Father John Whitehead is Archpriest and pastor at St Jonah Orthodox Church in Spring, Texas. As well as delivering a learned exegesis on the first two octaves of the longest psalm, Psalm 119 (Psalm 118 in Orthodox and Catholic numbering), Fr John chats to James about everything from his early days as a Nazarene, Sola Scriptura, Dead Kennedys lyrics, which forms of sexual activity God most detests, and which are the best translations of the Bible. His website is http://fatherjohn.blogspot.com
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Now, Psalm 119 is divided into 22 verses known as octaves.
I'm going to do just the first two octaves today.
And I'm using the Miles Coverdale translation for the book of common prayer.
Psalm 119.
These are the first two octaves.
Octave 1.
Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way and walk in the law of the Lord.
Blessed are they that keep his testimonies and seek him with their whole heart.
For they who do no wickedness walk in his ways.
Thou hast charged that we shall diligently keep thy commandments.
Oh, that my ways were made so direct that I might keep thy statutes.
So shall I not be confounded while I have respect unto all thy commandments.
I will thank thee with an unfeigned heart when I shall have learned the judgments of thy righteousness.
I will keep thy ceremonies.
O forsake me not utterly.
And now we have octave two.
By the way, they're divided into the letters, the names of the Hebrew alphabet.
So the first one is Aleph, and the second one is Bet.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way, even by ruling himself after thy word?
With my whole heart have I sought thee.
O let me not go wrong out of thy commandments.
Thy words have I hid within my heart, that I should not sin against thee.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, O teach me thy statutes.
With my lips have I been telling of all the judgments of thy mouth.
I have had as great delight in the way of thy testimonies as in all manner of riches.
I will talk of thy commandments and have respect unto thy ways.
My delight shall be in thy statutes, and I will not forget thy word.
Come to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole.
And today I'm going to be talking about the first part of Psalm 119, because it's a jolly long psalm, so we can't do it all in one podcast, with Father John Whiteford.
Father John, tell me about yourself.
I know you're in Texas, and I know you're Orthodox.
Were you always Orthodox?
No, I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, which came out of the Methodists, which came out of the Anglicans, and which came out of the Roman Catholics.
But basically, Nazarenes, most people, when I say that, they have no idea what I'm talking about.
So I used to say they were like conservative Methodists with Baptist tendencies, but now I say they're more like moderate Methodists with Baptist tendencies, because they're not quite as conservative as they used to be.
I think that's happened to a lot of the denominations, hasn't it?
They all sort of soften their stance.
Right.
And the experience I had of church when I was a kid, you would be hard-pressed to find any Nazarene churches that would have services like that.
They're almost totally different.
Which, when you have to reinvent yourself within someone's lifetime and become something totally unrecognizable, I would say that's an indication that maybe there's a problem with your religious views.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I can see that.
A lot of people seem to be of your persuasion seem to be migrating towards the Eastern Eastern Orthodox.
Is that because it's sort of kept its rigor?
It hasn't moved with the times, as it were.
Well, I mean, for me, I was actually studying to be a Nazarene minister in the, you know, like, I think I first encountered Orthodoxy probably like in 1988.
And while I was getting my degree in theology, and I met an Orthodox priest because I was involved in the pro-life movement, but I was also reading the fathers of the church because you never would have known this when I was growing up.
But when I started studying theology, they started talking about how we actually have some room that we make for tradition and our theology.
Because in Anglicanism, you have the three-legged stool that they talk about, which is that scripture is primary, but you interpret it with tradition and reason.
And in the Wesleyan holiness movement, they talk about the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which supposedly Wesley added experience into that mix to make it a four-legged stool rather than a three-legged stool.
So I decided when I was doing a research paper on the inspiration and authority of scripture to look at the question through the Wesleyan quadrilateral, because we talked about using this method, but I never saw one actually use it in practice.
So I thought, well, let me see what the Bible says about itself, and then let me talk about what tradition says about it.
Then, you know, talked a little bit about reason and experience.
But for me, most of that paper was focused on what does tradition say.
And I came to the conclusion that if the church has always believed something, that it would have to be true.
And while I was researching that paper, I'd met this priest, but I'd not really had any theological conversations with him.
But then I, you know, when I was looking at what does tradition say about scripture, I was looking at sort of like through the branch theory of the church that comes out of Anglicanism and thinking, you know, what does the early church say?
What do the Roman Catholic traditions say?
What do the various Protestant branches say?
And I spent a lot of time talking about the Methodist and Wesleyan Holiness tradition.
But I thought, well, you know, the Orthodox Church is kind of an important part of the church history.
Maybe I should talk to Father Anthony about what they believe.
And when he explained what the Orthodox believe, it made the most sense and actually became essentially the thesis to my paper.
And this was for a graduate course that I was taking, which the purpose of the course that I discerned anyway, it wasn't stated, but the purpose seemed to be to convince everybody that the Bible is full of errors, but somehow it's still inspired and you can derive truth out of it.
But of course, if you believe that, you get to pick what's true and what's not.
And when I presented this to paper in sort of a seminar forum where the class was participating and commenting on everybody's paper, one of my professors said, well, if you believe that, then you're going to have to accept the Pope in purgatory.
And I thought, well, you could convince me the church has always believed those things.
I guess I'd have to accept it.
But, you know, out of my conversations with the priest that wound up baptizing me was Father who's Father Anthony Nelson, now Father Benedict, because he's a monastic.
I asked him to recommend some Orthodox books and started reading.
And at first I was thinking, you know, I'd probably be it'd be beneficial to know more about Orthodoxy.
So I was just curious.
So I had another class.
It was called the Theology of Christian Worship, where one of the assignments that we had, we were supposed to go to three services that were not like our own tradition and write a report about it.
So I thought, well, let me go to Father Anthony's church and write a report on that.
So I went to a Vesper service and it was not in a beautiful church.
It was in a storefront with rust stains on the ceiling tiles and a carpet that had seen better days, but the singing was well done.
And I thought it was a very beautiful service.
And my first thought when I was watching the service was this is a lot like a synagogue service.
And to come to find out when I started researching the history of the services of the church, particularly the liturgy, that's where it comes from, is Jewish synagogue worship and temple worship.
And the interesting thing about that is there's only one time in church history where that could have been even possible, and that's the time of the apostles, because even by the end of the first century, Jews and Christians, Jews that were not believers, not Christians, were not on friendly terms.
And so it's not like in the second, third, or fourth century, Christians would have said, you know, those Jews do some cool stuff.
Let's copy them.
So to me, this is one of the greatest examples because sometimes when you talk about why sole scriptura, which you know, the idea of scripture alone is wrong, I'll have Protestants say, well, point to me one apostolic tradition that's not spelled out in the scriptures.
Well, the liturgy is one of those traditions that's very clear.
And there's a really good book by an Anglican scholar by the name of Dom Gregory Dix back in the days when Anglicans still believe in God and stuff.
That it's called The Shape of the Liturgy.
And in that book, he talks about all the ancient liturgies and how they all have a common structure.
So you have differences in the ancient liturgies, but they all have a common structure, which also tells you that they have a common origin.
So it was very enlightening to read all that.
Yeah, I was reading about Martin Luther yesterday and he said some pretty dodgy things and believed some pretty dodgy things.
I'm not feeling so comfortable in my sort of Church of England tradition.
Now I think of the I mean, do you think it was?
Do you think it was a sort of sabotage of the church?
Well, the problem with Anglicanism was that Anglicanism was basically a creation of parliament and the king.
And, you know, that the British government was enforcing some kind of uniformity, and they started off, obviously before Henry VIII decided to go his own way.
That were Roman Catholics, and because of Henry VIII and the introduction of Protestantism, you started having even radical Protestants in England, and what Parliament tried to do was to make everybody fit into the same church, whether they liked it or not.
So You wound up with a church that had everything from Anglo-Catholics that really wanted to be Catholics to low church Protestants that really didn't want to be Anglican.
And so basically, Anglicanism was always a compromise that tried to skirt differences.
And it was still relatively conservative when you compare it to other Protestant groups up until really the 20th century.
I mean, I don't have to probably tell you about British history, but you know, Queen Elizabeth's sister wanted to marry a divorced man.
So we're not talking about ancient history.
And that was such a scandal that she wound up not marrying the man that she really wanted to marry.
And then we went from that to now we have the king of England, you know, who got divorced, married to a divorced woman, and that's not seen as a big problem.
And of course, you also have LGBTQP clergy, and that's not seen as a problem.
