke in tongues then but not afterwards.” That’s problematic.

We’re dealing with a basic hermeneutic issue of interpreting the new in the light of the old, or the old in light of the new. The Old Testament told us, in Malachi for instance, that every place under heaven will be a place to offer incense to God under the new covenant, that God will take Gentiles and make them Levites, that God will raise up the tabernacle of David that’s fallen, so that all people may seek the Lord.

When we look at those we don’t say, “Well, that means I should go out in my backyard and offer incense to God.” We don’t say, “Dad, I’ve decided I’m going to become a Levite, because God says he wants those.”

How exactly do you go about changing your genetics to become part of a certain…

You get adopted into the tribe of Levi. It’s not that hard. You just have to pay the amount specified in the last chapter of Leviticus, and probably go through some cleansing ceremonies.

No, that’s not what those passages mean. When he speaks here of all of God’s servants prophesying, certainly it doesn’t mean less than what it says, but we do need to be open to the possibility that it means a whole lot more than what it says. He’s speaking in the language of the Old Testament, which was inadequate.

We point at pictures in books for kindergartners and say, “Doggy. Kitty. Woof woof. Meow meow,” and you know what? That’s not a dog. That’s not a cat. Those are pictures, and they’re usually comical pictures as well. A real dog and a real cat add dimensions of time and space, of texture and breath and sound and licking you and all kinds of things that go on. They are so much more. When our children finally meet a real dog or cat they don’t say, “Mom, you lied to me! The cat is supposed to be flat and have funny eyes.” They understand.

If they’re my children they just burst into tears.

How is Titus doing with kitties? I understand he did really well with our kitty the other day.

Titus is good with kitties. He adores kitties, in fact. He just wants to come and lay his head on them.

I see you have one behind you and one just went by the door behind you, too. And I have a cat right now at my feet. [“What are you even doing? I’m busy.” I don’t know what’s going on. “Bye!”] We’re all cat people, it seems.

So when he says they’re all going to prophesy, what we need to understand is what’s the heart of prophecy? Is it going into an ecstatic state? Is it speaking things about the future? Ultimately a prophet is somebody who has the word of God, someone who has been invited into the very councils of the trinity and hears the word of God and internalizes it and comes out and speaks it to the world.

In the Old Testament we’re told that God spoke to the fathers at various times in various ways, in bits and pieces. We’re told in Peter that often the prophets didn’t understand their own messages. We’re so far beyond that. Sometimes we want to have these ecstatic visions and revelations and speak things that no one has ever heard before.

First of all, no, because Jesus has already revealed to us all that the Father has for us. He said so in the Upper Room discourse, and it’s now been recorded in the scriptures so that all of God’s people have the complete revelation of God in Christ in writing, and with the descent of the Spirit we have the illumination that he provides so that we can rightly understand the word of God. In a word, under the new covenant we’re all prophets.

There’s a gentleman in our church who I highly respect but we’ve had a discussion a few times about this passage. I think he may have changed his opinion, I’m not sure, but he’s pointed out to me, “The New Testament calls us kings and priests. It never calls us prophets.” Yes, it does right here. We are prophets.

Eventually I pointed to the Heidelberg Catechism that says that we are members of Christ and thus partakers of his anointing. In the context of the catechism, the anointing is to be prophet, king and priest, and we’re partakers of that. So yes, the Bible teaches very clearly that Christians are prophets.

In I John, you have an unction, an anointing from God, and you know all things. All things? Yeah, all that God has revealed to us about Christ, so that would seem to be the focus of this passage. The thing that changes is not that suddenly we can all speak in foreign languages, or that we all speak things that no one has ever known and never heard, but that all Christians have the word of God in its totality and thus we’re able to turn around to the world and say, “Thus saith the Lord,” and do so with confidence and authority and understanding. We know how all the pieces fit together now, or at least we can and should. That’s what’s brand new here.

Often when I’m teaching Bible to teenagers a hand will go up and say, “But how many of God’s people even understood this?” and I have to say, “I don’t know.” Somehow you get the impression that not very many of them did. Again Peter says that even the prophets sought diligently as to when or how the spirit of Christ that was going to prophesy concerning the Messiah, things the angels desire to look into.

When the 12 apostles can all be with Jesus at the last supper and he says, “So and so is going to betray me,” they’re like “What?” I just wouldn’t expect too much from us as the church collectively or the church at any stage in history particularly.

But I think that’s an encouragement to us because we don’t have to understand perfectly what the scripture says to speak to someone else. It’s not about our perfect understanding. It’s what the Lord has said and it’s what’s true.

That is so encouraging.

We have the Bible. There are people at least in my generation who kind of sniff at the Bible. I remember one lady saying, “Well, some people say it’s almost like Father, Son, Holy Spirit and a Bible.”

“It’s the voice of God.”

The revelation of his mind throughout history that he wanted us to know. We’re just going to put that to the side?

With my students at school I’ll pull out my cell phone – yes, I have a cell phone, sort of – and say, “If I were to hold this out and point it at you and say, ‘It’s your mom,’ would you think that I meant this phone is literally your mother?”

