23: The Life of Jesus (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the life of Jesus series. As we start, do you want to cast a vision for application? What are we going to be studying during this series, and how are you hoping, hoping our listeners will come away equipped from it?

[00:20] Marcus: Absolutely. So, one of the things that used to bother me, and still does now and then, is that a lot of us Christians who are, by definition, followers of Jesus, would have a very difficult time explaining to anybody what are the prophecies that made us think he’s the Messiah.

What’s the apologetics there? What did Jesus actually accomplish on the cross? What is the evidence for his resurrection? What did Jesus teach? Can you give me a summary of his life?

I find that a lot of times we aren’t really experts on Jesus, even though we are, by definition, followers of Jesus. So, we’re kind of building off of an e-institute course I did a couple of years ago on the life of Jesus. And we’re trying to get this information out to as many people as possible just so we have a better grasp on this foundational information about our faith.

[01:13] Stephanie: I know when you were younger, you went and you found those — not cassettes?

[01:19] Marcus: Yeah, this is really old. So you remember they had movie projectors and in these little canisters were the film strips. So the film strip would load to this projector, and then we would watch. And so for Sunday school, it wasn’t uncommon to have one slide of a still of the life of Jesus. Here’s another still and here’s another still.

And I can remember, even as a young elementary school student, being frustrated that I didn’t know how it all fit together, that I didn’t understand what came first and what came second. Is there an order to the life of Jesus? Because we always seemed to just study random stories — here’s a random story where he heals a leper, here’s a random story where he casts out a demon — but I had no idea what the flow was to his life.

So one Easter morning when we had a break between sunrise service and the rest of church starting, I snuck down into the elementary part of the church and I got out the projector and I got out the canisters, and I just took myself through the life of Jesus to try to figure out how does this all connect?

[02:26] Stephanie: I just love it. I just love little Marcus wanting to understand.

[02:29] Marcus: I want the big picture doggonit.

[02:32] Stephanie: It’s amazing. So I am very delighted to get to talk to you about all of this and what you put together back then and in further study throughout your life. This is going to be great.

So Jesus fulfilled at least 300 prophecies in the Bible. And in your special way, you’ve identified three prophetic pictures that we can use as anchors for how we think through some of these prophecies. Like in our last series, these three pillars, if you will, can be remembered with three S’s: seed, Servant of the Lord and Son of Man.

So we’re going to go through a crash course of these three today, but if you, dear listener, want more detail, Dad taught an entire e-course on the topic that you can find in our learning library. So, Father.

[03:26] Marcus: All right, so yeah, we do. Just like we had three pillars that started with s, we had sacred romance, sovereign lordship, spiritual warfare. Now we have three foundational prophetic pictures, right? So we’ll call them three pictures. And the first one is seed. The second is suffering servant, and then Son of Man.

So the idea here is seed. And when I was in seminary, we learned that a lot of times in our English it says offspring. Especially in the NIV, it said the word was offspring. So Abraham was promised offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky.

At the event where Isaac is bound, and Abraham is ready to sacrifice him — that story is just dripping with overtones of what God was going to do with his own son. So Abraham is told, take your son, your only son, Isaac, and yet we know he had Ishmael. So this idea of your only son, meaning this is your heir, this is the one through the promised seed.

And so this word seed is sometimes called the saga of the seed, and it runs all the way through Genesis. And it starts with the promise in Genesis 3:15 that Eve would have a seed that would crush the serpent’s head. And ever since, that’s the foundation of this prophecy that there’s a war, but the seed of Eve is going to crush the head of the seed of the serpent.

[04:57] Stephanie: I was just listening, and I find it interesting that maybe you could note, women don’t have seed.

[05:05] Marcus: Women have eggs, and men have seed. That’s the way it works. Yes.

[05:10] Stephanie: So why is it the woman’s seed?

[05:13] Marcus: Well, because of that, because it is very unusual language to say the woman will have a seed, that has forever been seen as a prophecy of the virgin birth. When the woman conceives a seed without the help of man, so to speak, the seed isn’t going to come from man, it’s coming from the woman.

So that makes the virgin birth part of this, but in God’s unique way, it wasn’t obvious to everybody that this must be a virgin birth. But once the virgin birth happened, you could look back and go, oh, that’s what this is talking about.

[05:48] Stephanie: Foreshadowing.

[05:49] Marcus: Foreshadowing — you got it.

[05:50] Stephanie: God is a master storyteller.

[05:53] Marcus: So that’s the foundation of this saga of the seed — the seed is going to come through the woman. And then we find out the seed’s going to come through Abraham. And there is this kind of epic struggle throughout. When it goes through Abraham, is it going to be through Ishmael or through Isaac? And God’s clear it’s going to be through Isaac.

And then he has two sons. Is it going to be through Jacob or is it going to be through Esau? And again, God chooses Jacob. And then we see that there are twelve sons of Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel. And it doesn’t go to the firstborn, doesn’t go to the second born, and doesn’t go to the third born. It goes to the fourth.

Now, the reason for this is pretty straightforward, too, and that is there are some dark parts of the Bible that people don’t often know about because we aren’t taught them in Sunday school. But one of them, for example, is the oldest son, Reuben, actually had sexual relations with his stepmother. Israel (or Jacob) had two wives and two concubines. One of the concubines was Bilhah, and Reuben and Bilhah actually had relations together, and so he forfeited his birthright as the firstborn, and that’s why he got bypassed.

Well, the next two, Simeon and Levi, are the two who tricked the men of Shechem into circumcising themselves in order for Shechem to marry their sister Dinah, and then they wiped out all of the men of Shechem. So they were discarded because of this great sin, and that left it to Judah. And so Judah, the fourth born [his name means praise] and the prophecies about the seed all now move into the line of Judah.

And we’re told that a star is going to come from the line of Judah, a scepter will rise from Judah, and the seed is going to come from Judah. And then later on, we see, sure enough, David comes from the line of Judah. Then all the promises regarding the seed come through David.

So the foundation of all of the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament are related to this idea of seed. It starts with the seed of the woman, then goes to Abraham, then to Isaac, then to Jacob, then to Judah, then to David, and then from David on we’re waiting for Jesus.

[08:06] Stephanie: So cool. There’s so much to explore in seed, and I’m trying to decide how much to press in because we have lots to cover. Do you want to move on to suffering servant?

[08:15] Marcus: I think it’s enough for now to introduce the idea, and we can move on to suffering servant.

[08:19] Stephanie: All right, well, this is going to take us into one of your favorite books of the Bible, possibly. I’ve heard you say it is your favorite book of the Bible, but there’s, you know, wriggle room there.

[08:29] Marcus: Yeah, it’s Isaiah. And, how do I put this? When I was teaching the Old Testament at Bethel — it was then Bethel College and now is Bethel University — I remember the dean asked me to teach a course on Isaiah, and I said, “I don’t think I’m capable. I’m not enough of an Isaiah scholar to teach a whole semester course just on that one book.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t do it, I’ve  got to go find a pastor in the area to do it.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

And it was a great experience. It was a great excuse to just dive deep into that book. And one of the things I found is that it’s just a book full of compassion for people dealing with wounded hearts. There are few books in the Bible, other than maybe Psalms, that have such comforting images of help, of God’s compassion for those who are broken and the brokenhearted, and of this idea that the Messiah is going to come, particularly for those who have been oppressed and those who have been abused.

And so it’s in Isaiah, for example, that we read, The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to give sight to the blind, release to the captive. That’s Isaiah 61.

[9:47] Stephanie: Which is what Jesus reads.

[9:50] Marcus: Yes, which is what Jesus reads when he introduces his identity to the people. He goes straight there. And in the book of Isaiah, there is a famous portrait of God’s servant, the servant of Yahweh. And the servant of Yahweh is presented in two very starkly different portraits.

Portrait number one is of a blind and deaf and rebellious servant. And this is the idea that God chose — he elected the people of Israel to be his servant — and he had a purpose for that. He wanted them to bring his glory to the world, his light to the world, but they messed up completely. They were blind servants who were rebellious, who turned to idolatry. And he’s like, ‘Who’s blind like my servant?’

And so there’s parts of this where you’re like, wait a second. It feels almost schizophrenic because is the servant of Yahweh a good person or a bad person? But what we find is that in this chosen line — which is directly related to the seed image — Israel, as God’s chosen seed, is going to be embodied by one particular seed who is the servant of Yahweh. And so what we see is that Israel as a whole failed in their task as the seed of Yahweh.

And so God is going to, through them, bring up another servant who will be his chosen servant, and he will succeed. He will bring justice to the nations, he will bring righteousness, and he will establish a throne. And then you get this unique thing that not only is he going to be victorious, but in there is this startling image of him suffering. He’s rejected, and he’s despised and rejected.

So I’ve often felt that every Christian really needs to master Isaiah 53. If there’s only one passage of Scripture that every Christian should know inside and out, it’s Isaiah 53, because that is the foundational passage that tells us how to interpret what happened on the cross. For example, when you see Jesus on the cross, how do you know how to interpret what you’re seeing?

What did the jewish religious leaders see? Well, they saw that they had won. They saw that, okay, we have successfully silenced this blasphemer. So they saw a blasphemer getting what he deserved. What did the Romans see? They just saw somebody who was another poor sap being crushed by the Roman machine. They didn’t see anything special.

So how do we know that when Jesus died on the cross, he was dying for us, that this was an act of atonement? And the answer is, it goes fundamentally back to Isaiah 53, where it says he was despised and he was rejected. He suffered. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. You know, we have each turned our own way, but the Lord laid on him all of our iniquity. And so we have this idea that Jesus is the substitute. He died for our substitution.

And not only does Isaiah 53 talk about him dying, it talks about him being buried with the wealthy, and it talks about him rising again, because after the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life, he will see his children and be satisfied. So it’s all right there. His rejection, the purpose of his death — that is for substitution — it’s to bear our sin. His death, his burial and his resurrection are all there.

That’s why Paul can write in 1 Corinthians 15, I pass on what I received to you as of first importance, that Christ died according to the Scriptures, that he was buried according to the Scriptures, that he was raised. He’s probably got Isaiah 53 in mind for most of those.

[13:29] Stephanie: That’s so epic.

[13:31] Marcus: It is. It’s an epic passage, no doubt.

[13:34] Stephanie: I’m really excited. Next semester, I’m going to be doing an exegesis of Isaiah with Doctor John Oswalt.

[13:42] Marcus: Oh, yeah.

[13:42] Stephanie: And Isaiah has been his baby in terms of what he studied with his life. So I’m so excited.

[13:48] Marcus: Yeah. Dr. Oswald’s a bit of a bridge for us, right? Because he was at Trinity when I was there, and now he’s at Asbury while you’re there.

