G'day, and welcome to our first ever bonus episode of stories of a faithful God.

It's really exciting.

We're going to be answering some questions

today and looking at some things that have come up in Exodus, and I'm particularly

excited because we also have our first ever guest, Andy Martin.

G'day, Andy.

Hi, Dave. You can tell I'm feeling slightly intimidated.

That's scary to be the first ever guest.

Have you ever done a podcast before?

No.

Ok, well, me either.

And I've never interviewed anyone on a podcast

before, so we're both working it out as we go along.

Andy is the minister at my church, and you've got a different accent to me, don't you, Andy,

can you give us a bit of background to where you're from?

Yes. Yeah. I was born in London and grew up in a bit of.

Bit of time in Kenya and then in the UK.

Okay. And now you're in Australia.

What happened there?

Yes. So I had the good fortune to marry an Aussie girl from Orange, and two years ago,

we thought we'd make the move over, come and live in Australia for a bit and give our two

girls a taste of what it means to be an Aussie.

Fantastic.

There are plenty of people in church who just

love listening to your sermons.

Yes, because of the Bible stuff, but also

because of your accent.

But you keep pointing us to God, so that's

really good.

Thank you very much for coming on.

And we're going to start with a question that's been sent in by Becky.

Thank you so much for sending it in, Becky.

Becky wanted to know some more information

about the gospel writers.

Who are they?

Where have they come from? Can we trust them?

Has anyone else told us about them so that we can have a bit more information?

Do you want to kick us off with some things there?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I guess, first of all, this is such an

important question, isn't it? So, Becky, thanks for asking this question.

The gospels are our primary source for knowing who Jesus is.

And so I guess we've got to ask that kind of question because we need to know that what we

read in the gospels is true and it tells us the true things that Jesus said and did so

that we can know Jesus.

So that's why it's so important.

We've got four, haven't we? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

And two of the writers give us a really specific answer to how they wrote it, what

they were doing.

So at the beginning of Luke's gospel, Luke

says very clearly, he tracked down eyewitness eyewitnesses to what Jesus did and said,

because he wanted his readers to be absolutely sure that what they were reading was the

truth.

And actually, that gives us a window into what

the four gospel writers were doing.

Three of them were eyewitnesses, Matthew, Mark

and John.

And they saw Jesus in action.

They heard him, and they were so convinced by what Jesus said and did, they came to believe

that he really is the son of God, the eternal word of God, and that they wanted to follow

him.

And John tells us at the end of his gospel,

again, that he wrote this all down so we could know the truth about Jesus and follow him,

too.

Yeah. It's so good, isn't it, that they've left this legacy for us as they grew

older.

They knew that we needed it, that they

wouldn't be around for so long.

So you've got Matthew, who's one of the

disciples of Jesus.

John, also one of the disciples of Jesus.

One of the really close disciples.

He had his twelve, obviously, but there were

the three, weren't there, that sometimes Jesus wandered away with.

And John was part of that.

Mark.

You said Mark was an eyewitness, Mark, yes.

It's a little bit trickier with Mark.

So many folk think that there's a young man

mentioned in Mark's gospel who is Mark himself.

When Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane, when he's arrested, this young man is

described as running away.

He was there with Jesus disciples, but he runs

away, leaving his cloak in the hands of a soldier.

But we do have a letter from a guy called Polycarp, who he was writing around really

just after the turn of the first century.

Polycarp, we think, knew John the apostle

himself.

And he wrote a letter talking about the four

gospels in a way that suggested these gospels had been accepted as reliable and authentic

very early on.

And he says in them that Mark wrote down

Peter's account.

So actually, we think that in Mark's gospel,

we have Peter's eyewitness account written down by Mark to preserve it for us through the

ages.

I love just in what you've said about all these different people, we've got

everything that we might want say in a court of law, so we've got eyewitnesses.

We've got people who spoke to the eyewitnesses and checked what they said.

So Luke went around.

He didn't see it himself, but he wanted to be

confident and he wanted other people to be confident.

And then as the generations went on, you start to get people, you know, those generation die,

but you've got someone like Polycarp who says, no, no, I can still tell you the connection

for these people.

And so we've got that ongoing connection, and

so we have a legacy that can be trusted, not just from one person, but from a bunch of

people.

And we can say, yes, this really is the Jesus

who walked on earth.

Isn't that exciting?

It's incredibly exciting.

