From Saul to Paul

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.

We’ve been on hiatus for a little bit, so I want to start by saying thank you to our listeners for your patience and for your prayers. I know there were many of our listeners who knew of our situation and were praying for us. If you were not aware, the reason we disappeared for a couple of months was because I had some pregnancy complications which was mostly fine, but it did make it a high-risk pregnancy and I had to be in the hospital for a number of weeks.

I’m fine, baby is delivered and healthy and home from the NICU and we’re all good and happy to be back. Thank you again for your patience and your prayers. The Lord was gracious every step of the way. His mercy was abundantly clear. I do really appreciate all your prayers and we’re so happy to be back with you.

We’re in the book of Acts, but before we get to that we had some fan mail we wanted to answer, asking about Sheerah. Rachel, what can you tell us about Sheerah?

Sheerah appears in 1 Chronicles 7:24. Depending on your translation, she is noted in a parenthesis. She’s called the daughter of Ephraim in the genealogy, which can mean either direct daughter or a descendant later, so there is some of that flexibility and uncertainty at times, particularly when they’re inserted into the list like that.

What’s significant about her is, first, there aren’t a lot of women listed in the Chronicles genealogies, but she’s also listed as having built multiple cities, particularly Upper and Lower Beth-horon. If you look up Beth-horon, it sits on the border between Ephraim and Dan, and over pretty close to Benjamin, so it’s almost smack dab in the middle of the Promised Land and was considered a key battleground. It shows up first in Joshua, but the only other places that we hear about it are in Kings and Chronicles.

If she was a direct descendant of Ephraim or even later, we don’t hear the story of that happening in the narrative ever. We don’t hear around the time of Ephraim about the city, but we see later that it is an Ephraimite city. It’s likely listed in the narrative for the fact that that’s why it’s a city of the Ephraimites, but we don’t know why she built it, or it could also have been a rebuilding of the city, which happens.

We truly only have what’s in the text and we can firmly say yes, she as a woman built those cities. We don’t know for sure any further significance beyond that. Did you want to add anything to that, Greg?

You covered most of what we know, which of course is kind of the point. We don’t know a lot. In most cities that were built from the ground up – you can think here of the founding of Rome or of any random Greek city – these things were usually done by a clan, united by the worship of a common ancestor who’s been deified. It’s usually laid out with magical lines and formulas and incantations and all kinds of things.

The building of most cities was a group project, even if there was a leader who took credit, like Romulus, so on that basis alone in the pagan world women wouldn’t normally build cities. I do have an exception for you in a second. But then most men didn’t build cities either.

It’s a hard thing to do.

It’s kind of a hard thing to do. You need a lot of laborers and you need a lot of money to support them or pay them, depending on how you’re going about this. The legendary Semiramis, the wife of Ninus of Nineveh, supposedly built or enhanced the walls and towers of Babylon, but she was a queen, arguably an empress, with tons of money and tons of power and tons of “I say this. You do it or you’re dead,” so it was not unknown.

Among the records of God’s people we don’t have any records that I know of of any other woman building cities. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It was significant to the Chronicler for a reason. Whether or not we’re going to figure out what the reason is, beyond simply saying, “Hey, women do these things sometimes too,” is about all we’ve got.

In this context, interestingly enough, both in my devotions and in our family devotions we’ve just gone through Numbers and we’ve met the daughters of Zelophehad, who make claims on inheritance. “Our father has died in his sins but doesn’t have any particular mark against him beyond that. We have no brothers. We don’t want our father’s name extinguished in Israel, so what about us inheriting the land? Doesn’t that make sense?” and God said, “It sure does. Go for it.”

In the final chapter, the elders of the tribe of Manassah come in the last chapter of Numbers and say, “That’s great and all, but if they marry outside of our tribe then the land will go to their husbands and the jubilee will pass into some other tribe, so can you make sure they marry our guys?” and God says, “Yeah.”

And that’s significant for Paul later when he says that we should marry in the Lord, because Jesus is our tribe. We have an inheritance from him that is not to leave.