[13:54] Stephanie: I got a lovely little note from his wife, who was like, oh, I remember your grandpa and your grandma. It was so sweet. Now for a crash course on the Son of Man. What does this title even mean? Where does it come from?

[14:08] Marcus: All right, so we started with seed, right? And this idea of the seed of woman who’s going to become the seed of Abraham and eventually the seed of David. And that is the foundation for the suffering servant in Isaiah. And now we come to this idea of Son of Man.

Most of us — if you’re like me — grew up being taught the Son of Man was the title of Jesus’ humanity. He’s the Son of God and Son of Man, but the reality is that Son of Man in the Old Testament is a divine title. And to understand this, we have to go back to the book of Daniel.

Daniel has a vision. He says, in my vision at night, I saw thrones. And he saw the throne room of God. We would call that the divine council, using Michael Heiser’s now famous terminology. So in the throne room of God, there’s thrones set up. The Ancient of Days takes his seat, and he says one like a Son of Man enters the presence of the Ancient of Days, and everybody serves him. And that word serve is the same Hebrew word that’s used for worship.

So in a sense, it’s like the whole world worships the Son of Man. So that raises a significant question. Who can walk into the presence of the Ancient of Days and receive worship?  Who can walk into the presence of the Ancient of Days and everybody bows down to him. So, this is not a title of his humanity. It’s also in this passage where it talks about one coming on the clouds — the Son of Man coming on the clouds.

So Jesus at his trial, when they’re pinning him down, are you the Messiah or not? This is what he quotes. He says, ‘I’m the Son of Man, and you will see me coming on the clouds of heaven.’ Now, this idea of riding on the clouds is kind of a Baal metaphor, because Baal was a storm god, and he was pictured riding on the clouds in a lot of Canaanite literature, but in Hebrew Scripture that image is corrected.

So no, Yahweh is the storm God, Yahweh is the rider on the clouds, and Yahweh is the one who does all of this. And so again, presenting himself as the rider on the clouds is another divine image. It’s the idea that I am the true divinity here.

[16:19] Stephanie: It makes me think of — is it Psalm 18? That is some very epic Psalm where it just describes God, like, riding on the clouds.

[16:29] Marcus: Yeah, I can’t remember what it is off the top of my head. I’m thinking it’s Psalm 29. There are several passages of Scripture that talk about his voice like thunder and lightning coming from his hands. And part of what they’re doing here — it’s an apologetic against Baal saying it’s not Baal who does all this. It is Yahweh.

So the Son of Man image is this idea that Jesus is saying he is the supreme ruler of the divine council, he is the supreme ruler of all of the thrones. So in other words, this idea that Paul talks about in Ephesians, where he says Jesus has been given a place of authority above thrones and dominions and principalities and powers and every title that can be given — not only in this age but in the age to come — he probably has this Daniel text in mind, because here we see the Son of Man walking into the presence of the Ancient of Days with thrones laid out, and they are all acknowledging his supremacy.

And so we see that when Jesus died on the cross, when he was raised from the dead, he was given   a name above every name. He was given all authority in Heaven and on earth. And as a result of that, he was found worthy to open the scrolls in Revelation, because not only was he the crown prince by birthright, he was the prince by victory.

And so we see all of this tied up in this Son of Man imagery. So rather than us thinking of the Son of Man, almost as a reflection of his weakness, that’s not really where the Old Testament takes us.

So there’s our three core pictures of the Messiah and Messianic prophecy. I think every Christian ought to really have a good handle on these: seed, suffering servant, and Son of Man.

[18:18] Stephanie: So epic. Everybody go listen to the e-course and go deeper and study these passages.

Any final thoughts on the episode application?

[18:39] Marcus: Well, I am looking forward to talking about S.M.A.R.T. That actually came when I was asked to teach fifth graders about Jesus. And I wanted to give them a simple way that they could walk through and remember the life of Jesus and what it was all about, as well as the order of key events in his life. So we’ll look at that next week.

For this one, the prophetic portrait of Jesus is part of the worldview that grounds our faith and reminds us this is who we serve. I like to watch period pieces now and then, kind of with the idea of what’s going on downstairs and upstairs, like a Downton Abbey kind of thing.

So you get this picture that what gave a servant status was who they served. And we are servants of the most high God and of the Messiah. And our status comes from who we serve. And I think it’s good for us to remind ourselves of these foundations. And it’s also a good idea to just be able to explain to other people the reason for our hope, and prophecy is certainly a big part of that reason.

[19:55] Stephanie: Today, we’re talking about the five stages of the ministry of Christ by using the acrostic, S.M.A.R.T. How did you identify these five stages and where did this acrostic come from?

[20:06] Marcus: So the origin story is that I was asked to do a devotional for fifth graders and decided to do it on addressing an issue that bothered me when I was in elementary school. I wish I had had a big picture of what was going on in the life of Jesus, so I decided to give them one.

As I broke down the stages of the life of Jesus, I began looking for a single word that summarized what each stage was about, and I realized that I had S, M, A, and R. And I’m like, wow, I need one more. And I got T, and T is in the shape of a cross.

And it starts with the triumphal entry, so that was pretty smooth. So it just sort of created itself just by trying to come up with one word to summarize each of the sections. But where they came from specifically is that as I was studying through the Gospels, I realized what a strong connection there is between the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus.

There are triggers, actually for the first three stages of the life of Jesus that come directly from John’s ministry. So, for example, stage one is triggered by the baptism by John. So when he is baptized by John, it’s at that point that he receives the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It’s at that point that he receives the anointing of the SpIrit.

And Luke especially makes a great big deal out of this. The Spirit comes upon him, and the Spirit drives him out of the desert, and then the Spirit drives him to Galilee, and then he goes to Nazareth, where he reads from the Scriptures, ‘The Spirit is upon me.’ We’ll talk a little bit more about that, but that one was pretty clear that Spirit is the word. So that’s the S of S.M.A.R.T.

Then the second trigger is that John was put in prison. And when he was put in prison, it says Jesus moved to Capernaum. So that was when he established a headquarters. He goes, okay, now that John is in prison, it’s time to establish a headquarters, and he became much more focused about going from village to village to village throughout the region of Galilee.

And then the third trigger was the beheading of John. And we realize that when John was beheaded, it signaled something to Jesus. I personally think it was a reminder to him — I came to die too — it’s time to start preparing my disciples for the fact that I am going to die. And so once John was beheaded, Jesus took a retreat. He withdrew with his apostles, and then he went on a second retreat and then a third retreat. So there are three retreats associated with that third stage, which I use A for apostles to remember.

So we’ve got Spirit, ministry headquarters established, and apostles go on retreats. And then we get to that third retreat that ended at the Mount of Transfiguration. And this story is just hugely important because it was, as Peter says in his second letter, when he was an eyewitness of the glory of Christ.

Well, where was he an eyewitness of the glory of Christ? It wasn’t just in the miracles he did. He saw him transfigured into his heavenly glory up on top of this mount. So, it was a huge event because it revealed his identity once for all. And it’s also a turning point in the life of Jesus because from that point on, Luke says he set his face to go to Jerusalem. It was time to die in a sense.

So he leaves that, he goes on his final journey to Jerusalem, where then we get to that triumphal week, which honestly, most of the Gospels give half of their material of what happened in that final week of the life of Jesus. So that’s where it goes. And so that’s how we use S.M.A.R.T. and that’s where it came from. It’s spirit, ministry of the masses, apostles on retreat, the revelation of his identity and his mission at the Mount of Transfiguration, and his final journey into the triumphal week. So that’s S.M.A.R.T.

[23:59] Stephanie: Oh, there we go. We can just close up shop now.

[24:04] Marcus: That’s all five stages. We just dive into them a little bit more.

[24:07] Stephanie: Well, I would love, before diving into them, maybe to go back to John the Baptist.

[24:14] Marcus: Amen.

[24:14] Stephanie: I’m going to let her out or not. Okay. I would love to talk about John the Baptist in terms of his prophetic nature, especially since we just came out of our Messianic prophecy episode and how he prepares the way for Jesus.

[24:36] Marcus: Yeah. John the Baptist reminds me a little bit of Samuel in this regard, and that is that the story of Samuel takes place in the book of First Samuel, but he’s really the last judge. So his story connects to the Book of Judges, but it’s not found in the Book of Judges, but he is a judge.

In the same way, John the Baptist is the last of the Old Testament prophets, even though his story is in the New Testament. So we think of him as a New Testament prophet, but he’s actually the last Old Testament prophet. And you could even argue that he’s the last and greatest because he was tasked directly with introducing the Messiah to the world.

And John, in some circles, gets a lot of recognition. In other circles, he’s sort of forgotten. You know, he’s like an afterthought. Now, I know that if people are fans of The Chosen, they probably either love or hate the portrayal of John because he’s quirky and he’s different. But I look at this again, and the issue here isn’t really John’s personality. It is his mission, and he was given the task of helping people see their need for what the Messiah was going to do.

The baptism of righteousness for the forgiveness of sins was preparing people for the idea that the Messiah came to do something about their sin and not just something about their slavery to Rome. So it was a very important ministry that he had, and it’s no accident that each stage of Jesus’ ministry was triggered by something related to his life.

[26:13] Stephanie: That’s so cool. All right, so let’s go deeper into S.

[26:17] Marcus: Yeah, into S — the Spirit. So in Luke 4:18 and 19, Jesus gives what is sometimes called the kingdom manifesto. And that is where he is declaring his mission statement for what he’s here to do. And the mission statement is a quote from Isaiah 61, but it begins with these words: The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me.

And so this raises the question, okay, well, when did you receive the anointing? Did Jesus come into this world with the anointing? Was he born with the anointing? Is it just on him because he’s the Son of God? But you go back and you realize very clearly that just a few paragraphs before he was baptized by John the Baptist, Heaven opened, a voice came from the throne room of God and declared him to be his Son, and then the Holy Spirit came upon him.

Well, in the Old Testament, we see two real common terms, and that is the Holy Spirit coming upon and the Holy Spirit filling. When the Holy Spirit came upon, I think of Samson. He’d be his average self, then the Spirit would come upon him, and he would become invincible. Well, the Holy Spirit coming upon people had to do with power to accomplish a task that they had been given.

So Jesus came to do the task of being Messiah. So he got an anointing I think that was different than anybody else’s. Occasionally you hear people say that we’re just like Jesus. He emptied himself, he got an anointing, and we are just dust, and we get an anointing. In that regard, yes, there’s some parallels, but Jesus got an anointing we didn’t get.

