Hebrews - Part 11 Christ: Appointed High Priest (Hebrews 5:1-6)

Well, it's been a while, guys. I think our last time we met would have been late November. And I don't even remember if we canceled after Thanksgiving or if we made that one. But we pretty much missed a whole month thanks to me being sick. and then we had five Sundays, or five Fridays in December, so it feels longer. But if there's anything that's changed since then, it's that I got a new LSB Bible for Christmas, and I've been trying to read it.

And I've been trying to sort of use it for teaching and studying, just to kind of see how it goes. and so I'm going to read from the LSB Bible today and that's the only real change but the biggest thing is that my my desk is not really set up for having a book in my hand while trying to teach so if I fumble around just forgive me but we left off we we looked at Hebrews 4 and we looked at the end of Hebrews 4 where Jesus Christ was described as the great high priest and we then had some obvious implications to that that are you know revealed in the text and we probably could have drawn out a little bit on our own even that we can go to him. He's our intercessor. He's who we go to.

That's why the last verse of Hebrews 4 says to draw near with confidence to the throne of grace. So we can draw near to the throne of grace because we have Jesus as our intercessor. So now the book of Hebrews is, I said earlier that the author writes, and then he'll write what looks like maybe something else, but after you inspect it, it's like he's saying the same thing again and again another way sometimes.

And so he's going to go on a very long section where he's really proving a few of the same things here. So some of what happens in the beginning of Hebrews 5 is not really even explained until Hebrews 7. And so we'll see that happen. So there may be questions you have in 5 where we'll say, hey, we're going to talk about that when we get to 7 anyway. So it's almost as if he's giving us his outline, and then he's going to break down, and he's going to prove the different points he's making in his outline.

And so, you know, some of the points you're not going to learn about for a while in the book. Now, if you can just sit down and read a few chapters of Hebrews, you'd get it yourself. But I'm talking about from the perspective of, you know, verse by verse teaching here. So let's read some of the text. Starting in chapter 5, again, I'm using the LSB. For every high priest taken from among men is appointed on behalf of men in things pertaining to God, in order to offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins, being able to deal gently with the ignorant and misguided, since he himself is also beset with weakness.

And because of it, he is obligated, just as for the people to also offer sacrifices for sins in the same way for himself. And no one takes this honor to himself but receives it when he is called by God, even as Aaron was. In this way also Christ did not glorify himself to become a high priest, but he who said to him, You are my son, today I have begotten you, just as he says also in another passage, you are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

He in the days of his flesh offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the one able to save him from death. And he was heard because of his reference. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from the things which he suffered, and having been made perfect he became to all those who obey him the source of eternal salvation so there's there's a lot there and again this is going to be explained more and more but if we go back to the beginning he says for every high priest taken from among men is appointed on behalf of men in things pertaining to God in order to offer both gifts and sacrifices for sin.

So we have here somewhat of a definition of what a priest is. What does a priest do, right? And when I think of priests in the New Testament, you know, I think of 1 Peter. and if you go to 1st Peter chapter 2 you get the antidote to a lot of the problems with churches today that try to carry over the Old Testament priesthood into the New Testament in what I'll say is the wrong way so in 1st Peter 2 Peter says in verse 3 coming to him as to a living stone, he talking about us which has been rejected by men but is choice and precious in the sight of God He says you also as living stones are being built up he says as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood.

And he says, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And so, one of the things that we recognize in the New Covenant is that there's a priesthood of all believers. This is why we don't go to a building and confess our sins to a guy called a priest. This is why we don't have somebody else who we must go to on a human level that isn't the divine person that we go to to intercede on our behalf and go to God.

You have a high priest, Jesus Christ, a single high priest, who's already made the perfect sacrifice necessary so that God and you could be reconciled. This is what Jesus accomplished as our high priest. He's fulfilling what the Old Testament priests were foreshadowing. The Old Testament priests, they were the only ones that went into the presence of God.