And we have certain priorities that overrule romance and destiny and all that garbage. So they married for land? Yeah, or chose not to marry for land, as the case may be. But it does mean that in terms of civil society, these were women with some clout. Everybody knew their names. And probably – we’re not told here – they would have had some kind of say, either directly or indirectly, in tribal meetings because they didn’t have brothers.

How Old Testament Israel handled that I don’t know and we’re not told, probably because it doesn’t matter a whole lot. But the idea that women were simply non-entities either politically or religiously in the Old Testament is ridiculous. Building cities is hard work, and not only do most women not do it, but most men don’t do it. In Israel you didn’t have to be a mage to do it, so that helped.

I think also part of the question that we received was coming from the fact that there are groups out there, particularly in the history studies, who like to accuse ancient history of ignoring women, and particularly Christian Old Testament history. So they love to run through the Bible and find these random women and pull them out and wave them around and make them into these huge figures, which is honestly doing violence to the text because you have to make up all sorts of stuff about this person that the Bible chose not to tell us.

And honestly it’s ironic in the fact that these women have been recorded in history – that speaks volumes because not a lot of other cultures were telling me what women did. That’s kind of unique.

We need to be careful to allow God to direct what we think is important in history, I think maybe is the bottom line for our podcast at least. It’s wrong to go back into histories and try to basically resurrect unknowns, that were unknown for a reason. It doesn’t mean they’re unimportant, it just means that they weren’t significant to history. Those are two different things there. You can be lost to history and still have been important to God in your time, or to the people around you in your time.

I think that’s probably all the time we can give to that particular bunny trail. We love bunny trails here. It’s a good thing. But we’re going to jump back to Acts 9 for our regularly scheduled program.

We are told –

And Saul arose from the earth and when his eyes were opened he saw no man, but they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.

Sometimes we think that all the biblical imagery vanished when Jesus came. It’s still around – 3 days and 3 nights, yeah, ok. Saul undergoes a death and resurrection here. He goes from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, which will be his assignment when God finally spells it out.

And there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said unto him, Arise and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus: for behold, he prayeth and hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem, and here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel, for I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake.

I don’t know about you, but I think at that point I’d be wiping my forehead and saying, “Whew, glad it’s not me.”

This always gets me. God is talking to Ananias and he’s like, “You’re going to meet this guy named Erwin.”

“Erwin? Erwin who?”

“Erwin Rommel.”

“Whoa, hold on, what? Saul of Tarsus? Are you for real?”

“That Saul?” You know, there has been only one other Saul of significance in scripture. I think there might have been an Edomite king named Saul, but as far as we know…

Another Benjamite.

Yes, another Benjamite and someone who persecuted the messiah of his day. There are no coincidences here. The imagery continues. “Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf,” and that’s what Saul has been doing.

I think it’s significant to note at this point for Christians of all times that this is one of those early examples of someone who we would look at and say, “They’re never going to be a Christian. They’ve done too many bad things. They hate the church. Why in the world would you send me to talk to them?” which is basically what Ananias is doing. “I think you’re wrong. This can’t be what you want me to do.”

We were studying Psalm 51 this past Sunday evening, and David in his sin but then also Saul in his sin are two examples that the church needs to take very seriously as we think about sin and repentance and restoration for people for very serious things, which is something the church has struggled with a lot through history. What do we do with people like this, and should we actually try to convert somebody?

And what happens when they say they have been converted?

Yes, do we trust them? How do we accept them? What’s okay? Do we sit in the same pew with them? Do we let them become a pastor?

I’m thinking of a particular pastor in our denomination actually who was a very serious gangster for many years down in the LA area, and now is an amazing pastor. He’s like, “I understand. My history still sits there for some people, and if I were ever to get into any kind of altercation all of that would come back and people would wonder if I’d just never been changed.” Those are very challenging situations, but Saul is a good one to meditate on when we think about repentance.

And the power of God to change people.

Yes, and the fact that he calls us to talk to people we think he’s crazy to ask us to talk to.

I once did a message on that, but you just summed everything up so well that I’ll let it go.

And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house, and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales.

Kind of like a dragon, breathing out fire and slaughters.

Or a snake.