So we went from having qualms about somebody marrying a divorced man to thinking that it's okay for a man to have sex with another man or for a man to think that he's a woman, you know, trapped in a man's body or what have you.
And so it's the disintegration has really accelerated, but the seeds of it were there from the very beginning because they just tried to skirt differences and didn't have really a good anchor in truth.
You know, what is what are we really going to base our beliefs on?
Well, you can say scripture, but that begs the question about what the scriptures mean.
And, you know, they did, and there were a lot of Anglican scholars that really tried, they thought they were going this middle road of, you know, we're not like the Catholics that have gone overboard with tradition, but we're not like those reformers on the continent that have thrown everything out and have rejected all these things.
So we're going to chart a middle course.
But the problem is, there always were people on opposite spectrums, even within the Anglican church.
And then when you had the rise of biblical skepticism from mainly continental Lutherans and Reformed people, combined with things like the sexual revolution, everything just started going to pop pretty quick.
Before we go into the Psalm 119, I mentioned I use the Coverdale translation for the Book of Common Prayer, which predates the King James version by about what, 50 years or something.
I quite like it.
But what's the version you use in the Orthodox Church?
Well, in the Russian church abroad, in English, we typically use the translation that's done by Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston.
So it's usually referred to as the Boston Psalter.
But that translation, I didn't know this for many years, but if you compare it with the Douay Rheims, particularly the revised version of it that was done by an English bishop of Chalinor, I think is the way his name is pronounced, who cleaned it up because the Douai Rheims are generally, particularly in its original version, was certainly not the most beautiful version.
But in the Psalms, they did make it much more beautiful.
And the Boston Psalter, they did make corrections based on the Septuagint.
So the Douay Rheims, I think, is even older than the Coverdale Psalter, if I'm not mistaken.
But there is an edition.
There's an edition of the Covered Ale Psalter that was published by Holy Trinity Monastery, which is the main monastery in the Russian church abroad, that's based on the Covered Ale Psalter.
And it's called the Psalter for Prayer.
And you might want to get your hands on a copy of it.
There are some places where I think they'd have been better off if they left the Covered Ale as it was, but they did make corrections based on the Septuagint and the Slavonic.
And it's not a bad translation.
I personally don't like it only because when I became Orthodox, the Boston Psalter is what we were using.
And when you get a translation into your heart, it's hard to deal with another translation.
It's not because the other translation in the grand scheme of things is necessarily worse.
It's just that you've got this translation in your heart.
And then when you are reading something that's similar but different, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.
And it can be painful to listen to.
That's very well put because I, for Psalm 23, for example, I learned the King James Version.
And when I look at the, even though I'm a sort of covered ale guy, I'm used to the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
And that's probably the version that most people know anyway, because Americans tend to go with the KJV, don't they?
Yeah, that's what I grew up with.
And so for me, when I became Orthodox, it took some getting used to to switch to the Boston Psalter.
But I've been using it for 35 years now.
So it's become what I'm used to now.
So you've got what the Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing?
Something similar to that.
It's something like that.
I'd have to look at it to give you the exact wording, but it's a bit different.
And just very briefly, because this is a very long preamble, but is the Septuagint better than the Masoretic text version?
Well, when I was in college, I had two years of Greek, and then I had the option of going into the advanced Greek classes or to take two years of Hebrew.
And I decided to take two years of Hebrew.
And I think that there's a lot of benefit from studying Hebrew just because that tells you how the original language works, because the Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew original.
But what most Protestants are unaware of, though, is that the Hebrew Masoretic text that we now have is about a thousand years more recent than the Septuagint translation.
And in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found actually Hebrew texts that are clearly the original Hebrew text that the Septuagint was translated from, which was different than proto-Masoretic texts.
So in other words, there were for at least quite a bit of the Old Testament books different versions in Hebrew prior to the time of Christ.
They were similar, but there were differences.
And one thing, another thing that a lot of people are unaware of about Hebrew is that Hebrew was originally written in Proto-Israelite.
So the letters were different than what you see if you buy a Hebrew Bible now, which is written in Aramaic script.
And the other thing that was added by the Masoretes or the Masoretic scholars were vowel points, because Semitic languages are consonantal in terms of their structure.
In other words, like a verb, the root of a verb is the Consonants and then the way the verb changes makes the vowels different.
But the consonants remain the same.
Well, it used to be that Hebrew texts were just written with consonants.
And so if you think of an English text, if you took the vowels out and you took the spaces out from between the words, then it would be easy sometimes to misread a text because you might combine letters in different ways, thinking that that's how they're supposed to be done.
So Hebrew went through all these changes, but the Septuagint was translated by people who still understood old Hebrew.
And so I think it's a more reliable text than the Masoretic text is.
But I do think there's benefit to be made by looking at the Hebrew text because a lot of times when you look at the words in the Hebrew text, you can tell, yeah, this is what the Septuagint was translating, but you get some insights into what they were translating and what the range of that original word means.
Also, Hebrew has some unique things about it that, you know, in English, for example, we talk about English having a past, present, and future tense, but really we only have a past and a present tense, and then we modify the present tense to make it future.
So we say, I shall go, but the verb is the same.
So you can say, I went, I go.
Well, in Hebrew, they only have perfect and imperfect.
And usually perfect means past, and present could be for the present or for the future.
But then you have what's called the prophetic perfect because the prophets, when they're speaking God's words, it's usually in the perfect tense.
So you have a verse that says, by his stripes ye were healed.
But you have Protestant, you know, word of faith people that want to take that line and say, well, see, God's already healed you.
So you just, if you say you're not healed, you're calling God a liar.
Well, that's not how Hebrew works.
That's not you, something could be in the future, but be stated in the perfect tense.
And that just means that there's no doubt about it.
But it doesn't mean that it's already happened, that you're calling God a liar if you say that it hasn't happened yet.
Right.
Right.
Interesting.
So Psalm 119.
Should we just do the first?
Are they called sections or what?
What are the names of the?
Well, sometimes in English, we call them octaves because the 118th or 119th in the Protestant Bibles, Psalm 9 and 10 in the King James are two separate psalms.
But in the Septuagint, that's one psalm.
And actually, that's also an acrostic psalm.
So we know that that should be one psalm.
If you just look at the Hebrew text, but that acrostic psalm, and there are many acrostic psalms in the Psalter, but usually each line begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
But in the case of Psalm 118 or 119, you have 22 sections which correspond to the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
And each section has eight verses, but each of those verses in that octave starts with the same letter.
So the first section, the first eight verses, every line in Hebrew begins with the Hebrew letter Aleph, which means it actually comes from originally the Egyptian hieroglyph or an ox head.
And it's similar to the word for an ox in Hebrew.
And if you think of the letter A in English, and if you turned it on its side and you extended the bar and the A a little bit, you kind of see how the bottom lines of the A make horns.
And so that was the proto-Israelite character for Aleph.
And St. Theophon the recluse was a 19th-century Russian saint and commentator.
He wrote an entire book on this psalm, which I would recommend getting if people really want to do a deep dive on this subject.
But he points out how these letters and their meaning have some influence on what goes on in each one of these sections.
And I think in this first section, you can kind of think of it as the head, which is, you know, the head is what you think with, it's what you eat with, it's what you lead with.
And so in the first section, he points out that the first four verses talk about the kind of person that we're supposed to be.
And then the verses five and seven talk about what we need to do to become that kind of a person.
The last verse, verse eight, talks about, it's basically an affirmation of making a commitment to become that kind of a person.
So the very first verse says, Blessed are the blameless and the way who walk in the law of the Lord.
And first off, the word blessed in Hebrew and in Greek, you could translate that in different ways.
And in some English translations, particularly more contemporary ones, they'll sometimes say happy.
But the problem is the word happy in English is a little bit trite because we tend to be happy at one moment and then sad at another.
But in the case of the Greek word, the Greeks used this word to talk about the happiness of the God.
So it was a happiness that was enduring.
It was not something that was fading.
And he says, blessed are, which one thing it tells you that that's already blessed as opposed to being blessed will be.
But it's also plural.
So it's talking about not just one person because a lot of the Psalms really are talking about Christ.
And so you could, in many cases, say, well, this is referring to Christ.
And in a certain sense, you could say Christ is among the blessed are the blameless, but clearly it's saying we can be this.
So blessed are the blameless.
And to be blameless obviously means to be free from sin.
And in the case of Christ, he's free from sin by nature, whereas we can only be that by grace.
But us becoming blameless is something that's possible.
And then he says, who walk in the law of the Lord.
actually bless her the blame is in the way my version says undefiled I think it means essentially the same thing Yeah, yeah.