He got the anointing to be the Messiah, and none of us get that anointing. So each one of us gets an anointing, but his is unique because he is the anointed one. And in Hebrew that’s Mashiach from which we get Messiah, which means anointed one. And in Greek, Christos, from which we get Christ, which means anointed one. So this is his identity. It happened at his baptism.

And then Luke really drives that home by saying, not only did the Spirit come upon him, but then the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. The Spirit drove him up to Galilee. The Spirit was upon him. And even in Acts when Peter is preaching on Pentecost, he says God’s Spirit performed miracles through him among you, which is a very interesting thing.

And so this idea of him as the anointed one is directly connected to John’s baptism, to the coming of the Holy Spirit upon him, and it is a model for us of the fact that God wants us to live out of our anointing as well. But I just want to make sure we don’t take it too far. So he is the anointed one, and he is the Messiah, and that’s where it happens. So that’s where the whole thing launches.

[29:27] Stephanie: Excellent. And it launches into his ministry.

[29:30] Marcus: It launches into his ministry, so the M can be just ministry. So when John is imprisoned by Herod, it says that Jesus moved to Capernaum. Sometimes we think he was just always in Capernaum. But really when he moved to Capernaum, it was John’s imprisonment, when he began collecting his disciples and when he began calling the twelve specifically.

So it’s not that the twelve hadn’t been in his life before that, but he is making a point of saying, okay, I’m choosing twelve of you, and we’re going to go. So his ministry and the calling of the twelve to be his apostles begins right here with this imprisonment of John, the moving to Capernaum, and all of this becoming very more intentional.

And what he said was interesting, too, that Capernaum may have been the headquarters, but he didn’t come just to help Capernaum. He said, we must go to other towns also, because that is why I have come. And so this is the beginning of him traveling throughout Galilee. During this time, it appears that he took several trips to Jerusalem. You kind of have to read between the Gospels to piece it all together.

But this is that time of ministry. It’s also the time when he sent out the 70 and began preparing people. I love the image I heard somebody say about the ministry of the twelve and the ministry of the 70 and going out to these various villages, and they were to look for a house of peace.

And that means to find somebody who was receptive and open and just stay there. And so by staying in that one house, people got used to the idea of coming to that house for discussions and things related to Jesus. And so, in a sense, Jesus was laying powder kegs all across Israel.

[31:21] Stephanie: He was planting house churches.

[31:23] Marcus: He was planting house churches all across Israel that would be powder kegs. Once the holy spirit fell at Pentecost, that was the fire that lit these, and all the powder kegs are already ready, and so it just took off. And so they were all ready to go, these churches in every community. And, you know, the Bible doesn’t just come right out and say that. But you get the impression here that Jesus was getting things ready in sort of a very under the radar sort of way.

[31:55] Stephanie: He’s good at that.

[31:56] Marcus: He is very good at under the radar. Yeah. Anybody who tries to follow God knows he’s really good.

[32:01] Stephanie: He’s good at under the radar. He’s good at preparation and preparing a place and doing it in such a way that you’re like, oh, that’s what you were doing.

[32:09] Marcus: Now I see what you were doing. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the challenge because sometimes when we’re in the middle of it it makes no sense to us. So this is the ministry time of his life, and it was triggered by the imprisonment of John.

And then we come to the third element. So the third stage was triggered by the beheading of John. And at this point it says after John was beheaded he took the apostles apart. The first place they went was Bethsaida. Bethsaida is a town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. And he went there to get away with his disciples. But when he got there, there were 5,000 men plus women and children waiting for him. That’s where we have the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000.

Finally when they’re all done, Jesus sends the apostles back across the water. He goes off and prays because he really needs to be alone with God and talk to his Father about the next stage of his ministry, because now that John’s been beheaded the final bell has sounded, so to speak. We are now ready to go towards the cross. I’m sure he needed some extended time with his dad about this.

So this is when, coming back in the middle of the night, he’s walking on the water and surprises the people, and Peter has his experience, the encounter on the water. And you look at all that and what’s happening is Jesus is beginning to prepare himself and his apostles to understand his true identity and the nature of his calling. It’s not enough for them to know he’s the Messiah, they have to know what kind of Messiah he is.

And so one of the reasons Jesus didn’t just go around saying, yes, I’m the Messiah is because everybody thought they knew what that meant, and it would have actually been misleading. And so he chose his own words, his own vocabulary so he could fill them with his own meaning.

There were three retreats. If you think about the letter A, there’s actually three strokes to it: up, down, and across. So I think about these three strokes as representing the three retreats he took with his apostles. The first one was this one at Bethsaida where the feeding of the 5,000 took place.

On his next one, he went up to Tyre and Sidon, which is really interesting because this is the home turf of Baal. And this one ends up with him feeding 4,000 people. I find it interesting that they both ended with feeding a mass of people.

And then on the third retreat, he takes them to Caesarea Philippi. Now, until you dive pretty deeply into the backgrounds of Caesarea Philippi, it seems pretty random, like an interesting detail. But once you dive into the background of Caesarea Philippi, you realize there is something with spiritual warfare going on here, because that town was located at the base of Mount Hermon.

That mountain, in intertestamental literature, was heavily connected to the idea of the fallen angels called the watchers. So the Book of Enoch says specifically that there were 200 sons of God who descended to Mount Hermon, and there they made a pact that they were going to intermarry with the daughters of men. And so given that this was such a strong tradition in that area, not only was Mount Hermon right there, but there was a cavern system that went deep into the earth that was called the gates of hell, and it was dedicated to the god Pan, who was a nature god of chaos and wildness and passion and abandon.

So when Jesus is there, he is looking at Mount Hermon in the background, he’s standing in front of the gates of hell, and he says to his disciples, ‘Who do people say I am?’ Peter says, ‘You are the Messiah. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’

Then Jesus says, ‘Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. Flesh and blood hasn’t revealed this to you but my Father, who is in heaven. Your name is Peter, which means stone or rock, and on this rock — Petra — I’m going to build my church, and the gates of hell will not stand against it.’ Well, he’s standing right in front of the gates of hell when he says this.

So there are multiple images going on here, and part of it is that Jesus wants them to know his true identity, and he wants them to know his true calling. And so this episode wraps up with him taking Peter, James, and John to a high mountain apart. Well, it’s almost certainly Mount Hermon because they’re right there, and Mount Hermon is the tallest mountain in Israel. It’s snow covered most of the time.

And he comes up there, and that’s where he is transfigured before them. And they see him as a heavenly realm being with this glowing and brightness, and they are overwhelmed, but there is no longer any question. This is not a carpenter from Nazareth with delusions of grandeur. This is a divine being from another realm. This is somebody unbelievable.

And then to make clear that we know which divine being, which heavenly being this is, God speaks once again: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him.’ (This may have been directed to Peter.) But it was directly stated right there, and then they come down. This is kind of the high water mark — this has all been building up to this.

And now Jesus has finally made it clear, and the law requires two or three witnesses, and we have Peter, James and John. He had his three witnesses, and they come back down, and now there’s no question who he is.

But at this point, not only does he reveal his identity for sure, but he reveals his mission, that is, yes, I’m the Son of God, but I didn’t come to save us from Rome right now. I came to be betrayed, to suffer, to die all according to the Scriptures. So I’m thinking he’s got Isaiah 53 in the back of his mind, plus some other passages.

It says in the book of Luke, he sets his face like Flint now to head to Jerusalem. So he starts this final journey to go towards his destiny. And having told them that he came to suffer and die, he now heads to Jerusalem, knowing he’s going to suffer and die there.

[39:15] Stephanie: And so now we come to the triumph, the final letter, appropriately in the shape of a cross.

[39:21] Marcus: Yes. T is for triumph. T is shaped like a cross. It brings all this together. In fact, we’re going to have a couple of podcasts in the future about what actually happened at the cross and what actually happened with the resurrection. And I’m not going to get into the whole debate about the chronology of when things took place, on which day, and that sort of thing.

The point here is it was confrontation time, and Jesus went. In a sense, he picked a fight. He went and turned over the tables in the temple. He went and he did not go and hide. He went, and he provoked them. He gave answers to questions, and he told them that the sign that he was the Son of God, that he was the Messiah, was that the temple would be destroyed in this generation. That was the sign he gave them.

He also told them that if you kill me I’ll rise again in three days. He said, ‘I’m giving you two signs — my resurrection and the destruction of the temple in this generation — so you know that who I say I am is true.’ And this is kind of the theme for the whole thing, who is Jesus?

So you go back to the anointing with the Spirit. This is my Son whom I love. He’s the anointed one. He’s the Messiah. You go out into his ministry to the masses, and people are like, who can do this? Who can just speak, and demons leave. Who can just speak, and things happen like this?

And you go to the apostles and their retreats, and he wanted the apostles to know, this is who I am — the revelation at the Mount of Transfiguration. This is who I am. And now he comes, and he basically makes it clear to his enemies, this is who I am. And he leaves them with only one of two choices. You’ve either got to kill me or you’ve got to serve me, because this is who I am. And so we know which way that went.

Paul says if they had known who it was, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. But they were blinded, and he went to the cross, and he was betrayed. And so all this started with the triumphal entry, and Jesus’ offer to them to be king. So when he came, he basically said, ‘I’m the king. Do you accept my rule or not?’ And then he said, ‘I am the prophet clearing the temple. Do you accept my word or not?’ And he said, ‘I am the Son who has come to require fruit from the stewards. Do you acknowledge who I am or not?’

And all the way through, he was just rejected, rejected, rejected, but he gave them opportunity after opportunity after opportunity. And so we see that when Jesus rose from the dead and when the temple was, in fact, destroyed in that generation, those two signs were fulfilled, giving confirmation that Jesus was who he said he was.

So the triumphal week begins with the triumphal entry, and it ends with the triumph of the resurrection. And that’s the life of Jesus in a nutshell.

[42:27] Stephanie: Hey, so helpful. And I love how simple you make it. It gives us good anchors, and I love the John the Baptist anchor points. I think that’s really helpful.

So next week, we’re going to be looking at the teachings of Jesus. But for now, any closing thoughts for the episode?

[42:51] Marcus: Well, it helps me going back through this again and again, because this is the anchor of the faith. It’s the life teachings and the finished work of Jesus. His life is what we are to learn from. We are disciples to learn from our master, so we learn from the way he lived. And it helps us to know who it is we’re following.

Next week, we will look at the teachings — that’s the other part of being a disciple. We need to know what he taught and how he expects us to live. And then in the episodes after that, we’re going to look at what he actually accomplished when he died on the cross and rose again. So these are the foundations of the faith, and this is really huge.

And one of the things it reminds me of is somebody you know who was a missionary to Muslims. And one of the things he found was that when evangelizing, in that context, it was best to start with the life of Jesus and not start with [telling them to] choose to leave that religion and join this religion. But it was, let’s look at Jesus, because your religion honors him too.

