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Sept. 28, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:52:17
PSALMS 22 with James & Jonny Woodrow

Jonny Woodrow is a pastor of a Christ Church, Loughborough,  which he planted in 2003. He has a PhD in social psychology ("all the mad stuff shaping critical race codswallop"). He is now making amends by working on a second PhD part time on the doctrine of God and Thomism. He works part time for a baptist publisher called Broken Wharfe.  "We have two podcasts exploring baptist confessional themes. It’s more exciting than that sounds!" ...The Broken Wharfe Podcast on Apple Podcasts‎Religion & Spirituality · 2023 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-broken-wharfe-podcast/id1633639407 ...Coffee House Sessions on Apple Podcasts‎Religion & Spirituality · 2023 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coffee-house-sessions/id1651097256 ↓ ↓ ↓ If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold / / / / / / Earn interest on Gold:https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ / / / / / / Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleSupport James’ Writing at: https://delingpole.substack.comSupport James monthly at: https://locals.com/member/JamesDelingpole?community_id=7720

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Psalm 22 King James Version My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me and from the words of my roaring?
O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not, and in the night season, and am not silent.
But thou art holy, thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Our fathers trusted in thee.
They trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
They cried unto thee, and were delivered.
They trusted in thee, and were not confounded.
But I am a worm.
And no man.
A reproach of men and despised of the people.
All they that see me laugh me to scorn.
They shoot out the lip.
They shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him.
Let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.
But thou art he that took me out of the womb, that didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breast.
I was cast upon thee from the womb, thou art my God from my mother's belly.
Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help.
Many bulls have compassed me.
Strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.
They gaped upon me with their mouths as a ravening and a roaring lion.
I am poured out like water.
And all my bones are out of joint.
My heart is like wax.
It is melted in the midst of my bowels.
My strength is dried up like a pot sherd.
And my tongue cleaveth to my jaws, and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.
The dogs have compassed me.
The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.
They pierced my hands and my feet.
I may tell all my bones.
They look and stare upon me.
They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture.
But be not thou far from me, O Lord, O my strength, haste thee to help me.
Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.
Save me from the lion's mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.
I will declare thy name unto my brethren.
In the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.
Ye that fear the Lord, praise him.
All ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him.
And fear him, all ye the seed of Israel.
For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither hath he hid his face from them.
But when they cried unto him, he heard.
My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation.
I will pay my vows before them that fear him.
The meek shall eat and be satisfied.
They shall praise the Lord that seek him.
Your heart shall live forever.
All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Thee.
For the kingdom is the Lord's, and He is the Governor among the nations.
All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship.
All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him, and none can keep alive his own soul.
A seed shall serve him.
It shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.
They shall come, and they shall declare the righteousness of the Lord unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.
Welcome to The Psalms with me, James Delingpole, and today we're going to talk about Psalm 22 with my special guest, Johnny Woodrow.
Johnny, you approached me having heard one of the earlier episodes of The Psalms series and you said, well, you know, I could talk about a psalm.
I said, well, do you fancy doing Psalm 22?
Because that's quite a sort of tricky one.
And you said, yeah, I'm up for that.
Just tell me about yourself briefly before we go on.
Well, thanks for having me on and thanks for taking up the offer.
I'm a pastor of a church that we set up, I think, almost exactly 20 years ago.
I married with four kids and I did a PhD in madcap continental philosophy applied to psychology.
And that was a, as I was writing that up, in my mid-twenties, we got, I got involved with setting up a church.
And then I, so I didn't actually, I got the PhD, but I didn't carry on in academia.
And then I, I've kind of, Bumble through leading a church and being involved in training others to lead churches far earlier than I ever should have been in a kind of find out what I need to know on the job and then sort of pass it on to others.
I don't have any formal theological education, although I'm now doing a second PhD in theology, because I found a mate who was mad enough to enjoy the idea of the project and let me do it.
Johnny, it's obvious to me that from some of our correspondence that you know your stuff, which is kind of why I want you on this podcast.
Also, I quite like to mix it up.
I mean, we've had Gavin Ashenden, who was a chaplain to the Queen.
He was Anglican and then he went over to Rome and is now an ardent Catholic.
We've also had a, what was he, a Calvinist, I think?
Yeah, Presbyterian.
Presbyterian?
Yeah.
What denomination would you be, technically?
Well, so I'd call myself a reformed Baptist.
Right.
What does that mean?
Well, what that means is...
After the Westminster Confession was written, that the Presbyterians go with, a group came out of that, wrote the Savoy Declaration.
They were congregation-less, had a different way of understanding how church governance works, so they adopted most of the Westminster.
And then out of the Savoy gang came the Baptists who.
So I would operate by the what was called the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, which is basically the Westminster adapted for those of the Baptist persuasion.
Yeah, these these these.
This is all very kind of inside baseball.
Yes.
Just in a nutshell, what's your kind of position on stuff?
What's your defining position?
How would I know what a Reformed Baptist looks like?
Well, that's a good question.
How to do that quickly?
Well, so I guess we would be Absolutely, with the ecumenical creeds, the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, the creeds that Catholics and all persuasions would go back to.
And then in the Reformation period, There's the Reformation and people are trying to sort of set out, the Protestants are setting out their stall, as it were, and making the claim that we're still part of that tradition.
So how does that narrow it down?
So put it like this.
You'd go Bible, the ecumenical creeds, And then what narrows it down would be which confession you went with in the 17th century.
And the Baptist one would would assume that only believers are baptized rather than babies being baptized.
That the church is their independent churches rather than under some a larger kind of something like the Anglican Church or the Presbyterian structure.
Right.
Because we would be looking back to the Reformation and prior the Reformation we'd be what you describe as Calvinist although I mean but then Calvin was quoting Endless Augustine who's quoting Paul you know so it's very much The further we go back into the Reformed Baptist roots, the closer we get to all the others, and the distinctives would be who gets baptised and how does church governance operate.
There's some other technical distinctions within the gang about how the Old and New Testament relate, but Right.
Is that too insider info?
I have to say, it does sound like the Big Endians and Little Endians in Gulliver's Travels.
We've had exchanges about this.
I am astonished by the pettiness over doctrinal differences between the different branches of the church and I personally don't like it.
Because I think that we're all Christians.
There are really good Catholics, there are really good Presbyterians, there are really good Baptists.
You know what I particularly don't like?
Go on.
I particularly don't like the way each of these groups claim that they have They have the perfect take on Christianity.
They know the score, and these idiots, they're just kind of, well, I mean, they're not real Christians, almost, the suggestion is.
And I kind of think, I don't believe that God, insofar as I can know how God thinks, I don't think that he's so petty.
Well, this, gosh, there's lots to say on that.
I think I think what's attracted me, I've come to a confessional approach, which basically means there's a document that does a good summary of what the Bible says, that's held in common across a number of churches, but that is rooted in the tradition.
Later, that's not where I was.
And actually what it's enabled me, and the spirit of the thing, and if you ever get time, read through the 17th century confessions.
They're not partisan.
And actually the Baptist one is all about a generous orthodoxy.
Where because we're looking at what the church has always taught, I think a friend of mine says, if you think about the creeds and confessions, they're not primarily, this is my team, these are my badges.
The best spirit of them is that they're the commonplace notebook of the church.
As we've been reading the scriptures as a church, as a universal church over the centuries, 1 Timothy is very clear that the Holy Spirit is absolutely engaged constantly with preserving the truth, enlightening the minds of the church and the readers.
And there's a commonplace notebook.
And so, and so, I, yeah, there's lots to say on kind of church schisms and all those sorts of things.
No, we shouldn't.
I've already, I've opened a wormhole and actually we shouldn't have gone down it because we're here to discuss Psalm 22.
Although I believe that Catholics call it a different number don't they? 23?
Um, yeah, I, so, they might do, I mean there's a number of different numberings of the psalms, depending on, so for instance, I was only preaching on Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 the other day, and older texts take them as one psalm.
So, you know, to some degree, there's that legend, isn't there, that the big numbers and the small numbers are put in to help, but sometimes you get some odd breaks because the guy doing it on horseback went over a lump.
The numbers in a different place.
Yeah.
And so there are some different divisions of the Psalms.
I'm not expert enough in the Hebrew at all to be able to comment on that.
But the Psalm 22, as you've described it, is an Everest, if not the Everest of the Psalms, isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's got a very dramatic beginning.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why are they so far from the words of my roaring?
That's the the KJV version now.
Um, I when I started reading the Psalms or what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't familiar with the Psalter but but in the last couple of years when I when I came over to Christ or whatever you call what's what's happened to me.
Um, I read the opening line of Psalm 22 and I thought, wow, because I remember, because I had a very, like my gen, many of my generation did, particularly the privately educated ones.
We had a very, very good scriptural foundation in our teaching, you know, put my prep school, we were taught very well.
And then, then so I knew the old, the old Testament.
Um, So the New Testament pretty thoroughly and most of the major Old Testament stories.
And I remember that Christ on the cross says, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?
And I don't think if I knew I'd forgotten it, that how remarkable it is that Christ is on the cross and he is quoting the Psalms.
Yes.
Now that was like a, that was a sort of wow moment for me.