But when it talks about being blessed, are the blameless in the way, you know, before Christians were called Christians, Christians were spoken of as being followers of the way, because the Christian life is a life.
And so what's being talked about here is people who are living the Christian life.
And Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
And another thing interesting about the beginning of this psalm is if you go back to Psalm 1, it has a very similar beginning.
Blessed are is the man, in that case it's singular, who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly.
Some scholars think that actually these two psalms form the original bookends of the psalter.
And because we know that the psalter went through various stages of development over time, you can see that in the fact that there are five books of the psalms that are noted.
And in one place, it says, Here endeth the psalms of David, and yet you find more psalms of David later on.
So you have a collection that grew over time.
And so it is possible that Psalm 118 was an ending to the Psalter at one stage in its development.
This is presumably a Psalm of David, isn't it?
I don't think I don't remember if the superscription says that, but that's how it's interpreted by the fathers as being a Psalm of David.
Is it the longest psalm?
Is it considered the big one?
The one that is like you've got to know.
Well, it is certainly the longest psalm.
It's the longest chapter in the Bible.
And in some ways, it's kind of a daunting psalm because it's so long.
In the Orthodox Church, it's appointed to be done liturgically almost every day of the week.
And it's also done at a funeral.
And it's kind of the centerpiece of a funeral service.
And so I think that the fact that it's used daily is to highlight how important it is.
And also the fact that it's done at our funeral, it kind of tells us something about the Christian life from beginning to end.
And so St. John of Shanghai, who's a fairly recent saint, reposed in 1966.
He wrote an article for his church newsletter when he was still in China back in the 30s.
And basically, it was chiding people about not reading the Psalms.
He said, you know, many of you are going to come to the end of your life.
You're going to die.
And it's only at your death that good people are going to read the Psalter over your coffin because it's the pious practice in the Orthodox Church that in the night a coffin is in the church.
People take turns reading the Psalter over the coffin.
And I think, again, this is instructive because it tells us that the Psalms are really the way we're supposed to live our life.
And I think for those that are reading the Psalms, to read the Psalter while you're gazing at someone who not long ago was living and now is dead kind of drives home the point that these words need to be taken to heart.
But Psalm 118 is actually part of the funeral service itself.
And he basically says, you know, these words will only be a rebuke to you when you're dead if you've not opened the book in this life and made use of it.
And he especially said, you should read this 118th Psalm, especially, because it's so important.
Yeah.
I mean, there are psalms I consider fun psalms.
And they've got all sorts of stuff going on which delights you and makes them enjoyable to recite.
118 or 119 as I would number it doesn't have that fun quality.
It's a much more serious endeavor.
And it's quite repetitive, isn't it?
I mean, it's all about testimonies, keeping testimonies, keeping commandments, judgments.
That's another feature of the psalm is that every verse makes some reference to the commandments, the word of God, the teachings, you know, the law.
And so it's all about scripture, God's word, God's teachings.
And so it really highlights how important these things are for how we live the Christian life.
Yeah.
I think I mentioned to you before when we were sort of setting up, when we were trying to make up our minds which psalm we were going to do.
And you went for this one.
And I was really glad.
I was glad because it had been hanging over me.
Who am I going to do Psalm 119 with?
But also it had been hanging over me.
Well, am I ever going to do it?
Because it's so long.
And then you found a very sensible solution to just do a small bit.
Because I've been, when I learn the Psalms, I learn one of the other Psalms and then I learn a section or an octave, do you call them?
Octet.
Octave.
Okay.
I learned another octave.
Because it's too much.
I mean, you could never learn Psalm 119 and one go.
It wouldn't be fun.
And I've come much more to like it and appreciate it.
I think it's got a special quality that I think noah, well, apart from Psalm 1, which is very similar, it's got a character that no other Psalms have.
I think if I remember correctly, Saint Augustine commented on this Psalm and he said that he had tried to start commenting on it many times.
And at first glance, the Psalm seemed to not be super deep, but that the more he started to look at it, the deeper it seemed to be.
And I think that's really true of the Psalm.
If you just read it on a surface level, you might think, well, this is not really that deep.
But when you start pondering, what is it really saying?
There's just so much that's there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
But I wanted to ask you, obviously, this was written.
This is a book of the Old Testament.
So it was written, what, a thousand years before Christ?
Yeah, David, he lived around the year 1000 BC, if I remember correctly.
Right.
So when it talks about the law of the laws and the law of the Lord and keeping his testimonies and keeping his counsels and stuff, it's referring to, well, the Ten Commandments.
It's referring to sort of Hebrew law, isn't it?
And yet, at the same time, it probably focused primarily on the five books of Moses.
But one thing that should be understood about the word law or Torah in Hebrew is that we tend to think law means strictly like judicial statutes, but the Hebrew word means more along the lines of instruction.
So it actually has a broader meaning than what we mean by law.
Right.
Because when I'm reading the Psalms and I'm sort of wondering, because I think this probably as you do, I think that the Psalms are a really important part of living a godly life.
And they're a very good guide.
And if you recite them every day, as I do, I think it's like becoming a monk in a way.
Well, as a matter of fact, in the history of monasticism, the Psalter was such a central feature of monastic spirituality that monks originally recited the entire Psalter every day.
And there are ancient canons that actually say a bishop, one of the requirements to be a bishop was to have the psalter memorized.
Now, I don't think that that's strictly enforced these days, but that used to be the norm.
If you were a pious monk, you did this every day.
So after many years of being a monk, you would know the Psalter by heart.
And I mean, Jesus would have been able to recite the Psalter, wouldn't he?
Wouldn't he?
Well, what's interesting, you know, if you look at the Gospels, and obviously we don't have everything Christ said in the Gospels, but just looking at what we do have that he said, when you look at what he quoted from the Old Testament, basically, he primarily quotes from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms.
And I think the Psalms are pretty high up there, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't think it was quoted as often as maybe one of those other books, but it was like maybe if it wasn't the most quoted, it was like maybe the second most quoted text of the Old Testament.
Yeah.
So what does that tell us about the Psalm?
I mean, they're very special, aren't they?
Well, they are.
You know, if you read St. Athanasius the Great, and actually, if you get the Psalter for Prayer that I mentioned that's based on Coverdale, they have in the introductory material a letter from St. Athanasius the Great to, I think it's like a Marcellinus or something like that, but he's just talking about the Psalms.
And one of the things that he says is that the Psalms have elements of all the rest of Scripture.
The Psalms have the law, they have history, they have wisdom, they have prophecy, and they have the gospel.
So everything you find anywhere else in Scripture, you find in the Psalms.
So the Psalms really are a great place to spend a great deal of your time studying the Bible, which is why monks memorized it.
And it's beautiful.
It's also every human emotion, every human difficulty in terms of the kinds of struggles we have as human beings is addressed in the Psalms.
And so you can always find something in the Psalms that will address any situation that you're in, any difficulty that you're going through, and you can find consolation there.
Yeah, yeah.
You're right.
When I was sort of looking for a Psalm that, hey, I need a Psalm that I can use to thank God for being good and giving me stuff.
And there, I found Psalm 116.
Probably, what number would you call it?
115?
I think it would be 115, yeah.
Yeah, there is, and there are psalms for kind of, well, the imprecatory psalms where you're sort of wishing ill on your enemies and consolatory psalms.
It's wonderful.
But what I was trying to figure out is: okay, so the law is not just the rules, it's more a kind of general sense of the right way to live.
But does that mean that I should be worrying about my pork consumption and stuff like that when I read the Psalms?
Well, the thing is, when it comes to the ceremonial law of the Old Testament, there's the moral law of God, there's ceremonial law, and then there's what you maybe could call civic law.
And so, for example, in Israel, they had certain procedures that they followed because every country has to have a way of dealing with what do you do if somebody steals something?
Or how do you conduct a trial?
All these things have principles and some spiritual significance to them that still have meaning for us.
But the moral law of God was there before the law of Moses was put into place.
And it was always understood that everybody was judged based on the moral law, whereas the ceremonial law was for the people of Israel.
And so, when in I'm doing a Bible study through the book of Leviticus right now in my parish, and we haven't gotten to this part yet, but when we, there's a place in Leviticus that's known as the Holiness Code, where it talks about sexual immorality, you know, what's not okay.
And it's prefaced by saying, these are the kinds of things that the Egyptians did, and these are the kinds of things that the Canaanites, who I'm driving out before you, did, don't do these things.