And let’s look at who Jesus was, what he did, and what he said. And I think it’s just really important for us to be grounded in this and have a really strong handle on who Jesus is, what he did, and what he taught. And this is why we try to live the way we live.

[44:17] Stephanie: So, the last episode was an awesome fire hose of information about the five stages of Jesus’ earthly ministry using the acrostic, S.M.A.R.T. And during this ministry, Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom. If there is one core theme to his message, it’s probably repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near?

[44:37] Marcus: Yeah, I often say if you want a bumper sticker that encapsulates the message of Jesus, Matthew already gave it to us. And there’s three different times we read, repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near or something very close to that. And that’s the heart of it.

So I look at repent, and that means I’ve got to change something about the way I’m living, which usually starts with changing the way I’m thinking about the way that I’m living. And that is a whole different worldview, a whole different perspective, a different set of values. And what are the worldview and values I want to embrace? Those are the kingdom.

So, repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near. I take that as a call to order our lives around the worldview and values of the Kingdom of God. So that’s what we’re talking about today.

[45:20] Stephanie: Awesome. When you think about this Gospel, sometimes you anchor the message with three L’s, light, life and Logos.

[45:32] Marcus: Logos, yes.

[45:34] Stephanie: Tell me more.

[45:35] Marcus: So, John 1:1 says, the Word became flesh. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that has been made.” Then it says, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

This is a fairly familiar passage to us, but there’s this debate in scholarly circles over Logos, and that is, does John here refer to Plato and to Greek philosophy and the idea that there is this almost non personal reason or rationality that can be found throughout the universe? And is he saying that Jesus is this philosophic rationality that we find in the universe?

Clearly, that is a discussion in Greek philosophy, but the odds that that’s what John’s talking about are remotely low I think. What he’s talking about here, you don’t have to go any further than Genesis, which John would have been intimately familiar with. And that is, how was the world created?

“In the beginning” gives us a clue. We read in Genesis 1:1 that in the beginning, God spoke.” Elohim spoke, and light came into the world. And then all of creation was accomplished by speaking, which is the Word. So what John is saying is this really remarkable idea that the Word that was spoken by God is Jesus, that he is the one speaking the words, that it is his voice calling life into existence, light into existence.

And he is now taking this symbolically and saying that Jesus is life, and he is light. So Jesus, as Logos, is the one who gives us eternal life, and he is the one who gives us truth — the light that gives light to our life. So I love this title, Logos, that Jesus came as one outside of this realm to bring life to us through what he did with death and resurrection, and to bring light to us through what he taught.

[47:49] Stephanie: I have one word for this, and it will shock no one. And that word is epic.

[47:54] Marcus: Yeah, epic.

[47:56] Stephanie: I know I overuse that word, but I truly find epic things everywhere. I was just thinking how in John 1, and I think also in Hebrews 1, in my Bible I have “epic” written right in the margins next to them. It’s so good. All right, so there’s Logos. Can you unpack light and life a little bit more in terms of the Gospel?

[48:20] Marcus: Yeah. So life is related to the idea that the Gospel gives us life. Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. I’ve come so that your joy might be complete. I’ve come to give them eternal life. Whoever believes has eternal life.”

So the idea of life in the Gospel is directly related to this idea that Jesus came that we might have life, that we might have life abundantly, joy-filled life and eternal life, and all of this is at the heart of the gospel.

And then the light, again, is this idea that out of this life that Jesus is living, there is light. And that’s how they put it in John. He says, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” And so this idea is that his life gives us a light for dark places, just like the Torah and Psalms light our path, “Thy word is a light unto my path.”

In this case, it’s Jesus himself. His life in us, his presence with us, his Spirit lights the way before us, so that even though we live in a dark world, we have somebody who’s there with us, and we have light.

[49:34] Stephanie: Excellent. So you took a break with the letter L. But, Father, you really like the letter S. I’m looking at our Kingdom of Heaven notes, and we once again have a list of words beginning with the letter S.

So when thinking about the core values of the Kingdom of Heaven, we think of salvation and stewardship and spirituality and servant love. Look at those lovely S’s. So, do you want to give an overview of how you determined those core values?

[50:08] Marcus: So, starting with this idea that you could summarize the life of Jesus as repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. This idea of kingdom living is at the heart of what Jesus taught. I don’t think too many people dispute that. So where do you find his core kingdom teachings? Well, you find it in his parables and in The Sermon on the Mount.

I was actually doing a sermon series back when I was pastoring, and this was the series: What is the worldview of the Kingdom of God? What are the values of the Kingdom of God? What did Jesus ask us to do? And this is where you get the worldview of sacred romance, sovereign lordship, spiritual warfare, and the values that grow out of that are salvation.

The idea here is that nothing is more important than salvation. First of all, nothing’s more important than obtaining salvation. Secondly, nothing’s more important than sharing this message with others.

I go to the parable in Matthew 13, which says the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure buried in a field that a man found and reburied, then in his joy he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field. So the idea here is that the Kingdom of Heaven is the treasure, and it’s worth everything. It is the highest value. The highest value is obtaining the kingdom.

Now, interestingly, there’s two completely different perspectives on this verse. One is the idea that we are the merchants. We’re out hunting, we find the treasure, and we’re like, oh, the Kingdom of Heaven is so valuable, I will go sell everything that I have to obtain this. That’s the way I was always taught. That was the interpretation I’m probably most familiar with.

But there’s another way to look at it, and that is Jesus is the merchant and he is saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure buried in a field, and he’s the man who found it and reburied it. And in his joy, he went and sold everything that he had. Because Jesus really did empty himself of everything. He really did lay down his life. Why? To obtain us as the treasure of his kingdom.

Either way, though, whether you take this as Jesus laying down his life for us, or this is us letting go of everything to obtain the kingdom, you’re talking about salvation being the core value. This is the highest value. You get the same idea in the parable about the merchant who found a fine pearl, and  it was worth everything.

So priority number one is salvation. Number two is stewardship. The idea behind stewardship is, again from The Sermon on the Mount, where it says to seek first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. He also says, don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourself treasures in Heaven.

If I am focusing on laying up treasure in Heaven, then what I’m doing is I’m trying to be a good steward of what God has given to me. And the way that I am a good steward is by taking what I’ve been given to store treasures in heaven rather than treasures on earth. And so this is a core value of the kingdom. This is how we go about it.

Once I am saved, what do I do with my life? I am now storing up treasure in Heaven by investing my life, by seeking first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness in everything that I do. And so this is the stewardship idea that my whole life is an act of stewardship to God. I’m trying to manage what he has given me in a way that maximizes kingdom impact.

The third is, well, how do I do that? Because I can do that in the flesh, or I can do that in the Spirit. So the natural third S here is Spirit, and that is, I think, best embodied in John 15, in the vine and the branches.

I think about the Spirit as the sap that flows through the vine into the branches. And the idea that we can’t bear fruit — we can’t store up treasure in Heaven — if we’re doing it in the flesh.

In order to store up treasure in Heaven, we have to do this in the Spirit. John 15 lays this out for us that as we abide in Christ, and his life flows through us, we end up being good stewards. So there is salvation, stewardship, and then spirituality. And then the last one is servant love.

And this is the idea of what is this fruit that we’re supposed to be building? Well, the fruit is love. How do you know that you are walking in the Spirit? How do you know that you’re doing this? Well, Paul lays it out as love is the fruit of the Spirit. But Jesus also, in John 15, says that abiding in Christ produces love.

And so we understand that as disciples of Jesus, we’re supposed to love our enemies. We’re supposed to love those who persecute us. We’re supposed to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, those who are in the family and those who are outside the family. And all of these things kind of bring the core values of the kingdom together in a way that we can remember. So those are the four S’s.

[55:15] Stephanie: That’s great. My brain keeps going back to the stewardship idea, and I keep thinking that maybe there’s something to tie into Genesis or into creation, too. I’m totally coming up with this on the fly.

[55:32] Marcus: In some ways, this all ties back in, because God created a world for us to enjoy, and he wanted us to enjoy it with him. I think about food and that it is always better when you can enjoy it with somebody. And, in fact, food is a great excuse to connect with people. And Jesus talks about God always using food in his feasts when he wants to connect with his people so there’s joy in what’s going on.

I look at all of that, and I’m thinking of all the things that go into the creation and the preparation of food, all the things that go into the creation and preparation of whatever it is that you do in life. You have an opportunity to do it in a way that is joyful or a way that is not, in a way that is relational to God. If I’m doing what I’m doing in relation with God, then I’m doing it for his glory.

And so all this comes back to, let’s live for the glory of God. And in Genesis, I would go back to, again, this idea that life is a gift, and a gift is a trust that we are to steward. And so we find this idea of stewardship all through the Bible. Now, did you have something in mind when you brought up Genesis?

[57:48] Stephanie: I often think about God placing us in the garden, and there’s such a rich message, I suppose. It’s rich because there are many messages you can get through it. God placed us to be his image bearers here, and there’s a sense of stewardship in our being image bearers, I think, as well.

[57:19] Marcus: I see this in two places specifically. One is Genesis: 1:26-28, where he says, let us create man in our image, in our likeness, and give him dominion. And so this idea of us as humans being given dominion over created order implies in it being a good steward of what I’m giving to you. That’s implied in the mandate.

Secondly, when you go to Genesis 2, and Adam is actually installed in the garden. The Hebrew verbiage there is the same verbiage that’s used for installing a priest in the temple. And many people have noted this. One of my mentors, John Sailhamer, pointed this out, that Adam is presented as the priest, the garden is presented as the temple, and the priest is installed.

And he is given two commands — I want you to keep and to tend. This is how we tend to translate it, but they’re the same two Hebrew words that if it was a priest, would be translated as to serve and to keep. In other words, the way that a priest served was to light the candles and put out the bread and  offer prayers of incense.

[58:28] Stephanie: Wait, light the candles and give out the bread. That’s light and life.

[58:31] Marcus: There you go. The priests would perform these acts of service in the temple, whether it was lighting incense, or keeping the candles lit, saying prayers, doing the things that they were doing. That was part of their act of worship. Paul builds on this in Romans 12, where he says, this is our spiritual act of worship to make ourselves a living sacrifice.

In Genesis 2, Adam is seen as a priest who is installed in the garden. And the language that’s used there is the same that we find in Leviticus for the installation of a priest in the garden. The two commands that Adam was given actually use the same two Hebrew words that a priest would be given to describe his work.

One was avad, which is to serve, and the other is shemar, which is to keep. So the idea of serving is not just like any old service. The specific temple service was replacing the bread, lighting the candles, burning the incense, doing the offerings, all the tasks that went into the service of God. And then the shemar word, keep, is the word that we would translate to keep the law, to obey the law.