Because what it meant was, if we accept as Christians do, that Christ is the son of God, God's only son, that Christ is, among other things, endorsing the Psalms.
He's endorsing pretty much the whole of the Old Testament.
You know how there's some sort of, there's a certain type of Christian which says, well, the Old Testament's kind of, you know, that's the old stuff that the Jews were interested in.
We're New Testament.
But what this does is it binds the Old and the New Testaments, and it's Christ putting his imprimatur on the Old Testament because he's saying, well, my dad, God, you know, he's the guy featured in all these Psalms, and here I am quoting it.
So it's a lovely moment, yeah?
Oh, I think it's wonderful.
And one of the things I was looking through some notes and I was thinking, one of the things I hope we get to go after is exactly that.
How Psalm 22 actually teaches us to read the Bible.
Because if you think about it, what Christ is actually doing in the extraordinary pain of crucifixion, and we can't ever understand that, and neither can we understand what it is to be under the wrath of God.
He's teaching from the cross.
He's teaching us how to understand what's happening and his scripture is the Old Testament.
As he sings, if you might say, from the cross, he quotes that line, and anyone who knows their Psalter, the whole psalm appears at that moment.
And it's a story.
And actually, if you get the psalm in its context, it's a bigger story than just Psalm 22.
So I had wondered, to take that idea of how How Jesus teaches us to read the Psalms.
And it just isn't, I find it electrifying that the Son of God dying on the cross teaches.
And when you get into Psalm 22, you know what he's thinking about.
And particularly the second half, he's thinking about when he's going to be declaring his name and the name of the Father in the congregation.
So when he's hanging on the cross, we'll get to that in a moment.
But when he's hanging on the cross, he's thinking about gathered Christians where he will be present speaking of all that has been achieved.
That's what he's thinking of when he's on the cross.
So he's thinking of you and me.
So the first thing to say is you're grounding your scripture and just noting that for a technical term, intertextual moment.
Bust open a whole world of how the Old and New Testament relate, and there you are thinking as a man in the tradition, because that's not only how the early Church Fathers read, because they got their doctrine of the Trinity from the Old Testament, given how the New Testament shines a light back on the Old Testament, but also the New Testament writers follow Jesus in teaching the Gospel from the Old Testament.
They do that.
I'm a preacher, so I could just keep going on and on.
I'm loving it, John.
Keep going.
So if we go to Luke 24 for a moment, this will connect.
I'll try not to go too off plot, so I lose track of where I'm going, because that's really what I'm doing.
So in Luke 24, Jesus has been raised from the dead, and he appears, and he does these mysterious appearances where nobody recognises him until he decides, you get it.
And there's these wonderful moments, either he calls Mary and she goes, oh he's not the gardener, it's the risen Lord.
Or he breaks bread, having taught these two disciples, who were miffed, they thought, they say, haven't you heard?
They're walking away from Jerusalem, the Christ has been crucified.
They've heard that he's been raised from the dead, but they're not buying it.
So they're wondering.
So he joins them and says, Oh, come on.
What's the issue?
Have you not heard?
And then he says this.
Verse 25 of Luke 24.
And he said to them, O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.
Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?
And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
That's a text That where Jesus tells you what the story of the entire Bible, Old and New Testament is about, it's about the Christ.
So the one who comes in the line of David, the Messiah, you know, the Greek is Christ, the Hebrew is Messiah, the promised son of David, who would suffer and then enter him into his glory.
So what we should do then is go, okay, if that's how Jesus reads the Old Testament, That's how we should read the Old Testament and see how it points to that.
And then whenever you read that story, you say, I would love to be in that Bible study where Jesus, before he broke bread, walked them through the whole Old Testament and showed how he's the silhouette in it, who then slowly gets filled out and then appears.
And you're like, oh, yeah.
And the answer, the question, where's that Bible study?
It is Luke's gospel.
Because if you go back through Luke's Gospel, in fact the end invites you to go back to the beginning, you see all the Old Testament quotations.
Luke built his case for who this one is.
Think of the Song of Mary.
You have been faithful to Abraham and to our forefathers.
The sending of Jesus was faithful to promises to Abraham.
It was faithful to promises to David.
It was faithful to promises to Adam and Eve that there would be a serpent crusher.
And then you look at the New Testament writers and they follow Jesus.
So if you read through Romans, Paul is writing, the Apostle Paul is writing to the churches in Rome.
He's going to go and visit them.
He wants to get support to go on on his missionary journey.
And they haven't met him before.
So he basically sends a letter of his credentials and says, this is the gospel I preach.
And he establishes it all from the Old Testament.
So the right way to read the Psalms will be, how does this help us understand who Jesus is?
So the idea that the Old Testament's for another religion and the New Testament for us is not how the New Testament understands itself.
So just in terms of that wonderful insight, and it's like the experience when you see those connections between texts, kind of an electrical circuit.
Kind of connecting in raw.
You know what I mean?
Without the... And you go, wow!
I see a thing!
And it's a moment of the Holy Spirit enlightening us.
So, I completely agree with you.
Yeah.
I was thinking that I mentioned in a previous podcast about Psalm 22 and about the fact that Christ quotes it on the cross.
And I remember some atheist person sort of angrily stating in the comments below that he'd read the text of Psalm 22 and it had nothing to do with the crucifixion.
And I was thinking, what?
I may tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me.
They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture.
Which part of the Crucifixion does that not relate to?
I mean, that's what the Roman soldiers do, isn't it?
Do you know, when was Sanctuary 2 written?
Well, it is a Psalm of David, so it's in the Davidic period and that's also fascinating and interesting.
So it's somehow, it speaks to that very issue.
You know that all the scripture writers, the Old Testament ones in particular, often write beyond what they're understanding, and there's more meaning in the text than they even understood themselves.
Psalm 22 is fascinating because if you get it in its context in Book 1, the theme of Book 1 really is the struggle in Christ.
I'll give you some keys to how the Psalms are organised in a second, which is show that.
But Psalm 22, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of psalms you can find likely background.
David escaping his psalm at Absalom, for instance, those sorts of things.
But Psalm 22 breaks Any account of David's experience.
David had some awful experiences, but it speaks beyond anything we know historically happened to him, actually.
And it's why, you know, the older commentators say he's clearly writing as a prophet here, about something that's coming down the line, as it were.
I don't know, it might be worth just putting Psalm 22 in its context.
When I read about this, Psalm 22 came alive for me.
And I keep going on about this book.
The Flow of the Psalms.
Sorry for those not watching.
The Flow of the Psalms, O. Palmer Robertson.
You'll know you found it because it's got one of those typically bad front covers that Christian publishers usually whack on things.
But he's got, he's very helpfully sort of coded up A possible structure of the Psalms.
And if you imagine, he has this image, and I think it's a really persuasive one, of the shepherd boy.
He's in Israel.
He's up on the hills.
He knows of the Davidic King.
So you've got Israel established under the Old Testament covenant.
You've got the people of Abraham under the law of Moses, under the promised King, or the King David, the Davidic King.
And so they've got the whole story of Israel kind of there in front of them, as it were.
But he's not literate, but he does know his Psalms and worship at the temple.
And he sits there and he can work through, because he's memorized all the Psalms, the story of Israel, actually.
And it's a, Luther called it, the Psalms, a Bible within the Bible.
So if that's the case, if it's, apparently, Oparah Robertson points out, you You can see the Psalms organised for memory, so they're in five books.
If you look at the book one, fascinating things which zero in on Psalm 22.
So if you indulge me for a moment, I'll do the quick tour.
So we know Psalm 1 and 2, the big gateway to the Psalms.
And psalm 1 and 2, if you think of psalm 1 as a Torah psalm, it's a psalm of the word.
Are you one who lives by the word and delights in the word or are you with the, you know, what side are you on?
And then psalm 2 is the great Christ is enthroned and God laughs from heaven and it's the It's the big spiritual V's, if you like, to the nations who rage against.
And so these two act like two pillars of the Psalms.
And they really ask you, what side are you on as you go into this songbook?
And the Psalms always ask you that question.
But it starts off, so Psalm 1 and 2 do Torah and King.
Torah and King.
Torah and King are vitally important because you could go Check it out later, folks, if you want to.
But Deuteronomy 17, Deuteronomy 17, 18 to 20, Moses gives the rules for how a king will operate in Israel.
And it's unlike any other king in any other place ever in the world.
Because rather than the king writing laws, The king in Israel is to write his own copy of God's law and sit under it.
So king and law, king and word go together.
So the Psalms kick off with king and word and announce the kingship of Christ over all.
Then you get into Book 1 and Psalm 3 actually is a bit of a disappointment at that point because you suddenly find the king's not doing so well and he's on the run from Absalom and it's David.
And the King, the Christ, because David's the Old Testament Christ, is struggling.
All the Psalms, up to about Psalm 18, are struggling Psalms.
Now Psalm 18 and 19, we're zeroing in on 22, are a Torah Psalm and a King Psalm.
They're paired.
They bookend.
So Psalm 1 and 2, Torah, King.
Psalm 18 and 19, King, Torah.
Psalm 18 and 19, King Torah.
Again, and then after that moment, so you think you're a shepherd boy.
I know I've got a king and a book psalm and then I've got some struggle psalms and I've got a king and a book psalm.