“My dad is not a phone!” Sorry, that’s a cultural reference but it’s after your time.

I guess. But they get it. Is the Bible God? If you mean a collection of paper and ink, no. But does it contain the words of God and the voice of God, and is it empowered by the Spirit of God, and are we given illumination by the Spirit to understand? Yes, so let’s not create this artificial separation.

You could not stand at Sinai and say, “Well, I hear that loud voice but that’s not God. It’s just noise. It’s just a disturbance in the atmosphere.” Oh, you better start listening real fast, buddy. That’s dangerous.

That’s my toddler’s lawyer brain at work.

Yeah. The Spirit is going to come upon old and young, upon free men and those who had been servants, upon boys and girls. “In those days of my Spirit” – the New Testament is going to be characterized as the age of the Holy Spirit because, as we said earlier, the gloves are off. He’s here to do some very serious work in fulfilling God’s promises. He’s always been at work, but now with Jesus on the throne, the types and shadows being swept away, the destruction of Jerusalem looming on the horizon, he’s ready to get to work and win a world to Christ, so in that sense it’s his age.

And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke.

Those three aren’t particularly miraculous. The easy way to get blood and fire and smoke is to start a war. Probably the allusion here is to the coming destruction of Jerusalem, which will end the old covenant rather decisively.

At this point, for those forty years while the church is in its infancy and trying to grow, people could still point at the temple and say, “Jesus is the new temple,” but there’s a temple there. “You say he’s the lamb. I see lambs on the altar.” “He’s the high priest, but there’s a high priest over there doing stuff that God has ordained that’s been going on for 1500 years. Where is this new kingdom you’re talking about? Where is this new heavens and earth?”

One of these has the prior claim in the earthly view.

Yes, so it’s necessary for that to be swept away, and God gives Israel 40 years, as he did in the wilderness, to get their act together, to repent, and to turn to him. Some do but most don’t.

The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord comes.

That is what books on hermeneutics call apocalyptic language. It’s rooted in Genesis 1 and in Joseph’s dream of the 11 stars and the sun and the moon bowing down to him. The sun and moon govern, and the sun, moon, and stars in Joseph’s dream are the authority figures in his life. Jacob interprets it immediately and says, “Wow, that’s going to be pretty spectacular when the sun comes out of the sky and bows down to you. Shall your brothers and your mother and I indeed bow down to you?” He got it the first time. He was used to understanding scripture.

I find it so funny how Joseph immediately understands the others’ dreams also. It wasn’t as much of a miracle as it seems to us today. The Hebrews seem to interpret dreams all the time.

The one that still gets me is, “The three branches are three days.” Why? The only thing I can offer on that one is that Joseph probably knew that Pharaoh’s birthday party was three days off. Probably the whole world about him was humming with it. “Hmm, three…uh oh. Guys, let me tell you the good news and the bad news.”

Throughout the prophets with respect to Edom and Egypt and Babylon, these images appear – the sun going black, then going to blood, the stars falling from heaven. This is common language and it speaks of the heavens and earth of that world. We would say world-changing events. When we say that we don’t mean the planet actually gets manipulated into being something different.

We’re talking about the order of things.

Yes. When we say an old Batman line, “It’s a dark day in Gotham City,” we don’t mean that we actually had a power failure. It means that there are problems going on here. Or the Hollywood line, “A star is born.” Nobody who reads that actually thinks there’s a new star in the sky. They understand that’s talking about a person, so readers of the Old Testament would be very familiar with this language.

“There’s coming a great war, and in the end everything is going to change.” There’s a figure of speech – everything. Well, not everything. Dust will still be dust, and the elements will still be the elements and all that.

Conservation of mass.

Yes. But the religious and political order in which Israel has lived is going to change drastically. The “great and notable day of the Lord” could refer to the second coming, but more likely refers to the coming of Christ to destroy Jerusalem, which he said he would be doing before too long. “You shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Father, coming on the clouds of heaven” – that judgment.

The prophecy ends –

And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

We’ve seen the Spirit poured out on all flesh, and now another ‘whoever’ calls on the name of the Lord, so there’s a universality here. It’s not that everyone is going to be saved, but that salvation is being made available to everyone, despite class distinction, ethnicity, national boundaries or language boundaries. The gospel is going to be going everywhere, and anybody anywhere who calls on the name of Yahweh, the name of the Lord, will be saved. So that’s his text.

When I was younger I would say, “How does this even have anything to do with the text?” It has everything to do with the text but we don’t see that until we get to the conclusion where Peter says…

Stop! Spoilers! We have to save it for next time because we’re running out of time.

Speaking of which, let me do some really fast stuff, and please feel free to interrupt me, but I think we can get…no, we can’t, sorry. I looked down at the resurrection of Messiah and said, “Oh, there’s no way I can zoom past that one.”

There’s far too much in the second half of this passage to rush through it.

Let it be shown, this is a re-recording, as I mentioned. We have the outline of what we said last time in front of us, and we still cannot do the same thing in one week.