And he received sight forthwith and arose and was baptized. And when he had received meat, he was strengthened. Then was Saul certain days with the disciples which were at Damascus. And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God.
But all that heard him were amazed, and said, Is not this he that destroyed them which called on this name in Jerusalem, and came hither for that intent, that he might bring them bound unto the chief priests? But Saul increased the more in strength, and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.

Again it’s not perfect evidence. “Well, someone egregious like that, he’s got to be saved!” No, unfortunately. Angels of light and all that – wolves in sheep’s clothing. In this case he actually is saved, but his enemies are being amazed, but people especially when he goes back to Jerusalem are still not going to be sure. “It could all be a complicated charade to draw us in.”

We know for sure because the scripture tells us, but for the rest of history we don’t typically get the divine revelation. The pastor and elders have to try to discern, and there are only so many facts you can look at.

We also don’t get to be part of the literary canon of scripture where it’s like, “Ah! This guy who’s associated with the wolf is going to dwell with the lamb. Aha, therefore everyone we know who reminds us of wolves must dwell with lambs.”

No, it’s a closed canon. The literary unit is complete. That’s what we’ve got. We don’t have the divine insight into the rest of history.

There also are many people in scripture that it never says we have to discern, because of course teaching kids in Sunday School, their favorite question is, “So is that person saved? Did that person go to heaven? Am I going to see that person? Did that person go to hell?”

That’s Gretchen watching movies, too. She’s like, “Is that a bad guy? Is this a good guy movie or a bad guy movie?”

We always have to be very careful unless the text specifically says, to say, “Well, they did these things so it appears that they were not a believer,” but in everything we need to be careful not to be overly declarative.

I don’t know if we talked about this last time but this is one of the great turning points of Western history. Imagine had there been no Paul the Apostle. What if the Damascus conversion had been fake? What is this was a charade of some sort? So much of what follows throughout Western history hinges on this, and we can be thankful that God actually tells us, “Yeah, it was real, in case you didn’t know.”

There are a lot of passages in the New Testament that keep coming back, not so much to the Damascus road, although that’s implied because the question is, “Is Paul really an apostle?” Galatians and 2 Corinthians for sure, and there are other places where people are questioning Paul’s authority, which is to say questioning what happened here, because they want to preach a gospel of works righteousness, and this changes that 180o.

Here’s a guy who’s persecuting Christians, and suddenly within the space of three days he’s a bold champion for the gospel. Even the unbelieving world realizes, “Something weird happened here,” so we get discussions of Paul’s possible epilepsy and other kind of brain malfunctions that could create such a change in personality and opinion so quickly.

I think he is the one that is most often attacked in modern scholarship, and you put your finger on it, because his writing in the rest of the New Testament is some of the things that have most shaped Western civilization and the development of the church, because so much of the New Testament is his writing.

It seems that more than any other figure or any other apostle even they go after Paul and come up with all sorts of crazy theories about him, not just for this but other things too that he said. They try to make them into these interesting stories.

The liberal line for some time now has been that Paul reinvented Christianity. They want to say nice things about Jesus to a point by largely disbelieving most of what he said. “No, he never claimed to be the Son of God.” “Well, Paul said he was.” “See, there’s the problem. That was Paul. Paul wasn’t one of the original apostles.” It’s like we’re back in the first century with the same battles. He met Jesus and we’re back to the Damascus road. This is history.

The neo-orthodox scholars would say, “No, this isn’t history. This is Saul trying to explain an upper-category experience with words that are doubtless failing him, but there cannot be any direct crossover between the other side, the supernatural or supranatural and ordinary human life. Obviously, Saul had sunstroke, fell down, and then did the best he could with it.”

Frustratingly for our liberal friends and for gnostics in general, God keeps tying the gospel to historical facts, which is one reason we have this podcast. We keep pushing things back. No, these are not fairytales. These things really happened.

I think it can also therefore reinforce why we’re going to spend time in the book of Acts, because we particularly need to know Paul’s narrative so that we understand the rest of his writings and ground him in history, and don’t just make him this floating figure for us.