And then the next psalms are about the triumphant king. - From struggle to triumph.
And you don't actually get the phrase anointed mentioned at all from verse, so the Messiah, as it were, mentioned from Psalm 3 through to 17.
It comes up for the first time again.
In 18.
If you like, if you sung through, just imagine this shepherd boy up on the hills.
He sings through Psalm 1 and 2 and he's on an adventure because he's like, God and his King are triumphant.
The next episode is, the King doesn't look so triumphant.
But when I get to the next King and Law Psalms, I'm introduced to a triumphant King.
And then you come to Psalm 20, 21, 22.
It's the middle Psalm.
Try not to flip the bird.
23 and 24.
Psalm 20 is the king about to go out.
His people are praying for him because the Israelites, as it goes with the king, so it goes to the people.
He's the man to fight for them.
If he's faithful, it goes well, and they basically get what he wins.
Effectively, that's kind of how the kingship thing works.
Psalm 21, So Psalm 20, he's on horseback, he's armoured up to the teeth, they're about to open the gates and he's going to go out and defeat the enemy.
Psalm 21 is his return.
And when he comes back, God is the people celebrate.
This is the triumphant king, the triumphant Davidic king.
God himself runs out, as it were, to crown him.
And this is the king that God delights in.
So we've got Psalm 20 and 21 are the kingship of the Messiah.
Now just skip over Psalm 22.
Psalm 23 and 24 are actually about the kingship of God and life under his kingdom.
In the middle is Psalm 22.
It's the peak of a pyramid.
And you know, the Hebrew writings like to centre the important thing in the middle so often.
And the first half of Psalm 22 is the suffering Messiah.
So we've gone from victorious Messiah to suffering Messiah.
The second half from verse 22 onwards is the victory of the Messiah now, out of suffering, declaring the kingship of God.
So it's a transition Psalm.
So the group of five, like a concept album, go the Messiah's kingship in victory through suffering,
...brings about God's Kingdom in the second half, which he celebrates and in his resurrection will declare, and then in Psalm 23, as a Christian, you enter in through Psalm 22, and then you come under the kingship of the Shepherd in Psalm 23, and then you're away, as it were, into living in the Kingdom of God.
So just to complete the idea, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22, verse 1, he's saying, I am that victorious king who rode out in victory.
I am the king who brings about the glorious victory of God.
And I did it by going through death.
And that's what he sings from the cross.
I find that extraordinary.
But anyway, there we go.
Sermon over.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, thank you for that brilliant exegesis.
Isn't it weird that the high point, as it were, of those five psalms, the central moment, is actually this king Who is, um, all they that see me shall laugh me to scorn.
Yeah.
They, they, they, they shake their head.
They shake their head saying he trusted on the law that he would deliver him.
Let him deliver him, seeing that he delighted him.
But I am a worm and no man.
It's this, this wretched, by the way, what are the, um, uh, the bulls of Bashan?
I was worried you could ask me that!
Is it the same bull that you see on Wall Street and I saw in that...
elaborate satanic garden in Singapore.
These balls seem to be, and the ball ring of course, in Birmingham you got at the opening ceremony.
Did you see that?
I'm probably not doing that, I'm probably doing my black country accent, but the opening, Alastair Williams had a brilliant, a brilliant take on this, on the Commonwealth Games opening in Birmingham and they had this giant ball.
Yes.
No, I know, I know.
The symbolism of animals, lions, eagles, bulls, bears and all sorts of things in the Bible is a fascinating topic.
I can't remember and I'll send you a message if I can find it to get back to you on that.
What is interesting though, this is just an interesting thing on the side.
Tell me interesting things.
So verse 21 talks about, you've rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen.
Oh yeah, it's the unicorn thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that goes down well with the kids particularly.
Well it's a great, I don't know what your version is, but deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog, which is by the way a movie title.
Right.
Save me from the lion's mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.
I mean, what crazy stuff, eh?
Woah.
I thought connected to the high point of the middle is these extraordinary articulations of suffering.
Yeah.
And the Psalms, I think Gavin Ashenden pointed this out as well, they are God's words given to us to say.
And so as much as this is about Christ, they are also, he's also, they're David As the faithful Christian suffering, he's the type of Christ to come, he's the foreshadowing of Christ.
Jesus reads these words and goes, this shows me, as to his human nature, as it were, the Father's commitment to the Christ.
So he knows the story as he's going through things here.
But also, Psalm 22, I think it's verse 22, is quoted in Hebrews, Where it says this, so I'm reading from the ESV, it's the one I've got here, I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation, I will praise you.
And the thing that the writer to the Hebrews picks up in chapter two is the brothers bit.
In other words, he uses this phrase, this suffering man.
As an argument for the incarnation and also as a support for the struggling church who are also going through persecution to say he aligns himself With you.
And so Psalm 22, as it describes suffering beyond what so many can, will experience or some, I mean, you know, in our slightly more comfortable situations, perhaps we won't experience something like that.
Well, let's hope.
Let's hope.
But I think it's coming.
But we can take these words and And speak them.
They are legitimised complaint against God in the silence.
That's a wonderful idea that we're told by the Lord that we can say these things.
Yes.
Yeah.
They're a form of preparation, aren't they?
I think so.
I mean, that's one of the reasons I've started learning them and why I recommend Learning them.
They inhabit you after a while.
And the point you made at the beginning, when When better read Christians, let's say, were ones better versed in the scriptures, the people in the early church, they would have known the whole psalm.
They wouldn't just see one line, you know, and they didn't just pick handy quotes and forget the rest.
They knew the whole context.
I think it is one of the things that's missing from our age, isn't it?
People are much less versed in the scriptures than they were.
Yeah, here's just a theory pops to mind.
Let's go to the shepherd boy.
You know, he hasn't got a print text.
And if you don't have a print text, you don't isolate verses in the same way, do you?
You think in whole memorised pieces.
What's fascinating is we have more print Bibles available to us in the West today than ever before.
And when I, let's go back to my, if I go to the Westminster Confession, which was a standard for churches, the sad thing is that for many Christians, it's now not the standard for The basics of the Christian faith just laid out.
It's actually rather too technical.
Now, I'm not sort of saying we all need to become intellectualist about it, but we have more access to the scriptures, but we don't know them as well as the folks in this pre-enlightenment era.
Yes.
Or they don't shape our thinking in the way, in the totality of the scriptures, in the way that a text actually operates or is verbalized on us.
It doesn't shape thinking in the same way.
I liked Doug Wilson's point when I heard you did an interview with him, didn't you?
And he pointed out that the Psalms are filled with enemies.
And so they do prepare, they do just get you thinking and enabled to see the world as it really is.
The nations are not happy with the worship of God.
So they're doing something about it.
And Christ, according to the second half of Psalm 22, is alive and well and is declaring his name and the name of the Father Every time the word is preached in the world, and that's the clash that we're living through.
By the way, just a random thought that's cropped up there.
I don't know about you, whether you're past this stage, but as a kind of new, sort of proper Christian, I'm Okay, I've got the faith element, but I'm always looking for extra things, you know, extra bits of proof, like sort of Doughty and Thomas, like things that show the divine, the supernatural element in all this.
And I cited one, you know, the connection between Christ on the cross and the Old Testament, which kind of seems to me that this stuff is real.
And I've completely forgotten the point I was going to make there.
Looking for other evidences?
I know what it was.
How do we know?
I think one has to ask these guys, I'm not one of those trust the plan Christians.
I'm not one of those, I'm not, I really resent the ones who say well you mustn't intellectualise, you know, this is what it says and you know.
I want to think about this stuff because I think it's really, really, really interesting.
And when I'm sometimes asking myself, well just as a kind of plain devil's advocate here, how do you know that The Christians are right.
Maybe the Gnostics are actually, you know, onto something.
Maybe the Christians are just like idiots.
Or maybe, you know, maybe Buddhists have got it right and we're just... Yeah.
Or maybe it's some kind of... And I think... Come on in, dog.
One of the biggest tells for me is those enemies you mentioned in the psalm.
If Christianity were just a kind of misdirection as it were, why do all the bad guys in the world hate it more than anything else?
Yeah.
Why do the rulers of the darkness of this world particularly focus on Christians?
That seems to me the biggest tell of all.
That if what we believed in was not a threat, was not powerful, was not the word of God, then I don't think they'd be interested in us in the way that they are.
But they're constantly seeking to undermine us and destroy us above all else.
Oh, yeah.
And Jesus said that would happen, didn't he?
I mean, so if they persecute me, they'll persecute you.
And we become, Christians become the lightning rod for people's anger against God.
Just at a personal level.
I mean, I've not encountered anyone wanting to deck me.
But there is something about when you, not because you're living some super duper holy life, but because pastors often have the experience, Of being with somebody, not saying a single word, and then hearing later that that person just felt judged by them, or something like that.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, you've been judging me, Johnny.
Don't.
Stop it.
Stop it right now!
You bastard!
You judge!
Judgey McJudgingson!
But I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, on the question of how do we... There's just multiple lines of... How do we know anything's true?
There's all sorts of different aspects of that, isn't there?
There's the lived experience of something consistently working out.
There's it's something stacks up philosophically.
