Acts, 24:1-27

Let's see, we're here towards the end of the Book of Acts. Actually, after today we'll have three chapters and then we'll be at the end. The intent, since we're not at the end of our time, is to go back and look at some things that aren't just marching along chapter by chapter. I've got some ideas in mind. If you have particular things you'd like us to kind of backtrack on and take a look at, let me know. Where we can go and take a look at a question, a subject, One of the things I intend to do, I taught a study in Acts some years back where instead of teaching it chapter by chapter, I went linearly through the book and said, okay, let's look at, for example, let's look at Barnabas. Let's just look at Barnabas and look through Acts and then through the rest of the books and see what happens there. Let's look at Timothy and see what happens. It's real interesting. You end up with some surprising patterns show up. Things that just, if you look just at item by item in acts, you almost wouldn't guess the outcome. Is that surprising?

But anyway, we'll touch on that. But if you have questions that you'd like us to take a look at, let me know, okay? The other question to ask here is we're now at a point where Paul is very close to being shipped off to Rome. And his time on the ship and the travel up to the city of Rome is going to be recorded. Paul is at a place, however, where a number of New Testament books have been written by the time we're reading about here this morning.

And so I think it's helpful for us to look at it and say, okay, what What did they know? What did they not know? What did they have in the way of the New Testament books? Let's think about that. What books didn't they have by the time Paul was finishing his prison time in Caesarea? What books didn't they have in the New Testament?

That's right, 1st, 2nd Timothy, Titus, because those hadn't been written yet. Those were later on towards the end of Paul's life. Good. What else? Yeah, okay. 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, Jude, and Revelation were probably all later. Good. Anything else? The prison epistles, right? Because those were likely written from his prison time in Rome. It's kind of like right at the end of Acts, okay, here we are in Rome, and then he writes. So, yes, the prison epistles. Good.

What else? Alright, Philemon was another one. Probably Hebrews was later. Did we mention 1 and 2 Peter? Those were probably later. Probably after that as well. Of the Gospels, I would at very least say the Gospel of John had not been written. I think it's quite possible that Mark may have been written by this time.

Luke was probably writing about this time. One of the things you think about, the kinds of things that Luke would need to record and investigate, and the people that he would need to talk to, because one of the things that he wrote in the beginning of the Gospel of Luke is, you know, I've investigated these things carefully, and that kind of thing.

The time that Paul was in prison in Caesarea was a very good time for Luke to have investigated a good many of these things, and then he only would have had to complete the last few chapters after that, but most of the investigation would best be done right in Israel at the time when Paul was in Caesarea. So here's Paul, he's there in prison, and one of the things that is indicative of that is the letter from Claudius Lysias. Luke uses the word tupos, which means this is basically like a stamping. This is precisely what was in the letter. So it's like he had the letter from Lycius that he recorded there, or a copy of it. So there's that kind of indication, that eyewitness testimony indication there.

So Luke had probably, during this time, compiled the Gospel of Luke, compiled most of the book of Acts by about this writing and it was catching up to the latter part of it just as we're reading along here. Okay? And I think, you know, you start to get a picture. They'd begun to have one or two Gospels. They'd be, you know, here's Luke gathering the information in Acts.

You still have, think about this, by the time he's writing here, This is approaching about 60 AD. By the time he's writing what we're reading here this morning, the church is not quite or about 30 years old. So it's been around a while. Think of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians. He told them that the Lord had appeared resurrected to 500 people at once. Right? Now, probably some of them had gone home to be with the Lord during that time, but there were probably some still around.

So here's Luke kind of getting the account. Remember, Luke was likely a Gentile. He may be the only known Gentile author of any book of Scripture. Oh, yeah, yeah, but in general what you find is those are collected by Jews that are recording it down in Hebrew. Yeah, it would be a matter of still a Jewish prophet or apostle pulling those things together. So now here's Mark and Luke.

Here you have most of Acts pulled together. Paul has written several books to different churches. Likely by this time you've got 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians in the mix here. So you've begun to get some books, probably James has been written by this time. So you've got some New Testament books that have started to come together enough to start to copy things, pass them around, and get some distribution on those, and then things also are going to rapidly fall into place with a lot of the rest of them too.