So you could translate this that Adam was placed in the garden to worship and obey, and all of a sudden, it means a whole lot more than he was put in the garden to do some gardening. He was put in the garden for a very high purpose.

And again, this is how he stewarded. He stewarded by making his life an act of worship to God. So there are all kinds of connections back to Genesis, and those are just a few.

[1:00:11] Stephanie: And then we bring it all the way back to Jesus, who was the second Adam. Do you want to talk about that?

[1:00:17] Marcus: Jesus is the second Adam. There’s a theological idea called the federal headship of Adam that says that as the only human, he represented the whole human race. And so when he fell, when he sinned, the whole human race sinned, and he was then sent into exile away from the garden.

And people ask if Adam died on the day that he ate the fruit. And they want to say he died spiritually, but the Bible never actually says that. What it does say is that he was sent into exile on the day that he ate the fruit. And exile and death are synonymous in Scripture. So the nation of Israel died when it was sent into exile. It was brought back to life when it returned from exile.

In the same way, Paul in Ephesians 2, when he talks about the Christian life, he talks about us being dead in our trespasses and sins. And then he goes on to explain that in terms about exile. What it means to be dead in your trespasses and sin is to be separated from God, alienated from him, in exile.

So the second Adam idea is that while the first Adam brought sin and death and exile, the second Adam, Jesus, embodies in himself a new humanity, so that all of those who are in Christ are righteous. They are alive, not dead. Their exile is over. They’ve been reconciled.

So you get reconciliation, you get new life, and everything is done over. Those who are in Adam share sin, death, and exile. Those in Christ share righteousness, life, and all the good things that come from being in Christ.

[01:02:28] Stephanie: So next week we are going to move forward to look at the cross. But for now, I would love for you to share some final thoughts of bringing all this together, maybe into a practical note for how this reflects on how we live our lives.

[01:02:43] Marcus: Well, hopefully nothing is more practical than the core values of the kingdom of God. Right. And that is that one we want to make sure that we’re living our lives out of gratitude for our salvation. I think when we talk a lot about appreciation, gratitude, but the fundamental thing for which our appreciation should never end is just the gratitude of what Christ did for us to make salvation possible, to give us life, to give us light. And we just meditate on those things. We dwell on those things, and they anchor our lives in gratitude. It also reminds us that we live in a lost world and there’s people living in darkness, and they need. The greatest thing we can do for them is to help them to find salvation as we move forward. I’m like, stewardship is really not. Sometimes people hear stewardship and they think giving, and that’s part of it, because one of the things we’ve been entrusted with is money. But the idea is that life is a gift, and I am to steward my life. And that doesn’t mean that every last second of every day I need to be doing some kind of ministry. The idea here is that the overall thrust of my life is heading toward the kingdom, right. That the general direction of where I’m going is going toward the kingdom. And that because of that, I have a rhythm to life that is kingdom focused. I think that’s the essence of stewardship. And so we go through these things and realize they can only do if I’m walking in the spirit. Then I got to make that a priority and recognize when I’m slipping into the flesh and get back on, on track. And then I’ve got to bring it all together. When I begin to notice that I’m walking in the flesh, the first sign that I’m walking in the flesh is that I don’t love the way that I ought to be loving. And so if I find that I’m having a hard time loving, I’ve got to go back to God and say, you’re going to have to love this person through me. I really can’t do this on my own. So all of it is just no end to how all of this applies. But I think as we come back, sometimes it’s helpful just to see how they all connect together.

[01:04:53] Stephanie:  Yes, indeed, indeed. Yes, no trauma. I live in a fabulous house with a very godly couple who are wonderful, a very wonderful living situation. So anyway, we’ve been covering the life and ministry of Jesus. Today we come to the literal crux of our faith of his incarnate life, the cross. You have another acrostic for us today Father, and it is aptly CROSS. However, before we get to this helpful acrostic, could you bring us into the “boots on the ground” context of the crucifixion?

And today we come to the literal crux of our faith, of his incarnate life, the cross. You have another acrostic for us, and it is aptly c r o S S. However, before we get to this helpful acrostic, could you bring us into the boots on the ground context of the crucifixion?

[01:05:15] Marcus: Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about today, the meaning of the crucifixion. How do we know what it means? We got into this a little bit when we talked about Isaiah 53. And you know, every christian needs to know this because it interprets the cross for us. So let me give you the context for that final day. And if you think about the Jewish calendar system the day starts at 6:00 p.m. So in the Genesis story it says there was evening and there was morning one day, day one, and day two. And the idea is that the day actually starts at 6:00 p.m.

So if you look at the last 24 hours of the life of Jesus at 6:00 p.m., he and his disciples are gathering for the last supper. Three hours later at 9:00 p.m. they’re on their way to Gethsemane. Three hours later at midnight, he’s being arrested and Judas is betraying him with a kiss. Somewhere between 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. he meets with Annas the high priest, and he’s put on trial. By 9:00 a.m. he’s on the cross. The crucifixion began at 9:00 a.m. and at noon, three hours later, darkness came over the whole land. And then at 3:00 p.m. he dies right just before the end of the day, so he is buried by 6:00 p.m.

So within one 24 hour period, he goes from the last supper to Gethsemane, to the arrest, to the trials, and to the crucifixion. Darkness covering the land, dying, and being buried, it’s a really climactic thing. And I realized it was actually one calendar day in the Jewish system. So I always find that helpful to kind of get that in my head of how much transpired during that pivotal 24 hours.

[01:06:58] Stephanie: When they say, a lot can happen in a day, yeah, a lot can happen in a day. Wow.

[01:07:04] Marcus: Yeah.

[01:07:05] Stephanie: All right. Oh, go ahead.

[01:07:08] Marcus:  No, it’s true. It just really hit me how much he went through in such a quick span of time. And one of the things that always amazes me about Jesus, (and we talk about this with Rare Leadership) is his ability to remain himself, act like himself, and stay relational through the whole process. You think about everything he went through, how many people he had to interact with, and how many upsetting things he had to go through. How much pain and everything else, and yet he acted like himself. He stayed relational. He acted like himself and he returned to joy. He helped other people return to joy. He did it all. So he is “that model” of enduring hardship well on the cross.

[01:07:47] Stephanie: I love that you brought that up. Oh my goodness. I still remember the first time I read the first draft of Rare Leadership. I got to that chapter that starts with looking at Jesus acting like himself on the cross. And I don’t have very many experiences where my mind just feels blown. I don’t know if it’s the benefit of growing up with you and just being desensitized to “mind blowing things” because you’re awesome. But I read that and was like, “Whoa! Mind blown. That’s amazing.”  What a picture of Jesus acting like himself and remaining relational, even on the cross. Okay, sorry. I’m just reiterating it all over again, but it’s so cool. While we’re talking about that, could you linger on some other areas when Jesus did that? Not just on the cross.

[01:08:50] Marcus:  Not just on the cross, but when he remained relational and acted like himself. Think about how often he was confronted. He spent the week before this being confronted in the temple. And part of acting like himself is that it was like him to make a whip out of cords and clear the temple, right, it was not okay. And he knew when it was time for that versus, oh, come to me and let me comfort you. He was the proper response in every occasion. So even when he was saying, this generation will not pass away before the temple’s destroyed, and God sends an army to wipe this whole thing out, he was still himself when he was doing it. In some ways, even the woes to the Pharisees, he was trying to wake them up. If you’ve got people who are that hardened, how do you get their attention? And so this was his attempt. And you can kind of walk through almost any story from the life of Jesus you want and you will find these rare qualities at work.

[01:10:01] Stephanie: I just keep thinking, is it Jim who was like, oh, yeah, and that one time when Jesus was so angry that he healed someone?

[01:10:07] Marcus:  Yeah. That’s a Jim’s story for sure. Like, he got really angry at the Pharisees and told the guy to stretch out his hand so he could heal it. He got angry but still acted like himself.

[01:10:22] Stephanie: Yep. I love it. All right, very good, very good. Thank you

[01:10:28] Marcus: A little bonus content.

[01:10:31] Stephanie: So now let’s dig into the points of your acoustic. So it spells CROSS, covenant, ransom, ownership, subjugation, substitution. So, Father, tell us how you developed this acrostic and then we’ll explore each point.

[01:10:45] Marcus:  The question that comes up is, what did Jesus actually accomplish on the cross? And there’s a lot of different paradigms that have been used through the years to try to explain it. So I just started assembling them, collecting some of the classic ways people have tried to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross. When we take communion we say, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” So it was his shed blood on the cross that created the new covenant, so we start there. We talk about ransom, a ransom’s a payment for sin. There’s a payment that was taking place here so that Paul could say, You’ve been bought with a price. So the blood of Jesus is the price that paid for us, so that’s the ransom. That brings us right into ownership. I am not my own anymore, I belong to Jesus.

So discipleship starts with bowing the knee to the king and that my life is not my own anymore. I was bought and paid for at the cross. The ransom has to do with any claim that Satan had against me, Jesus is taking care of that at the cross. When we come to subjugation we’re talking about the demonic spirits being subjugated. We’re talking about the principalities and powers being brought into subjection to the authority of Jesus Christ so that it could be said, That all authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me. That happened at the cross. So Paul says in Colossians two that the written document that gave Satan a claim against us was nailed to the cross. It was taken away.

That’s all part of this subjugation, where Jesus is placed higher than the principalities and powers. And then there’s substitution. Which is the classic Isaiah 53 interpretation of the cross that he died as our substitute. He died in our place and all of our sin was placed on him, our iniquity was laid on him. So these are the classic ways in which people have tried to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross. And so what I did is I took those classic ways and I just tried to boil them down to one word. And once you realized that you’ve got four of the five letters, it wasn’t hard. You know, subjugation was the one I had to struggle with a little bit. How do you get what Jesus did at the cross into an “S” word, but that was it.

[01:13:11] Stephanie: Let’s move into covenant.

[01:13:16] Marcus: When we take the Lord’s supper we always hear these words, This is my body. This is my blood. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. So the idea here is that the old covenant was ended and made way for a new covenant. Now, this gets really messy for some people. The old covenant had to come to an end. And so that’s why it says John the Baptist was the greatest of all those under the old covenant.

But now we’re under the new Covenant. And he says, I tell you, the least of those who are under the new covenant is greater than John. Why? Because the least of those is still under this covenant of grace. We still stand before God fully pardoned. Fully belonging to the family of God, full citizenship in heaven, and full sainthood. There is so much of what is true about us in the new covenant that was simply not true of those who were under the old covenant. It was foreshadowed in the old covenant but it wasn’t there yet.

