HE HAS RISEN, HE REALLY HAS MORE THAN A MAN SERIES

Transcription

1 As I was preparing this past week for this message, I came across a story about a father and his five year old son. The father and the son were driving and they went past a cemetery. The little boy noticed that there was a grave that was excavated and there was this big heaping pile of dirt. The boy looked at his dad and asked, Hey dad, check it out, one got away. That is cute when you think about it from a five year old s perspective but his dad would say, You know every time I drive past this cemetery now I am reminded that one got away. That Jesus Christ escaped the grave. That He arose from the dead. And if you have never comprehended that, that is a glorious truth. We know that the Bible tells us that our faith is futile if Jesus is not risen from the dead. We are wasting our time. Like, we could just go home and eat our ham and our chocolate bunnies. Get out your Cadbury eggs and start eating because that is what Easter is about if Christ is not risen. I Corinthians Chapter 15 and verses 14 through 17says this: And if Christ be not raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. That is an astounding statement. Here is the Apostle Paul saying to give it up. If Jesus isn t alive, give it up. Forget about it. But thankfully we can trust in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact in I Corinthians Chapter 15 and in verses 3 to 7 there is this statement that the Apostle Paul writes: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received; that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Now Gerd Ludemann, who is an Atheist New Testament scholar dates that tradition that Paul is talking about in I Corinthians Chapter 15 to about three years after the death of Jesus. What does that mean? It means that there was a community that believed that Jesus died, was buried, rose again and appeared. And that gives great historical evidence. In fact Gary Habermas, who is a premier theologian and resurrection expert said this: Seventy-five percent of all modern day scholars believe that Jesus died and was buried. The question is what happened after that point. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Was His body misplaced? Was His body stolen? What happened to Jesus? Did He come out of the grave? Page 1 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

2 Listen to this statement about the empty tomb. The world offers promises full of emptiness, but Easter offers emptiness full of promise. And it offers emptiness full of promise because Christ came out of the grave, because our sins can be forgiven, because if Jesus was raised that means when we die we have hope beyond the grave as well. Wolhart Pannenberg, who is a resurrection expert, whose scholar William Lane Craig, a philosopher, studied under, said this: The evidence for Jesus resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things. First, it is a very unusual event, and second if you believe it happened you have to change the way you live. And so many people, not wanting to surrender their lives to God, will come up with fabricated stories on the resurrection. Like one that was formulated in the 18 th and 19 th century known as the swoon theory, that we alluded to last week. It said that Jesus never really died when He was on the cross. He merely became unconscious and then when He was in the tomb His consciousness was restored and He moved the stone away and walked off. And people came and saw that He was gone and said He was risen. But could Jesus incur the beating that He did, could He incur being crucified, being wrapped up in seventy-five pounds of spices and material, only to unroll Himself and move away a stone? After He had needed Simon the Cyrene to help Him bear the cross down the Via Delarosa Road to be crucified? Come on, sometimes it is just easier to believe the truth than to believe the pseudo stories that we come up with. So we are going to look at the resurrection. But first I want to read you a story about Erik Weihenmayer. He was the blind mountaineer who successfully scaled Mount Everest. He writes this in Outside Magazine. A few days after I arrived in the Kathmandu Valley for the Mount Everest climb, a rumor began circulating. Because I wasn t flopping on my face every few minutes the Sherpas thought I was lying about my blindness. Women would approach me and wave their hands in front of my face. I would feel the wind and flinch which only confirmed their suspicions. Finally I resorted to drastic measures. I asked Tommy Tenzing, our climbing Sardar, into the kitchen tent. Tommy came in and I said, I want to give you a message to take back to the Sherpas. I pulled down my left lower eyelid, leaned my head forward, and my prosthetic eye plopped into my palm. I can take the other one out if you want, I said. No, he said firmly, Not necessary. It is not necessary that you see the physical Jesus in order to believe that He rose from the dead. And we are going to see this in John s gospel. We have been touring through John s gospel for almost two years. And today we come to the resurrection passage. Last week we saw the crucifixion and then the burial. And this week we are going to see that Jesus comes out of the grave. And John is going to write like a Page 2 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