And perhaps one thing to add to that is that

as you read the gospels, and scholars have done lots of analysis on this, too, there's a

chap in particular called Richard Baucum at Cambridge in the UK, wrote a book called Jesus

and the Eyewitnesses.

And he looked at names that crop up in the

gospels.

He looks at places, and all of this, he says,

fits exactly with that first century palestinian context.

So the names are the right kind of names you'd have expected for that time.

Details that are thrown in are precisely the kind of details you'd expect from an

eyewitness.

And in fact, he suggests that those people who

are named specifically in the gospel accounts are named because they were some of the

eyewitnesses that could back up what the gospel writers were writing as well.

So that if you heard Peter or sort of John or Matthew later on talking about these things,

you could have tracked down Rufus, let's say, or Alexander, other folk mentioned by name in

the Gospels.

So again, all of that gives us confidence that

this really is eyewitness testimony to the events, the words, the deeds of Jesus.

Oh, that's fantastic.

Can I. I wanted to say thank you.

Thanks again, Becky, for sending in that question.

Hope it's helpful.

If there are other questions, keep sending

them in.

Can I change track a little bit here?

In the episode that we released earlier this week, we looked at Moses and Moses meeting

God, and Moses is not in those chapters, at least.

Moses is not the great man that we sometimes think of him as.

In fact, he kind of begs God not to make him go back to Egypt and lead the people out.

And it got me thinking about leadership and church leadership and christian leadership.

You're a church minister, Andy.

Can you give us some insight when you read

those sort of things about Moses, what does that make you think, make you feel about

church leadership and your own leadership?

Yeah. Thanks, Dave. And thanks, whoever might have asked that question.

It's.

I think many of us who are in positions of church leadership find Moses a really, a

really helpful character to think about.

I all too often feel inadequate to the task.

It's hard and in Moses, I see someone who says he couldn't speak very well, he didn't want to

do it, and yet God still used him to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt.

So I take great confidence that I don't need to be an expert at everything.

I'm not the one really who is responsible ultimately for the growth of God's church.

I trust God to be at work when I do things as best I can, in my weakness, in my inadequacy.

I trust God to be at work by his spirit and through his word.

And I guess lots of us, maybe you've experienced some of this yourself, but lots of

us can expect our church leaders to be perfect, to have everything sorted, to do

everything some churches do.

All the work seems to be done by the minister.

But actually a really healthy view of leadership is that we human leaders are, we're

weak, we don't have all the answers.

There's lots that we struggle with and it can

be tiring and exhausting work.

But it's God's church and it's God who builds

his church, and he does it using weakness.

Sinful people like me.

Yeah, it's funny, I've actually made that mistake both with myself and with other

people.

So with myself, I've sometimes gone into a

ministry thinking I am great, I am awesome, I'm going to change the world.

And God very quickly reminds me that I am completely incapable of doing that.

But yeah, the same comfort of saying, well, actually it's not about me, it's about God.

But I've also made that mistake with other church leaders where I think I've put them up

on a pedestal and then been surprised when they haven't been as perfect as I've wanted

them to be.

And God's not shocked by that.

He knows they're not perfect.

He doesn't expect them to be perfect.

The only person who was shocked was me.

And so I've got to keep reminding myself who's

God and who's doing God's work, but, but is not actually God themselves and to be a bit

generous with other people and with myself as well.

So, yeah, that really struck me again as I read about Moses.

I also said in the last podcast that we do a bit of explanation about the name Yahweh.

We talked about how that is related to the name I am or he is.

It usually gets translated in our bibles in Lord in capital letters.

Do you want to give us a bit of the history of how we've ended up with that as the

translation.

I'll certainly do my best.

Yes.

So, way back, I think it's exodus, chapter three around there, isn't it?

God tells Moses his name in the Hebrew, I am who I am.

Just saying, I could never have said those hebrew words.

So thank you very much for saying that.

Thank you.

A pleasure.

The he is bit is yhya.

And that became sort of linked in with his

name, yahweh.

It was the vowels.

Y hwh.

Sorry, not the vowels, the consonants.

Consonants, y hwh.

But for the jewish people, God himself is so

holy and his name represents him, and so they treated God's name as holy.

So they didn't want to actually say the name Yahweh.

They didn't even want to write it.

Now, hebrew letters, hebrew words are made up

of consonants and then the vowels are actually just little dots and dashes above or below the

consonants.