The evidence is there and also other people's behavior.
If something's not real and somebody it doesn't it can't act in the world on its terms.
Can it you know, so if I went out and believed it is simply that I was I could I could become gas and walk out in front of a bus.
That's clearly not real.
I'll get whacked by the bus.
Well, maybe if you got to the right level of operating thetan in Scientology, or if you do what thou wilt to be the whole of the law, if maybe you did the Babylonian mystery ceremonies... I might leave my body behind.
Well, you might.
Do you think that's how Tom Cruise jumps off so many things?
He's trying to get gassy.
I think the Tom Cruise rabbit hole is not one we should go down here.
No, no, no, no.
It's a very deep rabbit hole and I think probably the person at the bottom actually is a horned rabbit, a horned rabbit.
Yeah, yeah, I'm afraid so.
Anyway.
Where were we?
You're talking about turning into gas.
Oh yes, I'm doing that thing on the hoof illustration.
If something...
If something's real and true, it acts in the world whether we like it or not.
If something's a fiction, the world will not respond to it, inconsistent with the fiction.
So if I think I can just walk through a bus, the bus is going to respond to me, not by the lie, but by the truth.
And so if the Lord is present and active, Speaking through his word, his spirit goes out, the people are sharing his word, they're being brought from darkness to light, from dead in sins to alive in Christ.
That's actually happening.
And the Bible describes a counter-offensive, a counter-mission.
If that's true, you'll see the counter-mission, won't you?
That'll be one way in which it declares itself to be true.
And isn't there a counter-mission?
Yeah funnily enough one of the one of the one of the the staging posts on my journey to Christianity was I almost came at it from the position of the devil is real and he walks among us therefore God is real and Christ is real and that because yeah, I mean in a way it's easier to to if you're looking for sort of
evidence in the earthly world you're really going to see a lot more work of the devil particularly in these times and it yeah I this connects it it is hard being a Christian isn't it When you're given a view by faith behind the veil to see that evil is more evil than you ever expected it to be.
God is more glorious and in that sense terrifying to the evil than we ever expect him to be.
And so I think this is revealed in one of the fascinating things about Mark's Gospel.
Let's just go to Mark's Gospel for a moment.
There's not a whole lot of demon chat before you get to the New Testament.
There's stuff there, right?
But when Jesus comes as the new Joshua, and Joshua was meant to cleanse the land in the Old Testament.
Moses didn't get to go into the land.
Joshua was supposed to cleanse the land of the serpent, effectively.
Like Adam was supposed to cleanse the garden of the serpent, of the demonic and the rest of it.
And that's what Joshua was supposed to do.
Now, he didn't do that.
And that was a unique thing for Israel, that they were kind of an instrument of God's judgment.
And so the false religions, the satanic religions remained in the land.
Well, then Jesus shows up.
He's declared to be the Son of God.
He faces down Satan.
And in Mark's Gospel, you get a shorter account of the temptation.
But that's because actually it's kind of inviting you to read it across the whole body of Marx.
Satan's there all the way through in this sense, because you get the demons.
Now Jesus comes into the land and reveals, tears open, what's really going on behind the scenes.
And demons are coming out of people.
And he exposes what's under the bonnet, as it were, and goes and acts like a Joshua, not kicking out the Romans, but expelling the demons and showing that the showdowns with Satan.
And what is the gospel?
Well, one way of describing the gospel, apart from the substitutionary atonement of Christ, is that he came to break and destroy the works of Satan.
And that bit, I think, in my early Christian days, sort of different to you, actually.
I didn't contemplate that strong enough.
I was more, wow, my sins are forgiven, and I've slowly walked into the devil is more than just a personal kind of, do I feel tempted to do something naughty right now, but actually has a bigger plan.
It's fascinating that you came in as it were, oh no, there's awfulness and we need a saviour in that way.
Yes.
Do you know what?
I sometimes feel, because a lot of Christians I know have come to it having been kind of, having had tremendous sort of personal suffering to do with addictions and things like that.
Right, okay.
Like they were smack addicts or something, or they were really booze addicted.
And I know that Jesus particularly likes, you know, tax collectors and publicans and people like that.
And I feel that I'm starting from a disadvantage.
I feel a bit of an imposter.
But I do worry about
I've talked about this a bit before, I really feel like I've been given a mission by God and this book I'm writing which I keep failing to, I keep being distracted by stuff, I keep wanting to talk about that, about my journey, about the, you know, how even though recently I've sort of, you know, got into all this stuff, that actually if looking back at my life I realise that this is, you know, God had it all planned out actually.
Yeah.
These staging posts are on the way.
And then I worry to myself, well, hang on a second.
Isn't that a terribly arrogant thing to do?
Because I don't feel arrogant.
I don't feel like I'm better than other people.
I just feel that this is kind of the job I've been given and I'm grateful for it.
But I do worry.
You know how you have these niggling doubts, which other Christians are very good at encouraging, like saying, you know, you're not a proper Christian, you know, you're a so-called Christian, you claim.
So, you mean doubts about the mission?
No!
Doubts about the conversion?
No, I don't have any of that.
What I mean is that I kind of feel, and maybe I shouldn't, that I am going to go to heaven.
I don't beat myself up as much as I should about how sinful I am.
Oh, okay.
Well, is that because you're trusting Christ and he's done the work for you?
Yeah.
So, so, so, I mean, I'm, you know, Luther says some dangerous things to some ears, doesn't he?
But, you know, he, he has this sort of going, and this isn't a command, but he says, the gospel is so securing because Christ has, as the better David, he has By his works, his completing of the law, his undergoing punishment and his being rewarded.
There's wonderful passages in Isaiah about how the father will reward the son.
We are co-heirs.
So, and he says he wouldn't lose any of those that the father's given him.
And so Luther's like, okay, go and sin a bit and just see what the devil does.
Absolutely can't touch you because the devil, you know, one of his favorite things is to, is the accuser, isn't it?
He likes to, He's to stand in the presence of God and go, well, look, look at the list of things that person did.
Surely they can't possibly stand.
And what happens?
When Judgment Day comes, the person who is trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ will show up to court dressed In a resurrected, glorified body, that's the right stuff to show up to court in.
The folks that have not trusted in the death and resurrection of Jesus and have sidelined that, and I don't need that, will show up dressed in their own sins.
And that's not the right stuff to show up to for it to go well with you in court on that final day.
Yes, yes.
But don't you think we're cheating a bit?
I mean, don't you think we have an unfair advantage?
What, because of Jesus?
Well, yeah.
Please write the book, Jesus Gave Me An Unfair Advantage.
I'd love to give that away to button believers who want to know what the offer is.
Well, I just look at the other side And I think however you've rationalized things to yourself.
I mean, however long you think you can extend your life through the use of adrenochrome and so on.
Yeah.
It's not very long compared with eternity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're really making, you've made a very bad choice there.
Yeah.
And I don't understand it.
You know, however tempting.
I mean, I can't imagine there's a temptation.
Okay.
So maybe if somebody were to offer me 80 years of really solid hunting as a master of foxhounds with a succession of really good horses.
That would be the most mortal man could ever hope.
The ultimate happiness.
But that would still only be 80 years.
Well and also... Oi, off the bed.
Hang on.
Wait a second.
Off that bloody bed now.
Sorry, dog taking the mickey.
You know you're not allowed up there.
Right.
But I also think it would be ultimately unsatisfying anyway.
Here's why.
Because Paul says in Acts 17 to the Areopagus, all the philosophers, he quotes one of their own poets about the God in whom we have our being and our movement.
What you enjoy about the hunt, all the great wonderful things, can be dated back, indexed back to the glory of God.
The power of, I mean, you know, you can wax lyrically, but the power of horses, the kind of, you know, it's all, it's all actually, what consummates that joy is actually in the one who designed the whole thing, Yeah, for that in the first place.
And so if we love some aspect of life, whether it's hunting, whether it's art, whether it's whatever, you want to pursue what is in it.
And in it is the one, what Jesus says in John 17, this is eternal life that they may know the one true God and the one whom you sent.
And he's the creator of the world, and so our personal happiness, our souls, are designed and hardwired to be fulfilled in gazing upon the risen, glorified Christ.
That's what Jesus says is the point of life.
And all of creation, when you know that, all of creation is a refraction of aspects of God's glory and all the experiences we have in it.
And so why would you want 80, 100 or even two years of doing something where you've kind of taken the absolute core and source of the joy out of the thing because you denied it before you even showed up to the hunt?
That's nuts!
Yeah, you're right.
Absolutely, it is.
I occasionally get people saying, well, I would support James Dellingpole, but he participates in this cruel and nasty sport.
And I'm kind of thinking, I'm not in it because I hate foxes.
I'm in it because I love foxes.
I'm in it because I love horses.
I'm in it because I love the people.
I'm in it because I love the countryside.
I'm in it because I love the camaraderie.
I'm in it because I love the thrill and the camaraderie and the shared danger and the conversation and all these things are ultimately, as you've suggested, aspects of God, of the divine.
They are about Celebration of this world that he's created for us.
And you're enacting the role of Adam is vice-regent in the sense he's given the task of stewarding creation.
Yeah, yeah.