It’s also significant that all the history we have of Paul and most of what happened to him, he did not tell himself. It’s being told by a third-party witness about him. So it’s not just him saying, “This is what happened to me,” but it’s somebody else who has been there, done research and such, who is then giving this testimony.

This might be a good point to interject, and please add in what I forget here. He was born in Tarsus, which was a free city. If you were born in Tarsus you were automatically Roman, so he’s a Roman citizen by birth. He sat at the feet of the Jewish rabbi Gamaliel, who we run into in the book of Acts and who was one of the greatest rabbis of the time.

He was known to the high priest. He was present at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and approved. He was a scholar, but he didn’t measure up to Greek standards, and the people at the time said, “He doesn’t speak good like the people we’re used to hearing.” Paul said, “I don’t care. It’s the truth of God. That’s all that matters.”

Have I missed any of the major historical elements?

I think you said he studied with Gamaliel and then eventually was considered one of the Pharisees. He was a Benjamite and was of those people who had actually managed to maintain the tracking of their lineage, which many hadn’t. He was somebody because of all that study. He knew the law backwards and forwards.

Obviously he had misused it as a Pharisee, but it enables him in many ways to jump into preaching and teaching here in a way that many others would not have been prepared to do because he had so much training. You could almost say he meant it for evil, but God used it for good.

God had prepared him. In the book of Galatians he does give a very short autobiography. He says, “God separated me from the womb and called me to his Son,” so as far as God was concerned, God had this all planned and was working from conception forward to make him the kind of man that God needed him to be and God planned him to be. It wasn’t an accident. God wasn’t stuck with whatever he had. God made this guy to be exactly what he needed and what the world would need in this next step of world evangelism. So that’s Saul of Tarsus.

“Wait, we keep calling him Paul.” Yes, he gets a name change. Why? We’re not told. Maybe because Saul was not a very popular name after awhile. “And Saul, who was also called Paul…” and we go on.

And he’s always called Paul from there. You end up calling him Paul more than Saul.

Yes. There is something there that we should at least acknowledge by way of history in Galatians 1. This is what I referred to a moment ago –

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

That’s not mentioned here. Sometime when he was in Damascus he took a trip into Arabia. Christian Bible teachers, probably forever, have speculated or guessed as to what happened there. There are things that Paul seems to know about the gospel that might have come from a direct conversation with Jesus, or maybe he just collected a lot of the writings that were already becoming New Testament books – whatever the case, he spent some time in Arabia doing something that prepared him for his work, and then returned to Damascus.

In passing, a point about Bible history, the Bible doesn’t claim to tell us everything. Sometimes people will say, “Wait a minute, why wasn’t that mentioned earlier?” “Because God didn’t want to.” “But that’s contradictory.” “No, that’s life.”

Yes, you try writing a history with absolutely everything in it. You almost wonder what the point of writing anything down is.

Exactly. I went to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions for my wife, and she was commending God on how quickly I was able to do it, at which point I told her two things had happened that I wasn’t even going to mention. I had told the story to that point and then suddenly, “Well, two things actually figure into this. First, I missed my turnoff…” The point is, even when people tell us stories, they don’t claim that they’re telling us everything.

There have been times when I’ve been working on my history syllabus – something I haven’t done in years – where I would get to a point and try to figure out a sequence of events. I would read four different books, and the first three would be absolutely certain of the order that things happened, and they all disagreed with each other. “That’s really helpful, guys. What’s going on?”

Then I’d read the fourth and they would say, “Oh, did we mention that this thing happened twice?” Oh, so A did happen before B, and then happened again after B, so you’re both right. You just forgot to tell us.

It’s good to remember that just because you don’t tell something does not make it lying. There is a form where you purposely omit something because you don’t want people to know it, but that is not the same as simply not sharing every detail.

So Paul went into Arabia and something happened there that was significant enough for Paul to mention it in passing in Galatians in terms of Christ preparing him for ministry.

We could also point to the fact in Galatians that he mentions that Sinai is in Arabia, which could be him like Elijah, going back there, or others could be him going to Mt Sinai, so we’re supposed to think of that as his coming to meet God sort of moment.