3 Christian apologist, not as someone who is apologizing for Christianity, but as an apologist, as one who defends the bonafide Christian truths that are presented from the lips of Jesus and from a scene that is highlighted in the Scriptures. So as we come to John Chapter 20, maybe church is new for you. You are not used to this. Let me just kind of get you in context here. First of all, the Bible is made up of two Testaments - the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament. The Bible was written by 40 different authors over a 1500 year period. It was written on different continents and in three different languages. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. And then we have some sprinkling of Aramaic which we see in Daniel, and in the sayings from the cross like when Jesus says tetelestai, it is finished, which is an Aramaic term. Now to understand the Bible there is one message that streams through the 66 books, and that is the fact that God is in pursuit of humanity that is separated from Him. And the Bible can be broken up in ten parts, five in the Old Testament and five in the New Testament. So when you approach the Old Testament you have the Law, or the Pentateuch, or the Torah, which are the first five books of the Old Testament. Then you have the historical writings. Next you have the poetic writings. Then you have the major prophets and last you have the minor prophets. Then what happens is there are 400 years known as the silent years. There is a space where God is not speaking to any of the prophets. And then the New Testament picks up and we have the gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Then you have Acts which is a historical document. Next you have the Pauline letters the Apostle Paul wrote. Then you have the general epistles and finally you have Revelations that lets us know how the world is going to end. From the first book of Genesis we learn how we got here and in the last book of the Bible, Revelations, we learn how we are going to get out of here, and where we are going to go. And everything in between is about getting us in a relationship with Christ. And so the gospel of John is the fourth and final gospel. The New Testament opens up with the book of Matthew, then there is Mark, then Luke and then John. The first three gospels are known as the synoptic gospels. They are similar in content. John is a nonsynoptic gospel. It is the latest written gospel and it has non-similar content to the other three. Gospel means good news, and each of the four gospels helps us to understand who Jesus is. And we have been studying the person of Christ in our study of John together. And now we come to the passage where it is all about resurrection. So let s pick up in John Chapter 20 and the first verse. Now on the first day of the week Mary Page 3 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

4 Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. There are a couple of things I want to draw your attention to. First of all, it says, On the first day of the week. Once Jesus rose from the dead, the church began to celebrate worship on Sundays instead of on Saturdays. There was a shift that transpires. All four gospels note On the first day of the week. Now only that, all four gospels note that Mary and women showed up and eye witnessed the empty tomb. Now John will give us some nuggets to help affirm the validity of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. And here is one proof right here and that is the fact that women showed up. In this case it was Mary at the tomb affirming that this was written as true history. Maybe you don t understand what I mean by that. Well, you have to understand Jewish context in the Greco-Roman world. It was said that the Jewish men would pray every day and they would say, God thank you that I am neither a Gentile (which means a non-jew) nor a woman. It was said that it took two women s votes to equal the vote of a man. Women were not given the privileges that men were. They did not get the educational opportunities that men were given. Now clearly men and women are different; that doesn t take a rocket scientist to figure out. But we re equal in the sense of our essence, that we are valued equally by God. Unfortunately, the Jews did not always treat women with equal dignity, as being created in the image of God. And so if someone was fabricating the resurrection story they would not write that women showed up at the tomb to discover that it was empty. If it was a fabricated story they would write that men showed up at the tomb. Why? Because women s testimony was not as valid as I said. So who were the first ones validating, giving testimonies, it was women. If you were in the 1 st century and you are making this story up, you are going to have men showing up there. But that is not what happens, and so scholars will say that this gives great attestation to the fact that this is being recorded as true history. Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved. And we know the one whom Jesus loved is referring to John the apostle, the writer of John. And said to them, They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him. So Mary Magdalene shows up at the tomb, she sees that the stone has been rolled away and the tomb is empty. So what does she infer? It is that Jesus body has been stolen. Understand this - Mary Magdalene sees the stone has been rolled away and the Page 4 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