So you're starting to get some spreading of the gospel, including in written form, and going off to different places. What's interesting is, and this is a testimony we brought it out in church history, but one of the Chinese government's own professors says that before 90 AD there are Christian markings on the Chinese gravestones. So the gospel is getting spread far and wide. Some have, I would say, An unconfirmed claim, the gospel went as far as Britain by 100 AD. Yeah, Art?

What's interesting is that we don't have any record of multiple manuscripts. We do have some record within the New Testament itself to talk about copying and distribution. Paul says, you know, make sure this gets to this other church and likewise the one I wrote to them to you. There would be that kind of copying and redistribution of things so that things did get copied around. In terms of the initial letter, I don't know explicitly that we have anything that says that. Possibly the closest we might have to that kind of thing could be with the Book of Revelation, at least in some part, because you have messengers going to the seven churches, and here's this one document written to seven churches, so that sounds like duplicate rather than, you know, take it here.

Okay, now you're done, now I take it to the next place. But it sounds like... Tom? Yeah, Peter himself acknowledged, he talked about Paul's letters in the other scriptures. So that's an obvious inference that he was seeing Paul's letters as scripture.

But I would say probably revelation is the strongest indication we have actual copying taking place. But we don't have, you know, like Paul didn't say there's three copies of this I'm sending to you or something like that. I'm not aware of anything like that. But we do have a record that they were doing some copying even at that time. The number of copies that we have now gives strong evidence that they were starting to make copies pretty quickly. and spreading them in different places.

In the Greek, we have over 5,300 handwritten copies, and of course a lot of those are later times, but the indication is that they were well spread out. And that is including what became increasingly in the Roman Empire a period of severe persecution where scriptures were destroyed.

They would come to a household and the law went like this. Have you got a scripture in your household? And of course, that pressed the point. What's scripture and what isn't? The rule went like this. If you declared a scripture, and then they went in and found the ones that you declared, you're okay. If you said, I don't have any, or I won't tell you, and then they go in and find them, you're dead.

So that was their rule. And of course what they were trying to press people to do was to reveal where the scriptures are so they could destroy them. So in spite of that intense attempt at destroying things, we still have a great number of copies, handwritten copies. And they were still able to get it around.

Okay, let's take a look here. This is a diagram of Caesarea. We were showing it last week, and so I won't go through the whole slide set, but just so we get oriented. Caesarea was a place built during the time of Herod the Great and a few decades before the New Testament era. It was a port that you can see artificially constructed out there, and it's on the right side, this B area, that Paul is being kept. Felix has been their procurator when he initially arrived. Felix got in trouble and got taken out, and now Porcius Festus is the one who's taken his place. So that's kind of the point of transition we're at here. Let's do a couple things.

One, is anybody in need of copies here? You can pass some of those along if you would. This is Acts 25, 1-27 that I'm handing out there. And I want to go over the questions on Acts 24, 1-27. And we have but two. The first question in Acts 24, 1-27, should Paul and the other Christians have prayed for and expected that things would go more fairly more fairly smoothly for Paul in Caesarea.

When can Christians expect that God will intervene to straighten out their path? What does this episode do to give us any insights into this question? Alright. Should they have said, hey, we prayed about this and everything is going to go hunky-dory now with Paul. Is that a reasonable expectation?

What do you think? No! What on earth is he saying? No! Oh, okay. Just checking. Okay, you say no. How is it you say no? Okay. And this is an area that a lot of Christians and people who have studied it in some depth have gotten actually to a conflict upon, and that is, on the one hand, you'll see multiple evidences that the Lord told Paul, hey, you're headed for trouble. And at the same time, you get indications that Paul is seeing, the Lord's telling me I must go there. And so you will find Christians on both sides of this issue. Some will say that Paul is just blowing it.

He shouldn't have gone. He got plenty of warning. He shouldn't have done this. And he's just being stubborn and bullheaded. Others will look at it and say, no, Paul is doing fine. The fact that he was given warnings that he'd have a tough time didn't mean that he shouldn't do this.

I think one of the things I've pointed out here is the Lord Jesus himself appears to Paul and calls his time there in Jerusalem a time of testimony for him and does not correct him at all. So I have to look at that and say, you know, after all the pieces of input, that's pretty heavy, that's weighty in my consideration of it. Words from the Lord Jesus himself said, You know, you've testified for me here, you must go to Rome. Now, does it mean the trip home to Rome is going to be easy? No. That's not going to be easy either.

