On today's episode of Good Morning Mug Club, we discuss the story of Easter, the crucifixion, and the resurrection, and why we celebrate it as a day of celebration. Gerald apologizes for the audio in this episode.
00:01:03.000Good Friday to all of you and just wanted to take a second and welcome all the Vince viewers.
00:01:08.000We really do appreciate you guys staying around for us on this special Good Friday episode.
00:01:14.000We are actually going to get into the story of Easter, talk about the crucifixion, talk about the resurrection, but really what I want to do is tell you a lot of details that maybe you don't hear in church.
00:01:25.000Things that I think are really just the fingerprint of God that show you places where you can dig, where you can grab a...
00:01:31.000A bit more understanding and really start to see the texture behind the story.
00:01:36.000So it isn't just a story that you're hearing.
00:02:13.000Thanks for hanging out with us on Good Friday to hear a little bit more about this story.
00:02:18.000I have to start with people in the audience, maybe, who are...
00:02:20.000You wouldn't classify yourself as somebody who's spiritual or a believer.
00:02:24.000It is the most important decision you can make in life for one of two ways.
00:02:27.000Either it's true and it changes everything about how you live your life or it's not true and it's a complete waste of time and you don't want to end up falling into that trap.
00:02:37.000Either way, it's important to look into this issue of who Jesus is, who God is.
00:02:42.000What the story of Easter is and decide for yourself what you believe.
00:02:46.000I have a point of view and I hope you follow along with that point of view.
00:02:50.000But I understand people are coming from a lot of different places.
00:02:52.000So hang out with me for just a little bit and we will get into the details.
00:02:57.000But I grew up in church like a lot of people did.
00:02:59.000Just going to church because my parents did.
00:03:02.000Every Easter, hearing about how Jesus sacrificed his life to reconcile me to God.
00:03:08.000And I'll be honest, as a 6, 7, 10-year-old kid, I didn't even understand really what all of that meant other than Jesus was good and he sacrificed himself and I knew the stories.
00:03:22.000Because as anybody who has seen The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson before he went crazy or during, I don't really know which one, but either way, it is absolutely brutal.
00:03:32.000But I was eternally grateful that the story was being told.
00:03:36.000With that being said, though, there are a lot of details that I never really heard in church.
00:03:41.000Now, I want to make sure that I'm clear at the outset.
00:03:43.000I am not going to be one of those history channel shows where I promise that we're going to find the mummy at the bottom of some ancient thing that nobody's ever discovered and we don't actually find a mummy.
00:03:52.000What I want to tell you, though, is that there are a lot of really interesting details that churches either don't know about, don't have time to cover, Or cover, but maybe you've missed them, so probably in one of those three buckets.
00:04:05.000And really what they do is they show the fingerprint of God on the greatest story that has ever been told.
00:04:11.000This is the story of Jesus'death, burial, and resurrection, and this is why we celebrate Easter.
00:04:27.000It doesn't mean that, but nevertheless, they're never going to correct that.
00:04:31.000For years, I grew up in the church studying the Bible, and I loosely would call studying the Bible making sure that I read a little bit of it here and there.
00:04:44.000And when I was 26 years old, I moved from Ohio back down to Texas.
00:04:49.000And I found a church that really interested me.
00:04:51.000I really wanted to get back into church and really connect with God in a way that I felt like I hadn't done many times throughout my kind of early 20s, late teens.
00:05:01.000And an opportunity came up to go to a friend's church, and it turned out to be a life-changing moment for me.
00:05:07.000Not because of the church necessarily, though they played a big role in this, but because of what the church introduced me to.
00:05:32.000I knew that this was an area of my life that I wanted to pursue.
00:05:36.000I wanted to pursue my relationship with God.
00:05:38.000I wanted to pursue an understanding of Scripture.
00:05:40.000And I wanted to do it in a practical way.
00:05:42.000And I wanted to put it all into practice.
00:05:45.000And I signed up for a ministry school that was offered by the church that I was going to.
00:05:51.000And during that time, I met somebody who had insomnia.
00:05:54.000And it's only relevant because this guy, I mean, insomnia sounds like the worst possible punishment for somebody ever if it was devised as a punishment, not letting somebody sleep.
00:06:04.000But he just had insomnia through no fault of his own and would end up studying Scripture and doing all kinds of things with the extra hours.
00:06:11.000And he came across a teacher who was called Chuck Missler.
00:06:15.000And Chuck did in-depth Bible studies where he would go line by line through Scripture.
00:06:20.000For example, I think his Genesis study is something on the order of...
00:06:27.000I immediately fell in love with it because it would go verse by verse and it would talk to you about different things that would happen in Scripture and tie it to other places in Scripture, whether it was something that was a fulfilled prophecy or just a story that had a connection.
00:06:42.000And I just remember being fascinated because I had no idea that all of these little details in Scripture connected to all of the other places.
00:06:51.000When Chuck would show us those things.
00:06:53.000So my goal today is basically to help you see some of those connections and encourage you to go and do some of this study for yourselves.
00:07:00.000So one quick analogy, there's several things that I could tell you, one of which would be that, and look this up, God gave an entire people hemorrhoids as a punishment for stealing the Ark of the Covenant.
00:07:10.000That's pretty hilarious if you're God and you've got a Rolodex of punishments.
00:07:13.000You know, you're looking through, you're like, nope, done that, locusts, done that, frogs, it's a little dated.
00:07:25.000I think that shows that God has a sense of humor even though he's getting a message across.
00:07:29.000Or perhaps the idea that during the Exodus there was a giant cross in the middle of the desert that only God could really see because we didn't really have the power of flight.
00:07:40.000Maybe I guess if you stood on a mountain nearby you could see it.
00:07:43.000But if you look at how the Israelites were supposed to camp around the kind of the tabernacle that they took with them.
00:07:50.000You will essentially see, if you put some mathematical equation together of, I don't know, every person is one square foot and look at the number of people and where they were told to camp, you'll see that it makes a giant cross.
00:08:01.000Those kinds of things were things that I never really knew about.
00:08:03.000And they're not doctrinal positions necessarily, but they're just little interesting details that give the Bible more texture.
00:08:11.000So I wanted to start out with one of those and go into a little bit more depth, and that is the story of the serpent on a pole.
00:08:17.000One thing I want you to keep in mind as we go through this is that to the Jewish mind, pattern is prophecy, right?
00:08:24.000In our kind of Western mind, we think of prophecy as, you know, you make some kind of a prophetic claim and then there's some fulfillment to that claim.
00:08:31.000Like it's going to rain tomorrow and then it rains tomorrow.
00:08:33.000Well, for the Jews, you start establishing a pattern and when you see something that fits that pattern, that is prophecy, right?
00:08:42.000It's a different way of thinking and I think what you'll see, Sometimes we miss those prophecies in Scripture because we don't see the pattern for what it really is.
00:08:52.000So in Numbers 21, 7-9, I'll just read it for you and then I'll tell you kind of what I think about this.
00:08:56.000It says, Then the people came to Moses and cried out, We have sinned.
00:09:55.000I guarantee you, you're not choosing the option where God says, go and make a snake out of brass and put it on a pole and put it on a heel and everybody who looks upon it is going to be healed.
00:10:41.000Doesn't seem to be much reason for that, but let's just kind of surmise, maybe it looks something like, you know, a straight-up pole, and then you kind of hung this snake on it like this, right?
00:10:50.000Now you start to see, okay, maybe that has some similarity to the cross.
00:10:55.000How it looked isn't quite as important as what it symbolized, though, right?
00:10:59.000So we've already said that the snake symbolizes sin.
00:11:01.000So if you put sin on a pole, on a heel, those who have sinned can look upon it and be healed.
00:11:12.000If that's not a picture of what Jesus Christ did, During the crucifixion, during the Easter celebration that we know it, I don't know what is.
00:11:20.000And it's really interesting because all you had to do was look upon it.
00:11:23.000There was no other work needing to be done.
00:11:25.000You just had to look upon this saving figure and you were saved.
00:11:32.000So when we call Jesus sin on the cross, he literally was made sin and we'll get back to that in just a minute.
00:11:38.000But he became sin for us, was on a cross, and all we have to do.
00:11:43.000So that's an interesting story out of numbers that not a lot of people will have heard the comparison.
00:11:53.000Dive into that story a little bit more if you want to.
00:11:56.000But before we go any further, because this is our Friday show, we're going to do just a little bit of a free portion here, which we've done.
00:12:03.000We are going to go ahead and go to Rumble Premium here in just a second.
00:12:06.000If you're not a Rumble Premium member, make sure you click that button right there and sign up.