5 tomb is empty, so she runs off to tell Peter and John. They stole the body of Jesus. She doesn t say that Jesus is alive or that He has arisen. Now those of you that are astute Bible students, and if you compare Scripture with Scripture, you have been at a crossroads perhaps, because in Mark s account it says that Mary shows up when it is sunset, and here it says she shows up when it is dark. In Mark s account Mary Magdalene shows up with the women and she goes inside the tomb and the angel says, He is not here, He has risen. Go and tell the disciples and Peter. But in this account here there is no mention of angels. There is no mention of Him being alive. She just leaves. So this means that the Bible is contradicting itself - right? This means that we can t trust the Bible - right? No!! Not so fast. The way you reconcile this is there are two different situations where Mary Magdalene is showing up. She goes once when it is dark and she sees the stone has been rolled away. She then runs to let Peter and John know. And then as you are about to see they ran to the tomb and they look in there and they see that He is not there. But then after they leave Mary Magdalene follows at a distance and she shows up with her women friends at sunset and then she goes in and now the angels tell her that Jesus body has not been stolen but that He has risen from the dead. And they tell her to go and tell the disciples and Peter. And I love that in Mark where it says, And Peter. It is like it is to give Peter comfort because he has already been here and he is stressed out and worried. So you see how that comes together. Why do I take time to do this for you? It is because you will have people on the history channel, you will have other skeptics who will say you can t trust the Bible, the Bible isn t reliable. But the problem is we need to step back and we have to understand how to put the events together correctly. Some people will say it talks about two angels in one account and one in another account. What is going on there? Well, whenever you have two there is always one. (Laughter). So the author might choose to emphasize one just like when the shooting happened at Columbine. Who do we remember from that? Cassie who said yes, that is who we remember. We don t talk about the other names of those who died. There is emphasis given to Cassie. Well whenever you have 8 or 13 you also have one. So I hope you are tracking with me here. So let s see then how Peter and John respond in verse 3 of Chapter 20. So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. Can t you just see it? Mary shows up and says, Jesus body has been stolen. And then Peter and John start running. Peter has been eating too much fried fish and John gets to the tomb first. Page 5 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

6 Verse 5, And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Who did not go in? John. Verse 6, Then Simon Peter came following him, and went into the tomb. This is typical of impulsive Peter, just going right into the tomb. If you have studied the Bible you know this is totally Peter. It is the way he is wired. It is also the way that I am wired. Are any of you that way? You just kind of jump in and do things impulsively and sometimes get yourselves in trouble for doing it. Unfortunately I have that kind of wiring myself so I relate to Peter. So Peter steps in and he sees that Jesus really isn t there. What is interesting is that there were a couple of ways you could be buried back then. You could be buried in a ground tomb or you could be buried in a cave tomb. We know that Jesus was buried in a cave tomb by the language. The language shows us that. When you study the Bible look what it says right here in verse 5, And stooping to look in. And then in verse 6 it says, Simon Peter came following him and went into the tomb. So there would be this cave tomb that had a stone over the entrance and the stone had been rolled away. If it had been a ground tomb it would be kind of hard to see in there. Some scholars might say that perhaps a garden tomb is the place where Jesus rose from the dead, but we really can t be dogmatic about the place where He rose from the dead. I can t wait because I am going to Israel in about three or four weeks and I will be able to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. I will send you devotionals before all these sweet spots like the Wailing Wall, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Dead Sea, so you can follow me in the footsteps of Jesus and learn about the Bible background there. There are a couple of nuggets that I want you to grab hold of here. Verse 7 says, And the face cloth, which had been on Jesus head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. So when Peter went into the tomb, he saw the linen cloths that had been bound around Jesus, and then off in a corner he saw the folded up head cloth. What does this tell us? How does this help affirm the resurrection? Well, I said the fact that women were the first eye witnesses gives credence. The tomb had been guarded by a soldier. Another fact is this, if someone really stole the body like Mary had presumed, do you really think if you were going to steal the body of Jesus you are going to go into the tomb and unwrap the body. It would have been a mess. And then are you going to take time to fold up the cloths? I mean - really? John knows all that and now let s read verse 8. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed. I love that. John went in and believed. Mary didn t believe; she thought that Jesus body had been stolen. Peter will believe later, but not at this point, but John saw, and he believed. Why did John believe? It was because he saw the linen cloths and the head cloth folded and it made him believe. Page 6 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