They were the ones that carried the sacrifice on behalf of the people. they were the ones that would perform the ritual and and thus reconcile people to God in that way in the in the fleshly sense at least in the Old Testament Jesus did it in the heavenly places and so you have a single high priest who made the one time necessary reconciliation you need with God and we're going to see that in in Hebrews 7 fleshed out a little more clearly even and as the result rather than have a bunch of priests running around uh that that we call intercessors for us i mean when people call a roman catholic guy a priest that they're really just saying this is my intercessor between me and god that that's what a priest is and when you designate someone distinctly as a priest in a different way from the way the New Testament does. You create a new system that the New Testament doesn't promote. So in the New Testament, we're all priests.

Now, does that mean we all bring sacrifices to God? Yes, it actually does. We just don't bring a blood sacrifice to God, because that's already been done by Jesus Christ once and for all, for all of his people. But you now have access to God. That's really the distinction between priests and non-priests, is priests are able to go to God. And so when you are a New Testament Christian, whether you've been a Christian 50 years or 50 minutes, whether you're a really well-learned and educated guy in the Bible, or whether you're not.

I was going to maybe use a word to offend people. whether you're handicapped, I guess, in some way, you have access to God. And you can go to God and you make sacrifices. And these sacrifices are a broken and contrite spirit. The sacrifices that we make to God is offering up our body as a living sacrifice and thus letting what God's word has said that we ought to do be our guide.

So one of the things that should happen to you as a Christian is you should once in a while do something uncomfortable. Where your body's crying out, well, I want this. And your spirit's crying out, no, we believe God desires that we do this. And so you're a priest in the New Testament, a priest of God, meaning you have access to God. And thus you should intercede for others. you should go to God on behalf of others and you should pray for them and but you don't need somebody else to do that for you as if you can't do it so we ask each other to pray for one another but we don't ask because well I can't pray we ask because we want more prayers on our behalf okay your prayers are heard by God because you're a priest and you're a priest because Jesus Christ has made you one he's done everything possible so that you can have access to God so he's describing though how priests are created basically says priests are appointed among men on be appointed by men and among men in verse 2 he says the priest is able to deal gently with the ignorant and misguided since he himself is also beset with weakness.

And so what we see here is another thing that Jesus fulfilled in a sense. And in a sense, he couldn't actually do this. In the sense that we are weak and frail as human beings, priests, also being human, are able to relate to us. so if jesus did not become a man he would not have had that experience of hunger thirst okay of difficulty of being tired of even what will what i'll clarify is the external temptation to sin okay so every time you have something around you that's trying to allure you into sin which will not exist in heaven, and which has no effect upon the immutable God, who's completely separate from his creation, Jesus experienced those same things.

And so Jesus fulfills the role that every priest taken among men fulfills, which is that they can completely understand the weaknesses of men So priests aren supermen Priests aren these guys that are expected to have it all figured out in the Old Testament But what Jesus didn do is he wasn't beset with weakness in such a way where he had to cry out, you know, who will deliver me from this body of death? Okay, so never mistake Jesus' identification with your weakness as Jesus somehow being a sinner like you, you understand it as Jesus being human like you are, and thus able to experience difficulty and passion and even experience temptation in the external sense. Now, the difference between that, let me explain real quick, is that you and I, we experience temptation internally as well.

So we like to believe that we're driving down the street and we see a billboard with a girl in a bikini, and the only reason we look at it longer than we should is because, well, it was there and I couldn't help it. That's what we like to think. And had Jesus saw a woman in a bikini and he looked at her, he would have never had one even moment of lust for her, and he would have looked away as quickly as humanly possible.

The reason why we dwell on those kinds of things is because we have an internal temptation where we still have a sin nature that we carry in the fall of Adam. And so Jesus fulfills this of a priest. But then in verse 3, it says, because of it, the priest now, not Jesus, says he is obligated just as for the people to also offer sacrifices for sins in the same way for himself.

So now there's this explanation that the priest in the Old Testament, because he's a sinner, has to offer sacrifices for himself. Well, Jesus didn't have to do that. So one of the reasons why the priestly sacrifices of the Old Testament couldn't satisfy God's wrath for sinners is that the man bringing it was never actually morally perfect himself. and so it was always a picture of what Jesus was going to accomplish.

It was never intended to be that these ritual sacrifices of the Old Testament were going to actually make atonement for people in the eyes of God for their eternal salvation. It was always a picture of a man who is trying to be morally right, at least in the Old Testament, and being as ceremonially clean as he could make himself, coming to the presence of God, so that when Jesus would eventually do it, we'd see what he was doing. If Jesus had showed up in Genesis 3 and just said, all right, I'm going to take care of things, nobody would have understood it.