And so, God judged the Egyptians, and God judged the Canaanites because they did these things, but God did not judge the Canaanites because they were eating shrimp.
So, so, so, people who try to conflate these things really miss the point.
And it's very clear in the New Testament that Christians are not held to or expected to live according to the ceremonial law because these things pointed to spiritual realities that become clear in the New Testament.
St. Augustine, another great quote from him is: the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed, and the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.
And so, in the New Testament, the spiritual meaning of these things becomes very clear.
But we don't abide by the letter when it comes to the ceremonial law.
But again, the moral law is still absolutely mandatory, and it always has been, and it always will be.
Well, I've got to ask you now: what are the things that the Canaanites and the Egyptians did that we're not allowed to do?
Well, in the case of the Canaanites, probably the worst thing that they did was they engaged in temple prostitution and child sacrifice.
And, you know, when the Romans were fighting the Carthaginians, who were actually from Phoenicia, which the Phoenicians and the Canaanites were essentially the same ethnic group and had the same religion,
when they were saying Carthage must be destroyed, they felt that that was justified because they were dealing with people who sacrificed children to the Romans didn't do that.
Is that right?
The Romans never engaged in human sacrifice, but the Canaanites did, and the Carthaginians did as well.
And so they had a lot of very evil practices, but I would say that if you're looking at the top of the list, those would be two of them.
Well, I mean, and these are still practiced by our so-called elites, the rulers of the darkness of this world and their servants.
Well, I mean, when you have people who celebrate abortions and also who live dissolute lives and basically promote sexual immorality, they're certainly not very far off from the Canaanites in that respect.
And in the Old Testament, the shedding of innocent blood was seen as something that was especially a heavy weight on any nation.
And we're told that even though King Josiah, who came after King Manasseh, was a very good king.
If you read the end of 2 Kings or 4th Kingdoms, if you're reading the Septuagint translation, it talks about how God destroyed the kingdom of Judah because of the sins of Manasseh, even though he was followed by a king that tried to undo what he had done.
But King Manasseh engaged in child sacrifice and promoted things like temple prostitution.
And basically, because of all the innocent blood that he had shed, it says God would not part.
And so basically, in a certain sense, you could say that there was grace given to them because, unlike the northern kingdom of Israel, they were not utterly destroyed, but their kingdom was taken away from them and they were in exile for 70 years before they were allowed to come back into the land.
But that's how serious the shedding of innocent blood is.
So when you have a nation where abortion is legal and people think that it's all great, and every day you're killing thousands of innocent babies, that's something that a nation's going to have to answer for at some point.
God judges people at the final judgment, but he judges nations in history.
And there's a come-uppins that comes when you engage in that kind of behavior.
Temple prostitution is that worse than what's the difference between that and normal prostitution?
Is it just prostitution in the temple?
Well, because it's worse than normal prostitution because you're making this part of your worship of God or the gods.
Well, see, that's what it is.
I wasn't sure.
So having sex, the sexual act as part of the kind of ritual.
Right, right.
And so it's a sacrilege and blasphemy on top of sexual immorality.
So it's not just mere sexual immorality.
It's a whole bunch of other things too.
Right.
Okay.
So there's obviously, well, none of us listening to this podcast are going to be doing that kind of thing.
I hope.
I think.
I pray.
But we live in a country where lots of people do, unfortunately.
Okay.
But in terms of so, because obviously I want to be undefiled in the way.
When I go to bed at night, I want to think, you know, I'm undefiled in the way.
So what are there any other bad sex things that you I mean what it for example?
What if you what if you were a um a widow say and you went I mean it must be quite hard if you lost your partner and you know you don't get any sex anymore.
What what what would you can you use prostitutes?
Can you can you how does it work?
Well the thing is someone who is a widow or widower was perfectly free to get married to somebody else and uh so it was never a situation where people had no avenue to express their natural desire to have intimate relations.
But what about the thing where Christ gets, where Jesus gets, asked that question about the brothers?
And the wife marries seven brothers or whatever, and what you know, they all die and which one is his is his, is his wife.
So what he's talking about there is that, you know, the Sadducees denied the resurrection and so they came up with this hypothetical story, A woman who has seven husbands of seven brothers in succession,
And the reason for that is, is that in the Old Testament law, if a man died and his wife had no children, then one of his kinsmen had an obligation to take his wife to have children on behalf of him so that his name would not cease.
And so, in this hypothetical that they created, you've got seven brothers in total that wind up marrying the same woman.
None of them have children with her.
And then at last she dies.
So the question they ask is, well, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?
And Christ's answer was simply, well, you don't know, you err because you don't know the scriptures because God's not the God of the dead, but of the living.
But he also says that in the resurrection, we'll be like the angels.
So life as we know it in this world is not going to continue.
So basically, and sometimes when you tell this, you might have a spouse that you love so much that when you hear that, you might think, well, dad gummed, I don't want to have a life where I'm not living a married life with my spouse.
But the thing is, you will not have a less intimate relationship with your spouse in the kingdom of heaven.
It just will not be a fleshly relationship like it is in this life.
But you're not going to be up in heaven saying, well, dad, I'm missing out.
You're not going to be thinking that.
It's going to be a very different.
We will be like the angels, and it's going to be more beautiful than we can possibly imagine.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this bit.
Though, obviously, it's not guaranteed, is it?
Right.
Well, I mean, it can, it's something that's available to everybody, but there's nobody who this side of the grave can say, there's no way I could lose my salvation.
Well, this is the thing.
So I get, I was discussing in a previous podcast.
I said, look, I try and do the right thing and I try and follow the Lord's teachings and stuff.
But I'm not sure that I'm definitely saved.
And lots of people said, you don't understand.
The deal is, if you believe in Christ, you're saved.
That's the deal.
But I'm not totally convinced it's quite that simple, is it?
Well, for a lot of evangelical Protestants, they have a belief that's kind of in most cases, it's sort of a hodgepodge of Calvinist views mixed with Armenian views, which James Arminius taught that basically we have free will, and so it's possible to lose your salvation.
Anybody could be saved, and if you go to hell, it's because you choose to go to hell rather than to accept the gospel.
John Calvin believed in double predestination, so he believed that from all eternity, God has already decided who will be saved and who will be damned.
And so if you're among the elect, there's no way you could be unelect.
So he believed in what's called the perseverance of the saints, which is the idea that if you are the elect, you will ultimately be saved.
And it will be through no merit of your own.
It will only be the grace of God.
But the problem, what evangelicals typically do is they take part of what Calvin says, because Calvin actually, and true Calvinists, they would say that, hey, if you're living a sinful life, that's pretty good evidence that you're not among the elect.
Okay, right.
Whereas, you know, an Armenian would say, or, you know, a Wesleyan would say, you know, if you're not living a Christian life, well, clearly you've chosen to live that kind of a life and you're not a Christian.
But these kinds of evangelicals, typically Baptists, they want to say anybody could be saved as long as you ask Christ in your heart, you're saved.
But then once you're saved, you couldn't lose your salvation if you wanted to.
You could steal a horse and ride it into heaven.
And that's just totally you find no one who had any views remotely similar to that for most of Christian history.
I suppose what it comes down to is: look, if being saved is as simple as believing in Christ and He died for your sins and stuff, what's even the point of reading the Psalms and studying them and trying to live a better life?
Why even bother?
Monks are wasting their time, aren't they?
It's just like well, you know, what most Protestants would say is that, you know, if you truly are saved, you're going to want to do those things.
But if they believe in this eternal security thing, they're going to say, but none of that really adds to your salvation.
It's just, you know, God's grace working its way into your life.
But the traditional Christian view is that being a Christian is a life and you have to actually live it.
You know, Christ in the gospel says, he makes it very clear that we have to believe, we have to repent, we're supposed to be baptized.
And so all these are things that we're supposed to do.
And if we really have faith, we really have repented, we really are baptized, which means we're now members of the church.
That means we start living the Christian life because faith works by love, St. Paul tells us.
And St. James tells us faith without works is dead.
And so if you have a real faith, it's a living faith that's going to work its way out.
And you're going to want to get closer to Christ.
And you're going to want to, you know, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments, Christ says in the Gospels.
So if you love God, you do want to do these things.
But I think it's an unfortunate thing that evangelicals give people this impression of eternal security because you can imagine if you're an 18-year-old kid who's maybe a minimum of a few years away from being married, but in most cases, probably 10 years away from being married if they follow traditional paths of getting an education and waiting until all that's done before you're getting married, which I don't think is a good idea personally.
But you can imagine someone like that might kid themselves into thinking, okay, well, I did accept Christ in my heart.