7 Now when you steal you usually are in a rush. Have you ever ripped something off before in your pre-jesus days? It is not like you are real casual about it - right? It is like you have to get this thing and go. There is no time to fold laundry. Back when I was playing college baseball one day we were playing in San Diego at the University of California and I was stretching on the sidelines getting ready for the game. And I noticed that my Volkswagen Scirocco was put in reverse and here I am stretching and I wonder who is driving my car. And they back up my car and start driving off as I am watching them down on the sidelines. And they are unrolling the sun roof as they are nonchalantly driving off. And then they stuck their hands out and gave me the bird as they left. And I thought that is ripping off with no sense of conscience right there. But Jesus rises with style. Now what do I mean by that? Well, here He is, He has died on the cross, He has been wrapped up in linens and spices by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and He is placed in this tomb. And then He comes alive and He goes through the linens, He doesn t unroll them, He just comes out of them and those linens just lay down. He sits up and takes off his face cover and He would have made His mother proud because He folds it up neatly. So Jesus rises with style and we can kind of picture Him going through the motions and then He is out of there. I just love this about Jesus because He is never in a hurry, is He? He just has time, He is cool and collected. Like when He is preaching to the multitudes and as He is preaching He is walking along and He notices Matthew the tax collector. And He takes time to just give Matthew a little sermon and then ask him to follow Him. On one occasion the disciples were hanging out and all the kids started gathering around. The disciples saw the kids as maybe pestering Jesus and Jesus says, Let the children come unto me. Jesus is never in a hurry. You never see Him in a hurry, but He always seemed to have a sense of the time that God had given Him. I think about my own life and honestly I always feel like I am in a hurry. I so want to fulfill God s purpose for my life. I so want to fulfill what He has called me to do. But if I am not careful I can seem like a hurried dad. I can seem like a hurried husband. I can seem like a hurried friend or a hurried pastor. It is one of the things that I don t like about myself. And maybe you can relate. But thankfully Jesus always had time for people. Jesus is never in a rush when you get in His presence. We might be in a rush to get out of His presence but He is never in a hurry to us. He is always ready to listen and to give us some time. It is one of the great things about our Messiah. So it says the other disciple reached the tomb and went in and he saw and believed. D. A. Carson in his fine commentary on John says this: Most of the early witnesses came to faith in Jesus as the resurrected Lord, not because they could find His corpse, but because they found Christ alive. But John testified that he came to such faith before he saw Jesus in resurrected form. And he took the step, not simply because the Page 7 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

