Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah and welcome to this assembly and to the beginning of an entirely new preaching and teaching season. Last week I gave my last two sermons of the 9th Netsach series (2018-2019) and today we start the 10th called the Briah Chadashah or New Creation series which I am anticipating may take anything up to one or two years to complete. We have never done anything like this before so I feel a mixture of excitement and, to be perfectly honest, trepidation too. We're not only going to try and capture the entire scope of the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) but we're going to do so in a way that's never been attempted before. The subtitle of this series, The Complete Messianic Evangelical Phronemic New Testament Study may give you a clue. Let me clarify.

The day before yesterday Yahweh very clearly gave me a vision of what He wanted me to do and I have to say I was elated as revelation started cascading into my mind and spirit. This kind of experience is what I call a 'divine deposit', like an unopened package from heaven whose contents yet remain largely unknown which one must progressively open. Then yesterday I started panicking when I realised the scope of what He has called me to do. Today I will do my best to explain what is going to happen and why (though most of you here know, in outline). I want to go into more detail and lay out for our listeners and readers abroad what they can expect over, at least, the next 12 to 24 months.

We're going to study the entire New Testament, from beginning to end, in an entirely new way. We are going in search of the divine phronema [1] of 'mind of the Messianic Community' (Church) as it progressively developped beginning with the apostle Peter's earliest preaching as found in the Gospel of Mark [1][2] and ending with its most complex development in the easily misunderstood writings of Paul. You may recall I introduced you to this in the series of sermons, Ancient Connections which, if you missed, you might like to run through so that you know what we are pursuing. And though I have never known, until recently, how Yahweh wanted us to do this, I have sensed that something important was being gestated. You have probably noticed that my sermons have changed in content, approach and style over the past year, and especially since I came out of hospital at the beginning of the year. When your life is on the line it has the extraordinary effect of sharpening your mind and forcing you to focus on what really matters. My operation really threw me into greater dependence on Yahweh than ever before. It's been a really hard year, not just because of health issues (one of which the operation fixed) but financial difficulties, family tragedy, a huge spiritual shake-up by the Ruach (Spirit) as part of the judgment currently happening, culminating recently in the destruction of my work computer and the realisation that I had lost about a year's worth of unpublished work projects, and so on, which I don't currently have the heart to try and rewrite again. I have concluded that this is not the time to do so. This loss was a huge blow and I'll not pretend that everything hasn't got on top of me. I have more than once wanted to quit the ministry altogether in recent times.

And then, rescuing me from the doldrums, what Yahweh wanted me to do over the next year or so, became crystal clear. Two days' ago when this happened I was so excited I could barely contain myself, as I sensed a spiritual equipping for the task ahead. Though there have been thousands of little spiritual 'deposits', as it were, over the last few years, something 'big' happened last Tuesday. I got a spiritual map with the promise that the Heavenly Cartographer would fill out the details, in detail, as I followed Him in emunah (faith). Last night I started digging through some of my library books in preparation and felt very heavy indeed. I was not to use them, unless directed to under very specific circumstances. I was to go to Him, every week, and, I was told, He would supply me with the tools for the task as and when I needed them, as He has always done with my sermons and other writings. This would be an exercise in trusting because in my own strength this task, like so many others He has given me, would be utterly impossible for me to accomplish in the flesh.

My job this morning is to explain to you what's going to happen for you will all have a part to play in this and I'm going to do that by first of all giving you a set of questions and a then a challenge, the same questions I have been led to ask myself for months now and the same challenge that Yahweh gave to me personally. So without any further ado, let's plunge into the questions, which may seem a little odd to many of you, and perhaps even irrelevent, but by the time we have finished this morning you will hopefully know why they are important to the task that lies ahead. So here goes...

• 1. Why were the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - written 20 to 50 years after the death, resurrection and ascension of Messiah and not sooner? Why not right away or at least within a couple of years, granted that such projects can take time for a variety of reasons - the authors had professions (many were fishermen) and needed, in the absence of an anointing, to work to feed their families, they were (with the exception of Paul) uneducated, they were poor and paper was extremely expensive in those days, plus most of them had probably never written anything before save to maybe, like Matthew (Levi), keep simple tax records. What promped Matthew, Mark and Luke to write their Gospels somewhere between the 50's and 70's, and John possibly as late as 85 AD? Why then specifically? Bear in mind as you ask youself these questions, that the apostle Paul wrote Galatians somewhere between 48 and 57 AD, 1 & 2 Thessalonians around 51 to 52 AD, Philippians around 53-55 AD, 1 & 2 Corinithians around 55 AD, Romans around 57 AD, Colossians and Ephesians around 60 AD and 1 & 2 Timothy shortly before he was executed in 67 or 68 AD. In other words, with the exception of the letters to Timothy, Paul wrote all his letters in the decade of the 50's, so they're almost certainly the earliest known Christian/Messianic writings that we have. Other epistle writers, like James and Peter, almost certainly wrote in the early 60's, and Jude in the 60's or 70's. Luke wrote Acts in the 60's or 70's. John's letters, like his Gospel, were written in the 80's or 90's, with the Book of Revelation being written sometime around 95 AD, so they are the most recent books in the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) and therefore the whole Bible. My point is this: nothing was written down that we know of until at least 20 years after Yah'shua (Jesus) had gone to heaven with writing starting in earnest in the 50's when Paul starts getting active, followed by Mark (who recorded Peter's preaching material) and then Matthew and Luke.

• 2. My challenge to you, which is what Yahweh challenged me to do, is to formulate your Gospel message and salvation doctrine exclusively using the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), bearing in mind that the earliest of these you would likely have had in your hands had you been alive then would have been the Gospel of Mark which, as I have said, was almost certainly what Mark heard the apostle Peter preach. These were the notes made by Mark of Peter's preaching and teaching. This little booklet here, 61 pages long, is of the Gospel of Mark, containing 16 chapters. (For comparison purposes, the Book of Isaiah is 66 chapters long). What you would have heard Peter preaching for the first 20 or so years since's Yah'shua's (Jesus') departure, would likely have been contained in this tiny booklet. For 20 years. See if you can formulate your Gospel witness around this little booklet. Then you can include Matthew and Luke which were written just a few years later containing some extra details. In other words, for 20 or so years, the core message of salvation was to be found in the Synoptic Gospels making that our primary New Covenant material. Since Mark is what Peter was preaching, then this is what all the apostles would have been preaching. According to my calculation, the other Gospels lack only 58 verses found in the Gospel of Mark (less than 9 per cent of the whole book) who is otherwise fully reproduced by them. Over the next few weeks I hope, by the grace of Elohim (God), to make the Gospel of Mark become so alive and self-sufficient that you will see that all apostles, including Paul, were essentially preaching this for two decades at least.

Serious Bible students and scholars often like to read the Gospels using 'horizontal harmonies' like this book by Thomas Mumford, and this older one by W.J.Herschel (The Four Gospels in Parallel - 1911) where the four Gospels are arranged side-by-side. That way you can see what they have duplicated from Mark and other accounts they themselves remember or were told by other apostolic witnesses. Then there are those who like to combine the four Gospels together as in this volume by David Yarn (The Four Gospels as One) and this one by Enrico Galbiati (The Gospel of Jesus) which is certainly of interest from an historical perspective though I personally don't like this format as the four Gospels were designed for different audiences and are self-contained books all on their own. They tell the Good News from different perspectives.

Now it is the contention of a large number of scholars (a view I support) that Matthew and Luke used Mark's material as the core of their Gospels and then added the witness of other apostles to fill their stories out, as I said, and that they did so independently of one another. Once you have raided the Synoptic Gospels for your main witness, then you can study the Acts of the Apostles to get an overall picture of who did what, and what happened, after the resurrection at least up to about 63 AD when it abruptly ends, as though incomplete. You need Acts to tell you the story of the First Messianic Shavu'ot (Weeks, 'Pentecost') and how it transformed the first believers. When you have done this, read John's Gospel carefully (remember, it was written much, much later than the Synoptics and for a gnostic audience), then the epistles of James, Peter, Jude, and John followed by Hebrews, and then the Book of Revelation. Make notes of all the 'new' or 'extra' things you have learned in each of these stages which weren't present in the earlier volumes, particularly relating to the salvation message and doctrine in general. Then, and only then, read Paul's many letters.

So this is the order I'd like you to follow, imagining at each of the 8 stages that you are witnessing the Good News to unbelievers with only the materials you have covered - if you want to simplify the list and reduce it to 5 stages, you can treat the Synoptic Gospels as one unit, but these are the 8 steps we shall be taking:

• i. Gospel of Mark (Synoptic);
• ii. Gospel of Matthew (Synoptic);
• iii. Gospel of Luke (1 Luke) (Synoptic);
• iv. Acts of the Apostles (2 Luke);
• v. Gospel of John;
• vi. Epistles of James, Peter, Jude & Hebrews;
• vii. Book of Revelation & Letters of John; and
• viii. Epistles of Paul (leaving 1 & 2 Timothy to the very end)

If you systematically work your way through the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) in this way, reading it, as it were, with 'new eyes', side-stepping the artificial Protestant invention called the 'Romans Road' to begin with, taking your time to thoroughly absorb the Gospels, and not jumping ahead of the schedule, I think you will be pleasantly surprised and find yourself connecting to the original phronema of our forefathers in the faith. You will find them a very different species to the modern Western fundamentalist Protestant who has been 'saved' by repeating a 5 minute-long 'sinner's prayer' written on a Hallmark Card. Such a person would never have sat through a sermon by one of the apostles, let alone one of the great preachers of the Great Awakening like George Whitfield or Charles Wesley because people aren'r called to repentance any longer. Just as a truly repentant adulterer doesn't repeat what's on a Hallmark Card to reconcile with his or her spouse, neither can a sinner approach a holy Elohim (God) with such flippancy and such condempt of grace. Protestantism tends to put Paul first, making the Gospel top-heavy, and in consequence gets a distorted view of the Besorah (Gospel). Make this your goal this autumn/fall and winter and then, Yah willing, in the spring we will return refreshed with, I hope, a new perspective. Though we shall be looking at the Pauline Epistles last of all, we shall be looking at them in great depth but with the correct phronema.

What I plan to do over the next 6-7 months, between next Sabbath and the New Year (25 March 2020), is to work our way through this sequence using the New King James Version (NKJV) and the Kingdom New Testament (KNT). You have all got copies of the NKJV as well as the Halleluyah Scriptures (or, if you have copies of the Institute for Scripture Research version you can use that as the two are virtually identical). You should have the NKJV and HB/ISRV side by side so that you can get a Protestant and Messianic perspective. And if you're a budding theologian and teacher, and want to use other versions too (if you have the time and inclination - I know some of you like other translations like the Amplified Version), feel free to use them too. But even if you only use the two versions which we have available in MLT, you will find it a very instructive, rewarding experience. If one day some generous soul buys us a box of N.T.Wright's translation, that would be a fantastic addition, because his version is both scholarly and highly readable.

Our goal, however, if not only to instruct you but to connect you ever deeper to the Ruach (Spirit) and to prepare you for witness. I doubt if this system has ever been followed before. The rule is that you will not be allowed to quote any of the Scriptures ahead of schedule in the formulation of your Gospel message, so, for example, no quoting or referring to anything Paul says until we get to his epistles! You will soon discover where your biases lie and how you have been programmed to think denominationally. We have all of us been spiritually birthed in 20th and 21st century mindsets which have 2,000 years of theological evolution behind them. So in the first instance, you will only be allowed to use Mark! I'm not saying, of course, that you're not allowed to read the rest of the New Testament in your private devotionals, but for the purpose of this weekly study, you won't be allowed to cite them until we get to them! You will find this a very stimulating and challenging discipline.

We won't remotely get through everything by Aviv 1 but I would at least like to get as far as the end of the Gospel of John by the biblical New Year, though I think that's ambitious. We're going to be flexible and simply let the Ruach (Spirit) guide us. We may have to make Tanakh (Old Testament) detours from time to time so what we're clear what the theological matrix of the first believers was. Remember, only the Tanakh (Old Testament) was canonical scripture in the first century. That was the only 'Bible' they knew. Moreover, they were only familiar with the dominant theological interpretations of the Tanakh (Old Testament) that prevailed in the first century much of which was wrong because it was laced with human tradition.

So that's quite a lot of material to cover, and if we don't succeed, that's fine too. You, of course, to get the maximum out of this, will need to do your homework by reading the allotted material each week, preferably a little bit every day, and making notes, which I am sure most of you are doing already in your daily Scripture reading. No one will press you or check up on you as this isn't a 'school' though obviously the more you time invest into this, the more you'll get out of it. You all have notebooks that were given you a couple of years ago - if you need more, just ask, as we have plenty for the MLT congregation. Like I said, you can, of course, refer to any part of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and I recommend you neatly mark your Bibles so that you have materials to equip you for your own evangelism. My plan, if all goes according to schedule, is to produce a systematic, expositional New Testament course at the end of the day which will be available on the website in addition to the Foundational Studies which is topically-arranged (and which needs revising still).

So that is the plan. How we do this practically will have to be developped as we go along. Our goal is not to minutely dissect every verse but to get the 'general sense' or 'overall message' though I would encourage you to do a detailed study if you are able to...so long as you don't lose the focus. As Messianic Evangelicals we like to strike a balance between the systematic-expositional and topical approaches as a general rule. Rosh Chodesh messages will be completely separate from this study and proceed as usual as will the regular sabbath messages which don't fall on Gregorian weekends.

Next week we will introduce the Gospel of Mark. For me this is personally symbolic as our very first teaching material [1] was about this book which was inspired by Anglican theologian, Michael Green, whose classes at Oxford I attended. He was a well-known apologist and wrote over 50 books, a man I had the highest regard for. He sadly died this year on 6 February round about the time I was coming out of hospital after my heart surgery. I don't think we will have our first study this Sunday as there isn't enough time to prepare so it will be on 18 August, Yah willing. Next Sabbath we are expecting power cuts here so it will be impossible to broadcast in any case, unless we meet in the afternoon. Also please note that when the luni-solar sabbath falls on a Roman Saturday (7 September here), we will have our study that month on Saturdays and not the regular Sundays. We look forward to seeing as many of you as are able to join us in a week-and-a-half! Try, if you can manage, to get through the first two chapters of Mark's Gospel, and to spend time in contemplation. May it be, as it is written, that Yahweh "will light in your heart the lamp of understanding, which shall not be put out" (2 Esdras 14:25, NRSV) and so equip you to be the kind of witness that He desires in these the very latter days and may we all be the instruments of saving many souls and thus bring Him much glory like the Whitfields and Wesleys of old is my prayer in Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name. Amen.

Endnotes