2 Samuel Introduction

We study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel.

We do have extra copies.

If you would like one to follow along, just raise your hand up real high.

Make sure that uh somebody sees you and they'll they'll get uh get to you as uh soon as they can.

You can also, if you prefer, to uh look online.

Uh slide disabled, slide slide disabled disabled for okay.

No.

All right, I'm trying to read the instructions here on this device.

I'm not doing very well.

Show.

Okay, there we go.

All right, awesome.

There's the password, is what I was trying to go for.

You'll be running the slides up there, okay?

So there's the password up on the screen, I believe, and uh it's Jabesh Gilead.

We like to, you know, it could have been Smith or something like that, but we just like to make it as hard as we can for you.

Struggle a little bit.

Uh 2 Samuel, that's where we're gonna be.

And uh the slide should say 2 Samuel, the story of unlikely redemption.

Uh, that's because the more I read the Bible, the more I study the Bible, the more my mind is blown at how unlikely it would be that God would choose us, that he would call us, that he would, you know, uh put us in play, that would be called us to join him in his mission.

That's just mind-blowing the more I read, and the more we read 2 Samuel, we'll see it even more so.

Um what an amazing book.

Action packed.

I mean, I don't know if you're ready for that.

Overflowing with espionage.

Anybody like espionage?

Yeah, just a couple of you do, okay.

Um lots of power struggles, epic battles, rising, falling heroes, tsunami-sized social and cultural shifts, uh, family betrayal, family dysfunction.

Nobody here knows anything about that.

Unfettered human passion, uh, man, adultery, murder, revenge, there's all of that, so buckle up.

We are about to enter a really wild book that has, it's just overflowing with story after story after story of how unlikely it is that God would set his love on us and choose uh to redeem people like us.

Before we start, I'm gonna borrow.

I I listen to a lot of UK preachers when I'm preparing my sermons and stuff like that.

And there's one one young fellow over there, I think he's younger than me, sounds like he is anyway, um, who did a little thing where he did a little test.

He was trying to test and see, like, all right, well, how does a congregation, what does the congregation know about 2 Samuel?

So I'm gonna just run a list of names.

I'm not gonna put them up the screen, I'm just gonna run a list of names.

And with cheers or jeers, you tell me what you whether what your image is of that particular person.

Ready?

Here we go.

Saul.

Okay.

Jonathan.

That's nice.

We got a little going back and forth there.

The Philistines.

Mephibosheth.

I hear a lot of people scratching their heads.

Yeah.

Um, Absalom.

Joab?

Uncertain.

Okay.

I got that.

Nathan.

That's right, that's good.

Yeah, that's good, you guys.

Amnon.

Not sure.

Bathsheba.

All right now, here's a big trick question.

David.

You guys are torn a little.

I could tell on that one.

That was a little hard, wasn't it?

Well, look, it's not as uh simple, is it, as cheers and jeers.

Uh the one thing that's obvious, even as we read that list and respond to what little we know, and some of us have forgotten most of what we know about some of these names, but as we go through 2 Samuel, what we'll continue to see is that no matter who we're reading about, we all need redemption.

We all need God's redeeming work in our lives.

At no other time that I've read about in history uh uh would this, you know, would you see it so clearly here 3,000 years ago, or would you see it so clearly in our own time as well?

I need this.

I need the redeeming power of God in my life.

So here's the map.

Uh this is what was going on in the world at the time of these events.

By the way, today we're just doing, we're just doing an introduction.

I I my my job today is to whet your appetite for reading this book yourself.

And uh uh when I usually at the end of a message say, read ahead, uh you'll be able to read all.

I'm gonna read one verse, but then you're gonna be able to read the entire book all by yourself, and and we'll just start this way.

What was going on in the world during the time of the there?

There's the kingdom of Israel as Saul had it.

Uh as you see, it's mostly kind of purple, and um uh so Israel is is uh taking up that space there.

And then you have the Philistine, five Philistine cities that are very prominent in the lower left part of the uh uh of the map up there, and that gives just a little bit of an idea.

The rest of the world is going through a lot of changes.

Uh we're transitioning now.

This is basically what we uh would have called, if you're if you're studying world history anyway, the Iron Age.

It's the beginning of the Iron Age.