8 tomb was empty, but because the grave cloths were still there. John did not have to see the bodily resurrected Christ to believe in the resurrection. Do you? Are you willing to believe in the evidence that is there? John walked in and saw it and it was enough. Some of you sit there and think, Well, if I just could see the dead come back to life, then I would believe. And that s not the case. Let me tell you a story. It s Jesus story in Luke Chapter 16. There was a rich man and there was a poor man named, Lazarus. Lazarus would show up day after day begging for food from the rich man, but the rich man refused to feed him. Eventually both the rich man and Lazarus would die, and the rich man went to one compartment of Hades which was hell, and Lazarus went to another compartment of Hades which was Paradise. And there was a great chasm that was fixed between them. Now the rich man begged Abraham to have some water sent to him so that his tongue could be cooled. He also said that he had five brothers and he didn t want them to come to this place. He asked Abraham to send someone from the dead to his brothers so that they might believe. And what does Abraham say? All they need is the prophets and the law and they already have them. If they don t believe the law and the prophets they won t believe even if they see someone come back from the dead and tell them. You don t need to see the bodily resurrected Christ to believe. You just need faith in the person of Jesus Christ. You just need to know the Holy Spirit is working in your life and believe that and trust that. That is what you need. Sadly, seeing ultimately equates the believing for people, but John believed without seeing Jesus. Mary didn t yet and Peter didn t yet, but John did. Look at the last verse I want to unpack, verse 9. For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise from the dead. Psalm Chapter 16 and verse 10 gives this prophecy predicting the resurrection of Christ: For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol or let your Holy One be corruption. In Isaiah Chapter 53 after the suffering servant dies we see that the Son will come alive. So we step back and we think about his idea of how our faith works. And what I have found with people is usually their faith is baked versus microwaved. John s faith was microwaved in that moment, but Thomas who you are about to see, he is going to say, I am not going to believe unless I can touch Him. Thomas faith needed to be baked. What kind of faith do you have when it comes to God? Does your faith need to be baked? Do you need to be compelled and convinced? Listen, no matter what you believe you are going to have questions. If you are an atheist sometimes you would have to wonder when you hear those arguments for the existence of God. You would ask yourself in the quietness of your heart, Did all of this really come from nothing? Is it possible that this just showed up out of nowhere by some primordial ooze? Some soup Page 8 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

9 from the ancient world? Is that what it is all about? It takes a lot more faith to believe that nothing took nothing and made something than it does to believe that something and someone took nothing and made something. Or suppose you are a Mormon or a Muslim. Or suppose that you are an agnostic. You will have your questions. And Christians will have their questions as well. Nothing is air tight where we don t have to have faith. But when it comes to Christianity, it is so much more unbelievably plausible in light of any other option that I bow before it. On one occasion a bunch of disciples left Jesus and He looked at His remnant and said, Do you want to go as well? And they said, Where else are we to go? That is kind of what it is like once you become a Christian, once you have walked with Jesus, everything else just pales in comparison to knowing Him. You don t have to have all the answers right now. You just have to trust that Christ died in your place on the cross for your sins and three days later He arose from the grave. And then He can make sense of things. I have found that faith makes better sense of things than lacking faith often does. Listen to this verse from Luke s gospel. Jesus said to them after His resurrection, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Aha! Do you mean to say that Jesus was spoken of by Moses and the prophets and the Psalms? Yes indeed! And then I love this phrase, Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. Isn t that good? What a great prayer it would be to ask Jesus to open your mind to understand the Scriptures. It seems to imply that He opens our eyes when we are blinded to truth. He said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem. Isn t it shocking that the very place where they crucified Jesus is the place where Christianity exploded? I mean if Jesus really didn t rise from the dead, wouldn t it have been easy to access His body and say, Here it is. But in the very place where He died is the very place Christianity became a world shaking religion. I know some of you are thinking it is not a religion. Okay, I get that. But you see my point. And so we step back then and I want to read a statement to you from Chuck Colson who was a former presidential council to President Nixon during Watergate. Remember Colson went to prison, and while he was there he gave his life to Jesus Christ. And he writes this statement to give affirmation of the resurrection of Christ. Here is what he said: Here we were, the twelve most powerful men in the United States, all the power of government was at our finger tips. But we could not keep a lie together for three Page 9 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