Man, it's really hard to be a celibate person.
So you know what?
I'm going to just, I can't help myself, but I'm still a Christian.
And a true Christian would say, no, I can't do that and call myself a Christian.
That's not an acceptable way forward.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You mentioned about Christ saying, follow his commandments.
And here we are, God.
Thou hast charged that we shall diligently keep thy commandments.
What commandments?
I mean, we've sort of brushed on this before, but obviously the Ten Commandments.
And well, you're saying that the first five books, the Pentagon.
The Ten Commandments are a very good encapsulation of the moral law.
And if you read what the fathers say about them, they really do cover the bases of the Christian life.
The first four commandments talk about our need to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and strength, which is the first of the two great commandments according to Christ.
And then the next six commandments are all about how we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves.
So, those are the two great commandments.
The two tables of the law are the two great commandments.
But, you know, these are summaries, but to really flesh out what those commandments mean, you do have to read the rest of the scriptures to put them in their proper context.
So, it's not just the Ten Commandments, but that's a good place to start when you're talking about understanding what it is that being a Christian means.
Is there any stuff that Jesus added to make it more hard, make it harder to live up to be undefiled in the way?
I wouldn't say that he did anything to make it harder, but he, you know, for example, we have one of the Ten Commandments is thou shalt not commit adultery.
And Christ in the Gospel said, I'm telling you that if you look on a woman to lust, you've already committed adultery in your heart.
Now, in a certain sense, you could say that that was already present in the Ten Commandments because thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife is kind of talking about that same phenomenon there.
But basically, he was showing the deeper levels of meaning of these commandments, but it's not that he was making them more difficult, he was just making it clearer what it was that we were supposed to be doing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so let's wrap up the first octave.
I will thank thee with an unfeigned heart when I shall have learned the judgments of thy righteousness.
I will keep thy ceremonies, but forsake me not utterly.
So there's a kind of a desperate plea at the end.
Whoever's speaking this psalm really well, David, really wants to do the right thing, doesn't he?
Right.
And that's the commitment that I talked about in terms of the outline of this first octave.
It's a commitment to keep the commandments, but also recognition of our weakness.
And when it talks about do not utterly forsake me, there is the sense, I mean, obviously, that means completely be forsaken, but there is an awareness that there are times when we may feel some level of separation from God.
And this is something that happens in the Christian life from time to time.
St. John Cassian has a very hefty tome that's called the conferences, and there are records of his conversations with different Egyptian monastics about the spiritual life.
And he spoke with Abba Daniel about this question.
And Abba Daniel said basically that dry spells have one of three causes: that they could be from our own negligence.
And so it could be that we need to think about what are we not doing that we should be doing, or what are we doing that we should stop doing so that we can get back on track?
It could also just be an attack of the devil, but it could also be by God's design.
And he goes on to talk about the examples of Job and the prophet Elijah.
Because in the case of Job, we're told that he was a righteous man, so righteous that God brags about him to the devil.
But then the devil says, you know, if you take away all the blessings that you're giving him, he'll curse you to your face.
And so ultimately, the devil was allowed to take everything away from him, including his health, but not his life.
And when you read about it, I mean, Job goes through this gut-wrenching experience of losing his children, losing all of his wealth, and suffering horribly physically.
And then he's got these three friends of his that sit around telling him why it's all his fault.
And so he goes through this incredibly difficult time, but God allowed it to happen.
Why?
Well, you know, Job, as well as he knew God at the beginning of the book, he knew God a lot better at the end of the book.
And so God perfected him and brought him to a higher level spiritually as a result of all this.
And St. John Christoph has a treatise where he talks about how no one can harm us except ourselves.
And what he says in that is that, you know, people can physically harm us.
So, you know, if you're a martyr and they fillet you and roast you alive or torture you to death, obviously they've harmed you physically, but no one can ultimately harm you unless you let them do it.
Because if you respond to whatever anyone does to you in a negative way, in a Christian way, it ultimately redounds to your salvation.
And so a martyr comes out a great saint and gets to spend eternity with God.
So he doesn't lose anything.
But if you decide to respond in an un-Christian way, then now you've harmed yourself.
So, and he lived this in his life.
He was originally a priest in Antioch.
He became known as a great preacher, and they decided to basically Sanghai him and take him to Constantinople and make him a bishop because the emperor wanted to have this great preacher in his capital city.
But he was a preacher that told people like it was.
And at times he directly criticized the emperor and especially the empress, who was a very worldly woman.
And so he was exiled once.
And then there was a great earthquake.
And so the empress kind of had second thoughts and had him come back, but hope maybe he had learned his lesson.
And then he criticized her again.
I think the straw that broke the camel's back with her was she had set up a statue of herself right outside of the main cathedral in Constantinople.
And there was a service going on, and there were people celebrating the installation of the statue.
And St. John preached a sermon against it.
And he said, again, Herodias dances.
Again, she seeks the head of John.
And so they exiled him.
And this time, they made sure that he died.
They took him all the way up into the mountains of Armenia.
They made sure the soldiers treated him badly, kept him moving in all kinds of weather.
Ultimately, he died of exhaustion, but his last words were, Glory to God for all things.
And then the son of that emperor, because so many bad things happened to the empire after this happened as part of God's judgment, and the people demanded that St. John's relics be brought back to Constantinople.
When they were brought back, they were enthroned in the bishop's cathedra.
And the son of the emperor asked for St. John's forgiveness.
And St. John Christoph obviously is a pretty big saint in the Orthodox Church as a result of all that.
Yeah, yeah.
So who was it?
Who was the name of the guy who, the boy emperor?
I can't remember the name of that emperor, but it was a good one, presumably.
Yeah, yeah.
He was aware of the sins of his parents and wanted to make amends.
What was the mother called?
You know, I didn't think to write that down, but if you look up St. John Christopher on Wikipedia, you'll find her name.
She was actually from, she was a frank, if I remember correctly, and was married into the Roman or Byzantine imperial line.
And she had some, you know, she had some shortcomings, let's say.
All right.
So now we're encountering this young man, the 18-year-old who's tempted to play the field.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way, even by ruling himself after thy word.
Right.
And what fathers say about that is that there's a belief, I think there's actually a very ancient tradition that this psalm was used to teach Israelite children the Hebrew alphabet.
So it would memorize a psalm to memorize the alphabet.
And probably also aspects of Hebrew poetry and things like that.
So it probably served more than one didactic purpose.
But the importance of instructing children to live a Christian life from their very beginning, if they understand what it means to be a Christian from the beginning, it won't be hard, even if they get away from that, to find their way back.
But someone who's lived an immoral life, as they get older, these things become habits and they become very difficult to overcome.
And so that's basically what that verse is talking about, is how important it is to get it right from the beginning.
That's very interesting you should say that because we were talking about earlier on about the quality that Psalm 119 has.
It's quite variations on a theme, isn't it?
The same words crop up again and again and again.
And it struck me when I was first sort of inhabiting it.
It's a form of brainwashing.
I mean, it's like, I mean, in a good way, a good form of brainwashing, but it uses the same techniques that sort of NLP and stuff and all these kind of modern behavioral manipulation techniques use.
Because if you're repeating these things, you're inhabiting these precepts and they become almost like breathing in a way.
Like saying the Jesus Prayer all the time.
Right.
Well, psalms were sung.
And when you sing something, it gets down deep into your heart in a way that just reading doesn't do.
And that could be for good or for bad.
I could still quote to you Dead Kennedy songs that I haven't listened to since about 1985.
But I remember them because it's easy to remember things that you sing a lot.
And so to have a child learn to sing the Psalms, to learn to sing the hymns of the church, these are things that are really crucial.
And we need to guard ourselves against listening to stuff and singing along with stuff that is going to take us away from the path that we need to be on.
I mean, there are certain kinds of songs that I think are just, they're wholesome, but you wouldn't necessarily say that you're going to learn any great truths from them.
You know, like a lot of traditional folk songs, they're not bad, but you're not going to come away with any great truths that you're going to live your life by.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with stuff like that.
But when it comes to the hymns of the church, the psalms, you know, this is stuff that, you know, if you actually do become a martyr and they're getting ready to shoot you in a firing squad or burn you alive or something like that, you could sing these songs to give you strength when you're in that kind of a moment.
Whereas a Beatles song is probably not going to cut it at that point if you're trying to stand firm in your faith.
I think that the Beatles is more for the devil's devil's party.
Yeah.
Certainly, a lot of martyrs do recite the Psalms before their deaths, don't they?
I mean, apparently, Psalm 33 or Psalm 22, as you've called it, is known as the martyr's psalm, apparently.
Probably because it's nice and short.
You haven't got much time.
But martyrdom, I mean, I don't particularly want to go through the pain of martyrdom, but you're saying it's really worth it because you get all eternity as a saint.
As Christians, we're supposed to be prepared for martyrdom, but most Christians obviously don't experience it in the literal sense.
But the thing is, you know, I live along the Gulf Coast.
And, you know, when a hurricane is getting ready to hit, you know, when you first hear the news, there's a hurricane in the Gulf that's going to come up Galveston Bay.
And, you know, we're going to be experiencing category three to four hurricane winds.
It's too late to start preparing for a hurricane when that happens because hurricane preparation means that you keep your trees trimmed, you have certain emergency supplies on hand, things like that.
And when a hurricane is actually barreling into the Gulf, you go to the grocery store.
I used to work at a grocery store when I was in high school.
The shelves get picked clean.
Even stuff that would never sell.
I mean, stuff that no one ever would buy these things.
But when a hurricane was coming through, it's like people panic and they're thinking, you know, that canned salmon might be the last bit of food that I have or something.
So they'll snatch up everything.
And so if you're just going to the grocery store to buy your emergency supplies when the news is out that a hurricane is getting ready to hit, you're probably not going to find very much.
And it's certainly too late to trim your trees or anything like that or to get a generator so you'll have electricity when the power goes out.
It's kind of like that when it comes to persecution of the church.
When the persecution comes, you're going to regret that you didn't spend your time studying the scriptures if you have it.
You're going to regret that you haven't acquired religious books that you might not have access to any other way.
You're going to regret that you don't know the service of the church so that you can have a prayer life in your home.
But it's going to be too late for you to learn those things at that point because the hurricane's there and the storm is here.
So you're basically stuck with what you got.
But the emergency announcements are shelter in place.
That means you're stuck with what you got.
It's too late now.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I see that.
So this second octave would be Beth.
Is that right, Aleph?
And everything would have begun with a Beth.
Right.
And Beth in Hebrew means house.
And so in the case of this octave, it's talking about building the house of your spiritual life.
And the first verse says, wherewithal shall a young man correct his way by keeping thy words.
The next verse, I think we already talked about that one, but the verse 10 says, With my whole heart have I sought after thee, cast me not away from thy commandments.
And this gets to what we talked about earlier.
Can we be cast away?
Yes, St. Paul thought so.
Said, lest I myself become a castaway in the early church, there was a debate not about whether you could lose your salvation, but that if you lost it, could you regain it?
And the church came to the conclusion that, yeah, you could.
But there were people who believed that if you fell, if you had a serious fall, you were just stuck like Chuck.
There was nothing you could do about it.
And seeking God with our whole, whole heart, if we do that, we're not going to have any fear.
So we don't have any fear of our salvation.
We don't have any fear about being a castaway if we are doing that.
But we also have to have the awareness that, yeah, we could fall away.
So not to become arrogant about that, not to think there's no way I could ever fall, but to be on guard against those things.
But as long as you're on guard and you're doing what you know you need to be doing and seeking God with all your heart, you really don't have anything to fear.
How much leeway do you get?
Well, the thing of it is, is it's part of the, particularly the Western mind influenced by the Latin West, because Romans were very legally minded.
And you find this even in the saints of the church before the system, like Saint Augustine was a lawyer.
Tertullian, who became a heretic, but nevertheless had some influence on the Christian tradition.
He was also a lawyer.
And so this tendency to think about things in legal terms, maybe to an excess, was already there.
But there's this tendency among Western Christians to want to say, okay, tell me exactly what the minimum I need to do to be saved.
And the thing is, that would be like saying, what's the minimum I need to do to keep my wife happy?
Well, if you had that kind of an attitude about your wife, you probably would be keeping her happy because you'd be thinking, why are you trying to find the minimum that you could do to keep me happy?
You know, do you not love me?
If you love me, you'd want to find out what's the most I can do to make my wife happy.
Yeah.
I see that.
But at the same time, I've been reading Everyday Saints recently.
And so I've been immersed in the life of monks.
And I think, well, the kind of lives they're leading, they're about as godly as anyone could hope to live.
And yet, even they're worrying whether they're not.
Do you remember the story the guy who's a really good carpenter?
And then he has this vision and he realizes this nightmare dream.
And he realizes that God is saying to him, Look, your carpentry is not enough.
You've got to be dedicating yourself totally.
So he becomes what are the special monks?
Are they called schema monks or higher monks?
where you have to retreat to your cell and do nothing but hardcore prayer.
And I'm thinking, well, if those are the standards, how are we ever going to...
Well, the thing of it is that even a saint is always going to have an awareness of their shortcomings, even though the kind of shortcomings that they have are the kinds of things that we wouldn't even think about.
But when you're striving to live a Christian life, at the very beginning stages, you might not even be aware that a lot of the things that you're doing are sins on some level, but the fact that you're not aware of it makes it a sin of ignorance.
So it's not as serious.
And if God showed us right off the bat all the sins we had, we would be overwhelmed and we wouldn't know where to begin.
So God gradually purifies us.
But the key thing of it is that if you're trying to live a Christian life and you become, let's say you have some kind of a fall or you sin in some way, you become aware that you did something that you shouldn't have done.
It's objectively a sin.
You ask God's forgiveness.
You go to confession the next time that you have the opportunity to do it.
You trust in God's mercy.
And Saint John in his first epistle tells us if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness.
So you know that you're not going to earn your salvation.
You're never going to be good enough to where you could stand on the day of judgment and say, okay, God, I'm here.
Give me my keys of the kingdom of heaven.
But we also know that God is merciful and that he loves us.
So God's not trying to find an excuse to send us to hell.
He's like a father or a mother who has a kid that's trying to walk.
The parents don't try to trip their kids up so they can laugh at them when they're trying to walk.
They encourage them.
Come on, take another step.
And if they fall, they encourage them to get back up and take another step.
And so that's how God deals with us.
So it's only when we refuse to repent of sins that we start getting into problems.
Because if you refuse to repent of sins, that's a sin that God can't forgive.
It's a sin that you refuse to repent of.
So that's the unpardonable sin right there is when you refuse to repent of a sin.
And so when you become aware of a sin, you have to repent.
And that's one of the reasons why the Jesus Prayer is so important because we're constantly reminding ourselves of the fact that we are sinners and that we need God's grace and we're trusting his mercy.
Yeah.
And so we strive to cut those sins out of our lives.
So we don't just say, hey, we're sinners.
So hey, what else are we going to do?
We're going to just keep sinning.
That's not a Christian response.
But having an awareness that even if you got to the monastery, that you'd still be working on these fine points of sin because God would continue to be purifying you to draw you closer to him.
And, you know, when it comes to the saints, you know, the fathers say that the saints are kind of like the stars in heaven.
There are some stars that are very bright, and then there are some stars that are very small.
And then there are trillions of stars that we can't see at all, but they're there.
We just can't see them with the naked eye.
Well, everybody in heaven is a saint.
And so if you don't go to hell and you do go to heaven, you will be a saint.
But most of us are not going to have our name on the church calendar.
We're not going to have icons painted of us.
But we can be a saint.
We can be saved.
And we certainly should try to become the greatest saint that we can be.
But it's not like, you know, if we don't make at least a 95 on the test, if we don't get to 95% of the level of a great saint, that we just go to hell, do not pass, go, do not collect $200.
That's not how it works because God judges based on what we know and what we do with what we know.
And God is merciful, and we have to trust in that and recognize our own unworthiness, but have faith in His grace and mercy.
Right.
Yes.
One of my favorite lines from this particular octave is: I have had as great delight in the way of thy testimonies as in all manner of riches.
Because that's, I mean, isn't it?
It's about rejecting the world.
Right.
You know, on that verse, in the translation I have, it says, in the way of thy testimonies have I found delight.
And so the fathers point out that it's It could have been worded, I delight in thy testimonies, but it says, in the way of thy testimonies I found delight, because it's not in just the hearing, but it's in the doing.
And also to delight in the word of God as being greater than riches.
I mean, one of the things that you find that the more you dig into the scriptures, the more you realize how much wealth and depth there is, and you're never going to get to the bottom of it.
You're going to spend your life scratching the surface for the most part.
And so it becomes this great treasure and it becomes a delight.
I mean, when you start reading the Bible, most people have a difficult time because there's a lot in there if you're not familiar with it.