When can Christians expect that God will intervene to straighten out their path? Can we do that as Christians? Can we look at it and say, hey, I've prayed about it, man, from here on it's just a highway to heaven. Freeway with no offerings. Is that the way it goes? Do we get a promise like that? No, no, no. Okay. Why not? Why is that not the case? How come we can't count on that? Okay. First of all, I never said it would be like that. Okay? Yeah, Tom? Okay.

One is just there will be persecution. Paul wrote to Timothy, he who seeks to live a godly life in Jesus Christ shall suffer persecution. Yeah, good point. How about, how many of the New Testament books have some discussion of trials? A number, right? A number of them do. And here's James, he is so bold as to say, you know, he just gets through saying, Hi, I'm James, and it says rejoice, not if, but when you encounter various trials. My brother was doing some translation work on that from the Greek and he came across with a translation something like this. You must esteem it ultimate joy when you encounter various trials. It's amazing.

So the idea that now I'm a Christian, everything is just a piece of cake. We don't get that guarantee. Tom? Huh? Oh, my brother is a pastor of a Bible church over in California. I don't know how he handles it, but being on the left coast is a little rough. But yeah, anyway, he does a lot of translation work. He's got his Master's in Biblical Languages. Oh, he's in a little podunk town called Boonville. That's where I went to high school. That's where it went all through school.

I think that's one reason it's really important for Christians to make the distinction. All of Scripture is valuable to us, but it is not all written directly to us. And what people frequently do is grab something out of the Old Testament that is promised to the Jews, and there's a place for us to study that and to learn that. But to immediately grab everything in Scripture and apply it to ourselves is not right. And one of the distinctions that has to be made is the Jews were given conditional blessings.

If you do this and this and this and this and this, I will bless you, and that blessing will look like so-and-so and so-and-so. And if you do this, I will bring upon a curse and it'll look like this and this and this and this. And then Paul starts off, and here he is writing from prison.

You've been blessed with every spiritual blessing, not an if. It's a done deal. And these are people that he's later on in the same letter got to tell them, quit stealing! So he is not making a conditional statement You've been blessed with every spiritual blessing, but watch your P's and Q's. But he tells them right off, you have been. If you are a believer, you're a saint, you've been blessed with every spiritual blessing, straight across the board, flat out. Now, let's talk about the way you live.

So there's a distinction there, important to make. The Jews have a different arrangement explicitly laid out in scripture And those of the church, composed of believing Jews and Gentiles in this age, have an arrangement where they are blessed with every spiritual blessing. The Jews had physical blessings. Very important distinction. I'll hear people talking about, I read this psalm and it promises healing.

Good, that was for the Jews, that's their national song book. So, very important distinction to make, otherwise we count on promises that aren't ours. You ever get a hold of a contract and start trying to claim that contract as your own? You look at it, wait a minute, my name isn't on it. And that's the thing, the Lord has made promises to us based on who we are, and the Lord has made promises to the Jews based on who they are.

Okay, let's take a look here at number two. Was Paul losing valuable ministry time while in prison in Caesarea? Was this just a waste of time? What purposes might the Lord have had in bringing about this set of circumstances? was, oh, think about this, was this event diminishing God's ability to fulfill Ephesians 2.10, for we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them unless we're in the prison of Caesarea. Right?

No. And that's the amazing thing, is that we might be in circumstances and say, how on earth did I get here? That does not diminish the Lord's ability to carry this out. Is the Lord pacing the floor of heaven, wringing His hand, saying, what on earth am I going to do? Vern's gone and done it again. No. The Lord looks at that and He says, hey, I prepared good works beforehand. And He's not worried about it in the least. What do you think about this? Was there anything about this that was a waste of time? Isn't that something? Any other thoughts on that?

Here's something in a Roman prison You know, we'd look at a prison, and my second son, Ed, is actually a prison guard in Nevada. And they have prisoners that will get out of prison. He said the one guy that was in his prison, got out, was back in in 17 hours. Back in. In 17 hours, because the prison system, they provide the food and the clothing and all that, and there's a whole lot about it you wouldn't like. But at least it's there.

In the Roman prison, what you get is a very cold, dark, dank place to stay. They do not provide your food. If you have clothing on your back, fine. If you don't, that's too bad. If you want fresh clothes, somebody else is going to have to bring it in. If you want food, somebody else is going to have to bring it in. So if you didn't have any friends, you're in deep trouble. So imagine here in this Roman prison, this was one nasty place to be, unless you had some good friends. Let's go through our list in Acts. Who's there in Caesarea that we know of?