That doesn't wind up in some whacked-out environmentalism where we basically say nature rules us.
No, no.
We conduct, we manage and steward nature as As creatures who are in the image of God who have a soul and and say that's how we conduct ourselves in the world and there's joy to be found in that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do find it that the Psalms are a very very good way of Of learning how to live your life like a rule book.
I mean, yeah, starting with Psalm 1.
Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.
And then it lays out for you all the good things that happen to you when you live out the good life.
And you get these phrases coming to mind which are really, really useful in Understanding the world and dealing with it, you know, probably probably the best of all is It is better to trust in the Lord than put any confidence any confidence in man Yes, or in or in princes.
Yeah, or in or in princes.
Yes So suddenly it frees you of any obligation to take seriously anything that anyone famous says or anyone in politics says or because they're all Don't put any confidence in them.
Well, no, and I think that I know personally what I've had to do over the last, you know, everyone's been on a jet.
Well, not everyone's been on a journey of the last three years.
Is to not just read those at a surface level and go, well, of course, I'm not in the end going to trust in Beyonce or something like that.
That's good advice.
That's good advice.
But I should just calm down my fandom a little bit.
The problem is not that God wasn't saying, you know, you're all just a little bit too much into fill in the blank.
We deeply set these folks up to set the terms of engagement in life, to set our metaphysical view.
I mean, what have Disney been doing for years?
They've been giving us a metaphysics that says you can be whatever you like, and it's been transhuman from the beginning.
You know, Brother Bear used to do my head in because the fella ends up as a bear and that's kind of OK.
You know, the celebrity world sells us a view of reality.
And so it goes deeper, doesn't it, than just maybe I'm a little bit too much into.
And I think Christians need to start...
I think the 17th century, I'm a bit of a fan of those guys, it was a bit of a high point of theological thinking.
We're prepared to say there's more going on behind leadership and behind those who are thought leaders than just some slightly naff ideas and some slight, you know, problems that Christians might get swept up in.
There's something sinister.
Well, yeah.
I mean, It is the big reveal, isn't it, when you realise that the god of this world is Satan.
Yeah, and that he blinds the eyes of people from seeing that.
Although one gets cross with the people who are on the wrong side because they're doing all sorts of terrible things, you wonder how many of them are even aware who it is they're serving.
Yeah, and I... There's... Just as a pastor, you have...
You know, you have Christians who are kind of at the very milk stage and the New Testament acknowledges that those who are on milk and those who are moving towards meat and across the church you'll have folks who may stay at the kind of very milk drinking stage for quite a long time.
So within God's Gracious in that because it's all on Christ's work and you have people at various levels of understanding within within the church I think just to come back to Psalm 22 for a moment the second half.
Why not?
Only just to stop us despairing so much, you know Because and it's because of Psalm 22 that you don't despair because Jesus is saying, you know, so from verse Verse 21.
You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen.
This is the ESV.
I will tell of your name to my brothers in the midst of the congregation.
I will praise you.
You who fear the Lord, praise him.
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him.
So as he's hanging there on the cross, And it's the darkest moment in human history because here it's humanity has conspired to crucify the Son of God.
Yet it's all in his plan and he's on the cross already contemplating the victory and that he will be by his spirit proclaiming the gospel.
And there will be people who are coming The first move is to go from, well, to realize they're in darkness and to come to Christ, who is the light, to move from judgment to forgiveness.
That's the project that the sun is on, as it were.
And that brings people then on the Christian journey into beginning to, well, in Ephesians 5, expose the deeds of darkness and Various callings that people have in different aspects of the Christian life as we engage with the world.
But it all comes from that the resurrected Christ is perfecting his bride, calling people in and declaring his name every Sunday in a gathered congregation where the word is proclaimed, Christ is present and he's speaking.
That's the exciting counter mission.
As much as folks need to wake up to the reality of Satan, Yeah.
They also need to wake up to the extraordinary counter-mission against Satan.
And where do you see it?
You actually see it in the preaching and teaching of the Word in the gathered congregation on a Sunday, because Jesus says in Psalm 22, He will be there.
That gets me very excited.
Yes, the final line, they shall come and they shall declare the righteousness of the Lord unto a people that shall be born that he had done this.
So yeah, you're right.
I mean, of all the Psalms, it's got to be the one that condenses the most into the shortest space because it's everything, isn't it?
Oh yeah, and I think if you take Psalm 22 and 23, if that's all you could have, you'd have the Gospel and the Christian life.
Yeah.
And wonderfully so, wouldn't you?
I mean, that's the... All that Satan can do through all of the crazy world organisations and the rest of it, he cannot stop the Son of God calling people to himself and establishing his church.
Yeah.
It's just unstoppable.
I would say I've learned quite a few of the psalms now.
I would say it's not a fun psalm.
It's quite heavy.
Every time I say it...
Um, it feels like a kind of a pretty, I wouldn't say an ordeal, but yeah, it is an ordeal to a degree, but it's a pretty tough journey.
There are other Psalms, which are just like, they're great.
And they're just like you, you, you, they, they, they cheer you up.
And, um, I mean, Psalm 91 is a good one for going to war against, you know, going out into the world.
And Psalm 118 is a really, really good way to start the day.
But you are living Christ's passion.
Did you ever see that Podcast with the guy who specializes in in the the Turin Shroud and talking I haven't caught up with that one No, no, no worth looking at he goes into great detail at one point.
Okay about wound analysis blood analysis and and and the he the the shroud bears the imprint of Of all the different stages of the crucifixion, you know, including the run-up, where the crown of thorns, and this person explains in detail.
Okay.
One of the sort of marks is, I think, from where Christ collapses under the weight of the cross on the way to Golgotha.
And it really brings it home to me.
I mean, sometimes I think a lot of us don't really think about just how bad crucifixion was.
The Romans were masters of cruelty.
Yeah.
And they spent years, well centuries indeed, refining torture.
And as I understand it, crucifixion was the worst way to kill someone.
Yes, and they basically turned you into a billboard.
I mean, they stuck you on the road so that other people got the message, don't do what this guy just did, while you're writhing in agony.
I mean, it was absolutely designed for maximum public and personal effect.
And I think you touched on something important here.
From within my tradition, which would be broadly evangelical conservative Christianity, there has been I don't want to have a pop up my fellow brothers and sisters, but when you get to Easter and you're teaching on the crucifixion, folks tend to say, oh, the Gospels don't major on the gore, they major on the spiritual aspect.
So if you have a sermon where somebody describes crucifixion and goes through the suffocation and all the different things, Um, some folks feel a little bit like, and this is from, you know, the well-meaning believers who go, well, you know, the text doesn't say that because they're quite, we're about the text and the text only and not the reality behind the text.
Um, and, and really the appeal shouldn't be on the kind of the emotional level of that.
It should be like, he's going through the wrath of God.
Now, I don't know what it's like to go through the wrath of God.
But crucifixion, I mean, given that, you know, the Lord could have designed it some other way, but he, Romans talks about, Romans chapter 3 talks about how the Father offered up the Son.
John chapter 10 says the Son lays down his life.
The Father and Son and Holy Spirit chose crucifixion.
As an image of something.
As an image of going through the wrath of God.
And the first readers of the gospel would have known what crucifixion was.
They wouldn't have had to go into great detail to describe it.
And so I think just that it says he was crucified isn't being minimalist and don't look here it's the PG version.
It's telling you, if you have ears to hear, what on earth was happening.
And Psalm 22 gives you so much of the grief And what is going through the mind of Christ as he's hanging there?
And what I was going to ask you was your experience.
It's a tough psalm to read aloud and go through.
But what is your experience of the turning point in verse 21, verse 22, when the rescue comes?
Is there a kind of a...
Relief moment?
Oh, of course, yeah, yeah.
Where it goes, you mean, I would declare thy name unto my brethren in the midst of the congregation, will I praise thee?
Yeah.
Once you've got past the deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog, save me from the lion's mouth, for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorn.
So after that plea moment, Suddenly it all starts going right and you see the fulfillment of all these these scriptural prophecies And and it's yeah.
Yeah, I love lifting all I All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship.
It's wonderful.
All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him, I think.
A nun can keep alive his own soul.
Presumably that means, you know, without God we are...
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's got to.
Even if that text is saying something different, that is correct doctrine, even if it might be from the wrong text, but that's true.
It's interesting, if you go through the New Testament, you find the statements that become part of the Apostles' Creed.
The kind of the essentials of the Gospel, if you like.
There is a down and up structure to the Gospel.
All the Gospels begin with the down.
The one who is the Word of God takes on flesh.
The one who is God coming to us takes on flesh.
So there's the down.
And this is also the Reformed tradition we've all talked about, because it's just a reiteration of the tradition before.
The humiliation of Christ, including his taking on human flesh and becoming one of us and suffering amongst us.
And Hebrews, you know, really majors on this.
And then he's going through death and then being lifted up in resurrection and then ascension.
And that down and up structure is all the way through the Bible, even from Eden and coming down because it was a mountain place, sort of down, and then Moses going up the mountain and those sorts of things.
Even the temple structure, the temple sacrifices were a down and up kind of motif.
Psalm 22 gives you the experience of that in reading it, doesn't it?
It takes you to the heights as you've gone through Christ's humiliation and then exaltation.