The testimony of Scripture is that we are so dumb that we needed thousands of years of this priesthood for us to even begin to be able to understand how Jesus fulfilled it. And in fact, some of the people who should have understood this are the very people God's writing to in Hebrews to say, look, you're not getting this. You're still clinging to this old way that you know didn't work.

Had the sacrifice for sins been effective, the priest wouldn't have had to keep going in year after year, right? and so this is the whole point again jesus is greater than everything that we saw in the old testament he is the fulfillment okay so now we see how someone becomes a priest so this is going to be excuse me real quick i have to try to clear my throat so this is going to be fleshed out abundantly. But he says in verse 4, no one takes this honor to himself, but receives it when he is called by God, even as Aaron was. Just making another point, priests don't just step up and become priests.

Somebody else actually makes him a priest, which is exactly what we'll see in a second when it's fulfilled by Christ. I think there's lessons here, though, And I don't want to over-spiritualize some of these things that are maybe not explained in depth here, but we have lessons here about leadership in the church, where you don't appoint yourself as, for example, an elder or a pastor. And even a deacon, it's not technically in leadership in the same sense.

You don't appoint yourself. You don't just wake up and say, hey, you know, today I'm pastor, today I'm deacon. It's on behalf of the church that you will serve in a role, and it is actually by the appointment of the church that you will have that role. Okay, so I'm not trying to say that everything about church leadership is a direct translation from the priesthood of the Old Testament, but I'm trying to draw some clear and obvious conclusions from it that when you're in the church today, you're no more likely to appoint yourself as one of the positions the church is going to have, like pastor or deacon, for example, than the Old Testament priests were going to be able to become one.

There's an inspection process. There's a process by which you would show yourself worthy. So Old Testament priests just didn't automatically become priests when they were, you know, 18 or 20 years old, and they were from the tribe of Levi. Some of these people were clearly unqualified to step into what you would call the holy of holies, okay? This wasn't something that people just raised their hands and said, yeah, you know, I'll do it this week, you know?

And we model that a little bit in the New Testament and we could chuckle a little but you know you seen churches and you been to churches where you see the people who are taking care of we say the administration the ministering of the things that have to happen on a Sunday And you know that person's not qualified. And I'm not just talking about because you know a secret about them, which is important too at times, but have you ever been to a church where the guy that gets up and does the different things, communion or leading songs or any number of things, preaching even, where it's clear that these people aren't taking church seriously. You know what I mean?

And so I think that there's an aspect of that that we all want to deal with. But if you come to our church, all of us being priests, We actually invite all the men of the church who aren't under any discipline to minister in various ways. And so we also recognize that there is a priesthood of all believers in that sense. But the idea being that the church gets to select.

The church is who picks it. And you as a leader in the church, let's say you become a deacon, which isn't, some people differ on how much a deacon is considered a leader or not. I think that you're going to have some deacons that are very strong men with good leadership qualities, and they're going to function as a leader, not because they're a deacon, but just because they're a godly man who's been made a leader type.

But they will lead the deacons, and they'll end up leading some things as well. And then all of the people who are considered elders, I think, should be leaders. They don't all have to take a psychology test and then have it say they're a leader, but you should recognize in them that this is a person that can be followed. When you lead in the church, you will remember, verse 2 being able to deal gently with the ignorant and misguided since he himself is also beset with weakness as a church leader you're not a high priest um i don't even like the phrase you're the high priest of your home i've heard people try to say that one um i believe we have one high priest.

But as a leader in the church, a leader in your home, one of the things that you must remember is that you yourself ought to deal gently with ignorant and misguided people, since you are also beset with weakness. Okay, so if God has gifted you to be a leader, if God has gifted you with exceptional discernment, if he's gifted you with wisdom, if he's granted you a certain level of, we'll say, practical righteousness where you seem to love holiness better than people around you. Maybe you tend to outwardly at least obey his commands in a way that is, you know, clearly more obvious than others.

