Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. I had such a nice weekend in Indiana at my friend Logan's place. We only left his apartment twice for food and once for church. The rest of the time we just sat around and watched football, both college and pro. It was the relaxing, completely stress free weekend I needed. I have not had a single weekend since I got back to St. Louis that I didn't have to work, and do homework, and do field work church stuff. It just so happened that this weekend was the right one to leave too because there were two major events on campus and they both had things go wrong. Apparently guys were frantically trying to get all the corrections done. So if I had been here this weekend, I would have felt compelled to work way to many hours Friday night and all day Saturday. I can't tell them no for some strange reason, and they know that so when they need something done they come to me. So I was more than happy to be away from campus, out of town where they could not contact me even if they wanted to. I got to sit through church with no duties or responsibilities, and got a lot of great sleep. Anyway, all of this babbling adds up to it was a great weekend and a much needed rest.
This morning I went to breakfast with a couple friends at a little mom and pop diner. It was great food and a good way to start my day. Then after my first class and chapel I spent almost two hours scrubbing and deep cleaning the kitchenette in the dorm. Since we have all 54 guys living in the dorms in one dorm building now, things get messier faster. The mini kitchenette was disgusting and when warned that it would be taken away, it only got messier rather than cleaned up. So I threw away all dirty dishes, utensils, silverware, and anything at all that was in the cupboards. The clean dishes and stuff that could be reused, I took to the Re-Sell It Shop on campus. Then I scrubbed with all the elbow grease I could muster, the cupboards (inside walls, shelves, outside walls and doors), the drawers (both inside and underneath the drawers), the outside of the fridge, the shelves, the microwaves, and everything in there. I was dripping with sweat, but it is night and day difference. Now with it being completely empty and the cleanest it has been in a long time, my boss is going to send an email warning the students that it had better stay that clean. That has been my day so far.
We worked through a really fascinating point (at least to me anyway), in my first class this morning. The class is on the Bible in the Early Church and is my favorite class this quarter oddly enough. We are looking at how the "new" Christians and early church fathers used the Old Testament with the new fulfillment of Jesus. We look at how manuscripts we written, copied, and used, and then today we began our discussion on the canonizing of the Bible. In simple terms how we came up with the 66 books of the Bible that we have today. The point I want to share with you is on the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are several versions of a codex (ancient form of a notebook) that include all four Gospels together. Now there is a little difference in their sequence. The east uses the order of Matthew, John, Luke, Mark. The west uses the order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Our Bible comes from the west's version obviously and this is the reason our four Gospels are in the order they are in. However, no one is really sure why or how either one of those orders came about. However, the important point I want to make is that every time these codexes are titled in the Greek, they do so in a significant way. The codex would use the Greek work for "good news", "good message", or as we translate it "gospel". However, the important part is that the Greek word for good news or gospel is singular. The ONE good news, the ONE good message, the ONE gospel. Then when it came to the four books, they would title these books, The Gospel according to Matthew, The Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke, the Gospel according to John. The point that these editors of these codexes wanted to get across is that there is only one Gospel message. There may be four books that give account to Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, but there is only ONE gospel message. The ESV does a good job of bringing this across by using these titles at the beginning of the book. If you have an ESV translation of the Bible, open to the beginning of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John and you should see the title, "The Gospel according to Matthew, or Mark, etc." That is because even though we have four separate accounts of the Gospel message, there is only ONE Gospel message. The reason we say we have four Gospels, is because the term Gospel began to be used for the genre of these books rather than the title of the four together. So it is not wrong to say the four gospels, but it expresses a better message to say the Gospel, the ONE Gospel, according to these four accounts. This way we do not have to stress over slight details that may not exactly line up between the four books, because they are all making up the ONE Gospel message. We truly do believe in the One True Gospel message that Jesus Christ, the Son of God took on flesh, lived a life in this world teaching, preaching, and healing, before dying on the cross to pay for all the sin of mankind, only to rise again to defeat all enemies of God once and for all. This is the ONE Gospel message that all four accounts testify to and it is the ONE Gospel message we teach and preach as the church. So hopefully that is as interesting to you as it was to me, if not at least now you know a fun fact about the title of each Gospel.
Praise God for the ONE Gospel message we have, taught to us through the four accounts of the Gospel books, so that through through the Holy Spirit we may believe that ONE Gospel message of Jesus Christ our Lord.
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