Yes, but he does come back eventually.

I’m guessing we talked about this last time, though I don’t remember, that Damascus plays a big role in the Old Testament in the book of Kings, but Damascus is the enemy. It’s the enemy because they’re Syrians, distant cousins of the Jews, but through most of 1 and 2 Kings they are the bad guys.

To start here that Paul is going to the capital of Damascus and he’s going to the bad guys to get help from the bad guys, to be an even worse guy on his own part – that’s all really interesting.

There’s God’s recently-appointed general, Saul, and he would like to live to see another day so he can preach and do all that Jesus has told him he has to do, and he’s kind of stuck in the city because now they realize he’s a threat. He’s one of those Jesus people.

He’s got a target on his back.

He’s a turncoat.

So they set about to apprehend him. They set a watch on the gates. Paul references this in 2 Corinthians when he’s listing his credentials, the things that really stand out in his mind as making him a great servant of Christ.

We would look at raising the dead or miracles or preaching to thousands or something. He’s like, “No, no, here’s the really great thing. I get to sneak out of the city in a basket over the wall! Which was totally illegal. I got to break the law.”

In the ancient conception of the city, this is the violation of the most sacred boundary of the city. I remember how we said that it was a magical delineation of where the city was, so crossing that, not through the gate, was mucho forbidden.

We can think back to the spies who were let out of Jericho by Rahab. They also had their over-the-wall kind of thing, so Paul thinks it’s pretty cool, if humbling in the eyes of the people of his time. “I bet you didn’t get to go over a wall.” From there he flees, picking up in verse 23.

And after that many days were fulfilled, the Jews took counsel to kill him. But their laying await was known of Saul. And they watched the gates day and night to kill him. Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down by the wall in a basket.

It says the Jews took counsel to kill him. In 2 Corinthians Paul says that the king of the city was in on this. They coopted the civil government, so they weren’t acting simply as a bunch of vigilantes out to get him, which they try later in a different context. But here they’d gotten the police force on their side, as it were.

And when Saul was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself to the disciples, but they were all afraid of him and believed not that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way, and that he had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus.
And he was with them coming in and going out at Jerusalem. And he spake boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus, and disputed against the Grecians, but they went about to slay him. [The Grecians were the Hellenistic Jews.]

Which when the brethren knew, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him forth to Tarsus. Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.

So you just met Jesus. You’ve been appointed an apostle or things that you can begin to do. “Jesus is going to use me in powerful ways. I’m going to stand before kings and councils and things and give testimony, and suffer a lot, apparently. I’ve already done a lot of preaching because I know the Bible really well and God has used that, so I’m going to go hook up with the other apostles and Christians. I’m going to go to church.”

Nobody wants anything to do with him. “Christians? Yeah, I think you can find them on the other side of town. Nowhere around here, I’m sure.”

Enter Barnabas. We met him earlier. Barnabas was a nickname that means “son of consolation,” a name the disciples gave him because he’s the guy who comes alongside and says, “Hey, how you doing? How can I help?” We run into Barnabas a good deal in Acts and also in the epistles.

Arguably this is one of his greatest services to the Christian church. When no one else will believe Saul, he takes him by the hand and leads him to whatever apostles were then present in Jerusalem, and convinces them that this guy’s conversion is sincere.

That’s huge and I have no idea how he did that, but it is terribly important because otherwise Saul is going to be just sitting out there kicking around the city, getting himself in trouble, preaching without any support system or anyone praying for him. It could have been really bad. So God used Barnabas.

And if he’d never met with the disciples, too, you’d have the disciples saying, “No, we didn’t authorize this guy. We’ve never had any dealings with him. Don’t listen to him.”

Right. Apparently the apostles who were present, again from things Paul says in Galatians, he met with Peter and he says, “The other apostles I met none, save James the Lord’s brother,” which seems to mean that James, the Lord’s half-brother, was reckoned among the apostles or had some kind of apostolic authority or something. Anyway, the other apostles were apparently nowhere around.