10 weeks. Are you going to tell me that those powerless apostles who were outcasts in their own land could be stoned, persecuted and beaten some 40 years, never once denying that Jesus was raised from the dead? Impossible! Humanly impossible unless they had seen the risen Christ face to face. Otherwise the Apostle Peter would have been just another John Dean. He would have gone in to turn state s evidence; he had already done it three times. So we step back and look at this passage right here in John and we think what would help us to see that the resurrection is reliable. Well, there is the fact that women were the first to recognize the empty tomb and to be eye witnesses. There is the fact that John believed on the basis of Jesus linens, because if His body had been stolen they wouldn t have taken the time to unwrap Him and fold his head cloth. That is how you debunk the stolen body myth. Now only that but in I Corinthians Chapter 15 the Apostle Paul lays out the different appearances that Jesus had. On one occasion He appeared to over five hundred people. Now some skeptics today will say, Well they were just hallucinating. But folks, before Jesus saved me I was familiar with hallucination, and that would have had to be some pretty good stuff for five hundred people to all be hallucinating. And I don t buy it. Five hundred people were not hallucinating. It is atrocious to say that. New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd wrote that the Apostle Paul said this: If you are curious, just go ask some of the five hundred people who saw Him. Some of them are still alive to tell you. The eye witnesses are still here. I don t know if any of you got to hear me last night on the radio with the Chicago station talking about the resurrection of Christ, but I talked about how life change - life change is what really goes to show some real evidence as well. The Apostle Paul was on his way on the Damascus Road with letters in his hand to go and arrest Christians. And he sees the resurrected Christ and he is transformed. His life is changed and he went from being someone who was arresting Christians to having his life utterly transformed. The apostles, the disciples could hardly follow Jesus in His earthly ministry, but after He rose from the dead they would go die martyr s deaths for Him. His brother James ended up writing the book of James and being the leader of the Jerusalem church. James had been a skeptic. We know that Jesus brothers did not believe; they thought He had gone mad. What would you need to do to convince your brother that you are the Son of God? He showed up bodily after His death on the cross. James saw the resurrected Christ and he would go on as tradition says to die a martyr s death as well. What happened? How do you explain the growth of the church apart from the resurrection of Christ? How do you explain Christianity apart from the resurrection of Christ? You can t! They saw the resurrected Christ. The same disciples that ran away Page 10 of 11 pages 4/24/2011

11 from Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane were the same disciples that would later spill their own blood for Jesus once they knew that He had been resurrected. Something happened in history, and studying the resurrection has made many people come to faith. Dr. Simon Greenleaf, a Harvard professor and believed to be either an atheist or an agnostic ended up surrendering to Christ after studying the resurrection. Josh McDowell considered himself an agnostic and after studying the resurrection ended up placing his faith in Christ and he became a Christian apologist, evangelist and writer. C. S. Lewis was an atheist turned Christian as a result of studying exactly what I am sharing with you this morning. I have laid the evidence out before you this morning. What will you do with it? Who are you in the story this morning? Have you doubted the fact that Jesus was resurrected? Are you like Mary at this stage and believe His body was stolen or some other myth? Or are you like John who walked into the tomb and believed. Or are you like Peter and you want to believe but you are just not quite there yet? Where are you in this? He has risen, folks, He really has. And with Christ you will spend eternity in heaven. Apart from Christ you will spend an eternity in the eternal lake of fire. I would encourage you this morning to place your faith in the resurrected Christ. Let s pray. Father, I pray for those in the room this morning that don t know you. I pray that you would open their eyes to see how great you are. I pray, Father, for anyone in this room right now who knows they don t have Jesus in their heart but they really want to be saved. The Bible says, Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Maybe you don t know how to do that. Well, simply in the quietness of your heart just say this: Jesus, forgive me for my sins. Thank you for dying for me and for rising from the dead. Thank you that you will come and have a relationship with me and when I die I can live forever with you. Just as you were raised from the dead, I can be with you forever. I ask you to be my Lord right now. I surrender to you. In Jesus name. Amen. The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases. Page 11 of 11 pages 4/24/2011