And so what they did was they used those four

consonants and they just didn't write in the Dots, the vowels, so that essentially,

whenever God's name was written in Hebrew, it was the y h wh down the track.

What happened was they wanted to put in some vowels and they used the vowels from a

different HebRew word, adonai, which means lord.

And so at the consonants of Yahweh, you have the vowels of AdOnai.

And that then was.

So that was God's name in the Bible, but it

wasn't actually pronounced Yahweh.

They said Adonai every time that comes up in

the Hebrew.

That's where we've translated it as Lord in

capital letters.

Interestingly enough, for some early readers

of the Bible, not sure when this really started, but if you take those consonants and

add the vows from Adonai, you get what people read as Jehovah.

So Jehovah is actually a kind of made up name that's not really in the Bible, and it was

never God's name.

It's the consonants of Yahweh with the vows of

Adonai.

Yeah. I actually met some people who said, oh, no, your Bible is lying to you

because it doesn't have this word Jehovah in it.

But actually, that was never how it was meant to be pronounced, was it?

Hmm.

I guess it's interesting.

They were so careful, whether they were right

or wrong in using, mixing up those words and things.

They were so careful to honour God's name, weren't they?

They didn't want to bring it into disrepute.

Yeah.

It is really important, isn't it? I think so.

Often I hear people, and many christians just using the phrase something like, oh, my God.

We've tried to teach our girls not to speak of God like that, but to treat his name with

honour.

And I think that comes in when Jesus teaches

us the Lord's prayer, doesn't it? Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

And that's not a prayer to say, God, make yourself more holy, because God couldn't be

any more holy.

He is already holiness itself, perfection

itself.

It's a prayer that people would treat God

himself and God's name with respect and with love.

So while we don't avoid naming God or speaking of God like as God, we do want to treat him

with honour and love and adoration and treat his name with respect.

It's funny how ideas get attached to names, isn't it?

Because I could throw out a few names and you'd immediately have some sort of response

or emotional connection.

So if I throw out the name Adolf Hitler,

you're going to think of a whole series of things.

If I throw out the name Abraham Lincoln, you're going to think of a whole bunch of

different things, aren't you? So names carry this meaning.

We associate a whole lot of things with a name.

I was teaching a group of four year olds once and I said, hey, does anyone know what the

name Jesus means? It was close to Christmas and I just wanted to

see if anyone knew.

And a girl threw up her hand and she said, oh

yeah, that's what you say when you're really angry, because that's how she'd heard the name

Jesus.

Not with respect and honour, but just like a

swear word, which actually means that's how she thought about Jesus.

We want to treat God as holy and honourable and so use his name in that way as well.

Well, Dave, thanks for inviting me on to answer, try and answer some questions.

And Becky and others, thanks for your questions.

Dave, can I, just as we draw things to a close, ask you how you're finding podcasting.

So I know this is a new venture for you, a new project.

How are you finding podcasting?

Yeah, look, I'm loving it.

It's lots of fun.

No one ever interrupts me.

No, but it's been really exciting to be able

to do a deep dive into God's word and share that with other people, to see people start to

come on board and be listening and be helped by it.

So that's been heaps of fun.

One of the great things is seeing that grow

all around the world as well, because the Internet can reach anywhere.

Well, lots of places.

There have been some hard things.

So, you know, I'm used to working in churches and schools and so seeing people face to face,

that's been a little strange.

Just sort of talking into a microphone and

knowing that there are people out there but not meeting them.

But it has been.

Yeah, it's been exciting to be able to share

God's word with people.

Well, Dave, as we finish, then perhaps I could just encourage our listeners again to

consider giving, to support Dave in this project.

It is an exciting project.

I know that I've really enjoyed listening, and

my girls have enjoyed listening, too.

And it does take effort and it does take

financial support as well.

So if people wanted to give, and let me

encourage you to do that, Dave, how can people give?

Well, they can give on faithfulgod.net, comma, on the website faithfulgod.net, comma.

There's even a link in the show notes.

Thanks for mentioning that.

Yeah, I want to be able to keep doing this and keep sharing this with people.

So that's really helpful.

Andy, thank you so much for coming on the

show, for being our first ever guest.

We may do more of these bonus episodes in the

future.

If you have questions, if things come up in

our podcast, but also if there are other things that you're thinking about and that

you're struggling with, send them in and we'd love to talk about them.

Thanks, everyone.

See you later.

Thanks, Dave.