I mean, part of the qualification for elder isn't, hey, we know in your heart you're saved. It's you've practically shown that you have basically self-control so that you control all the passions of the flesh, enough at least that you're not known as a drunkard, you're not known as violent or quarrelsome, you're not known as an adulterer, right? So in the eyes of God, we're all the same because of Jesus dying for our sins, but we recognize that there's a difference between a guy that's still sitting around falling into porn once in a while and doing the things that you do and you look at porn and the man that says, yeah, I don't do that.

You know what I mean? We recognize that distinction in our world. So, but we still recognize as leaders, which, which whether you're ever a pastor or a deacon or anything here, you're a leader of your home as a man. We recognize as leaders that we still need to be gentle with the rest of the people. and we need to understand when we're dealing with them, in particular when we're confronting sin, we need to remember that we ourselves are also weak and we're sinners as well.

Jesus doesn't have to do that. Jesus never had to look at someone and say, well, you know, I know I'm susceptible to that too. So praise the Lord that we have a perfect high priest. but as the leader of your home as leader of a church you recognize when you confront someone you know i'm capable of far worse sin than i'm currently rebuking them for and i may in fact currently be engaging in sin that is at least to some degree similar to theirs even if it's a lesser degree we'll say okay we can't let that scare us from helping others but we also need to be able to recognize and have humility when we're dealing with it that's why in galatians when we help the erring brother it said be careful lest you fall as well okay when you're in galatians 6 1 and 2 or to be very cautious about our own susceptibility to sin but you know just to put it bluntly if you're trying to help a guy that's stuck in porn and you know that once in a while in your heart, you still lust once in a while, but you're not looking at porn, you still help the guy.

You're still a little bit further along than he is at this point, right? Even though we can acknowledge we all still harbor the same sin deep down inside, I'll say. So back to verse four now. No one takes the honor to himself, but receives it when he is called by even as Aaron was. So, in the church we believe people are called by God to serve in any number of capacities.

And this misunderstood concept, and most people believe that you just kind of show up at church and you water the flowers, you clean the toilets, you take out the trash, whatever the various things that have to be done are, and then if you get this special word from God, then maybe you're supposed to preach, or then maybe you're supposed to evangelize, or then maybe you should actually be called a deacon. And I do think that there's people who feel a certain tendency towards these things. So I'll be honest, I am compelled to preach.

Woe to me if I don't preach the gospel. I don't know why. I don't think it's just my personality. There's something in me that just wants to preach God's word. but that's not the same as God infallibly has told me that this is what I'm supposed to do therefore you must believe it and promote it so let me explain the difference here is for me to be called by God I personally should have a desire to do some of the things that God has called me to do.

So if God called me to be a pastor, if God called me to preach, I'm not going to not desire it unless I'm quenching the spirit, I guess. But me saying God called me to be a pastor is not God calling me to be a pastor. A local church body together with, I'll say one accord, but we have a voting process. It won't always be 100%, maybe. Together, deciding this man we believe together, collectively, as we've prayed with the Holy Spirit and with true pastoral decisions, prayer and fasting, we believe that this person is called by God to be in an office of this church, for example.

And so the difference is there's a lot of people that come to church and they say, look, God called me to preach, so I need to preach. And then the church looks at them and thinks, well, we don't really think he's a good preacher, or we don't think he's a very holy man, he's not a good example to others. There's any number of reasons why somebody might rationally understand that person doesn't belong in front of a group of people preaching.

But they say they're called by God, and I'm not going to argue with God. And the problem is that we're not prophets in the New Testament. So there's a priesthood of all believers. There's no propheticness of all believers. Our propheticness, if you really want to translate that in the New Testament, is that we know what God has said, not because he has said it to us for some private interpretation, but because it's written in his word. so we know how to evaluate whether someone's called by God to be a pastor by reading the qualifications for elders in God's word and there's churches everywhere where somebody had a dream somebody had a vision somebody had a strong sense in in their spirit that God was telling them to do something and and the people of the church not understanding that God does not reveal things to us infallibly in that way has allowed a man to cause devastation to their church and bring reproach on the name of Christ by letting him be in a position where they knew and they at least should have known he didn't belong, but they allowed it because they were afraid to just say, look, we don't buy the whole thing that God told you something privately. so that being said I do believe that God directs everything as the sovereign Lord and so even even your hopes and desires and I'll dare say urges can be something that God has intentionally placed there providentially to put you in a certain direction but the difference is is that because I want to preach all that means is I want to preach it doesn't mean God wants me to preach It just means that I want to It up to the church to decide hey is this guy a preacher And so nobody takes this honor to himself verse 4 but receives it when he called by God even as Aaron was So God chooses who going to be his spokespeople and this applies to more things in the church but in particular, it's the positions that eventually you have, we'll say, leadership, authority, in a sense, as well as just influence. okay so you know functionally speaking you know someone could argue well deacons you know they just serve the church okay i know people have made these arguments but deacons certainly influence the church and they're going to have far more influence with the effect of how money is spent how people are ministered to even just how the the room of when you do church is set up then then a lot of other people just because of their responsibility and so people who were We're going to put in any area where they're going to have influence over others, where, right or wrong, others are going to look to them as someone that they can look up to as an example.