At this point we’ve gotten through the first four points.

Yeah, we’re about halfway through, so tune in next time to find out.

Why don’t we stop here, and we’ll find out how the rest of the sermon actually comes out of the text he uses. We find out in Peter’s conclusion, but it takes us a while to get there. You may think, “Hey, he’s a preacher who read a text and went off on tangents and never came back.” No, he comes back with full force, but you have to understand who Jesus is before you can understand the force of the text. I guess we’ll do that next time.

We will, but before that let’s sign off with some recommendations.

You get to go first. You discovered a book on your shelf.

I did, but I haven’t read it so I’m not going to recommend it. I have a lot of books on my shelves that I haven’t read. I don’t want to give you a ratio, in fact. I would be embarrassed.

[laughing] Sorry, I just saw this black cat fly over Rachel’s head.

He was trying to climb onto my printer and eat the wrapping paper that I put up there to get away from him.

Oh, your cat eats plastic, too. Ours does that a lot. Anyway, you were saying, Emily?

What I recommend is looking into authors that you enjoy and picking up a book that you have not read by them. I recently picked up, for a creative project purposes, a P.G. Wodehouse book called Love Among the Chickens. You know just from the title that it’s going to be a good time. I can’t recommend Love Among the Chickens because again that’s another one that I have not yet read. I’m looking forward to it, but I do recommend finding more works by authors you enjoy.

I see that last time I recommended gardening in general. You look up on the internet how you’re supposed to do gardening stuff and you say, “Huh! I’ll have to remember to do that,” and then you don’t…and you don’t for years.

At least in northern California you’re supposed to plant grass seed in October or in early spring. For once I finally hit the October mark, just before the rains came, and I didn’t have to water the seed! God watered it for me and it grew! The grass sprung up and survived, and now it’s getting warm so I’ve got to start watering it by hand again.

It sounds silly but that was a major victory for me because there are certain parts of our yard that I’ve tried to get grass to grow in, but I was planting at the wrong time. There’s probably a biblical lesson in there about times and seasons and knowing when to plant and when to sow and when to reap and such. Now with spring coming up I need to plant some more grass seed, with the hopes that we will get more rain before too long, so that God can water it for me again.

It’s funny, if you work with the Lord rather than try to ignore him because we’re smart and know science and stuff, it tends to be a better universe all the way around. So go garden. Go plant some seed now that it’s early spring, but get to it real fast. Also tomato plants, it’s about time for those, people. Get your tomato plants in.

I’m going to recommend a game that David and I introduced to our friend group that was a big hit called Tortuga. It should sound familiar if you’ve ever seen things like Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s a pirate-themed game and we had a lot of fun playing that, so much so that the Maxsons and others wanted a second night of playing because they felt like they had a better grasp on it. It involves stealing gold and switching it back and forth and getting to maroon people and mutiny against your captain.

And a little bit of social duplicity, which I always enjoy in a game.

Wow, it sounds like a wonderful Christian past-time!

It’s a lot of reading people and knowing your friends, if you’re playing with people that you know. How well can you read somebody and do you know if they have the capacity to lie or not?

You mean are they good at lying?

Yes, actually.

It’s called acting.

Yes, are they good at a poker face – I guess we’ll put it that way. Some of us tend to wear everything on our face that everybody can read, or people take things the wrong way where you say something and they jump to a conclusion or what not.

There’s a lot of back and forth because you take stuff from the Spanish – you are either English/British or you’re French, then generally one person is being Dutch, who’s trying to balance everything between the British and the French, so it creates a lot of, “Are you on my side or are you just Dutch and you’re trying to do your own thing? Are you French?” It’s a lot of fun.

It’s a small little set, which is nice for travel. It’s a game that my husband David learned at seminary and then brought out here to people in California.

When did you introduce this? Because I played this before.

He first introduced it before we got married. He brought it out, because he’s somebody who likes to take games places with him. I’m still learning about this. That’s not something that I would normally do, but he likes to pack a couple games and see if people will play them, so he brought a couple games out with him. I want to say it was around Thanksgiving time that year maybe, but other people may have it out here. I don’t know.

There’s something interesting to the piracy myth. In the Poetry Dojo we just covered the poem The Pirate Don Durk of Dowdee, which just paints a picture of a Captain Hook sort of figure, and it got me really thinking about the role of a villain in a child’s imagination specifically. I think it’s because it’s all so rooted in roleplay. You do have to have some reason that somebody wants to be the pirate. They can’t really just be as disgusting and as truly villainous and horrific as pirates were in history. You have to create a myth to participate in it, and I think there’s a lot of food for imagination there. Anyway, that got me on a bunny trail.

I guess that’s all we have tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in. A big thank you to our financial supporters. Thank you for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, dear listener, you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion. Send us an email if you’d like to get in touch. Send us your thoughts about pirates or Tortuga or board games in general or whatever you want. [email protected] is the place to send that. Tell a friend about us and tune in next time. This has been a Diecast Media Group production. Good night.