What's that? With an F? Okay, and that is? Philip? Okay, Philip the Deacon, who had How many daughters? Four daughters. And who else? Luke is quite likely there. He is a parent from the account, writing a lot of things. As a matter of fact, we're going to see some details that are interesting here. Yeah, James?

Well, what's interesting is that the Roman presence there was pretty heavy. And what we see is in Jerusalem breaking out of prison was doable with an angel. But the bottom line is if you had latitude like that, the most probable scenario is that Paul was chained to a Praetorian guard And, you know, we live in a different era, but that would be, you know, like somebody's got a flak jacket on and, you know, M-16 and, you know, full military gear and, you know, you're not going to want to take that guy on very easily, and especially if there's a bunch of them. And especially since Caesarea, the whole town was a military base. And you're on the water, right? and all around you is a bunch of military guys who are a number of yards inland in each direction just thick with Roman soldiers so you're going to have a tough time you're going to have to pull off something miraculous to get them out of there so here's Paul he's in this prison he's in Caesarea Let's ask this question. Who were the first believers from the Gentiles? How'd they get there? Pardon? Cornelius, right?

And if you read the account, Acts chapter 10, if you read the account, there's a whole bunch of other people that were a part of his household and all that. So you've got those who are there as well. Basically you've got a pretty good number of folks there And Cornelius was probably pretty well off. He got paid substantially more than the average Roman soldier. So Cornelius and Cornelius' household would be another group besides, you know, Philip. So anyway, it's quite likely that Paul was well taken care of. But it wouldn't necessarily be typical of your average Roman prisoner.

Okay. Let's take a look here, we've got Acts 25, 1-27, and here's the deal. Felix, and this gets to be almost a comical scenario, okay? Felix was replaced by Festus. Felix was there from 52 to 59, so we know this was 59, right? 52 to 59 AD. And Felix was married, it was his second marriage, no excuse me, his third marriage, her second, to Drusilla, who was Herod the Great's great-granddaughter. And anyway, Felix got in trouble. So now Felix is on the outs, and they bring in another guy, Porcy Asbestos. from the records we have outside of scripture, seems to be a fairly straightforward, honest guy. Felix was not, but this guy was.

Nonetheless, he wasn't against politics. He was still a politician. He was not as familiar with, how does this Jewish thing work? So, apparently he was well regarded. But still, this Jewish thing is tense. And Felix had gotten booted out because he didn't know how to handle all this volatile activity among the Jews.

So here he is. Felix is out, Festus is in. The account starts him off there in Jerusalem. And what happens? The chief priests come up to him and say, hey, we think you ought to hand this Paul guy over to us, and we'll take care of it here. Just transfer him from Caesarea. And Felix, of course, is just kind of getting his feet wet here. And so he says, well, we got him over there in Caesarea, and so we'll keep it there, at least for now.

One question is why it says chief priests, as it frequently does in the New Testament, And why chief priests when there's actually only one chief priest? Why the plurals? Is the Bible an error? Oops. Is that what we got? A big oops? No. What they would do is the chief priests were typically selected from about one or two family groups. So it was sort of a family thing.

If you had been a chief priest, you stayed on the Sanhedrin and you still kept the title even though you weren't the designated one. And so you might have several chief priests by that designation, several chief priests who would be part of that council. The chief priests were almost always selected from, during this era, the Sadducees. So you had the power the concentration of power among the Sadducees, but the greater number of the Sanhedrin being Pharisees. So the Pharisees were the majority, but the Sadducees held the positions of power. Then, here's Luke, and he records, now think about this for a minute, Luke records that the Jews were still going to keep their ambush plan. How would Dr. Luke know that? How would he know that the Jews were going to keep with their ambush plan?

Okay, he had connections. He was a Gentile, not a Jew, and he didn't directly have connections in with the Sanhedrin. Certainly they wouldn't even want to talk to him. How would he have any idea to write that down? Is this a good guess? Did he have a real slippery look in their eyes? What was it that made him think that was the case? Here's the thing.