Those types of people have to be carefully chosen. This would include even the people we put in the front of the church for our worship service, which can be difficult because, you know, there's a sliding scale of, we'll say, practical holiness out there, right? it also can apply to it but what i guess i'm trying to say is it doesn't really apply at every single level so you know if you have a guy you say hey this guy cuts our grass um and that's all he does like that's his that's his thing he likes cutting grass he's got a business maybe he likes to cut the grass that i don't think you have to really vet this guy out and appoint him as the grass cutter you know i think everybody knows the difference between the guy you give a title in the church who now children and other people start to think, well, that's a guy I can reach out to for help, right? And somebody who's at a different place.

So that's not to exalt one person over another, but there are positions, and we do recognize that these things have an effect on people. So you receive it when called by God, even as Aaron was. Again, you're called by God when God calls you. And God will make that clear in the Old Testament through signs and wonders and sometimes speaking directly to people.

But also in the New Testament, God makes it as clear as possible through the collective agreement of a local church body instituted by Christ with Christ as their head, making decisions that they can as best they can. And churches are going to make mistakes. That's going to happen. but in general when you get a group of believers if they're all in theory trying to be spirit-led and trying to make good decisions you hope that the decisions will be the types God would want you to make so now we have two quotes where I keep wanting to say Paul and then I stop that's why I pause sometimes I'm starting to say Paul we have two quotes where the author of Hebrews now wants to help us see that even Jesus subjected himself to this principle.

Even Jesus. So if anyone had the right to appoint himself, it would be the Son of God. The eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the God from God, light from light, true God from true God. If anyone in the history of time had authority to just say, you know what, I'm just going to make myself a priest, okay? It'd be Jesus. But listen, in this way, verse 5, I'm in the LSB again, so if it's different from yours, you know why.

In this way also, Christ did not glorify himself to become a high priest. but he who said to him God speaking to Christ you are my son today I have begotten you just as he also says says also in another passage you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek so we have quotes here from Psalm 110. You have a quote from Psalm 2. I think we already looked at Psalm 2 and 110 in our Hebrews study back in like the first or second chapter here But the idea here being not that I want to go back to these passages and figure it out I mean you know Psalm 2 what you see is Jesus not only is appointed by God here but he's the king.

He's going to inherit everything. He owns everything. He's in charge. And you have actually a rare opportunity right now to kiss the sun. You have a chance to make peace with an enemy king who has already announced he's going to destroy you and it's guaranteed. Okay.

I mean, I don't know. It'd be like if you were on the Superbowl team and none of us would, cause we're saboteurians, but let's say they played the Superbowl on a Saturday and you were on the team that was going to lose and you knew they were going to lose. You had a time machine, you knew it was going to happen and be like the other coach saying, Hey man, you would just come to our team now?

I mean, you'd be stupid not to at that point, right? Unless you have some weird loyalty, but in this case, it'd be loyalty to Satan, right? So Jesus is king, and then in Psalm 110, you're a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. So this is the first mention of Melchizedek now in Hebrews. As far as I remember, it's the only book that mentions him in the New Testament.

Maybe I'm wrong about that one. let me look real quick because I don't want to say that if it's not true yeah Hebrews nine verses with his name found um and so it seems obscure but it's going to be explained and and so like I said there's nine verses that mention them we're going to have several more verses that we'll see in the next couple months where we will hear more about Melchizedek. Also, in November, I preached just like a one-off sermon about Hebrews 7. And so on Sermon Audio, somewhere in November, I have a, I don't remember what I called it even, but there's a sermon by me that's a one-off from Hebrews that actually talks through Hebrews 7, and it talks about Melchizedek.