If you haven't been raised in the church and taught all these stories, there's a lot in there that you've never heard before.
It seems very foreign.
The Bible's not written like Harry Potter novels that start in a logical sequence and keep you entertained at every point.
But the more you get into it, the more you start to make the connections and you start to see how rich it is.
And then if you've gone through the Bible a couple times and you do it with faith, you don't have to make yourself read the Bible anymore because it becomes such a delight for you.
Yeah, I found that.
I read it every night before I go to bed.
And I never think of it as a chore.
Right.
And the thing is, most people don't get to that point.
And it's because, you know, if you pick up the Bible and you start in Genesis 1, you're going to make it through Genesis probably okay.
And you're probably going to make it about halfway through Exodus.
But when you get to the description of the construction of the tabernacle, you're likely to start losing your interest.
And certainly, if that doesn't do it, by the time you get into the leprosy chapter in Leviticus, your eyes are going to glaze over and you're going to say, oh, this is a waste of my time.
So there was a Metropolitan Anthony Kropovitsky who was a great Russian theologian.
He has a book on confession.
And so it's written to priests.
But he's given advice on spiritual reading to priests.
And what he said was, you know, think of the Bible as being in three sections.
You've got the first half of the Old Testament, which would be the law and the history.
And then the second half is the wisdom and the prophets.
And then you've got the New Testament as the third part.
Now, I would personally say you could also divide the New Testament into two parts, gospels and everything else.
But basically, he was advising you read one chapter from each section every day.
And the advantage of that is that you might be reading the leprosy chapter in Leviticus the first time, and it might be very difficult for you to make much out of it.
But if you're also reading from the wisdom books or the prophets and you're also reading from the New Testament, you're not going to come away from that thinking, I wasted my time.
And what he says is if you've done this two or three times through the Bible, you won't have to make yourself do it anymore because you're going to want to do it.
And what happens is you might be reading the leprosy chapter in Leviticus and then be reading about Christ healing the 10 lepers in the Gospel of Luke.
And you're going to start seeing, hey, there's a connection here.
There's a reason why these two chapters are both in the Bible.
And you start connecting dots that you don't do the first time or even the first couple of times that you go through the Bible.
That's a good idea, the tripartite reading thing.
Yeah, because you do need some relief, I think.
Sometimes I do find the epistles a bit of a chore in places.
Do you read the King James usually?
First time I read the King James, and then I used the NIV just so I could see all the stuff I missed from there.
The NIV is not a good translation, really.
But if you get the Orthodox study Bible, it's in the New Testament, it's the New King James Version.
It's a fairly easy to understand translation.
But if you wanted to read the New King James, if you had to pick just one translation, that would be it.
I mean, it's not a flawless text, but it's pretty good, and it's got all the books, and it's an understandable translation.
But if you want to make your way through the King James and have an easier time of it, there's the Trinitarian Bible Society in the UK publishes the Westminster Reference Bible, and it's got like the most references of any Bible that's published, which that's not why I like it, but it does have that element.
But what it also has, it has the original King James margin notes, which are often very instructive.
And then it also has any obscure words defined in the margin.
And the way it's laid out is that if you're reading a verse, if there's an asterisk next to a word or a phrase, you'll see the definition of that obscure word out in the margin.
And so if you're wondering, you know, what in the world is a besom, you can look out in the margin, you'll see a broom.
So it's very helpful.
It's a very, very good edition.
I heartily recommend.
Well, of course, I'm tempted to one of those ones where you also get the Greek.
Well, it's nice.
If you are able to make sense of the Greek on some level, that's a really beautiful thing.
And I think that the maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like there's a version of the Eastern Orthodox Bible that they're talking about coming out with.
They originally published just the New Testament.
It's not a flawless translation, but it's at least readable.
But I think that they were talking about doing one that had parallel English and Greek, and that would really be wonderful to have.
Well, because Peter, I can't remember who told me this.
Somebody had taken it upon himself to learn enough Greek to be able to read the New Testament in Greek and said it completely transformed his, that there was so much missing from the translations that he got from the reading in Greek.
Well, it's certainly true that if you have some ability to make sense of the Greek, that there's a lot there that really clarifies things.
I mean, there's ways, there are tools that you can use if you don't know any Greek.
But you could get an interlinear Greek New Testament.
Like there's one that I have that's a majority text, Greek text that's using the King James text off to the side, but then it has interlinear translations of all the Greek words in the main text where the Greek is.
And so, you know, I took Greek, you know, more than 35 years ago, so my Greek's a bit rusty, but I can at least make some sense of it if I look at it long enough.
But that's an easy text to look at and have get some benefit from the Greek, but also have the English right there to help you with your infirmities with the language.
So what's that Bible called?
What's that version called?
Well, there are different editions of it, but I think this one's like the majority text.
I have it up on my shelf, and I could get it down and show it to you if you want.
But I think it's like majority text interlinear Greek New Testament.
Or interlinear Greek New Testament according to the majority text.
It's published by Thomas Nelson.
I'll bet there's a shop in London.
I don't know whether there are any in Texas.
I bet there's some sort of ecclesiastical bookshop that one can go to, probably in Westminster somewhere, where you can just browse all these Bibles, which is more exciting to me than perhaps it ought to be, but I love the idea of doing that.
Should we do section three?
Or do you think we've done enough?
I mean, we could.
I mean, we could probably just wrap it up with a bet because we're we got one minute left in the hour and a half that you like to normally do.
Well, that's that's true.
And also, we've we've we've covered a lot of a lot of territory, right?
Right.
There's so much here.
I mean, we could have spent, uh, we could have spent all of our time just talking about the first octave, and we might not have been done.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
Have we missed anything from the second octave that we ought to have mentioned?
Well, I mean, there's a lot there that we could talk about.
Well, verse 12 is a very important verse: Blessed art thou, Lord, teach me thy statutes.
In our services, we have a hymn that's called the Evlogataria, and it's called that because in Greek, Evlogite means bless.
So because you're repeating this verse, there are hymns that are sung in between the verse, but the refrain is, Blessed art thou, Lord, teach me thy statutes.
And so this, you find this verse used a lot in our services because it sort of sums up this entire psalm, you could say, on one level, which is our need to understand God's statutes.
How do we learn God's statutes?
One is by recognizing who God is and praising Him, which is what it means to say, Blessed art thou, but teach me thy statutes.
I need you to teach me.
So it's a very important verse.
With my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth.
You know, Christ in the Gospels talked about how out of the mouth the abundance of the heart springs.
And so if we study the scriptures, if we're trying to live a Christian life, what's coming out of our heart should be good things.
We're going to be declaring all the judgments of God's mouth if that's what's in our heart.
And we certainly don't want to have the abundance of our heart being evil things.
So that's what we have to really be careful about.
Let's see.
On thy statutes will I meditate.
I will not forget thy words.
Basically, the meditate is a word that, because of all the influence of the New Age movement stuff, when people hear meditate, they tend to think of Bhagwan, Sri Rosh, Nish or something like that.
But Christian meditation is not like Hindu meditation.
Hindu meditation, you try to empty your mind so you can become one with the great nothing.
But in Christian meditation, you're meditating on things.
And so when you meditate on God's words, you're really pondering the meaning of those texts.
And the thing is, is you discover when you really start digging into verses, you might have read a verse a thousand times, but when you really start to meditate on the meaning of the words, it's like, why is that phrase word of the way that it is?
You know, that's really beginning to ponder the meaning of the text on a deeper level.
And a lot of times you discover things that you just never noticed because you were just buzzing through the text and it didn't dawn on you what you were really reading.
So meditating on scripture is crucial.
It's why I recommend memorizing the Psalms.
You know, I've found, you know, I've not done as much scripture memorization as I should have, but, you know, I had to memorize Psalm 50 or Psalm 51 in the King James because a deacon or priest recite that psalm from memory in the services.
You can't practically have a text in your hand while you're sensing the church.
But there's other parts of scripture that I've memorized, usually shorter sections.
But I memorized the first chapter of the Gospel of John when I was in high school.
And I started seeing things in that text that I never would have noticed had I just read it.
And for example, Christ is the true light that lightens every man that comes into the world.
That's really a deep passage that most people don't think about.
What that's saying is everybody who comes into this world is given some measure of the light of Christ.
So even somebody, if they lived in a crater somewhere in some jungle, they have some measure of the light of Christ.
And so we believe that God judges people based on what they've been given, not what they haven't been given.
So someone in that situation would be judged far more leniently than someone who has all the riches that we have available to us in the church.
But there's nobody who has nothing.
I get that feeling with John.
I'm reading him at the moment.
I'm just coming to the end of my round of John.
And he's so dense.
It's not like reading the other three Gospels.
There's lots you don't understand, I find.
Very right.
But when you dig into almost any book of the Bible, and really, every book of the Bible is there for reasons that all have great truths, but obviously the amount that you're going to find in some books is not going to be as great as others, but there are so many that are super deep.
And somebody recently was saying, asked me which gospel is my favorite, and I really can't give an answer because you could say the Gospel of John because it's unique.
It's got so much in there.
But when you dig into something like the Gospel of Mark is repeated for the most part by the Gospel of Matthew, so you could almost say, well, hey, just cut that one out.
Why do we need to have all this stuff for people?
The thing is, there are unique elements in the Gospel of Mark that are not in Matthew that are so amazing when you dig into them.
I mean, for example, it's in the Gospel of Mark, where when Christ raises the, you know, Jairus's daughter, it gives you the Aramaic statement that Christ made and then the translation, Talithikumi.
And if you think about that, why is that there?
Why not just have the translation?
What was the point of giving us the Aramaic text?
Well, tradition tells us that the Gospel of Mark is based on the preaching of St. Peter.
And so when St. Peter would tell this story, he obviously repeated what Christ actually said.
And then he explained it to people so they could understand it if they were not native Aramaic speakers.
And it's as if he had to say the exact words because in his mind he was reliving what he had gone through.
And one very interesting thing, which I've never seen any father comment on this, so this I could be barking up the wrong tree entirely.
But, you know, St. Peter, when he raised up Tabitha in the book of Acts, we're told that he said, Tabitha, arise.
We don't have the Aramaic there, but if you conjecture what the Aramaic was, it would be Tabitha Kumi.
So Talitha Kumi and Tabitha Kumi are very close.
And so St. Peter had his own experience of raising someone from the dead, very much along the lines of what Christ did with that young woman.
And so it's these, you don't have that in the other gospels.
So if you didn't have the Gospel of Mark, you wouldn't have this.
And there are many things like that.
Can I ask you?
I loved all that.
Thank you.
Because I was thinking, do I know any Aramaic phrases?
And of course I do.
I know Talithakumi.
I know Eloi, Eloi, Lama, Sabaktani.
So, hey, I speak Aramaic.
Did you have you come across this doxology?
Why is the doxology there?
I think this is a bad thing.
At the end of the Lord's Prayer, only in the King James James Version and some of its sort of successors do you get for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.
And I've heard that this is an occult thing which was inserted by James I.
It wasn't inserted by James I.
It's in the majority of Greek New Testament texts.
One of the problems with the NIV, aside from the fact that it's a loose translation, is that it's based on a reconstructed Greek New Testament based on modern scholars thinking that they're approaching the scripture the same way Protestants approach church history.
So they're thinking, well, I can't just accept what the majority of Greek texts say because the church became corrupt.
So I need to hop skip over all church history and go back to the earliest and most reliable manuscripts.
And so they find a few Egyptian manuscripts that differ significantly from the majority of the texts.
And they say, well, these are the most reliable manuscripts.
Well, why are they found in Egypt?
Well, they're found in Egypt because it's a very dry climate.
And so material can last a long time in that kind of a setting.
But does that mean that these were the best texts?
And also, a manuscript that you don't use a lot is going to last longer than a manuscript that you do use a lot.
So I have a Jehovah's Witness Bible on my shelf that's almost in pristine condition because I've hardly ever used it.
And so, you know, a thousand years from now, if a volcano erupted, my house was covered in ash and someone dug up my study, they might find that Jehovah's Witness Bible still intact and say, well, here's the earliest and most reliable manuscript of the Bible.
Well, it would not be.
So anyway, the Didik is one of the earliest texts outside of the New Testament, and it contains the Lord's Prayer, and it does have the doxology as part of the prayer.
Okay.
And now the version of the Lord's Prayer in the Gospel of Luke does not have the doxology.
And so in the Orthodox Church, we actually sometimes say the Lord's Prayer without the doxology, and sometimes we do.
Usually, if a priest is present, the priest will say the doxology.
If a priest is not present, we'll say it without it.
But there's certainly nothing wrong with it.
And King James had little direct influence over the translation.
He gave guidelines to the translators, which were good guidelines.
He told them that they, for example, if a word could be translated in different ways, it should be translated in a way that's in accordance with the interpretation of the fathers or the majority of the fathers or the greatest fathers.
And one example of this is in the Gospels.
I think it's in the Gospel of John, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.
Christ says to the Pharisees, you search the scriptures as the way it's translated in almost every translation.
But the King James says, search the scripture.
So King James text translates it as an imperative, whereas the other one translates it as a statement.
Well, the thing is, the Greek word there could be translated either way.
But when you read the fathers, the fathers interpret it as a command.
And so the King James translators, following King James guidance, that's how they translate it.
And that's, as far as I'm concerned, the correct translation.
But another thing, you know, getting back to the NIV, look up John 5.4 next time you have your NIV in hand and you'll see that there is no John 5-4.
And it's reduced to a footnote.
And that story makes no sense without John 5.4.
And there are many verses that are missing in modern translations that are based on this reconstructed text and phrases that maybe we are harder to notice.
So I think that the King James is not a perfect translation.
The Greek text that they were using was not absolutely perfect in every respect, but it's way closer to the mainstream tradition of the Greek New Testament that you find in the church.
Right.
Well, that would be very helpful.
Because I often get asked by people which Bible should I get?
And I think they should listen to you.
The New King James is also based on the text of the same Greek text as the King James.
But if you look at that search the scriptures thing, they screw that one up.
So the King James often winds up being a better translation than the other option, even though it's not an easy translation.
I'm in favor personally.
I would like some group that could do a good job of it to go through the King James and update the language in areas where it's so obscure that people are going to almost always misunderstand it.
But for the most part, it's still understandable and it is so beautiful.
One thing that's interesting is if you look at the best-selling Bibles, the NIV is supposed to be the best-selling Bible.
The King James is like number two or three in any given year.
But if you ask people who actually read the Bible on a regular basis, what translation do you read?
The King James is like 54%.
And any other translation is far way down the list.
Because with the King James, it's so beautiful you want to read it.
Whereas the NIV reads like reading a motorcycle repair manual or something.
It's just not a beautiful translation at all.
Yes, I got very unchristianly cross with somebody who, you know, there are so many good phrases like, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Right, right.
You can't, once you understand, once you've grappled with the meaning and got it, it's just so perfect.
And somebody quoted this kind of modern-y, which made a nonsense of it.
You need that resonance, that sonorousness.
What's funny is even people who've never read the King James often will quote the King James because we have these things in our culture like, Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Even people who never read the King James will quote it that way because that's how we know it on a cultural level.
And to throw all that out the window is a real shame.
I do think updating the language where in those cases where it really is going to throw people is appropriate.
But why lose all the riches that you have with this text?
It's like arguably the most important English text in the history of the English language.
Why would you just toss it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
We could have talked for two more hours very comfortably if I didn't know the strict rule.
So tell us where we can, do you have a website?
Do we have a website?
How do we find you?
Well, I have a parish website, which is Saint spelled out, S-A-I-N-T, Jonah, J-O-N-A-H dot org.
So that's the parish website.
And there's an article section that has links to many of my articles as well as a link to my blog.
My blog is on its father spelled out, john.blogspot.com.
I also have set up a sub-stack that I've started posting to in conjunction with my blog.
It's not got anything that's not already on my blog.
And then I have my sermons are posted on Ancient Faith Radio and also on my parish website as well.
Well, you've been a great find.
You really know so much stuff, and it's been really enjoyable talking to you.
How many have you got in your parish?
Would you call them parishes or what?
Well, yeah, you know, according to the fire marshal, we're not supposed to have more than 155 people in our church, but let's just say that sometimes it might rise above that.
We're packed and we're actually trying to get permits right now to bump out the walls of our church so that we can double capacity.
We bought two additional acres, so we're going to expand our parking lot and ultimately we want to build a brand new church.
So our church doubled in size after 2020.
And it was growing before that.
But after 2020, it's like every week, and I am not exaggerating, I have somewhere between three and five either new single individuals or families that are visiting the parish.
And the thing is, we just don't have the room for all of them.
So they don't all stay.
But somehow we continue to grow, even though I would have told you probably a year ago that we can't squeeze any more in, but we're somehow still squeezing more people in.
It's been really enjoyable talking to you.
And everyone else, I hope you've enjoyed this podcast.