Paul Addresses King Agrippa

Tom:

This is our Understanding the Scriptures segment, we are in the Book of Acts.  Actually, Dave, we left off with Acts:25:27For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner, and not withal to signify the crimes laid against him.
See All..., but that’s the last verse in the chapter, so let me back up a bit just for an introduction.  I want to back up to verse 23:  “And on the morrow, when Agrippa was come, and Bernice, with great pomp, and was entered into the place of hearing, with the chief captains, and principal men of the city, at Festus’ commandment Paul was brought forth.  And Festus said, King Agrippa, and all men which are here present with us, ye see this man, about whom all the multitude of the Jews have dealt with me, both at Jerusalem, and also here, crying that he ought not to live any longer.  But when I found that he had committed nothing worthy of death, and that he himself hath appealed to Augustus, I have determined to send him.  Of whom I have no certain thing to write unto my lord. Wherefore I have brought him forth before you, and specially before thee, O King Agrippa, that, after examination had, I might have somewhat to write.”  And Verse 27:  “For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner, and not withal to signify the crimes laid against him.”

Dave:

How interesting, Tom, because there have been a lot of accusations, and he’s heard some of them, but they don’t make sense.  Something about your law, you Jews, or something about some man named Jesus that you say is still dead, but this man says is alive, it is getting kind of confusing.  Now, how are we going to tie this thing down?  What am I going to say to Caesar?  I can’t give him a whole book!

Tom:

Yeah, because there is a disruption going on and a lot of people are upset.  He has to explain himself.

Dave:

Right.  So, he’s a reasonable man—it seems unreasonable to send a prisoner and not say what he did that was wrong, and he hasn’t been able to find out yet.  But anyway—so, now Agrippa is going to hear the case.

Tom:

Now Dave, the thing that has just hit me, just as you were going over some of these things, this is history, this is God’s Word, [and] this is truth.  Jesus said—was it John:17:17Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
See All..., “Sanctify them by thy truth, thy Word is truth.”  So, that’s what we have here.

Dave:

Tom, it’s not like the Bhagavad Gita, I don’t know how well you know the Bhagavad Gita, I used to.

Tom:

I know how to pronounce it.

Dave:

There are quite a few versions of it, from different parts of India; it’s not a matter of translation or anything.  This is not like the Book of Mormon, or it’s not like the Qur’an, this is history.  When you read Genesis, about Jacob, Abraham, you read about the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Jebusites, and so forth.  I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I still remember back in the 30’s when the archeologists, at least the ones that filtered down into our fellowship, well, there’s no such people as Hittites—we’ve never found any evidence for that.  Of course, as you know every time the critics say the Bible is wrong, the critics are wrong and the Bible is right.  And our family, in 1967, I think it was—we visited the huge HittiteMuseum in Ankara, Turkey!  No, the Hittites did exist.  So, I’m glad you pointed that out.  This is real history, you can verify it.  And so is the whole Bible, this is not just metaphor; it’s not something someone made up.

Tom:

And Dave, that’s why, you know sometimes as we’re reading through the Bible, we read the genealogies, why is all of that in there?  You go through genealogies, at least you could say this is hardly platitudes, this is not just metaphors.  These are real people who lived at a certain time, and this is being documented in the Word of God.

Dave:

Tom, when you get names and dates, well there are dates—

Tom:

How do you spiritualize that, Dave? You can’t do it.

Dave:

You see, you couldn’t make this up, you couldn’t write this like, can I digress for a minute?

Tom:

Sure.

Dave:

Let’s turn to Luke 2, because I love some of these things in the Bible, I mean I love the Bible, but here’s an example of what you are talking about, Tom.  Let’s go to Luke 3, first, and Luke of course is writing the Book of Acts.  He says:  Luke:3:1Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene,
See All..., “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness,” and so forth.  I mean to say why is all of that there?  Sounds like the begats and begottens in the Old Testament.

Tom:

Well, more than that, you know how people like to take a verse and then spiritualize it, throw it away out, you couldn’t even begin with something like this.  This is just history.

Dave:

Right, so what’s the point?  Well, you’ve got a date, “fifteenth year of the reign of” and not just any old Caesar, Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, being governor of Judea, well that’s pretty technical.  You’ve got technical terms here.  Herod, tetrarch—tetrarch, that’s not exactly governor, that’s something else, of Galilee?  His brother Philip—he really has a brother Philip and he’s tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and so forth and so on?  Now let’s say, because the critics used to say, I mean, they can’t say that anymore, but they tried it for years—hey, this stuff wasn’t written, they’re not eyewitness, this was written centuries later.  Really!  What library did you go to, look up the scrolls, you know, unroll the old musky records, and find out, oh, fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—Pontius Pilate, he was the governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch—.  You couldn’t do it!  But furthermore, it has a lot more significance; you go down to verse 23:  “And Jesus began to be about thirty years of age.”  Now this is where the calendar came from.  Tom, we’ll read this some other time, but we can verify when Jesus was born.  He wasn’t born in 0, He was born about 4 BC, so the calendar is wrong, and the Pope somehow didn’t know that!  He celebrated the 2000^th year of the birth of Jesus in 2000AD, but we know that for a lot of other reasons.  I love this kind of stuff, Tom, because I like the skeptics to get caught.  And then we find out hey guys, you’re wrong again, because Jesus was born in the days of Herod the great, Herod the king.  Isn’t that what Matthew 2 tells us, the wise men came, and so forth.  But wait a minute, Herod died about, at least 3BC.  Well, then Jesus couldn’t have been born in the days of Herod the king if He was born at 0!  Okay.  So, Tom, I love what you said, this is history, this is the real thing, and we can count on it.

Tom:

Let me add to that.  We’ve been talking about “The Emerging Church” and we love young people and we’re really concerned about where they are and their attitude about the Bible and so on.  I talked over the weekend with some people who were involved with youth and they said well, how do we get young people excited about the Bible?  I’m excited right now, I pointed out you’ve been studying it for almost 60 or 70 years on your knees, and every time you talk about it I get more excited about it.  Dave, how do we convey this, how do we communicate this to people out there who are ministering to young people?

Dave:

Well, Tom, we’ve got to throw out the tragic paraphrases and re-writings, like Eugene Peterson of The Message.  They’re trying to— see, the Bible says, 2^nd Peter says,—he’s commending Paul.  His epistles, he says, Paul is an apostle, he wrote epistles, and he said, “In which are some things hard to be understood.”  Now to understand something that’s hard to be understood, I will only tell you something that is hard to be understood because it’s worth knowing, and I want you to really think about it.  Well, no, no, no, Eugene Peterson says we’ll dumb that down, we’ll rewrite it, and we’ll make it so any child could understand it.  You just destroyed the depth of the Bible.  So, we’ve got to get some people back to the Bible, the real thing, and to beginning to appreciate and understand what it is.

Tom:

And it may take some discipline at the beginning.  You know we have a generation that’s sort of been weaned off because of entertainment.  You know, we want to get their attention, we don’t want them to move off to this and move off to that, [and] we’ve got to keep entertaining them.  No, we’ve got to teach them, and out of that, out of the growth, that kind of development, comes the excitement, because the more familiar you are with the Bible the more you see how it works together, Old Testament, New Testament, this verse here being interpreted by that verse, it’s exciting!

Dave:

I can see myself as a 3, 4, 5-year-old, 6, 7, in Sunday school.  We didn’t have any study guides, we didn’t have any Sunday school material put out by a publisher who wanted to make some money, we had the Bible!  I mean, we were excited, little kids; we were excited about the Bible because that’s all we studied.

Tom:

And the adults teaching, if they’re excited, if they’re disciplined, if they’re doing their homework, as it were, they can convey that to the nth degree now.