What Paul is doing in Galatians when he recounts all this is to bridge the gap you’re talking about. One the one hand, if he has nothing to do with the apostles then we have the potential of some kind of organic split right from the beginning. “We don’t know this guy. We don’t know where he’s from. We’ve never checked him out. He’s preaching stuff we’re not at all sure about. We can’t authorize him. We can’t authenticate him. We’re not sure where this is going.”

On the other hand, if he comes and everybody’s there and everybody shakes his hand and he sits down and talks with them for weeks, then he loses his distinctive call.

He’d be derivative, in artistic terms.

Yes, he would simply be derivative, and again not someone to take seriously.

So as we read through Galatians and 2 Corinthians, which are the two books where he spends most of his time, but not the only places, defending his apostleship, these are things he keeps coming back to.

“I got my gospel directly from Jesus. I stand in a direct line, and thus with that commission comes my authority as an apostle,” including his authority to write scripture. “I don’t need anyone else signing off on it for it to be scripture. Jesus commissioned me to do that. That’s one thing apostles do. I’m an apostle. On the other hand, I did meet the other guys.”

In Galatians he talks about the next time he meets them. He says, “They didn’t add anything to me, but they saw that God was using me with the Gentiles, the way He uses Peter with the Jews. He gave me the right hand of fellowship. Everything was great.” We’ll look more at Galatians another time.

Again, this whole thing is crucial for the history of the church, for Western history, the history of liberty and freedom, the history of the gospel. God is in the details. God knows what he’s doing here.

Then, just when we would have written it completely different, everyone says, “Okay, well, he’s made a lot of enemies here too by preaching, such a great preacher,” Barnabas takes him away. He goes off-camera and we go back to Peter.

And we’ll get to Peter next time because we’re about out of time.

But this does give us the duo of Paul and Barnabas, which we’ll see later on their first missionary journey. They will be a significant pair for church history.

And in the meantime, although he’s been appointed an apostle, he sits this one out for a while until Barnabas goes to get him. So again, Barnabas is an important guy who serves the Lord well until he has to take care of little cousin Mark, and then passes off the pages of scripture, but God uses him. This is not the story of Barnabas or of Paul or of Peter. It’s the story of Jesus and all he continues to do and teach.

That’s all the time we have to commit to this right now, but we’ll be back again soon, and hopefully not after another multi-month hiatus. Before we go, shall we wrap up with some recommendations?

Sure, Emily, go ahead.

I have so many because I’ve been saving them up. Most of them are poetry-related. You’re just going to get a lot of poetry from me over the next several weeks because again I’ve been saving it up.

First I’m going to recommend a book that Greg and Kate leant to me when I was in the hospital, a book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Travelled. I read the foreword to this book and then immediately ordered my own copy. It’s just delightful.

Stephen Fry, of course, is a very funny British actor. He’s Jeeves from Jeeves and Wooster. I can’t even think of anything else he’s in, but that’s all you need. It’s Jeeves. He confesses in the foreword in this book that he writes poetry for fun, and he doesn’t write it for anyone else to see.

If you want to learn to paint, there are all sorts of resources out there for you. You can watch Bob Ross. If you want to learn to play the guitar you can go find a “how to play guitar” YouTube channel. He’s like, “There aren’t very many resources for poetry, so I’m going to give you a book. Here you go,” and it’s just delightful.

He’s very accessible. There’s nothing snobbish or elitist about it. He’s like, “Here’s how this works. Here are words. There you go. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s for you. Just have fun,” and I’ve enjoyed it very much. That’s The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry.

Mine is very silly compared to that, but it’s somewhat of a confession. If you have a smart phone and you have a camera that has its own cover, and you crack that cover, you should replace it right away. I had a cracked cover for a year and took progressively more and more dim blurry pictures and I couldn’t figure out why. I thought it was the lighting. I thought it was something else.

I have two cameras on my phone and it was only one, so I didn’t realize until I could not get a clear picture of Titus as he cutely sat on the pew in church for the first time by himself. I’m trying to take this picture and it’s blurry blurry blurry, and I finally realized I’ve had a cracked thing over my camera for over a year and that’s why I take terrible pictures.

I always would make David take pictures because I was like, “My phone is terrible. I don’t know what’s wrong with it!” So I share my recommendation that others may learn from my mistake.