But the idea being that God appointed Jesus. So there's a lot more we could talk about here. But in the end, Jesus is a high priest by the appointment of God. He actually followed the pattern given by God. So that's part of the point of Hebrews, is to show that Jesus came to fulfill the Old Testament, not just abolish it or do away with it or just come and bring something so different that it's unrecognizable.

So as Baptist covenant believers, we believe that Jesus has changed some things in a way where we don't have perfect continuity with the Old Testament, like with the New Covenant. That's why we believe the New Covenant only contains believers. And Presbyterians believe the New Covenant contains the children of believers. Well, and that's because of our view of how things have rolled along into the new covenant.

But the key here is that Jesus didn't come and just say, hey, now I'm a high priest. He could have, right? He could have said, hey, I'm a high priest, and there's this different priesthood and whatever. And people could have been like, okay, but that's kind of weird. But what Jesus did is he actually did things in such a way that anybody with discernment and understanding of the scriptures would have recognized him.

Okay, so the expectation Jesus had, if you read through the way Jesus spoke to people when he was on the earth, Jesus was like utterly disgusted that the people didn't recognize him. Because he did everything that was predicted he would do. And he fulfilled types and shadows that were so obviously types and shadows in his mind that anybody that saw what he was doing should have recognized that he was the Messiah.

When John the Baptist said, there's the Lamb of God, people who studied the Old Testament should have recognized, oh, this is what all the Old Testament lambs were pointing to. And Jesus actually has no, he doesn't pull any punches with people in expecting that they should recognize these things. and so we should too so one of the questions is that do you know do you know Jesus well enough that if that you recognize him okay so not saying he going to come walk around incarnate again like this and when he returns it going to be kind of sudden so you're not really going to have a chance. But let me put it this way.

Do you recognize Jesus in his work and in his people? Are you able to look at people and see Jesus' work in them? Are you able to look at a church or look at a teaching, and are you able to discern, yeah, that's of God or that's not of God? Because that's your job. And you have far more revelation than the people at the time of Christ had. Far more explanation of how types and shadows work and how Jesus actually works and who he actually is and what he's actually like.

And so that's something to think about. It's easy to look back at these Pharisees and say, wow, how did they not see this stuff, right? But the question is, what are you not seeing? Because you're too busy on Snapchat or whatever all the things are now. I don't even know all of them anymore. Because whatever it is you do that keeps you from a more intimate and a more frequent study of the Word of God.

Some guys, you could show them a football play and they could tell you the type of play it was even before they snapped the ball. That just comes from study. A lot of you guys can go to work and you can look at something and within moments you'll notice, well there's the problem or there's the thing that needs to be fixed or there's the thing that we need to turn left or you know what I mean we all have these skills you know I'm sure of it you know if you if I if I bake a cookie for you and I and I use some salt instead of sugar you're gonna tell me right away you're gonna know the difference well why a lot of it's just because we've We've trained ourselves to understand some of these things.

And so you can train yourself to know God better. And so I'm going to stop, but before I stop, I just want to go to verse 11, because this is kind of the exhortation that the author is going to give the people in the book of Hebrews, and I think it's the exhortation to us. He says, concerning him, or I think in the ESV it says concerning this or something, which it says about this which I think is interesting because in the King James it says of whom and in the NAS or the LSB it says concerning him which is concerning him we have much to say so he's talking about Jesus or about this description of Jesus is how you'd read it in the ESV and he says and it's hard to explain he's actually saying this is a little bit complicated.

It's not easy to explain for me. He says, since you have become dull of hearing, though. It's not that Jesus is hard to understand. It's not that it's hard to tell people about Jesus. It's that we're dull of hearing. And so he says, by this time you ought to be teachers.

You have need, again, for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God. These people are actually chastised for basically not keeping up with learning about Christ. And so let it be our exhortation that we learn about Christ and continuously recognize with humility that we need to know more about Him so that His Word will guide all of our thinking in this world and prepare us for the next.

Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us, and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net. You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us. I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures