followHIM - Christmas Part 2 • Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick • Dec. 19 - Dec 25

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Dr. Chadwick continues to explore the historical significance of archaeological and historical findings and the spiritual significance of the life and birth of Jesus Christ. Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/follow-him-a-come-follow-me-podcast/id1545433056Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz8yLp0dQyEcBQ8BYThanks to the follow HIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producers, SponsorsDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

Welcome to part two of Dr. Jeff Chadwick on the topic of Christmas. Go back to verse one of chapter two in Matthew, which says, When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem. There's an immediacy in that verse. It doesn't say two years later they came to Jerusalem. It says when Jesus was born, wise men came to Jerusalem and asked, where's the king of the Jews? We've seen a star in the east.

Now the east is going to be Mesopotamia. It's going to be either Babylon area or Persia area. And by the way, who were the wise men? We always debate this. They're called magi, which means magicians, really. But it actually means mystics. There were Jewish mystics even back then. I think the wise men were Jewish. They were maybe Persian or Babylonian Jews. But nobody else was reading Hebrew scripture other than Jews. So nobody else is going to know the prophecy of a star rising in the east that you see, like, numbers 24 or other places and we know there was a real star the book of mormon tells us so these jewish mystics in the east are looking for this sign and when they see it do they wait two years to go to judea oh there's the sign of messiah let's let's wait two years to go see it no they go immediately There's an immediacy to this story. And it's about five, six weeks to make the trip. So those magi in the East, those, I presume, Jewish mystics who recognize the sign of the star,

and we know it was a new star, whatever actually in the heavens happened, it looked like a star. And the Book of Mormon says there was one. And those guys in Babylon or Persia sought, and they got ready as quick as they could. Takes a week to get a trip ready. And they made their way so that about seven weeks later, they show up in Bethlehem. And in verse 11, they find the young child with Mary in the house that's been finished, which Joseph and Mary had prepared in order to live in Bethlehem so Jesus could grow up there. By the way, how do we know that it's that long? How come it's not four or three weeks? Because if you go to Luke 2,

Jesus will be circumcised eight days after his birth, but then he's presented in the temple 40 days later. Actually, that's six weeks. You have to wait for 40 days and go on the 41st or 42nd day. So it's six weeks after Jesus' birth that in Luke 2, the baby is taken to the temple. The wise men haven't arrived and Joseph hasn't left Bethlehem. It's at least six weeks later that Jesus is taken to the temple. And then it's sometime very shortly after that temple episode in Luke 2 that the wise men show up in Matthew 2. And after they leave, Joseph is alarmed by the revelation and leaves Bethlehem in the middle of the night to escape to Egypt. And this young couple who for now 11 months, 12 months, which includes Mary becoming pregnant, going to Jerusalem,

being with Elizabeth, being found pregnant, and the stir around Nazareth because of that, the episode with Joseph and the revelation, they get married. They understand who their child will be. They move to Bethlehem. They go, they become registered residents of Bethlehem so that when Jesus was born, there must have been somewhere in the archive of Bethlehem, a document that said, Yeshua ben Yosef, no lad be Bethlehem. Jesus, son of Joseph, was born here in Bethlehem. But the Romans destroyed Judea in 70 AD and burnt everything. And that means that any document that said Jesus was born in Bethlehem wouldn't exist. But in any case, their great plan and bringing about the righteousness of God and being there with a house so Jesus could grow up

in Bethlehem is thrown into chaos then when having not been the victims of circumstance before, having not been driven by a taxation law to Bethlehem before, but having done that of their free will and choice, all of a sudden, because of Herod's murderous intent, they do become victims of circumstance and have to go to Egypt. And then when they come back, it's still not safe to go back to Bethlehem and everything they had built. So they have to go to Nazareth and make a new life there where their family is. And Jesus would become known as a Nazarene, as the branch, as the Nazarene.

And this to me is what makes Christmas such a wonderful story because Christmas actually, the story is about Joseph and Mary. It's about the parents of Jesus who were the servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, doing what ultimately he needed them to do. Christmas is about the birth of Christ and the gift to us in the world, and that's what we should remember. But the story itself is really the story of the faithfulness of Joseph and Mary, these two wonderful people who would raise the Messiah and Savior of the world. If you ever needed better examples of who to be like in mortality, Mary and Joseph are the two. And if you wonder why some of our friends, particularly our Catholic friends, revere Mary,

there was never a greater woman in the history of the universe, Eve notwithstanding, than Mary of Nazareth. And there was never a greater and more trusted servant of the Lord, all the prophets notwithstanding, than Joseph of Nazareth, whom God the Father would trust to raise his son. That's great.

So when I take groups to Nazareth, and there's a church there, the Church of the Annunciation, which honors Mary, and next door to it, as you both know, is a church honoring Joseph. I like people to know that these two, those people in the holy family, that woman and that man are my heroes. The son of Mary is my Lord and my ultimate hero. But Joseph and Mary mean the world to me. And if you don't read it within this context, you don't see the sacrifice. Yeah. I wrote this all up years ago in the book that you mentioned,

Stone Manger, The Untold Story of the First Christmas. And I was trying to find a muse how to write this story. Tell us why you wrote that book. Oh, well, I've been working for 40 years in Israel. In fact, this year, this is 2022, marks the 40th year since I began teaching for the BYU Jerusalem program, way back years before we actually built the Jerusalem Center. It was a privilege that they asked me to teach there when we used to live at the kibbutz that overlooked Bethlehem at Ramat Rachel. And I've been involved

in the archaeology and the research of the land ever since. And it's been a great and wonderful blessing of a career. But I've always loved the Christmas story. And it occurred to me very early on that as an archaeologist, the only artifact of the Christmas story that you see in the text of the Bible is the manger. The manger is mentioned. A stable isn't mentioned because there wasn't one. And other things are mentioned. There's no Christmas trees. There's no Christmas trees. There's no drummer boy that's mentioned. Okay. The wise men don't show up for weeks. So

they're not there on the night of Christmas. The shepherds show up, but they do not bring their sheep because they'd never got there with them. So what's the only thing that is material in this story? It's the manger. Well, I always thought I would write a book called the archeology of Christmas and have it surrounding how you would tell the story from the perspective of a stone manger, which is what these troughs were made of. So when I finally wrote the story up, I decided maybe a book called The Archaeology of Christmas wouldn't really be interesting to people.

So I decided to call it The Stone Manger. And the reason I wrote the book was that my mother of blessed memory, years ago before she died, and I'd been involved in Israel for over 30 years by then, said, Jeff, because she loved Christmas, she was the Christmas queen. She'd never gone to Israel with me. And she said, sometime I'd like you to just sit down with me and we're just going to take an hour. And I want you to tell me about the real first Christmas, because we have these manger scenes and these decorations and they're lovely. But every time I hear you talk about it, it's very different than all my decorations. I'd love to do that with you. And I said, that sounds like such a great thing that

we'll do that. And I never did. It just was one of those things we were going to do. And then she contracted a terrible disease called ALS and died rather quickly. As I was coping with that, the first Christmas after her death, I thought, oh my goodness, I never got to do that. As I was working through that the year after her death, I thought it's time to write down that story that I would have told her. What you can know and maybe assume about the Christmas story based on the context. So I did, and it was great therapy. So I dedicated the book to her when I

finished it the next year. And it's really my gift to my mother, the story I hope that maybe she's heard of where she's at now. But that's how Stone Manger got written. That's why I did not name it the Archaeology of Christmas. I've always loved the idea, too, of Jesus being called the chief cornerstone and that his birth would start with something about stone. Well, that's the interesting thing, too, because Joseph was a tectone. That's the word used in Matthew and Mark to describe them in Greek, a tectone, a builder. And you're built of stone. But Jesus was that too.

That's what Joseph would have raised him to be. Jesus was a stonemason. If I ever write a sequel to Stone Manger, I'm going to call it Stone Mason. What was Jesus' life like before he became rabbi Jesus. When you look through the teachings of Jesus, he very frequently employs stone architecture or stone masonry imagery in his teachings. He doesn't ever use wood carpentry imagery, but he uses a lot of imagery

that has to do with stone and stone masonry. The chief cornerstone, quoting Psalms, et cetera. The wise man builds his house. Builds his house upon the rock. He knows how to build houses. Jesus probably built houses. There are wonderful scholars that have done a lot of research into this that note that the great Roman regional capital of Sepphoris was being built just north of Nazareth. And probably Joseph and Jesus worked as builders in Sepphoris, which was a short walk of Nazareth. And probably Joseph and Jesus worked as builders in Sepphoris, which was a short walk from Nazareth. And if you ever wanted to ask yourself,

what would Joseph have done for a living moving from Nazareth to Bethlehem? Well, building had to happen there. But within an hour and a half's walk of Bethlehem was the biggest building project in the Eastern world. Herod's temple was being built and they needed builders. So there was work for Joseph to do. He had to commute like I do. It would take him an hour and a half to get to work. But Joseph could build and use his talents all he needed to at Jerusalem and work on his own house a day or two a week, and they would have money. Because a builder made two dinars a day if they were skilled,

and Joseph was. And Jesus, because he had this background, and I assume he worked as a builder, he even named his chief apostle. He called Simon, which was the apostle's name, Shimon. He called him Kepha. Kepha is an Aramaic word, which refers to an unfinished stone, Kepha. And you see this in the New Testament occasionally spelled C-E-P-H-A-S, which most people pronounce as Cephas, but the S is a Greek contrivance. If you take it off, it's actually C-E-P-H-A. And it's not C as in city. It's C as in county. It's Kepha. And Kepha then means a rough, unhewn building stone that's only been roughly finished.

A rough rolling stone, shall we say. So that's why when Peter's nickname given to him by Jesus is rendered into Greek, it becomes petros or stone. Think of like petrified wood. Jesus never called his chief apostle Peter because Jesus didn't converse with him in Greek. Jesus called Simon kepha. And that, when you see the Aramaic there, leads through in a couple of passages in John and a couple of passages in the writings of Paul, where they're actually giving you the Aramaic that Jesus used to address

his chief apostle, Kepha. And in John 1, where this appears, it says, you shall be Kepha. And then it goes on to say, which interpreted is a stone, or you shall be Peter, which is interpreted a stone. What John was really writing is you're going to be Kepha and interpreted into Greek, this is Petros, a stone. So Jesus is even using that stone building imagery with his chief apostle. It's interesting too that going on this in Matthew 16, Jesus says to Simon, right? Thou art Kepha, thou art Peter, right? And upon this rock, this Petros, will I build my church. Now we've always gone to great lengths, and I love President Kimball who made a huge statement about this back in my mission days, that the church is not founded upon Peter, but the rock is revelation. Remember that? It's the rock of Revelation that

Jesus is referring to. Yes, true. But actually, at the very same time, it is Peter. It is that rock, that apostle, because Peter was the chief apostle, the senior apostle, the one authorized representative of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, the church really is built on the rock of revelation, but it is built upon the person who is that rock of revelation. Christ himself is that rock in perpetuity. It was Peter then, it's Russell M. Nelson now, who is that one person, that rock, upon which the revelation to this church is delivered. Either way you look at that scripture,

using Jesus' original stone imagery, it points to the very question we're asked in a temple recommend. Do you recognize the president of the church as the person who is authorized to receive revelation and manage the church? Jeff, I wanted to ask you something out of the manual. There's a section called I Rejoice in My Redeemer. And it says Christmas is known as a joyful season because of the joy that Jesus Christ brings to the world. Even people who don't worship Jesus as the Son of God can often feel the happiness of Christmas. Ponder the joy you feel because Heavenly Father sent His Son.

And then later on, there's another section called His Name Shall Be Called Wonderful. I would want you to comment on your thoughts on both of those sections. As I was saying when I told the story before, Christmas is just a time that we should be happy. In our climb, you need something to rejoice about occasionally with these short, cold winter days, but that's just our local climate. Wherever you're at in the world, the whole season of Christmas and the whole theme of Christmas is something to rejoice over. And this is simply the follow-up on what the angel said to the shepherds who came to Bethlehem to that grotto and saw Jesus in that stone manger on that very night. If you go to Luke 2, you see the words that the angel said to the shepherds. This is 2.11, Luke 2.11, for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord, a Savior, Yeshua, that is Christ,

the Messiah, who is the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. You'll find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in that stone water trough, right? But before they said all of that, they described this as being good tidings of great joy. Verse 10, the angel said unto them, fear not, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, not in that era, only the people of Israel, but eventually to all people. Now in our day, all people have the right to claim their Israelite heritage through the covenant. But the point is, the joy of the birth of Christ is for everyone. And maybe even if they don't know what we are, what we know, maybe even if they're not Christian, it should be

the most joyous occasion because it's joy to all people. So that when you go back and you alluded to, I think, Isaiah 9 there, right? The word wonderful. We read that wonderful scripture in Isaiah 9, 6. Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. And the government shall be upon his shoulder. He'll be the king. And his name shall be called Wonderful.

Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. The increase of his government and peace, there shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the increase of his government and peace, there shall be no end. Upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom to order it, to establish it with judgment. This is all joyous. It's also all very political. Going back to that earlier question of Jesus and his kingship and what the Messiah was to be, yeah, the Messiah is the King of Israel. But very often in our classrooms, and I giggle a little bit about this because I often sit back and think, boy, I wish I was teaching this class so I could get it right. And then I think to myself, you just ruined the class, Jeff. Just keep your mouth shut. Let the teacher teach. That's my rule. When you're sitting in somebody else's Sunday school class

is sit on your hands. I do not make comments in people's classes because it's not my show. I let the teacher teach. Now I'm on your show now and you've asked me to talk, but if I'm sitting in a Sunday school class, I am not tearing apart somebody else's lesson. That's just not what we do. Let the spirit speak through the teacher that's been called. But occasionally I hear something like this when we talk about Jesus and his relationship to the Jewish people in the New Testament. The teacher will say something like, and I'm exaggerating now, but they'll say something like, oh, those silly Jews of that age, because they were looking for a political Messiah, and they didn't realize that that's not what they should be looking for. They should be looking for a spiritual Messiah, not a political Messiah. Well, no, a political Messiah is exactly what the scriptures predict.

They predict he will be a king of Israel. They predict that he will have the government upon his shoulder. They predict that he will reign upon the throne of David. He will change the political order. And whether that is at his coming in mortality or whether at his second coming, the expectation is the same. Latter-day Saints expect a political Messiah. Now, we have the story of his first coming, and while we see that he was regarded as king, even by the Jewish people,

on Palm Sunday, on the last Sunday of Jesus' life, he rode into Jerusalem in the biggest parade Jerusalem had ever seen to that time. And what were the people saying? Hosanna to the King of Israel, Hosanna to the son of David. The populace recognized that he was the candidate to be this king. And it didn't turn out that way because the Romans killed him later that week with the collaboration of the Sadducees, the chief priests. And the great untold story of the New Testament is obvious on every page. And that is that Jesus was wildly popular with the Jewish people. He was not rejected by them, not in his lifetime. He was so popular that the crowds thronged him everywhere. You couldn't get close enough to touch the hem of his garment most times.

And the only place we see him cast out of on one occasion was his own hometown of Nazareth because of their jealousy. But everywhere else he went, he was not cast out. He was welcomed and Jerusalem welcomed him. It was a very small group, powerful political Sadducees that opposed him. But most of the Pharisees were intrigued with him, like Nicodemus. The people did not reject him. Sometimes even in the videos, we depict the Jewish people as rejecting him and spitting on him.

This did not happen. He was wildly popular. So why did the Jewish people not wind up recognizing Jesus as the Messiah? Well, because their understanding of what the Messiah would be is that Messiah would bring them freedom and redemption and throw off the yoke of their burden, which they understood as being foreign government that imposed upon their freedom. And everyone expected in the New Testament that Jesus would do this. No one expected him to die. Even Peter, when Jesus indicated he would die, said, Lord, this be far from thee. No one expected,

even if they believed that Jesus was Messiah, and even if they believed he was son of God, the way the apostles and many of his followers did, that he had been sent to die. That was the last thing they expected. They expected that if program went on another year or two, he would become the king of Israel. And when instead he died, this was a huge blow to the church membership, but to everyone who had looked at Jesus as the best candidate for Messiah ever, that expectation that he comes and overwhelms the foreign government and sets up the redeemed kingdom of Israel, Jesus didn't wind up providing that during his mortal life. Jewish people who in the New Testament were quite excited about him must have simply reasoned he would have been a great Messiah. But I guess we look for another. Because he didn't fulfill the expectation that the scriptures make

of him becoming the head and king of the government and changing the order and bringing in an age of redemption. Now, we know that that's still coming at a second coming of the Messiah. So yes, we too expect a political Messiah who will change the order and usher in the age of redemption. But the differentiation between a first coming and a second coming is only something that even in the New Testament, the apostles gradually came to understand. They didn't understand it during Jesus's lifetime. They did not expect he would come to die. We have the advantage with 2020 hindsight of looking back on the New Testament and saying, oh, they shouldn't have thought that he was coming as a political

Messiah in his first coming. Well, nobody, even Peter understood that his first coming wasn't the political change. That only came gradually. So our sometimes saying of those Jewish people, oh, they're so silly to have not understood what was going on. If we'd have been there, we wouldn't have understood it either because Peter didn't understand it until after it had happened. And none of the best of them did. So I like to tell folks that I teach, let's not be so smug and think that we're so much more insightful than people of past generations. The marvelous thing about the four gospels is that Jesus was wildly popular with those Jewish people. And the reason they did not ultimately accept him as the Messiah throughout Jewish history

is because he did not do what the expectation was that was clearly there in scripture. It clearly was. And we have the advantage of knowing something more than the very best of the former day saints in the New Testament did not know when he walked among them. So if a teacher said something like that, they'd be correct in thinking that they were expecting a political Messiah, but that wasn't what Jesus was going to do at his first coming. Those prophecies of Isaiah,

King of King and Lord of Lords and government upon his shoulder was an ultimately, that's a millennial expectation type of a thing. It's coming, but it wasn't the first coming. Yeah, right. Well, what you see in all of the messianic passages of Isaiah is this triumphant royal king messiah.

There is essentially no prophecy about the coming of the messiah that points to his death that was recognized by anyone in that age, even the apostles. Now, we always point robustly to Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about the suffering and death of the Messiah. But in all of Isaiah, that's the one thing that's not like the other. That's the one suffering Messiah passage when everything else is triumphal Messiah. Well, as it turns out, Isaiah 53 was not understood by Jews of that era as pointing to the Messiah. And Jews today do not look at Isaiah 53 as a Messianic scripture. It's called a suffering servant scripture, but Jews do not regard Isaiah 53 as Messianic in the way Christians have come to recognize it.

Now, the story of this and how Christianity in general comes to recognize it is in Acts chapter eight, when Philip meets the Ethiopian government official who's come to Jerusalem to worship. And that individual from Ethiopia, who, by the way, I point out was African and came as a African Jew to Jerusalem to worship, and then was on his way back to Africa, back to Ethiopia. He meets with Philip and the Ethiopian is puzzled as he's reading Isaiah. And he asks Philip, can you help me with this passage? And it says in Acts 8 that the passage he was reading was Isaiah 53. And the Ethiopian's question, he's Jewish.

He says to Philip, of whom doth the prophet speak? Of himself or some other man. But this very informed Isaiah reading, African Jewish government official does not understand that Isaiah 53 is about Messiah. It simply wasn't a Jewish tradition that Isaiah 53, about a servant who would suffer and die, was about the Messiah. It's only in the aftermath of Jesus' death that the early church came to understand that you have to look at Isaiah 53 and see Jesus in that scripture as well as all of the triumphant scriptures, which is what Philip pointed out to the Ethiopian. And that's why Jewish people today don't see Isaiah 53 as messianic,

whereas we as Christians do. But that's only with hindsight. Because all the New Testament saints were doing it in hindsight. It sounds like when you read the gospels, they're like, oh yeah, he did say something about this, that he would be killed and rise again. And it's like they're writing the gospels after this going, hey, wait a minute, he did talk about this. But I've often thought when we read about the triumphal entry, I've wondered what was going on in the Savior's mind is kind of like, yeah, thank you for this conditional support, but I'm not going to be what you're expecting this time around. I don't think he would have in any way been remonstrative of the crowds. It's hard to put yourself in the mind of anyone else,

and particularly to put yourself in the mind of God. But the way I might characterize that is that he may have thought, oh, what disappointment. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. That would not have been, oh, well, it serves them right for not understanding. But I'm sorry at this time that you're not going to have what you expect, but it will be coming. And that's exactly what I've thought. They're thinking, here comes, he's going to throw off the Romans. Well, not yet. There'll be another Rome to change. There'll be another Babylon to overcome.

Isn't that how it is in life as well? We have certain expectations on the Lord. And when he doesn't fulfill them, we get frustrated when he might say to us, If you're as old as I am and served your mission 25 years before the year 2000, you were conditioned back then to look to about the year 2000 as maybe when you ought to start thinking about the millennial glory arriving. And we're as far from 2000 now in the other direction as I was from it on my mission prior to 2000. And no, the millennium has not started. Jesus has not come back. And all those notions of like the six 1,000 year periods being six days, and then the 7,000 year being the Sabbath, which would be the millennium, which means Jesus must be coming about 2000. Well,

we've all experienced that that wasn't what maybe we had been taught somewhat incorrectly to expect. And now we just wait patiently for him to do his work. Well, Hank, what you said fits with Joseph and Mary, doesn't it? Their expectation, they thought they would be going back to Bethlehem and Joseph is sworn in a dream. We've got to go back to Nazareth. To me, what that whole story going back to Joseph and Mary and the way, at least that I understand the story being very different than tradition, not victims of circumstance, but anxiously engaged people coming to understand through revelation what they needed to do and being brave enough to go do it as a couple. What an example for every married couple, every young couple, just

go and do and serve and do what you need to do. But that's what life does to us. We'll do the best we can. And then something will broadside us through the intersection and change the direction of everything. And then what do you have to do? Start over and keep going. And that, again, is the story of Joseph and Mary and Jesus. Start over and keep going. Man, the manual is really waxing poetic this time around. They did a great job with this.

I want to read something from the manual, the second paragraph. Their hope began to be realized when Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. The mighty deliverer of Israel was born in a stable, not really a stable, and laid in a manger. It's okay. It's okay. But he wasn't just the deliverer of the ancient Israelites. He came to deliver you, to bear your grief, to carry your sorrows, to be bruised for your iniquities so that with his stripes, you can be healed. This is why Christmas is so full of joyful anticipation. Even today, the Messiah came

over 2000 years ago, and he continues to come into our lives whenever we seek him. What would you add to that, Jeff, for our listeners to come away with? The one thing about all of this is that it all wraps up together because we would have this same discussion and this same joy at Easter. We would have this same joy and the same discussion. If we were Jewish, we'd have it in the fall at the Feast of Tabernacles. We do it anyway because we have general conference in the spring and the fall. So we have the same joy at all these great occasions, but particularly Christmas is important because of its Advent aspect, the beginning of our hope, the birth of this great thing, the birth of the King of Israel. Yeah, that joy is first and foremost to Israel because Jesus

would be the King, the Messiah of Israel, but because everyone would become Israel, but because we would gather Israel from all nations. This joy is to all nations. And our combined message as Latter-day Saints is refining itself into a better understanding of that. One of the things that the spreading of the Christmas joy is an instrumental part of is in our message to all people as we gather Israel, all people. The Christmas message is just the beautiful annual way that we phrase what our entire life is about, which is that we are the servants of our King, Jesus Christ, the Master, and we bring that covenant to you with the message of his first coming and the expectation of his next coming. I testify that these things are true, that Christ was born

in the humblest of circumstances to Mary and her husband, a young couple who were valiant in their faith, and that he grew up to fulfill his destiny in saving us at his first coming and that he reigns over us now and will reign personally upon the earth in a day to come. That's what I always remember with Christmas because that's what the angels said. Unto you is born this day a Savior, Christ the King, the Lord. And this will be a joy to all people. It's my testimony that this is true and that he stands at the head of this church today. And that through that rock who is his present chief apostle, he reveals to us our joy and our assignment to spread this with all. May we have a Merry Christmas. May we spread this joy to our family, to all around us,

and radiate it so that everyone can see it would be my prayer for everyone. Wow. Merry Christmas to you. Merry Christmas, everybody. We want to thank Dr. Jeff Chadwick for being with us today and giving of his expertise. This has been so fun to see the real story of Christmas and to see it in this new way has been really fun for me. John, I know it's been great for you as well. Got a page of notes and it's beautiful.

And getting some of those interesting facts just makes it more beautiful and joyful. And as you said, Jeff, more admiration for Joseph and Mary. Yep. Hey, by the way, I would also say that I still love all the Christmas traditions and anything that I've said

that may conflict with what's a joy to you. Don't let that bother you at all. Keep your stables, right? I'm not an expert on Christmas, okay? I'm just a guy trying to understand it better. If anyone out there understands it differently from me, the Lord bless you. I'm completely satisfied with that. God bless us, everyone. We want to thank again, Dr. Jeff Chadwick for being with us today. We want to thank our executive producers, Steve and Shannon Sorenson and our sponsors, David and Verla Sorenson. We hope you'll join us next week.

We're starting a brand new year of the New Testament. We hope you'll all join us for that full year. Come join our team of Follow Him. We have an amazing production crew we want you to know about. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Jamie Nielsen, Will Stoughton, Crystal Roberts, and Ariel Cuadra. Thank you to our amazing production team.