So at the cross Jesus fulfilled the law. He fulfilled what the prophets had said about the law, but he also ended it. Which is why Paul could say in Ephesians that Christ in his death, tore down the dividing wall of hostility that divided Jews and Gentiles, taking it on in his body. So there is this end that happens with the old so that the new can come. And the author of Hebrews says the same thing, something isn’t new unless it’s replacing what is old. Every covenant of this is anchored in blood. So when Moses brought in the old covenant it was with the blood of bulls. He took part of the blood of a bull and put it in on the altar, part of it in a bowl, and sprinkled some of it on the people. And through the blood of the bull people entered into the covenant. Now it’s through the blood of Jesus that we are sprinkled.

And that brings us into a covenant. And what a covenant does is it defines our relationship with God. So you know how people kind of struggle? Like, where do I really stand with God? How do I know where we stand? Well, we struggle with that because we’re trying to stand on the basis of performance. And if I feel like I haven’t been good enough yet to know where I stand with God, that’s old covenant thinking. That’s performance based thinking.

New covenant says you can know where you stand with God because it is a gift to you through Jesus Christ. Here it is, it is the gift of grace. So I use the acrostic PACT to remember the essential things that grace has given us in the new covenant. We’ve been pardoned, we’ve been adopted, we’ve become citizens of the kingdom, and we have a new title, we’re saints. I said that fast because we already did a whole series of podcasts on those. But again, pardon, adoption, citizenship, and title. All these things are ours in the new covenant and because of that we can know where we stand with God.

01:16:25] Stephanie: Yeah, we talked about that in the FISH series, right?

[01:16:28] Marcus: I think that was on identity. Yep.

[01:16:31] Stephanie:  Yeah. Acrostics within acrostics.

[01:16:35] Marcus:  Yeah. They layer on top of each other.

[01:16:40] Stephanie: Very good. Are we ready for ransom?

[01:16:42] Marcus: I think we’re ready for ransom, yeah.

[01:16:44] Stephanie: All right.

[01:16:44] Marcus: Obviously, we could spend a long time on any one of these topics. Let’s start with ransom. The background for the idea of ransom is slavery. In the roman world over half the population were slaves. Basically if you were a prisoner of war, and a lot of prisoners of war from specific battles got sent off, you became slaves. Well, Rome conquered a lot of people. They had a lot of prisoners of war from the other armies.They would often take a city and kill the men and they enslave the women and children. So I say all this because at the time that the New Testament was being written, slavery was a dominant worldwide system with which everyone was familiar. That’s largely how prisoners of war were handled. So you picture this as that I am not only a slave but I am a prisoner. I am in a prison trapped by sin and my master is sin.

So in the slave image my master is sin. In the prison image I am enslaved by sin. And what Jesus did on the cross was he set us free. He said he paid a ransom which would be the price to buy us from our slavery, or to set us free from our imprisonment. So ransom is the price that purchased our redemption. So we hear this word redeem all the time, to be redeemed. Ransom is basically the price that buys our redemption. So I look at it this way. If I’m in a prison house of sin, it says in Romans 11 that God has locked everybody up in a single prison through sin. But he did that so that he can set everyone free with one key. And that is what Jesus did on the cross. And so that’s the idea that Christ’s ransom purchases our redemption and that’s part of what he did at the cross. He buys our redemption by his ransom. And so this is a significant part of what Jesus did on the cross that’s good for us to understand.

[01:18:53] Stephanie:  Kinsman, Redeemer. Yeah. All right, “O”, ownership.

[01:19:02] Marcus: Ownership. So related to ransom is this idea of ownership. And 1st Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23 says, we were bought with a price. And because we were bought with a price Christ is our master. He says to people do what you do as if you’re doing it for Christ. And he was talking to slaves in the Roman world and saying, if you’re a christian slave, you don’t spend your day being bitter and miserable, this is your lot in life.

He’s like, remember that you’re a slave of Christ. And he says specifically to them, in Christ you are freed. And he says to the free people, in Christ, you’re slaves. So understand that you’re no better than anybody else. So Paul does have quite a bit that he talks about in his letters, and having the mindset and the identity that comes from being bought with a price. Because I’m bought with a price which is the same ransom that bought my redemption, I have gone from being a slave of sin to a slave of God. From a slave of sin to a slave of righteousness. And so this has changed everything and it changes my core identity of who I am. So from this day on I live to please my master, and my master is now Christ. So this is a foundation that part of what he did on the cross was to make us his own.

And let me back up here a little bit. When you look at these first three things, what all of these things have in common is what all of the elements of the cross have in common, reconciliation. And what I mean by this is that they all have to do with attachment. God wants an attachment with us. He wants us to be reconciled. Now, we are apart from him and he wants us to be brought near. That’s the essence of reconciliation, right? We’re alienated from each other, we’re not in unity, and he wants to bring us together so that we are bonded. And God wants us to be joy bonded not just not fear bonded. So he wants us to have this really deep attachment with him. And so to do that first he has to set us free from what enslaves us so that we can form an attachment with him. He gives us a covenant which defines the nature of our attachment with him. He says, you now belong to me.

So ownership is this idea of belonging and belonging is the heart of attachment. And so he’s like, you belong to me. We belong to one another. In fact, the covenant defines the fact that we belong to each other and that we are one. I think it’s important to understand that probably the big idea above all of them would be reconciliation. And at the heart of reconciliation is this idea that God wants a deep attachment with us. And that’s why we talk about salvation as attachment a lot here at Deeper Walk. Honestly, it was Jim Wilder who really helped open my eyes to the role of attachment in salvation and kind of put all the pieces together in this way well.

[01:22:10] Stephanie: And it fits so well. We are Deeper Walk because we want to have a deeper walk with God. What is walking with God? It is being in relationship with him and walking in his ways. And it’s the whole story of the Bible. Like you said in one of those points, this changes everything. That could be the subtitle to this episode. This changes everything because now the problem of the separation of not being able to attach to God as he intended, that veil is torn down. Through Jesus we can attach to God in a way that he intended.

[01:22:52] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. You put your finger right on it. The point of a deeper walk is actually the relationship. And what Jesus did on the cross makes that relationship possible, it establishes the relationship. And as we die with Christ, as we live as those crucified with Christ, that means that we’re walking in freedom. We’re walking out of our covenant identity. We’re walking as those who belong to Christ. So all of these things are connected and they all relate.

[01:23:26] Stephanie: All right, are we ready to move on to the “S” that stumped you?

[01:23:31] Marcus: Yeah, subjugation. I almost went with spiritual warfare but that was two words. So we wanted to keep it simple. So the idea here is that Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers according to Colossians 2:15. And this idea of disarming as he also says, he led captivity captive and he had a triumphal procession. Because after the cross when he was resurrected that was his triumphal procession as a victorious general, putting on parade all of these enemies that he had just defeated.

So again, in the Roman culture they’re very familiar with the idea that a conquering general would come back to Rome, and in this triumph he would display the wealth that he had brought to Rome by his conquests. But he would also put on display many of the prisoners that he had. And he would put the most noble and most famous of the prisoners at the end of the procession. And then he would kill them all of course at the end of that. Jesus conquered his enemies, the devil, and all of those who are allies of the devil. They were defeated at the cross because they were disarmed. And he specifically disarmed them by paying the debt required by law. Colossians 2:15 has fascinating imagery here. It says there was like this piece of paper that the Greek word used for it is specifically the word used for a debt. It’s like this is a letter of debt.

It might say that you owe your student loans, you owe your car loan, and you owe these loans. If you couldn’t pay your loans in that culture what happened to you, you became a slave. So you are a slave because you can’t pay your debts. And so what Jesus did at the cross is he took this letter of all of our debts and he took it away. He erased it, he erased our debt. He took it away by nailing it to the cross. And in taking that away what happened is that he took away the devil’s claim on us. Because now the devil can’t say, but wait, look at the debt, he owes me. And I said, no, that’s paid for, Christ has taken that away. So by taking that away he has disarmed the principalities and powers. And I think this is what Jesus was talking about when his last word on the cross, the Greek word is tetelestai. So tetelestai is, it is finished.

Now, it wasn’t his pain that was finished or his suffering that was finished, or even his life that was finished, but all that’s included in there. But what’s interesting is on these bills of debt, on the parchments of debt, when a debt was paid off the word that was written on it was tetelestai. It was written on the bill showing that it was paid in full, there is no more debt to be collected. So I believe that Jesus had that in mind that it is finished like the old covenant is finished. It has fulfilled its purpose. It is time for the age of the Messiah to begin. The age of law is over and the age of grace is beginning. There’s a lot of things that are finishing and a lot of things that are beginning. But I think part of it was that a debt was being paid and that it was paid in full. Because of that the enemy had lost their claim on us. And also in conquering the enemy he was now leading them in triumphal procession. And therefore the Father gave him a name above every name and seated him at a place far above the principalities and powers. So again, this is a huge part of this. And this thing is sometimes called the Christus Victor, interpretation of the atonement of Christ and what he did at the cross.

[01:27:37] Stephanie: Amen. This is awesome. All right, final “S”, substitution.

[01:27:43] Marcus: All these things are connected at some level which makes sense. So, again, let me go back to Isaiah 53. It says, all we like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has gone his own way. But Yahweh laid on him the messiah, the iniquity of us all. So to lay our iniquities on Christ is to take what is on us and give it to him and to lay it on him. And I like the picture of exchange, which is sometimes called the “great exchange.” I am taking my sin and giving it to Jesus and he is giving me his righteousness. Let’s have an exchange here. You give me your sin and I’ll give you my righteousness. I’m like, okay, that’s a pretty good deal, I will take that. The Greek word that really kind of embodies this is the idea of ˈhīpər which is we where get our word hyper. But in this case it’s ˈhīpər.

So 1st Corinthians 15:3 says, “I deliver to you as a first importance what also I received that Christ died, who ˈhīpər our sins.” He died on behalf of our sins or in place of our sins. Romans 5:6 same thing.”At just the right time when we were still weak, (asthenos is a Greek word) still sick and weak, Christ died, (ˈhīpər) for the ungodly.” Meaning on behalf of or in place of the ungodly. Then Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates his own love for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died (ˈhīpər) for us on our behalf, in place of us”. This idea of substitution is embodied here that we deserve death. But Christ died in our place and he took upon himself our sin, and he also took upon himself the penalty for our sin. I want to point out here that he did more than take the penalty, though he did take the penalty for our sin. He also took the sin itself and removed it which is kind of the idea of purification. He gave purification for sins not just paying the penalty for our sins, he did both.