Paul's nephew, Paul's sister's son was in Jerusalem and he was the first one to let Paul know and then Claudius Lysias, the commander, know that there was this plot to kill Paul. May well be he's still in the picture and remember what Claudius Lysias said, don't tell anyone what you've told me here. If he kept his mouth shut he would be able to continue with whatever contact gave him that info and to tell Luke. So the information would still get back. So he'd be able to record this, not based on some fluky, I just guessed right or something like that, but the same connection that he'd gotten before through Paul's nephew.

Okay. Now, so here is Festus. And Vestas, now in Caesarea, is coming to Paul and saying, Paul, because he's known for being more honest, but he's not against being a politician. So he goes to Paul and he says, hey Paul, what would you think if we transferred your trial over to Jerusalem and let the Jews handle it there? And Paul says, oh yeah, I love that idea, right?

No. He didn't go for that at all. What does he do? What's his reaction? He's got this Roman citizenship and so he's going and making an appeal to Caesar. He's taking advantage of that Roman citizenship ticket. This is the second time he has taken some key advantage of it in this incident.

The first one being when they're about to flog him. And now this second instance where he has the right to appeal to Caesar. And so what happened, he could see that what was happening here in spite of Claudius Lysias, excuse me, scratch that, Porcius Festus, being known for being more honest and not as corrupt as Felix, Porcius Festus was also inclined to move things along where Felix was wanting to just postpone and postpone and postpone. And it was becoming apparent that Paul was going to have a tougher and tougher time getting a fair trial in Jerusalem when he got all these Jews that wanted to do the end.

So he opts for the thing that will get him out of that whole picture, especially since he knows he's not done anything wrong. Especially since he's got this Roman citizenship and he has it by birth, so it's not challengeable. It's even higher court ranking than the commander Claudius Lysias' Roman citizenship which was bought. Basically a black market Roman citizenship. So here's Paul, he makes this appeal to Caesar.

Now take a look at this second page here. You've got this little chart, it's a portion of the larger chart that we put out here. And I want you to get the family relationships because Porcius Festus is about to have a visit from Agrippa II and Bernice. Now, back in Acts 12, we had Herod Agrippa. He was Herod Agrippa I. He was the one who died of worms, as is described there.

Now, what happened, Bernice, his daughter, was given in marriage to her uncle. I told you, it's one of those deals where you're your own grandpa pretty quick. So anyway, she was given in marriage to her uncle. That, by the way, was the second marriage. Her second. She'd get married to one other fellow. He died like within a year. She got married to her uncle. He died, you know, not too long after that. And meanwhile, in between, she goes and lives with her brother, Herod Agrippa II.

She also got married after this event, once more, and then went back to her brother. And it was rather scandalous. I guess it was well known around the Roman Empire that this was not a platonic brother-sister relationship, that this was an indecent one, and one that, regardless of the poor morals of the people in much of the Roman Empire, even they saw this as kind of scandalous. So at any rate, here's poor Bernice that keeps getting popped around from one situation to the next, now in one that doesn't suit her well. But she and her brother, and it says wife of, they never actually got formally married, but the relationship was as much as common law wife.

So here they come, and where are they coming? They're coming to the home of, remember it was Felix? Who was Felix married to? Drusilla. So Drusilla, Herod Agrippa and Bernice's sister, had just moved out. And now they're coming to visit Porcius Festus at the same place here. as brother and sister. So a real mixed up bunch of people. So they're coming, and it's interesting at the middle of page two, there's some bolded words there.

Dr. Luke uses a term that's not used anywhere else in the New Testament, but it's a fascinating word. It's the Greek word phantasia. He says, when Agrippa II and Bernice came to visit, First they had this, and one English translation says, great pomp. And basically what Dr. Luke was saying, it was like fantastic, overmuch.

This is just wild. And so it's almost ironic, almost laughable, because here's Luke seeing, here's the scandalous couple. Here is this couple where their sister just left because the husband got in trouble and now here's the other two coming to visit with a scandalous relationship and rather odd. Nonetheless, they had this great pomp, this polis fantasia as they entered this auditorium. And so then what we're going to see is Paul is going to begin speaking to them and that's the next chapter, so we won't get into what he says there.

One thing I will say, in spite of this whole family tree being very confused and a whole lot of real strange relationships, one thing that could be said in their favor is that it is only a short number of years after this event when the Jews begin rebelling, that's 66 AD, The Jews begin rebelling and it starts a four-year period of great massacre and turmoil in Israel.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered in this. Once the rebellion took place, Rome brought in twelve legions of Roman soldiers from as far away as Britain to just stomp the people who were rebelling in Israel. Many of the Jews got captured in Jerusalem. The Jews killed several hundred thousand of their own people in Jerusalem in that event because they wouldn't fight the Romans. You're going to fight or we're going to kill you.