Thank you. That’s wonderful.

I have something that’s not nearly as fun as what you ladies have suggested, nor is it for everybody, and I think I’ve probably mentioned it before. When I went to college, my theology professor was a man named James de Jong. He wrote as his doctoral thesis a book titled As the Waters Cover the Sea.

First of all, it’s a doctoral thesis, ok?

It reads like a doctoral thesis?

Yeah, it does and it’s taken me forever. I see that I acquired the book in 2012, and I finished it like yesterday, but here is the subject matter. More than saying go get the book, here are some things that you might want to just think about.

It’s a discussion and examination of how millennial expectations affected the growth of missions in England and America in the 1700s. It is in many respects dry, detailed, orderly, well thought-out. To the best of my knowledge, Dr. de Jong is an amillennialist, but he’s writing what is essentially low-key post-millennialism.

He is saying, “Here is what happened when a bunch of Christians and a bunch of churches believed that the kingdom of Christ, the gospel, the Church, was going to fill the world, and possibly that it would take huge strides within their lifetime or that of their children – certainly by the year 2000.” They were willing to wait for 2000.

He shows that most of the missionaries and the whole missionary movement sprang largely out of those eschatological beliefs, beliefs that he doesn’t really share, but he keeps talking as if he does because they’re quoting scripture left and right, and he ends up quoting this scripture – Psalm 72, Isaiah 9 and 11, and he keeps going down the list.

That’s how you can tell a really good historian, I feel, when he’s writing about someone that he doesn’t agree with, and still does them justice.

Yes. But two things that struck me in his account. We’re in the 1630s to 1650s, and how little the Church understood the need for missions and foreign evangelism. It was like, “What?” Great Comm…what? Huh? It’s like you’re speaking a strange language to us. You expect us to go to the four corners of the earth, to people whose language we don’t speak, we don’t share a culture, who aren’t educated in the Western way, tell them about Jesus and plant churches? How’s that supposed to work? Why would we do that?” There was just a complete non-plussed response to the idea that the Great Commission was still in effect.

It took about a generation or so for Christians actually to realize that there are people out there who don’t look like us, don’t sound like us, don’t talk like us, don’t eat peanut butter and jelly for lunch, who are dying and going to hell, and for us to care about it. It took a belief that Christ actually claims all nations to get them off their tushes and get them going.

The next thing is that most of these people were in fact Calvinists, so the next roadblock, and you can probably see this one coming – “Well, so God’s going to convert the heathen. When’s he going to do that? We’ll sit back and wait. I’m sure he’s got a plan. He’s sovereign.”

One of the biggest roadblocks to missions was the older Calvinism, which today I hope we would call hyper-Calvinism. It says if God’s got a plan and he’s going to do it, then he’s going to do it, and we shouldn’t presume on him and actually think he’s going to use us. He’ll pour out His Spirit and save people and bring about the millennia and latter-day glory in His time and His way. We don’t need to do anything.

We don’t need to pray for it because it’s already God’s will.

Right. One of the biggest things that came out of this was prayer concerts. “Let’s get all the Christians in town to pray every other Monday for the conversion of the nations and for an outpouring of His Spirit,” and it happened, thank God. Christians across denominational barriers came to prayer together and to serve on mission committees together to reach the ends of the earth.

For what it is, it’s fine. He speaks English. But it was hard for me to push through and yet I’m glad I did, because now I understand that what so many of us take for granted now – “Oh, you’re a church so you do missionary stuff?” Of course, we do. There was a time when that wasn’t the answer. The answer was, “What?”

So Rachel, I will suggest it to you so that when you write your book on Church history I think this is going to be very important. And of course the follow-up is in the Puritan hope that picks up from here and goes from there.

How do we find this doctoral thesis if we want to read it?

I assume it’s on Amazon because that’s almost certainly where I got it… As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations in the Rise of Anglo-American Missions 1640-1810 by James de Jong.

Great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. As always, it has been a distinct pleasure. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, and to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We appreciate you. If you’d like to join their number, Dear Listener, you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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