Romans 3:25, God presented Christ as the hilasterion, which is a great Greek word. Hilasterion is actually the Greek word for the cover on the ark of the covenant. Now when you think about what happened at the covering of the ark of the covenant, it is where people would ask for mercy. It’s called the mercy seat. So you pour blood out on that and it was above the hilasterion, the covering of the ark, where the glory of the Lord dwelled overshadowing and covering the ark. In presenting Christ this way it’s bringing it altogether. This is one of the ways in which he fulfills the Old Testament that the pathway into the presence of God has been opened for us, because Christ himself is the sacrifice that has opened that door. So there’s a lot of things embodied in this idea of substitution. And I think the two main things I would camp on is that substitution both purifies us and it pays the penalty for our sin.

[01:31:08] Stephanie: Amen. And how did we think we could do one episode on the cross?

[01:31:13] Marcus: I don’t know. We’ll probably have to come back here during the Lenten season.

[01:31:20] Stephanie: We’ll come back and back but, yeah, so much good stuff. And I always when we talk about the cross, want to talk about the resurrection. But luckily that’s our next episode, next week we will be looking at the resurrection. So for now, any final thoughts on this whole episode, Father?

[01:31:37] Marcus: Yeah, it is a big topic. I think when the Bible talks about meditating in the Old Testament it used to tell us to meditate on the Torah. Those who meditate on the Torah their lives are anchored. Then Jesus said he is the new Torah. And so he told people in the sermon on the mount that whoever hears these words of mine and puts them into practice, he’s building his life on the rock. Well, then when you get to the finished work of Christ on the cross now you’ve got a rock on which our lives are built. And so the Christian is called to meditate on what it is that Christ has done for us. That doesn’t just mean how much he suffered.

Sometimes you can watch a movie like The Passion of the Christ and just think that meditating on the cross is about meditating on how much he suffered. Which is part of it, a part of demonstrating his love for us, but understanding what he accomplished there and dwelling on that. As we meditate on that we also talk to Jesus about it directly and talk to God about it directly. And we say, God, make these things more alive for me so that my life is truly built on the foundation of what you did for me at the cross. And I think as we learn to do that and dwell on that regularly, it’s one of the reasons why Christ has asked us to have communion on a regular basis, to practice the Lord’s Supper. We do this in remembrance of him because there is a lot to remember here. There’s a lot to reflect on and it’s good for us to do this regularly.

[01:33:10] Stephanie: We’ve been covering the life and ministry of Jesus. We have come to possibly the most important episode of this series, Jesus Resurrection. Paul says in 1st Corinthians 15 that if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is worthless. That’s a very big deal. So it’s only right that Dad, you have two acrostics for us today. Since I’m already derailing us, I’ll have you know that as I was typing up my notes spellcheck wanted to change acrostics to acorns. Which is also on brand for us, so I don’t know if the AI is getting smarter?.

[01:33:45] Marcus: Yeah, people may not know just how on brand acorns are but that goes back to our whole Bible. Actually, I think we’re going to be doing a Bible series next year on the podcast where we walk through the nine building blocks of Biblical theology a little more in depth. So acorn is related to the promise.

[01:34:04] Stephanie: Yes, we did and we have talked about the promise on the podcast here. I don’t know if we brought up the acorns? Anyway, as we get into the importance of the resurrection, would you Father help us with what I like to call, “the boots on the ground” context with our first acrostic?

[01:34:21] Marcus: Sure. The first acrostic, BEAT, I have to give some credit to this. I was reading one of Lee Strobel’s books and I don’t remember actually which of those “Case” books it was, but he was laying out the case for the resurrection. Maybe that was the book? And he laid out four core arguments. So I basically took those four core arguments and turned them into an acrostic so I could remember them more easily. And they spell BEAT. So I say this is evidence for the resurrection that is “hard to beat.”. So, the  “B” is burial, that Jesus was buried. Very few people dispute that. The tomb was found empty, also rarely disputed. There are people who claim to see him. So there were appearances that people claimed to see and the transformation of the lives of the apostles. And so those four lines of evidence create evidence that’s hard to beat. So I’m happy to unpack those a little bit. But that’s in a nutshell.

[01:35:26] Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you for that quick overview. So, yes, burial. Talk to us about burial.

[01:35:30] Marcus: So, first of all, one of the key things about burial is that he was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. And the reason that’s key is that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin. And so it would have been super easy to verify if that was true or not. Like, if this was a made up idea you would not have claimed it to be the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It was too easy to refute that because he was a very public figure. So they would have said, oh, he was buried behind an oak tree in a little known used piece of land someplace and nobody knew about it. That’s the kind of thing you would make up. That’s something that’s hard to verify. This is one of the most easily verifiable facts around. And it’s the fulfillment of an Isaiah 53 prophecy that he would be buried with the rich.

[01:36:24] Stephanie: Yeah. They didn’t ship his body back to Nazareth or something.

[01:36:27] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. He wasn’t just dumped in a mass grave somewhere. He was buried with the rich. And so Joseph of Arimathea placed him in his tomb. And because of that this is virtually irrefutable. In other words, this is not the kind of story you would invent. Also, we get the idea that nobody in the early years of Christianity tried to refute it. You can’t find Jewish sources or Roman sources or any other sources that are saying, oh, he wasn’t actually buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It was not something anybody even came up with an alternative theory for. Everybody agreed on it. So that’s the first evidence that’s hard to beat. He was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. So that’s the first one. “E” is empty. That tomb was found empty.

This is also irrefutable because everybody knew where the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea was, and if Jesus was there, there would be no discussion. So these first two points everybody agrees on. The question becomes, why is this tomb found empty?  What happened that this tomb would be found empty? Some of the counter arguments get pretty crazy, right? So two of the most common throughout the years have been that the disciples stole the body and then persisted in lying about it all of their lives. Even though they were all tortured, they were all brutally murdered. Right? They all went through extreme hardships and not one of them cracked. They held to the lie to the end.  That’s theory number one, it’s still the most common.

Number two is that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, but that he swooned. The cool dampness of the cave revived him and he was able to push the rock away, overpower a roman guard and get himself out of there. So that’s again kind of ridiculous on multiple levels. Here is the one that I most recently heard. William Craig was debating a professor at a major university and this guy’s theory was maybe Jesus had a twin brother and the whole thing was a setup. And one twin died on the cross and the other twin appeared to people and that’s what was going on. So once again, there is zero evidence for this. No one even proposed that idea for 2,000 years. But his point in bringing up a theory like this is that anything is preferable to a resurrection, right?

[01:38:59] Stephanie: Because as we say, if the resurrection didn’t happen our faith is worthless. Yeah, and his enemies didn’t even dispute any of that. Like his enemies were like, oh, hey, we need to come up with a reason why this tomb is empty.

[01:39:22] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So those are the first two lines of evidence you’ve got to explain the empty tomb. And then the fact that the tomb was guarded and that it was sealed. These are again not things you would make up because they’re easily refuted. Especially because the original audience of the gospel message were the Jews. They were right there. I mean, this was not something done in a corner. As Paul said in one of his trials in the book of Acts that these things weren’t done in a corner, everybody knows about these. And so then we get to “A”, which is the idea of the appearances where the clearly people claimed to see Jesus. This was the foundation of the whole thing. First the women at the tomb. Which is also interesting because as it has been pointed out to in the first century Palestine days, the testimony of a woman was not admissible in the court of law. Now obviously that’s not very politically correct, but that’s the way the law was back then. And so I find it interesting that God chose women to be the first witnesses of the resurrection, just like he chose shepherds to be the first witnesses of the birth of Jesus. Because a shepherd’s testimony was also not admissible in a court of law. That was just sort of synonymous with not being dishonest in that culture.

[01:40:49] Stephanie: Which is also another plus for the accuracy of the scriptures. Because if that hadn’t actually happened, why would they fabricate something so implausible?

[01:41:04] Marcus: Like, that’s not bolstering your case, right to do that. So the only reason to tell that story is because it’s true and because it’s not going to bolster your case with the audience you’re trying to reach. The other thing we find is that the appearances happen both to people who believed in Jesus and to non-believers. It happened to people who believed in Jesus first. But then you get Saul of Tarsus. Now, Saul of Tarsus, is famously attacking the followers of Christ. And so we see that it wasn’t just those who were predisposed to want to see him alive who he appeared to. And then you get the idea that he appeared to groups of people. He appeared to the disciples when there were ten of them without Judas and Thomas and then when there were eleven, because Thomas was present. Paul says he appeared to more than 500, all at the same time, most of whom are still alive. Kind of like, ask me, you know, we’ll double check this. So you have these appearances, you have eyewitnesses, and you have Peter’s original sermons, we are testifying to what we have seen and heard.

And so no one is denying that people claimed to see Jesus alive. It was both friends and enemies that it was individuals and groups. And you know, that it started again with stories you wouldn’t normally make up, that women were the first ones to bring this testimony. So that’s the “A”.  All right, so those are the first three, burial, empty tomb,  appearances. And then the “T” is transformation. And this has to do with two things. Number one is you look at the transformation in someone like the apostle Paul. Three times in the book of Acts he stands up to give testimony to the reason for the change in his life, that he went from persecuting the church to proclaiming the gospel, was that he met the risen Christ. That is his transformational thing. The risen Christ appeared to him and changed his life forever. And you look at somebody who believed it, in 2nd Corinthians he goes down the list of all the things that he suffered, and all he had to do to stop suffering was say, “Yeah, it might not have been Jesus.” “You know, maybe something else happened, maybe I was a little fuzzy that day?”

[01:43:20] Stephanie: No, it was his twin.

[01:43:22] Marcus: Yeah, it was his twin that showed up and “Charles” was very convincing. And Paul clearly saw Jesus more than just the one time on the Damascus road, because he says the gospel that he taught was taught to him by Jesus. It came by revelation directly from Jesus. So there’s that transformation. There’s also the fact that all twelve of the apostles including Matthias who replaced Judas, they all died a Martyr’s death. rather than saying, no, we actually stole the body.  When I think about conspiracies the idea of trying to get twelve people to all die for a lie, is just ridiculous. In fact, the evidence for the resurrection was so strong that for many years back in the eighteen hundreds, especially at Harvard law School, it was used as a demonstration of irrefutable evidence for a court of law. So it’s really only when the worldview changed that simply would not permit this explanation of the evidence that things like that began to change. So I say this because it’s important to know that there really is a strong case here and that we don’t believe in the resurrection just because we want to.

[01:44:43] Stephanie: And as you were talking I just couldn’t help but think about friends we know personally and  many, many testimonies from modern day people in closed countries, and around the world, who have seen Jesus and have been transformed because of it.

[01:45:03] Marcus: That’s true we’ve talked to people we know personally with that testimony, haven’t we? In fact, I was told by one organization there was a billboard somewhere in the Middle East with a picture of Jesus on it that said, “If you’ve seen this person in a dream, call us.” Because so many people we’re having appearances of Jesus. So that’s awesome, it’s still happening today.