Yes.
I was just going back on a point you made about People saying to you, well, let's not dwell too much on the horrors of the crucifixion because blah.
But it seems to me that unless you understand and dwell on the horrors of the crucifixion, which Psalm 32 captures very well, you know, my heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels.
You know, I mean, this is horrible.
That's me frozen.
Unless you... Oh no.
You've frozen.
Put yourself in the position of Christ.
You've been sent down to earth to live like an ordinary human.
And you know that you are going to die the most horrible death imaginable.
And there were those moments, those really touching moments just after he's come to Jerusalem.
Oh James, I'm losing you!
And you can see, you know, God, do I really have to do this God kind of thing?
He's a bit...
Whenever I do podcasts on the subject of Christianity, there's always, you know, that Satan there's always, you know, that Satan is the prince of the air, which presumably encompasses...
Some command of electronical pulses.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
The point I was making before we got cut off was that, just let me remonstrate again with those in your church who say, well, you know, if it's not in the Bible, we shouldn't think I mean, that's just the bare bones and then you you fill it out using your your imagination and your understanding of Various things so okay.
So Jesus is is God's only son he gets sent down to earth and And becomes incarnate of the Virgin Mary, becomes a human to all intents and purposes, because otherwise it wouldn't matter.
If he didn't become human, what he did would not matter.
Because, you know, if he's just a manifestation of God and it's just like he doesn't feel pain and he doesn't have our hopes and fears and stuff, his sacrifice doesn't mean much, does it?
No, so it's not the sacrifice of one of us, as it were.
No, exactly.
So Jesus comes down and he knows, because he's the son of God, Um...
Because it is written that he is going to suffer the worst death you can suffer.
And there are those very touching, almost unbearably touching scenes in the Bible, in the New Testament, where he comes to Jerusalem and he's saying, do I really have to go through it?
You can remember the bits where he said... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, the not my will but yours and the submission there.
And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And part of him is going, look, God, Dad, can't you give me, you know, isn't somewhere we can get round this?
Because he knows, he knows, and he's known it all his life.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, do you think he, we don't know much about the young Jesus.
I once had this great idea for a TV series for kids about young Jesus coming with his uncle, Joseph.
Is it Joseph?
Is it his uncle?
Some thought about that, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm not quite sure.
Coming to England.
And young Jesus sort of battling out, and the devil's trying to put all these things in his way.
And, you know, you've got dragons and you've got Romans and you've got all sorts of...
I think it'd be a really great great series like You know better than better than that Merlin series, you know, it's just like Anyway, yeah, yeah I'm Can we assume that for all of his 33 years, Jesus would have been aware this is how it's going to end up?
It must have been quite a burden to bear.
Do you know what I think?
Yes.
It is interesting that the Bible doesn't give us, you know, you get this moment of sort of 12 years old where he says, I'm about my father's business.
Yeah, yeah.
You also get the idea that as to his human nature, of course, he grows in understanding.
And you have him learning from the scriptures as to his human nature because, you know, although this gets into the mystery of the two natures of Christ, although he is God incarnate and so the entire mind of God is present in Christ, as to his human nature, he doesn't access that because the human mind can't absorb The mind of God.
So that's why there's moments where he says, I don't know, as the Christ, the time or date, you know, and some people then sort of try and challenge whether he's the son of God as a result, because they don't know how the two natures work.
But there's been lots of speculation on this.
How did Jesus' understanding of his mission and purpose develop.
What we certainly know in the three years that the Gospels cover is he keeps telling his disciples, I'm going to be handed over by the elders and by the chief priests, and I'm going to be lifted up.
To die and I think and then because the Psalms are his prayer book and he knows the story of the Christ and how this is going to work because it's there in the songs.
I just think it just underlines.
In John 6, a fascinating text where he says, basically, the Father sent me, all who the Father calls will come to me and I will raise up all those that he's given me.
So at that point, he knows he's come to rescue a people.
And how does he bear the burden?
Coming back to Psalm 22, Psalm 22 can be read as a Christian, following the pattern of the Christ, that it's prayer.
It's prayer and dependence on God, even in the silence.
And he's the archetypal.
It doesn't make it easy for him because he's the son of God and he's got sort of a bit of a leg up, as it were.
And Psalm 22 is quoted in Hebrews at exactly the points where it says, he suffered That he might be a, it's repeated, it's quoted in Hebrews 2 and the same theme is there in Hebrews 4, that he's, as our High Priest, able to, because he's incarnate, suffered, suffered living through the world under sin and the curse of sin and under the law and then going through the wrath of God.
He knows what it is to suffer as a human and so therefore he can sympathise with us and support us.
I've slightly lost where I was going with that.
So as he looks at the Psalms, he sees the repeated model of the Christ, because that's what the Psalms tell us, trusting in God, even when God is silent at that moment.
And the opening to Psalm 22 is that, isn't it?
Yes.
The people have trusted you.
I've been with you from the beginning, from my mother's womb.
But you're not answering.
Yeah.
That's gone through Jesus' head.
So he is sustained, as to his human nature, by his fellowship, by his relationship with the Father, which takes these moments in, and goes through these moments of your not answering.
Yet, it's fascinating text in John 16, Jesus says, you will all depart from me, but my Father's with me.
So even on the cross, the Father is with him, but not rescuing him from going through the wrath.
And so the encouragement there is whatever suffering comes our way, According to Romans chapter 5, where Paul says, all affliction is a tool essentially in the hands of God to grow us in hope.
How?
Well, we follow the pathway of Christ.
You look at Psalm 22 and as a Christian, when you're going through suffering and struggling and you're not getting an answer to prayer, you keep banging the door.
Because an atheist isn't going to do that.
You know, you don't keep banging the door if you don't think anyone's there.
But you do if you trust that the Father hears and will bring the rescue when he's determined to.
So that's all to say the sufferings of Christ give us a model and he's not like a superhuman.
He gives us a model for how we can also go through sufferings precisely because he really did suffer.
Yes.
Yes, it's, there are definitely aspects of being a Christian which I feel not 100% happy about.
One of them is the business of forgiving your enemies, you know, and loving your, you know, praying for the people who are most horrible, that kind of thing.
But martyrdom, I'm not, you know, I'm not thinking
I'm not thinking I want to be cut in half with a wooden saw or crucified or you know I'm not sure if I were being toasted on a griddle I would have the grace to say yeah right I've toasted enough on one side turn me over now and toast me on this side or indeed if I were chucked into the arena with the lions I'm not sure I wouldn't be just be well shitting myself and just sort of like running away and screaming.
Do you know I'll tell you what I lean on this and this is a this is there's a little bit of theology here but there's also just the testimony of Saints so you know you know the famous idea Corrie ten Boom you know her story and she her family hid Jews and then they're caught and then they they go off to the concentration camps and her sister dies there and that
But she tells the story of how she used to say to her dad, so they're a believing family, you know, I don't think I'll cope.
And he said, he's got this famous line where he said, well, you don't get the ticket until you need the train.
And so I don't think right now I have the grace to get through a martyrdom experience.
Yeah.
But when it comes, I'm looking for the ticket.
If it comes, I don't know.
I'm looking for the ticket to arrive.
And then you see Stephen getting stoned in the old fashioned way with the heavy stuff that kills you in acts.
And it reports that he sees heaven opened and he's welcomed in.
And then, you know, there's the story of Nate Saint and the folks who were trying to take the gospel to, I forget the island, it's probably Papua New Guinea, I can't find the file in my head right now.
And they land the plane and they get speared.
And now the people that speared them are believers.
And they testify that as they were spearing, they heard a strange song coming from the hills.
And it's fascinating, you follow the testimony up, they then heard the song many years later, and it was Christian hymns.
They believe they heard angels singing.
So I bank on this, that if I get martyred, the Lord is showing up, he's singing me into heaven, and I'm going to have some supernatural ability to get through that moment and enter into eternal life.
That would be good.
And if you're St Sebastian, You get to appear in so many, so many fantastic paintings, don't you?
I mean, you do get memorialised pretty well.
Yeah.
I often, God, sorry.
Do you, what do you think happens?
I mean, do you think there is a hierarchy?
Do you, I mean, it seems to me that, that, that, that, that what the earth is a kind of, is a sort of representation of what happens, happens in heaven.
So that must mean you've got God as the king with Jesus at his right hand.
Do you reckon that martyrs must get a place at the heart, you know, they're on the top table, aren't they?
So they're there, aren't they, around the throne asking when, O Lord...
And they're told when the full quoder of the martyrs come in.
And there are rewards in heaven proportionate to the works that Christ has called you to do.
And that's another thing that I think, certainly in my experience of evangelicalism, there hasn't been a lot of teaching on, because we all want to rightly emphasise justification by faith alone.
Not to say that you then don't have to, that the Spirit doesn't then enable you to live an increasingly good life.
But the saints will be arrayed according to Revelation.
The church will be arrayed.
What will the church, the bride of Christ, be dressed in but the good deeds of the saints?
Now, those would have been done through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And so Christ will crown his own achievements through us.
But there will be different rewards.
Nobody's going to be disappointed.
So there is a teaching about the rewards that the Lord will give us.