And so they did. It was a really bloody awful time. Following that, when the Romans did take over things, then thousands of Jews were crucified. It was a really awful time. Yeah, Tom? Yeah, I'm afraid the Romans, when they did oppress this and do it in, were really severe. However, the Jews were severe to their own people. Those Jews who would not fight were slaughtered by the Jews. So it was a really awful time. It was massive blood loss of the Jews.

Now, in their favor, Agrippa and Bernice, both of them appealed to both sides to, you know, cool off, back off. They didn't get much response. The heat stayed up where it was, but they did try to cool down the temperature of things, at least make some attempt there. So I suppose you could give them some credit for that. And they continued to have a place in Israel for quite a number of years. Okay, then we've got some questions here. Have we got time? Yeah, a little bit. Okay. First question, it's clear that Paul took advantage of the legal options available to him and the information at his disposal. Dr. Luke even records what seems to be inside information, not generally available, about Judea's political leadership.

How would a Christian reconcile Paul's defending himself by testimony and legal action? Because remember, he's not only said, hey, I'm a Roman citizen, you know, are you sure you're supposed to do this? And as he stood up in court, he said, I'm not guilty of these things. And he took the advantage here of saying, I appeal to Caesar. That was a legal option that he had as a Roman citizen.

How do you reconcile that? Here Christ said, turn the other cheek. Similar teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. How would you reconcile that? So anyway, I don't expect you to answer that now, but I'd like you to think about that. Second question there.

It was in the midst of the kind of rolling political and moral scandals, such as we find in the lives of Festus and the descendants of Herod the Great, that Paul writes to Timothy to pray for such political leaders. These kind of people. And by the way, he didn't say Caesars, he said Kings. And these were people of that kind of category. A lot of the people who had the second tier of Roman government out in the various precincts were allowed to take on the title King. And that's the term that he uses here.

Pray for them. He says, First of all, I urge that in treaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings be made on behalf of all men for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. What does this tell us about how we should pray for our political leaders here in the United States? Does that change if they are found or known to be corrupt in any way? So, something to think about, especially after you look at that a rather confused family tree on page two. So, anyway, think about those and we'll take a look at those next week. Okay? Questions or comments? Puzzling. Art? You mentioned, interestingly enough, an older expression that's not often heard these days. Someone, some time ago, admonished us to watch our feet Yes.

I heard the story behind that, if that's worth passing along. When I was over in Germany, one of the castles where Martin Luther was kept was in Coburg. It's funny, we have in our hymn book underneath a mighty fortress, this is Einfesteburg, and that was the name of the, that was what was on the signs to go to the castle, Einfesteburg, a mighty fortress. And interestingly enough, there was this room where they said that Martin Luther studied and there was this kind of prayer bench and that kind of thing.

And they had off on one side, kind of the opposite side of the room from where they said he prayed, they had different sizes of chalkboards and and what they would do is is Someone would go into the pub and they would keep track of you know how much you were drinking so they could charge you and so your tally was kept on these chalkboards and So but they would in order to keep track of how much it would be P's and Q's would be pints and quarts Okay And have you ever heard of somebody being deep in the chalk?

That's probably a less often used phrase. Deep in the chalk is a phrase meaning more in debt. That's because these chalk boards would stack up within each other. So you'd have a big one and then one that would fit inside it and one that would fit inside that. So you'd have two, three, four layers, each one progressively smaller, so it would fit in the frame of the other one and stay organized. And so if you really got these things deep with the chalk marked on each one, then you were deep in the chalk, which meant you were deep in debt to the tavern for what you had consumed.

So anyway, a couple of those expressions. Interesting background on it. So anyway, fascinating stuff. Well, we've run out of time. Brian's just going to buzz us out of here. Let's pray. Lord, as we look at this, boy, it would be real easy from a human standpoint to just say, well, I've lost two years of my life. And yet, as we looked at it here, we say, no. No, this is not two years' loss of life. And Lord, you waste no time in ours. And we thank you that we can count upon you and your faithfulness and for you to accomplish things that are beyond us to even fathom. We thank you for that. Thank you for who you are and who you've made us to be. In Jesus' name, Amen.