The Iron Age in the ancient Near East, anyway, ran from about 1200 BC to about 600 BC.

Okay, so now you know something about the Iron Age, okay?

Preceding the Iron Age was the Bronze Age.

Yeah, that's good.

And preceding that was the Stone Age.

That's right.

So we have stone, bronze, iron.

And you can kind of get an idea just by starting to think about that, that maybe that had something to do with their technology.

Maybe it had something to do with their uh farming tools or something to do with their weaponry as a, you know, if they were a warring nation or whatever.

And that's exactly right.

Uh the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, please don't fall asleep.

Um, the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age came as a result of a lack, a scarcity, if you will, of copper and tin.

They had run out of those softer metals that they had learned how to manipulate.

And they needed something else.

And so it was out of their need that they had to turn to other metals.

And the the one one writer describes it this way.

I'll just read this paragraph.

He says, this shortage likely caused people to experiment with other metals.

Iron was more common than copper and tin.

But it had a much higher melting point than bronze.

That meant they couldn't cast tools with iron in the same way.

By heating the iron, however, they could make it softer and then use hammers to shape it.

You can kind of see that, right?

Over time, people developed ways to increase the temperature of furnaces by using bellows to pump in oxygen and allowed people to cast objects out of iron, and eventually carbon was added to produce steel.

Additionally, they discovered that iron tools could be sharpened when they lost their edge rather than needing to be replaced as bronze tools were.

And so it was that the Bronze Age slowly gave way to the iron age.

It didn't all happen at once in one part of the world, all at one time.

It happened all uh sort of over time.

But it was because of this scarcity of copper and tin.

People had to turn to something else.

And as they did what an interesting metaphor that out of need, they turned to something else.

Uh interesting metaphor for our own situation so often uh with God.

When we run out of our resources, it seems like then we turn.

Seems like then we're desperate enough.

Because the kingdom of God is for the desperate.

Is that you?

Hope you're desperate enough and understand your desperation enough to know that it's Him you need.

His kingdom, he as your king.

The time period of the monarchy, I'll put this timeline up on the screen for you.

And uh you'll see this is kind of easy to see as well.

Proceeding uh one and two Samuel, we see the events they describe um uh following on the heels of a time period of the judges.

All right, so the blue up there, the blue stripe up there is the period of the kings, basically 1050 to uh 586.

Uh Saul will be the first of the kings, uh, David the second, and that's the the focus of 2 Samuel will most of uh King David's uh uh reign in 2 Samuel.

But it runs all the way up to 586.

What you have in 722, which is up there as well, is you have the carrying away of the ten northern tribes, the Assyrians come in.

And they literally carry, and those are typically, some people call them the lost tribes of Israel.

They're not really lost to God, he knows right where they were.

Um but they were carried away.

Uh some of them later uh migrated back to that region.

Um, but 722 was that time, and then 586 is when the southern kingdom, as it's called, um, uh down in called Judah, and uh this was uh the area where David, as a 40 years as king, spent most of his time as king, about 33 of those years.

But 586 is when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians came and carried away the southern kingdom.

So lots is changing a lot is changing, but right now we're in the time period of the kings, and it was preceded by this time period of the judges.

Now, Judges, a book which we've studied, I uh it was the first book we studied at the village chapel, and then we studied it again not too long ago.

Uh, it closes out with this sort of summary statement that is repeated throughout the book of Judges.

It goes just like this In those days, the days of the Judges, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did that which was right in their own eyes.

On a surface reading, some might say, Oh, well, awesome, everybody got to do whatever they wanted.

But it's actually an assessment of a of a really uh confused, chaotic time.

A time where people had fallen away from the Lord and gone in pursuit of idols, a time when uh there was uh uh fra they were a fractured people.

Uh no consensus, no communal norms for morality or ethics.

They were shifting in the quicksand of societal relativism.

There was spiritual confusion, rampant idolatry, and undiscerning acceptance of self-destructive behavior in Israel at that time.

Why?

Because everyone's just doing whatever they think is right.

That kind of relativism leads to decline.

And the problem is, as Oz Guinness points out in his book of Free People's Suicide, freedom is a beautiful thing when we typically think of that.

But what is freedom's greatest enemy?

And Oz points out that it is freedom is freedom's greatest enemy.

Because we can't bear the weight, and when we typically think of freedom, we think typically think of freedom to do whatever I want to do.

In other words, autonomy.

And we can't really bear that weight, and yet all day long, every single song, every single movie, every single TV show, it's all programming us to think of how life would be great if I were king.

If you were king.

And the Bible is like a beautiful mirror, it holds it up to us to see that none of us really can bear the weight of being king.

What we need is not King Saul and not even King David.

What we need is King Jesus.

Oh, I heard some amends.

Um somebody let the Pentecostals in.

All right, good.

I'm glad you're here.

We're gonna stir it up a little bit and we're gonna continue, even through, you know, as we go through, and I gotta tell you, this book is is it's gonna be shocking to some of you as we read it.

As a matter of fact, let's take a look at the first verse.

Ready?

It came about after the death of Saul, and that's how 1 Samuel closes.

2 Samuel opens up saying, after that, when David had returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, that David remained two days in Ziklag.

Well, there you go.

It starts off, and that's all we're gonna read for today, by the way, fade to black, okay?

So this is just an introduction, and I hope that whatever you just read and whatever you just heard there at least draws you in to want to, you know, read some for yourself and read ahead a little bit, but this is a chaotic time.

Um there is no king still.

There were in between.

There was Saul, but he turned out to be not such a great king.

Um, David's been on the run for who knows how long.

I looked it up and tried to find it.

None of the Bible scholars seem to want to nail it down.

It could be seven, it could be ten years.

He's on the run from Saul who wants to kill him.

And while David has had a couple opportunities to kill Saul, he doesn't do it because he views him as God's anointed.

That's an interesting thing because all of David's men in the cave, they said, Get him, take him now, this is it.

And David said, No, I won't touch him.

He's God's anointed.

Um, strange thinking, isn't it?

Unlikely in a lot of ways, when you know that is the guy who wants to kill you.

And yet David doesn't kill him.

It's not that David was opposed to killing, he was a man of battle.

Um, but it's that he saw Saul as the Lord's anointed, and he wasn't to do that.

And you'll see, even in this first chapter, some of that's gonna come uh to the foreground.

What was his thinking?

Well, um, Samuel, who wrote it?

That's another great question, you know?

And when was it written?

Well, we we don't really know a lot of this stuff.

It doesn't open up saying, I Paul, to you, young Timothy.

It's not like the New Testament where we have some clarity on who the writer is.

Some would say, well, Samuel wrote it, but the only problem is it records his death.

And I don't think he wrote from, oh, I forgot to tell you.

You know, it's not that so there seems to be maybe a couple of people involved, and maybe it's an edited text, an ancient edited text, and that's okay.

That's good.

God's still supervising and super uh you know, superintending the whole thing to be the way he wanted it to be.

Perhaps a collection of writers like Samuel, maybe along with uh um uh Gad and Nathan, who are also prophets, whatever the case, these books were likely assembled more in an editorial fashion, I would suggest, and then handed down along the lines.

Some people you probably know that in the Jewish Bibles, 1st and 2 Samuel are not 1 and 2 Samuel, they're just Samuel.

Um and in pre-Septuagent, that is uh um, so the Hebrew Bible was in Hebrew, of course, and then along about 250 BC, some Jewish scholars got together and translated it into Greek.

And that's called the Septuagint, and some of your Bibles in the margin will say LXX.

That's a reference to the to the uh to the to the 70 scholars that actually worked on that Greek translation of the Old Testament.

So, how do we get one and two Samuel instead of the Jewish Bible, which is just Samuel?

Well, guess what?

When you translate Hebrew into Greek, it takes more letters and more volume, and therefore one scroll wouldn't hold all of Samuel.

And so it became scroll one and scroll two of Samuel.

It's kind of like when your grandmother split the ham and cooked it in two pots because the ham was too big.

And then your mom learned that, oh, we we should always cook a ham in two pots.

And then you're cooking that ham in two pots as well, and so it just gets handed down like that, and and uh they just needed more room in the scroll as they went from Hebrew to Greek, as one Samuel opens, the people of Israel cried out to God for a king, just like, because they wanted to be just like all the other nations, which has been one of our problems for a long time.

We want to be just like everybody else, and that gets us in trouble often.

Doesn't mean everything's rotten in the world, it just means that when we want to displace God from being in charge of our lives, which is what the children of Israel were basically saying, we want a human king.

We don't want you to be our king, we want a human king.

So we want you to be marginalized, and we want a human person to be at the center and to have the final say.

And God warned them that that wouldn't go well.

They persisted anyway.

God finally gave them what they wanted in the person of King Saul.

That, as I said, did not go well.

Coincident with the establishment of the monarchy in Israel, we also see the rise of another group of people that we read about throughout the Old Testament called the prophets in a more formal way.

It's an office, uh, more than just Moses was a prophet.

Well, he was, that's true.

He had that gift of being able to prophesy and speak on behalf of God and point out sin and all that sort of thing.

But as an office, it really starts to rise with Samuel, who a lot of Bible scholars think was the last of the judges and the first of the prophets.

For you Bible trivia nerds, and there are at least ten of you, I think, here today.

Um, Saul is mentioned 300 times in the Old Testament.

David is mentioned close to 800 times in the Old Testament, and 60 times in the New Testament.

David.

Okay, so that's pretty interesting.

Just a number of times repeated, it seems like David must be an important figure in the overall grand narrative of the Bible, and indeed he is.

There are ways in which David, even while some of you weren't sure to whether cheer or jeer David, that's because he's as he's presented to us as human as he is.

He's presented to us with all his faults, but yet with as a man after God's own heart, as a man who keeps repenting and who keeps going back to God and turning back and receiving God's grace and mercy.

And um, and and yet as king, he he he he not of his own choosing, not of his own merit or anything like that.

God chooses to use him to point forward to Jesus Christ, the greater David, the king that we really need, and the king that we actually really want.

Some of us don't know it, but that's who we really want as our king.

And that will be part of what we'll try to get to in all of this.

So, this book, 2 Samuel, while it is about a time period where David is king, I want you to know it's not ultimately about David.

Um, Dale Ralph Davis is one of my favorite scholars on uh 1st and 2 Samuel.

His commentaries are brilliant.

If you're gonna buy one, buy his.

I get worried, he said, when someone says to me, Oh, I just love anything about David.

Dale says, I understand and yet I cringe.

The church seemingly cannot divorce herself from this people magazine approach to biblical narrative.

Let that sink in.

Again, again, as we read 2 Samuel, we have to shake ourselves and say, this isn't about David.

It is not even about covenant kings.

It's about a covenant God who makes the covenant promises to a covenant king.

Through him, he will preserve his covenant people.

That's right.

So Yahweh is actually at the center of this storyline.

And he is the one revealing himself into a crooked, sinful, chaotic, violent, fearful, turbulent time.

Here comes Yahweh revealing how he responds to the kinds of great needs and vulnerabilities of the people he would call his own.

And that's, I don't know about you, but that's exactly why I want to sit up straight and listen today.

Given the news around us, given the turbulence and the turmoil and the acrimony and all the anger and all the fear, all that's in our world, I need to sit up straight and listen.

I need to hear from God.

I need him to change me from the inside out and to call me to himself.

The literary genre of 2 Samuel is historical narrative.

It will include storytelling, lots of stories, poetry, song, family records, military records, military strategies, geographical data, international relations.

It's like an ancient documentary.

It really is.

As we enter 2 Samuel from the end of 1 Samuel, uh, these two things are happening at the same time.

Go back to the map now, and what you'll see is up in the north, uh, there's a little red name there, Mount Gilboa.

I don't know if you can see it from where you're sitting or not, but um it's up uh just south and west of the Sea of Galilee, which is the uh little body of water up there in the north.

But just to the southwest of that, by a few miles, Mount Gilboa, and this is where the Philistines are having a heated battle at the end of 1 Samuel with Saul and Jonathan and the rest of Saul's sons and the Israelite armies, and they defeat the Israelites.

This is one of the deepest penetrations into Israel by the Philistines, and they defeat Israel.

They defeat and kill Saul and Jonathan.

And that's happening.

And David had gone and lived in Ziklag, a Philistine city, because he was running from Saul, and now the Philistines are saying, Well, if you're really on our side, you know, he's invited by Akish to actually go up with them to battle against Saul.

Along the way, some of the other Philistines say, I don't trust David.

He's really an Israelite, send him back.

And so they sent him back.

Meanwhile, the second really important thing that's happening almost at the same time is happening in Ziklag, and we'll read about that at the end of 1 Samuel.

You can go back and check it out if you want.

The Amalekites, another marauding people of terrorists, they will sweep into Ziklag while David and the rest of his men are missing.

And it's just the women and children and their animals, and the village is vulnerable.

And these Amalekites come in and they literally burn the place to the ground and take all the people away, kidnap them.

David's gone.

He comes back, he sees smoke in the distance.

His village is burned to The ground.

His family is missing completely.

There's not one building that hasn't been burned down.

There's not one cow.

There's not one sheep left.

Everything's gone.

How broken his heart must have been, how broken the hearts of his men must have been.

He cries out at the end of 1 Samuel.

He cries out to God, God, should we go?

Or will you be with us?

We need to rescue our families.

And God says, yes.

And God, so they go, and we're told in 1 Samuel that he actually comes back with every single person, every sheep, and every cow.

And God gives him the victory as they rescue his people.

It's a powerful story, it really is.

Upon return of David and his men to Ziklag, they were, of course, devastated by what had happened and weary and tired and all that.

And then comes this visitor with the news, which we'll read about next week.

So it's really a difficult time.

It's really a dark time as we move from one book to the other.

How desperate and fearful they must have been, how anxious and unsettled, how uncertain those times were.

Where could they turn for solace and comfort?

Where was God in all of this?

I know David asked that same question.

How long, O Lord, will you wait?

Where are you?

He would say in so many of his songs.

Giving you and I the opportunity to come before God and be honest with our questions and our fears and our sometimes our anger.

The imprecatory psalms, so bold that they would cry out for God to be punishing their enemies in horrific ways.

And here we have this kind of situation where everything's unsettled, everything's difficult.

And so Robert Alter, one of the great uh scholars of biblical history, says the biblical tale, though, or through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character.

Because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God and enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom.

And Oz is right.

We can't really handle freedom if it means autonomy from God.

We're just not good at that.

We weren't designed for that.

And 2 Samuel will remind us over and over again how much we need our shepherd, just like David needed the shepherd of his heart and his soul.

And so we will follow a pattern that Dale Roy Davis has done in terms of breaking up the book, anyway, into three parts.

One, a man after God's own heart in chapters one through eight.

Two, a servant under God's rod, chapters nine through twenty.

This is when David falls.

This is when David is unsettled by his own lust and follows his passions, does what his heart wants him to do.

Which, you know, our world always tells us, follow your heart.

And the Bible says, no, the heart of man is deceitful.

Don't follow your heart.

Follow your Lord.

The Bible teaches us, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.

Yeah.

And yet all day long we're programmed with this follow your heart thing, which is kind of a very trivial veneer sort of worldview and way overconfident in the human heart when it gets right down to it.

So we'll be seeing a servant under God's rod and a kingdom in God's hands.

And all along the way through our study, we'll seek to persuade you that although the darkness may seem very strong in 2 Samuel or in our own day and time, although that darkness may seem very strong, although there's much wrong and much to be concerned about, we'll be reminded at least of these next three things up on the screen.

God's sovereignty over and throughout human history.

Somebody say amen.

We'll keep coming back to that over and over and over again.

This world is not a stagecoach runaway without anybody at the reins.

God is in charge.

Doesn't matter how dark the days appear, doesn't matter how we run out of gas or we run out of resources or things don't go the way we want.

God's still in charge.

And we can trust Him.

Humanity's vulnerability will be on full display in this book as well.

And look at, we'll be seeing this as well.

Our paradoxical capacity for both glory and depravity.

See, I would argue that even people who aren't believers actually long for this thing called glory.

But it has a weight to it, as C.S.

Lewis talked about.

He said the weight of glory in this essay he wrote.

It has a weight to it that nothing can bear except God.

So we but we sometimes try to rest the glory on our work.

Or we sometimes try to rest the glory on our ability to control or our ability to be holy or on the culture's view of things, whatever that might be.

And none of those things can handle the weight of glory.

The only thing that can handle the weight of glory is God Himself.

And He was the one that we were designed and created for.

The God that created you, the God that created me, designed us with His glory in mind.

We just keep misdirecting and misplacing our glory, our capacity for glory.

So we'll see our capacity for glory, and yet we'll see that, you know, because of our depravity as well, we're constantly misdirecting it all.

Thirdly, God's relentless grace and redemption.

And we'll see that over and over and over and over again, and I will point that out with great joy because I need it over and over and over again.

God's relentless redemption.

One thing is true, both the sadness of these times from 3,000 years ago and the brokenness of our time reveal the deep longing in all our hearts for a world where truth, love, civility, justice, mercy, and kindness.

We all long for this.

We want this to become a reality for all.

The message of the Bible is that in God's coming kingdom, God intends to set things right.

The Bible is quite realistic, though, in telling us, as much as we wish it weren't true, the solutions will not be finding categories that we control ourselves.

For this kind of transformation, we need outside help.

The good news is outside help is on offer, and I'll be pointing that out all along the way.

Just as God reminded David and the people of Israel, we need not be afraid.

The Lord is our shepherd.

We shall not want.

I have everything I need.

Why?

Because the Lord is my shepherd.

The Bible is, again, a great mirror.

It's great at helping us analyze, diagnose, and as well offers this great prescription that God repeatedly reminds us of that the church is here to preview God's coming kingdom.

That we are to live as the people of God's kingdom with Jesus as our king, nothing else, nothing finite as our king, but Jesus as our king.

And when we do that, we preview the coming world that we really all want.

It may be imperfect, we may be imperfect in our preview of it, but at least it foreshadows what God intends to do one day.

We are given the honor of sharing in the mission of Christ.

You see, the the gospel is not just about my little relationship with God, but I'm also sent out to be joining God on his mission in the world.

Not my mission, but his mission in this world as well.

So to take the gospel, to live it out in word and deed, before a watching world, before a broken world, before a fearful world.

Matthew Henry said, the God of Israel, the Savior, is sometimes a God that hides himself, but never a God that absents himself.

Sometimes in the dark, but never at a distance, he's there, quietly doing his work, unobserved, usually by human eyes.

We give him thanks, we give him praise.

I'll close with this quote from C.S.

Lewis, The Great Divorce.

Some of you have read it.

If you haven't, it's a great one to read.

There is but one good, that is God.

Everything else is good when it looks to him, and bad when it turns from him.

It's that simple, it really is, and that's what we're going to see in 2 Samuel.

When the people of Israel turn to the Lord, their souls, even though the storms may rage and the giants they may face, but their souls are safe with him.

Is your soul safe today?

Are you riddled with fear?

Are you struggling with anger?

I am.

You are too, I'm sure.

There's plenty out there.

Let us turn to him.

Let us fall on our knees before him.

Let us repent for all of the darkness that has encroached our hearts.

And even if it's just a tiny little bit, a tiny little piece of something that we see really boldly in somebody else, let's repent from that part that's in our hearts before the only one who can do anything about it.

The Lord of Lords, the King we really want, and the King we really need, King Jesus.

Amen?

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for this book, this ancient text, and and uh so unique in its source, timeless in its truth, broad in its reach, transforming in its power.

Thank you for your word.

Uh as we give attention to it, as we study it, I pray, Holy Spirit, that you will move among us, that you will turn us more and more into the likeness of Jesus, our beautiful Redeemer, our King.

Uh, and that as we learn to love Him more and surrender to Him more and trust and hope in Him more, though the storms may rage and the giants may scream and holler at us, Lord, we will be found resting in a quiet confidence in a sovereign God who we know loves us.

Send us out into the world as well to be courageous in loving as you loved.

Whether people look like us, believe what we believe, behave how we think we ought to behave, or not, may we learn to be your agents of grace and mercy in this world that so desperately needs the gospel and needs to see it and needs to hear it, Lord.

Use us in any way you see fit this week, we pray, in Jesus' name.

As we come to the table now, be with us.

Uh meet each person right where they're at, Lord.

Uh I'm sure there are some here who have been wrestling and struggling with unbelief of some kind that may have led them to some kind of sin.

I pray, God, that you would grant us the faith that leads to repentance.

And that we would then come to this table to receive a fresh measure of your grace through this table of thanksgiving, as we call it in Jesus' name.

Amen and amen.