And somebody I know, I really appreciate his teaching, pointed out that the Apostles, we still have Apostles today, in this sense, that the Twelve, including Paul,
are alive and well and they actually do rule the church from heaven through their word by which Christ speaks through, because the word is what governs the church.
So the apostles do get a rank above us, as it were, and they have a function.
But again, I'm an evangelical in the branch of the church I came into, and I think we're pretty thin on our reading of Revelation when it comes to the architecture of the heavens and the new creation.
So these are things I need to go and look at.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, Just going back to the Psalms briefly, well, maybe not briefly, I'm struck by some of the sheer weirdness that appears in the Psalms.
The Christians, you know, the trust the pan Christians I referred to, who don't want to delve too deeply, they sort of skate over.
I mean, look, there is so much stuff that we don't understand, isn't there?
I think so, yeah.
The deal that happens when you die, when you're reborn.
How does it work?
What are the rules?
These are questions that I feel are not properly discussed or thought through.
You'll get I mean, when I go through some of the other Psalms and talk about... I mean, Psalm 19, for example, is fantastically weird.
Oh, yes!
The sun coming forth like a bridegroom out of his chamber.
And, you know, I'm wondering whether there's some sort of indication that About the nature of the firmament and stuff and about the... I think we're almost approaching flat earth.
The cosmology of the Psalms is... Do you know what, Johnny?
I trust the Psalms.
I really trust the Psalms.
I don't trust modern... I trust the Psalms more than I trust modern medical science.
Or any form of modern science, actually.
I trust the Psalms more than I trust history.
Yes, yes, because it keeps getting proven true and there's a wonderful, rich set of resources, aren't there, that is filling the internet with people assuming biblical history is correct and then discovering that it makes a darn sight better account of the archaeology we have.
Psalm 19, I can tell you how the Reformed tradition handled it, and the Reformed tradition, so you're thinking, 15th, 16th, 17th century, the post-Reformation folks, Sir Calvin's just after, he's a second generation Reformation, and they are reading, if you read their commentaries, they're reading With Augustine.
So they're not going poo-poo Catholics.
They actually claim that they're reading how the early church fathers read stuff, right?
So when you go to the Reformed commentaries, you find they have a much deeper reading.
And Psalm 19, one way of handling it is that verses one to six give you what theologians have called general revelation, that the creation operates by God's word and therefore so has order to it.
And it's So it can't be evolution, it's not sort of happenstance.
So it's all word-based.
The heavens declare the glory of God.
And you think Romans chapter 1 talks about how it's evident from what has been created, because it's a speech act, if you like, of God, that the creation has communicated, that everybody knows there's a God, they just suppress the knowledge of the truth.
So verses 1 to 6 describe creation as word without words, and then If creation is, and Hebrews 1 talks about how Christ upholds the creation by the power of his word, if creation appears, comes about and then continues to operate by God's plan and his word,
Then we should expect that humans are designed to function by God's special revelation, that is, his spoken word.
And that's what verses 7 to 14 give you.
So in a world where there's a God who spoke it into existence, it will work regularly, and therefore you can have science if you do it properly, because you can see the regularity of things.
And in such a world, what would the pinnacle creature do?
Well, verse 7, the law of the Lord, so the law Torah, Of is perfect, reviving the soul.
And so you get general revelation through the creation and special revelation, which is what technically is what you call the Bible, both underlined there and related.
And so as we look at the Bible, it should actually help us to understand better.
Somebody's put it this way.
The Bible's book two.
Book one's the creation.
The Bible assumes the creation.
Jesus doesn't go, do you know what a sheep is?
He uses the sheep examples, you know, sort of thing.
So in one sense, verses 1 to 6 are book 1, verses 7 to 14 are book 2.
And if you read book 2, you'll understand better book 1.
I think that's what's going on.
That's how the traditions handle Psalm 19.
Just going back because I naughtily steered it onto some of my team when this is about 22.
But it's related because it does the Torah King thing and we're all about the king.
So it's legit.
Good.
Yes.
Well done.
What I want to ask you...
Do you where where it says they pierced my hands and my feet?
Yeah, do you reckon that line?
Was responsible for the misconception in a lot of Renaissance art where they have the the stigmata So or they have Christ yet.
We know that if you'd been Had a nail put through there.
It would quickly rip through you Yeah, so it had to have been through this joint had to be so when they say they pierced my hands and my feet Well, no Yeah.
It would have to be your, it would have to be there, and where does the, there, where would it have gone through his ankle I suppose, would it?
It wouldn't have gone through the... Well no, that's a good question.
Do you know, that does start to evoke images in one's mind of imagining like the human ankle a bit like a butchermite and try and work out where you could get a good purchase.
Yeah.
I mean, doesn't it just open that up?
I mean, even that line does.
The idea that you're not sort of invited into, not in a gory way, it's just sort of in a kind of a rubbernecking end of a car accident kind of way.
But it does make you ask the question.
Yeah, there's lots of I don't know the history of the painting in relation to the text.
Is a painting an illustration or a kind of a surface reading the text or those sorts of things?
I'm not sure.
So I don't know enough about that.
I'd have to go and look.
I think we'll probably sort of close it after this one.
You and I both spend a lot of time on kind of Awake chat rooms, let's say.
And we come across all manner of theories.
I mean, so there's the Christians who are one faction.
There are the kind of the New Agers who are another faction.
I mean, I don't know where David Icke is on this spectrum.
He ain't a Christian, I know that.
But the non-Christians say things like, they say that what we see happening now is not a fulfilment of biblical prophecy.
It's the baddies, the rulers of the darkness of this world as we would call them, Knowing that we believe in the Bible and ripping off its ideas and sort of imitating its predictions to just mess with our heads.
Have you heard this one?
Yes, yeah, I have heard that one.
How shit is that theory?
I think that's just appallingly bad.
This is just a thought, who knows where this will go.
You know the criticism, you know the criticism of conspiracy theories that, hey, nobody could organise such a big thing, which is nonsense, we know that.
But I think on that scale, no human could organise such a great thing to play out the whole Bible story.
You'd need Satan.
And the thing is that if you go with the story, Satan don't come off well.
So, I'm not sure.
Why would he bring about his own downfall?
A house divided will fall.
I don't get how this theory works either.
No.
But this is the sort of theory that would be espoused by that same person who said, well, I've read Psalm 22 and it's got nothing to do with any crucifixion that I can see.
Oh, apart from the detail about they pierced my hands and my feet.
There are these people that are determined to... I'm really up for really strong arguments against Christianity because I think it needs to be challenged, this crazy stuff that we believe.
One needs to be able to either argue out of our stupidity or have our belief reinforced by
By evidence, it's good that we're challenged, but I cannot see I cannot understand the rationale of Whoever whoever the powers that be are that the the cabal of the the most powerful people I can't understand why just for the kind of The lulz.
The kicks.
Yeah.
They would try and replicate biblical prophecy just to kind of, you know, undermine it.
No, I mean, because it could seriously backfire, couldn't it?
Because it's just... Well... But the Word of God, I mean, I think this part, this has to... Part of the argument here is the reason it's not the product of the cabal to try and Well, two things.
One is, that's the parallel world that argues that Christianity is the cause of all problems, isn't it, and creates white privilege and all the rest of it.
Or that it's a Jewish conspiracy.
Have you heard that one?
That it's a psy-op to make us weak and sort of acquiescent.
Yeah, but for the various lines of evidence is that we don't have time to rehearse and the Bible itself claims to be God's Word and I come back to I think where one of the comments I made at the beginning in 1 Timothy Paul says The Gospel.
So, Jesus tells us the whole Bible is about the Gospel.
The Gospel is the Father's testimony about the Son.
Paul is called to pass on that testimony.
He passes it on to Timothy, and Timothy is to protect it by the Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit superintends the teaching of the Word.
This is God's Word.
It comes on the breath of God.
And so, There is something... This isn't a bunch of stories cooked up either by some socio-economic kind of political project, neither by world leaders and people with... This itself, and this is the claim that those who claim the Bible is somehow a psyop,
Have to have to deal with the Bible's own claim that it is, in fact, the living word of God and that when it is read, God is addressing us.
So I so I think, yeah, there's a theological counter to it in that sense.
I think that's at least one line of argument one might use.
And my experience of folks who want to make the the Bible Either just a collection of religious experiences and they happen to fall together into one sort of collection, or that they should be read primarily as a collection of ancient artefacts or something like that.
There are people who haven't read the thing.
You know what I mean?
And when you read it, you are engaging with God.
And I know that can sort of sound super spiritual, like it doesn't engage your mind.
It does engage your mind.
You are dealing with the Lord.
You are hearing the word of the Spirit.
You're hearing the Father testify about the Son by the work of the Spirit through the penman that gave us the word.
And so, as Spurgeon said, you don't need to defend the Bible at one level because, you know, why defend a lion?
I do think we should do evidences, and he wasn't saying that.
But, but, like, come at us with that claim when you've read the thing and actually dealt with the contents, and then we'll have a conversation.
Otherwise, it's a, isn't it a, yeah, shut up trick?
Don't bring me your Bible, because it's a, yeah, shut up, just...
Whoever then engages.
Have you ever come across anyone who wants to go to, how does Psalm 22 get picked up in the New Testament?