[01:45:23] Stephanie: That’s awesome. All right, let’s look at your second acrostic, which is very appropriate, LIVE. What did the resurrection give us?

[01:45:32] Marcus: Yeah, the resurrection gave us life eternal. That’s the “L” of LIVE. That’s the first key thing. And Jesus is called the first fruits. And the point of the first fruits is that other people had risen from the dead before Jesus. Right. We have several examples of Jesus raising people from the dead. And people even in the Old Testament being raised from the dead, but all of them died again. Jesus is the first fruits of those who rise from the dead, never to die again. So he is the first fruits of those who experience life eternal. And he said, if we are attached to him, if we are in union with him, then we share that life eternal. So Jesus had to first rise from the dead in order to be the first one to experience this.

Now, I also say that we sometimes think of the goal of Christianity as getting to heaven, but that’s not what we mean by life eternal. It Isn’t life in a different realm someplace. We’re talking about going to paradise now, but Jesus is going to come back someday. We are going to come with him and we will be on earth with Jesus for eternity. I just want to dispel this idea of harps and clouds and things right off the bat here. What we’re talking about here is a resurrection life, such as the kind that Jesus demonstrated when he came back from the dead. So that’s the anchor thing and why this is so key. And it comes back again to this idea of the first fruits. But I thought LIVE was better than five, so we went with life eternal instead of first roots there.

[01:47:05] Stephanie: Yes, it’s very appropriate. I don’t know if this is too much to go into right now, but just the idea of him being the first fruits, we are in the last days because he is the first to resurrect. So from his resurrection we have been in the last days, because the last days happen when the resurrection of life eternal happens.

[01:47:31] Marcus: Yes. And the other part of that is that the days of being under law came to an end and we are now in the days of the Messiah. The days of the Messiah are the last days, that’s the definition. That’s why the Bible can say that we are in the last days and they were writing in 60 A.D.

[01:47:54] Stephanie:  A lot of people and myself included for a time, would hear last days, and would think, Left Behind. I would just think, oh, you know, last days means the tribulation. And we don’t have to get into all of the second coming stuff right now, but yes, just wanted to bring that up.

[01:48:21] Marcus:  Yep. It’s a good thing to bring up and we’ll maybe deal with the second coming someday, but it’s not yet.

[01:48:29] Stephanie:  All right, so inheritance in the kingdom.

[01:48:31] Marcus: Inheritance in the kingdom. The core thing that happens because of the resurrection, we gain entrance into the kingdom of God. So when the Bible talks about our hope, right? That is that our life is now anchored on hope. It’s built on a foundation of hope. That hope begins with life eternal. But then the second element of that is the inheritance that is ours that cannot be taken away, that cannot spoil or fade. Part of what was given to us was a place in the kingdom and an inheritance there. And so, Peter talks about the joy that we have because of this inheritance that is being kept for us in heaven. When Paul says it’s the hope that we have in Christ that leads to our faith in that hope and love. Because we know we’re taken care of, we can live a life of love.

So I look at this inheritance a little bit like being a trust fund kid and I know when I turn a certain age I got a billion dollars waiting for me, that kind of thing. I’m going to be okay is the idea. If I knew that five years from now I had a billion bucks waiting to come my way, it would change the way I live a little bit right now. It’s like I could kind of forget about myself some and realize I’m going to be okay. Let’s focus on taking care of other people. If I know I’m okay it sets me free a bit to love better. And so I do think that that’s part of what grows out of there. So I think about faith, hope, and love. And hope is about our inheritance in the kingdom. And because we have this inheritance in the kingdom that’s where we put our faith. We are trusting that is going to come and that is the case. And then because of that, it sets us free to love other people. So I think that faith, hope, and love are anchored there. While love is the greatest of them all, I think hope is the anchor of the whole thing.

[01:50:28] Stephanie: Beautiful, “V”.

[01:50:31] Marcus: The verification of the claims of Christ. Okay, so, again, when we’re told that Jesus died for our sins on the cross, how do we know that’s true? Well, because he rose from the dead. If he had simply died and that was the end of it, that would have been a problem. How do we know when Jesus said, I am the light of the world, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the father except through me. When he makes these kinds of claims how do we know that these are true? And the answer is,  because he rose from the dead. If he had died like everybody else does and stayed dead like everybody else does, then there’d be no reason to accept the idea that he was divine. No reason to accept that he was more than human. And so the resurrection becomes the verification that all of these things are true, he gave proof of this. Paul in his Mars Hill sermon to the people of Athens tells them about the gospel and then says, God has given proof to all people of this by raising Jesus from the dead. And so this is that idea that the verification or the proof that this is all true. And that’s why we go back to that acrostic of BEAT and the evidence for the resurrection, because all of Christianity really hangs on this. If this isn’t the case then you can be philosophically Christian but you can’t actually be a Christian, because it all hangs on this.

[01:51:56] Stephanie: Yeah, if he didn’t rise from the dead then maybe he was just a good teacher or a good man. Even in  that you can start saying, well, he said he was going to rise from the dead?

[01:52:06] Marcus: Well, as he said, destroy this temple in three days, I’ll raise it again. That’s also part of it. You could just go on and on with this about the whole thing. Everything is verified by the fact that this took place. So, life eternal, inheritance, verification of the claims. That brings us to the “E”, exaltation. The exaltation of both Christ and of his people. And one of the things we find interesting is that it says, Jesus, after his resurrection, says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now, at first that strikes me as odd because I’m like, well, wasn’t he the son of God? Wasn’t it already his? In what sense can he say that this authority is given to him. And the analogy I like to use is that he was like the crown prince and the kingdom was rightfully his but he was being challenged by the first knight, who was in rebellion against him. And so the kingdom became Christ’s both by birthright and by conquest.

And so now that he conquered the enemy, as we looked at in the last podcast, his subjugation of the enemy at the cross. When he rose from the dead it says he took captivity captive and he ascended on high, and he put them on triumphal procession. And so his exaltation included his triumph in which he displayed those whom he had conquered, and he was then given this position. And so it says that he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, and he is now seated in the heavens waiting while the rest of his enemies are made a footstool for his feet. So the battle continues, but Jesus is now in a place of authority and a place of majesty. Now, Ephesians 2:6 becomes very important here because it says that we have been raised with Christ and that we have been seated with him in the heavenly realms. Well, what does it mean to be seated with Christ?

If Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father and we are seated with him in the heavenly realms, that means we also have been exalted by our union with Christ and we participate in his death and his resurrection. And because of that, it is the anchor point for the authority of the believer over spiritual forces of wickedness with which we do battle. And this is why Paul says, we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, We are engaged in this battle from a position of authority and we have also been exalted. So you think about this idea like in Romans 8, Paul says, whom God foreknew, he predestined, whom predestined he called, and so on, and it ends with God has glorified us. And it always struck me that it doesn’t say he will glorify us someday. It’s Aeris, it says he has glorified us.

And so I look at that and I say, God has already shared his glory with us his people. And there is an already not yet aspect to this, right? And that is that we already participate in that glorification at some level, but we will someday participate fully in that glorification. And you can look at all of these things and kind of see that “already not yet” element to it, that we already have life eternal now, but we do not yet have our eternal bodies. So the experience of that is going to be different. We already have an inheritance waiting for us in the kingdom and we can grow that inheritance by our obedience to Christ and our walking with him, but we do not yet experience it in its fullness. And so, same thing with the exaltation. We have already been glorified but we will someday see him face to face, know him fully, be in a resurrected body, and participating in his kingdom. It’s going to be a much different thing someday.

And so there’s a couple of mistakes people can make when it comes to this Eschatology about the end times. And one of them is what we call an over-realized Eschatology. And that is the idea that everything about the kingdom is already here. Well, clearly not, right? Because not everything about the kingdom is already here. Otherwise we’d already have our new bodies. We wouldn’t be able to die and all these things would be complete. The other mistake you can make is to postpone everything to, someday. When people tend to say, well, someday it is going to be like this they also tend to spiritualize it in the sense of they make heaven the eternal thing. But heaven is not the eternal thing. Heaven is like the holding place and then when Christ comes back, we come back with him.

Here is the amazing thing about this, God says he’s going to make his dwelling place on earth with his people for all eternity. So it’s a pretty remarkable thing. So that’s kind of the summary of what the resurrection does for us. You can remember it with LIVE or LIVE, but life eternal, inheritance of the kingdom, verification of the claims of Christ, and the exaltation of both Christ and his people. So those are the four essential teaching points that come out of the resurrection that every Christian needs to know.

[01:57:36] Stephanie:  Amen. Thank you. So next week we’ll be taking a break for Christmas and then we’ll be back for the new year. But for now, any final closing thoughts for this episode and for this whole series?

[01:57:52] Marcus: I just come back again to the importance of hope. Right. It is impossible to live without hope and everybody needs it. We can anticipate a fun event coming up next week or another thing we’re looking forward to over the weekend, but real hope, out of that comes purpose. And the idea that because we can have a secure, eternal destiny, we can know where we stand with God, we can know that it is meant to set us free. To live with greater faith, to live with greater love, and to live with greater confidence that comes out of this. And so that’s why it’s worth revisiting these fundamentals of the faith again and again and reminding ourselves of the worldview, the values, the perspective that flows out of this. Because these are the foundations of our faith and we need to come back to them again and again. So I just encourage people that there is a very solid hope in Christ. Not only for the age to come, but this same God who’s going to take care of us then is walking with us right now, and is intimately involved in everything that we go through today.

[01:59:07] Stephanie: Thank you. Hey, before I close this out, would you pray over our listeners?

[01:59:14] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:59:15] Stephanie: Closing up this year and going into Christmas.

[01:59:20] Marcus: So, Father in heaven we do come to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who you sent into this world. He took on flesh, he became incarnate. He became one of us in a tremendous act of humility that we have trouble even grasping. Not only that, but he became a servant. He humbled himself even to death. And then you raised him up and you gave him a name above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow. And God we just pray for revival in our world and a hastening of the day when every knee will bow to the Lord Jesus Christ. Every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and that you will receive glory. We’ve longed for that day when the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters fill the sea. And God, while we await that day, would you fill our hearts in this way. That your glory would fill our hearts. That Jesus would live in our hearts by faith and give us that anchor for our souls, the hope that sees us through all of the various storms of life. I just pray your blessing especially this holiday season, Christmas and the New Year. And may we sense your presence and your guidance, and your direction both as we celebrate the season and as we begin to anticipate the year to come. May we do so with hope, in the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

[02:00:46] Stephanie: Amen. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, and subscribe share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.