How does Jesus read the Old Testament?
Let's see how it's consistent throughout.
Let's actually deal with the content.
I'm not sure I've encountered anybody who wants to dismiss it quickly who's actually read it.
That's really true actually.
It's been one of the real surprises to me.
I mean, I read the Bible every day, but not out of a sense of, well, you're a Christian, that's what you've got to do.
Yeah.
Because I find it really, really interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's the same with the Psalms.
It's not a chore learning the Psalms.
I do it when I'm doing my Pilates exercises and my sort of warm down from my running in the morning.
and I sort of you know the gaps between each exercise I try and memorize another line and then go back to it and it's not it's not people who are wondering when am I going to find time in my day to learn the psalms and is it going to be is it going to be difficult no you can you can make it work for you and and you know you don't have to you know you can take a whole a whole year to learn psalm 23 if you want to or you can
Take the crash course and try and cover a lot of... And I suspect that if somebody was of the view that this might be the product of the cabal who were trying to steer and stage aspects of it in order to discredit Christianity, if that person actually tried that, I think their category of questions would shift.
You'd stop worrying about, you'd start asking, what is going on in Psalm 22?
Yes.
I think you might even just be distracted from that idea for a moment too, because this is doing, you don't master this book.
It masters you.
Yeah.
And it searches you.
And as Calvin said, to understand God, you need to understand yourself.
And as you're trying to understand yourself, you inevitably end up looking upwards to understand God in some kind of way.
Not because we are God, but because we're made in his image.
And so I think the attitude and the set of questions shifts when somebody is actually engaging with scripture.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I think you're right.
Well, if you think about it, when you're reading great literature, probably doesn't count when you're reading Harry Potter, but you are engaged with an argument with the author.
It's a two-way thing.
And I suppose if we accept that God is ultimately the author of the Bible, then it's a discussion.
And I think Have you heard of this book, Falling Upwards, by Richard Rohr, I think it's called.
He's a Franciscan friar and he says that there are or ought to be two stages in your life and it's never certain whether it's going to appear sooner or later, the second part.
The first part, you establish yourself within the world.
You have your career going and you have your relationships and you get your house in order and so on.
But the second one is where you start dealing with the questions of why are we here?
What's my real purpose?
What happens afterwards?
And I think if you're not asking yourself those questions and dealing with them, you are missing a really important I mean, I'm not saying... This is what I'd say, I guess, to any... Blimey!
Do you think any non-Christians have lasted this far?
I don't know!
If the Spirit of God's active, then maybe.
I was really pleased, but I got this lovely... I hope he's listening.
I got this lovely message from a Ugandan pastor who'd listened to the Psalm 23 thing and had been moved by it and was praying for me and wanted me to pray for him, which I did.
I couldn't work out how to get his email because it was on one of those internet things that I don't understand.
Anyway, so it is reaching a wider audience.
I'm hoping that this series gets shared by Christians, but also that it gets shared by non-Christians, whom I would urge.
To read the Psalms, and I think really you should read them in the translations of either the King James Version or better still in my book, Miles Coverdale, just because you can appreciate them as poetry.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, and I mean saved me from the lion's mouth, but that was heard me from the horns of the unicorns or from Psalm 118.
They came about me like bees and are extinct even as the fire among the thorns for in the name of the of the Lord.
I will destroy them.
I mean just you don't even need to believe in God to read that stuff and go whoa.
Yeah, that is something.
That is some heavy duty.
You hear it at some basic level of programming in your soul, don't you?
It's kind of a, as a kind of a rewiring of what, if we were ones and zeros in our software, it sends a virus in and rearranges things, doesn't it?
It does something.
I think it does.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think the whole concept of We all have our different ways into Christianity.
And I think for me, as a writer, and I've always been blessed with a gift with words from a very early age.
I have a facility for it in the way that some kids can kick a ball around.
I was never any good at that.
I throw like a girl.
In fact, I throw worse than a girl.
It's awful.
It's awful.
But I do have the word.
And, you know, in the beginning was the word and the word was gone.
Yeah, yeah.
The language is, they are like, you know, not without reason does the dark side use incantations and spells and we have, we have the Psalms.
And the Bible and the Word of the Lord.
I really appreciated your insights, but I think in the Russell Brand article, but you've also mentioned in another couple of times about the way in which people use words to, well not just to persuade, but to cast a vision of life and to recruit you into particular ways of thinking and acting in that kind of spell casting kind of way.
It's just been very helpful.
It's also, I'm fascinated by your We haven't got time because I know you want to get off, but the disappointment of C.S.
Lewis's book on the Psalms, because I also was disappointed in it, thinking that this English professor might find all the connections to the New Testament, do the intertextuality, because surely language, when somebody quotes something from somewhere else, that's sort of a basic thing you get taught in English language, isn't it?
Why didn't he follow the connections?
Why is it so flat?
I don't get it anyway.
A wordsmith should recognise the power of the Bible in particular ways.
No, instead, he says, well, some people might find the psalms rather awkward, and the way that they repeat themselves, you know, that one of the lines says one thing in one way, and then the next line will say it in a different way.
And I'm thinking, yeah, that's part of the charm.
It reinforces the idea.
It's a beautiful thing.
And Clive staples Lewis, which all sounds like a sentence where some probably bloke called Lewis comes off worse after being stapled by Clive.
Can you imagine him sitting there puffing on his pipe going, oh this again?
Oh no, again?
Really?
I must discuss this with Tolkien, down at the Eagle and Child.
This one's a real dull one.
Sorry, you've encouraged me now.
Have you read the Miles Mathis essay on C.S.
Lewis?
No, I haven't.
No, I should go and take that.
You know about Miles Mathis?
Well, you introduced me through some of your stuff to him and then I was like, oh, okay, there's some questions about this guy.
I was introduced to Miles Mathis by somebody who was a member of my Telegram channel called Sunshine and Light, who was a very committed Christian, but she's really far down the rabbit hole.
She introduced me to Miles Mathis and somebody else mentioned this essay that Miles Mathis written on C.S.
Lewis in which he claims that C.S.
Lewis was actually working for the other side and as evidence of this he pointed out that C.S.
Lewis's novels are so rubbish that it can only be the work of somebody who's trying to discredit Christianity.
But also, he points out that C.S.
Lewis went to Malvern, which is the school I went to, which is also the school that James Jesus Angleton, the CIA chief, went to.
And I don't know how he makes the connections.
Anyway, it's worth looking at just to be familiar with this.
He's really elaborate.
I still have the faith in C.S.
Lewis's great Christian apologies.
Yes, so do I. Maybe there's more than one of him, and the one that wasn't the right one knocked out the book on Psalms!
I think the Psalms one is not the way forward.
It's not his winner, is it?
No.
It really isn't.
It's a filler.
Anyway, Johnny, where can people, if they want to come and worship at your If they want to come and join us on a Sunday.
So the name of the church is Christ Church.
It's in Loughborough in the East Midlands University town.
So that's where we are.
What time is your service and how long is it?
It's 10.30 and we wrap up about 12.
It's about an hour and a half long and then we have a six 6.30 service that is usually done by about 7.30 so we have two services on Sunday and we teach through the Bible.
So Sunday evenings we're going through book two of the Psalms at the moment and we're doing the guided tour so that folks can know the Where they are, so as they're trying to learn the Psalms, they've got some sense of the overall story and what book they're in.
And then in the mornings we're going through the book of Hebrews.
Because the book of Hebrews, which is really a sermon actually, it's the only New Testament example of a full sermon.
Which is quite fascinating, just as a, what did sermons sound like in the New Testament era?
But it shows you how to read the Bible, because again, the preacher Who tradition has is Paul, probably written up by Luke, is showing you the gospel and the personal work of Christ from the Old Testament.
So back to where we started.
The book of Hebrews shows you the connection.
So that's what we're doing on a Sunday.
That's the kind of thing that we do in the Bible teaching and, you know, we do communion and baptise believers and all that kind of stuff.
The normal things that churches do.
Well, Johnny, thank you.
I've really enjoyed this and it's been nice and digressive, which is the way I like it.
I haven't done any advertising and stuff on this one.
What I really like Um, and actually God will make this happen.
So, so, but, but, but please, you know, please be his human agents.
Um, I would like you, first of all, those of you Christians who, and non-Christians who enjoy this series to, to like put the word out.
I'd like it to reach a much bigger audience.
And also if you are a Christian and you would like to support this, this, support me making this psalm, psalm series, that would be really good too.
I'd, I'd, I'd really appreciate that.
I mean, I, I, I think, um, Yeah, it'd be nice to have your support.
So, do I need to give you, have you got emails and stuff or anything?
Not emails, any other web addresses or anything?
No, I mean, we have a podcast, not from the church but from a publisher I work for.
If anyone's interested in wandering around, Reform Baptist Theology in the Tradition.
You can go and check out the Broken Wharf podcast or the Broken Wharf Coffeehouse Sessions podcast where we chat about theology.
That sounds good.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you.
And it remains for me just to thank my regular supporters on Patreon, Subscribestar, Substack, Subscribestar, locals, of course.
Locals, yeah.
Or buy me a coffee.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
And please keep it up.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Johnny.
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