Gooding, David: 2 - Old Testament Symbolism

Let's begin this morning by a short reading from the Epistle to the Hebrews and chapter nine. Epistle to the Hebrews and chapter nine. Beginning there at verse nine, in the middle of a description of the ancient Jewish tabernacle, which is or was a parable for the time present, according to which are offered both gifts and sacrifices that cannot, as touching the conscience, make the worshipper perfect, being only, along with meats and drinks and divers washings, carnal ordinances imposed until a time of reformation. Verse thirteen: For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Chapter thirteen of that same epistle and verse nine. Be not carried away by divers and strange teachings, for it is good that the heart be established by grace, not by meats, wherein they that occupied themselves were not profited. A strong case was made out yesterday by Dr. Darling and Dr. Wenham that the food and apparently hygiene laws of the Old Testament are to be regarded as symbolic. I confess myself in large agreement with their viewpoint, though with sundry niggling misgivings here and there, as I indicated yesterday. One main difficulty that confronts us immediately, we decide that the food laws and hygiene laws of the Old Testament were meant to be symbolic. The first major difficulty that then fa- faces us is decide, is to decide symbolic of what? Some attempts at deciding this question have been perhaps less than convincing. It is, of course, a very ancient view that the food laws and hygiene laws of Old Testament were meant to be symbolic. You will find it expressed, for instance, in the so-called letter of Philocrates to a letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, uh, a treatise written around about one hundred and twenty BC, written by a Jew living in Alexandria. He's pretending to be a Greek and to be explaining the ways of Jews to Greeks. He is, in fact, a Jew. Uh, uh, and he discourses at some length on the significance of the food and hygiene laws, because, as you may understand, when Jews came to live in largely Gentile societies, like the Jews living in Alexandria among the Greeks, sometimes in the course of social intercourse, Jews found their dietary and food laws a very big embarrassment and wondered how on earth they were going to explain them to the rather, uh, flippant and sarcastic Greeks. Here, for instance, is an attempt, uh, then to express the view that the food and hygiene laws were symbolic. Uh, all the regulations concerning what is permissible with reference to these and other creatures, he, that is Moses, has set forth by way of allegory. For the parting of the hoof and the cloven foot is a symbol to discriminate in each of our actions with a view to what is right. For the strength of the whole body and its energy depend upon the shoulders and legs. He constrains us, that is Moses constrains us, by taking note through these symbols to do all things with discrimination and with a view to righteousness. An additional signification is that we are set apart from all men. For the rest of men defa- mankind defile themselves by their promiscuous unions, working great unrighteousness, and whole countries and cities pride themselves on these vices. But we have been kept apart from these things. Very early example of the view that the cloven hoof, so to speak, in the clean animal allow- was allowed to Israel to be eaten because the cloven hoof symbolizes the separation of the clean Jew from the unclean Gentile. A view that I think I heard whispered, if no more, here yesterday. When, however, Aristeas goes further in the explanation of his symbolism, perhaps he leaves us behind and we cannot altogether follow him. For instance, thus, the breed of weasels forbidden to the Jews to eat, the breed of weasels is peculiar, for besides the propensity mentioned, they have a defining characteristic. They conceive through the ears and give birth through the mouth. And hence a similar characteristic in man is impure. When they have given body in speech to what they have received through hearing and have entangled others in evils, they have engendered no ordinary uncleanness and are themselves utterly tainted with the pollution of their impiety. Uh, uh, an interpretation of the symbolism of the Old Testament that I think would convince very few of you. It is then a difficulty, and I do not, uh, mean by quoting the difficulty to pour scorn on the idea of Old Testament symbolism. I've already told you I am much attached thereto myself. But how, if these things are symbolical at all, how are we going to come around, uh, rightly to their interpretation? We have firmer ground, have we not, in the passage of Acts that we were considering last evening, where Peter was given a vision of a sheet let down from heaven full of creepy crawly things, unclean insects and whatnot, and the divine voice commanded him to eat. Peter objected on the ground of the Old Testament food laws. God didn't say, of course, don't be silly, Peter. That was a lot of narrow-minded nonsense. Be broad-minded, do locusts and and and and caterpillars and things, uh, caterpillars and unclean beasts taste very nice, if only you had the courage to have a go. No, the Old Testament laws were given by God, and God respected them. What God did was to announce that now a change had come, and in some sense he had cleansed things. The vision then concerned food, clean and unclean, and the pronouncement now of the food to be all of it clean. When Peter interpreted the vision, he didn't merely interpret it as now pertaining to his food, but he announced to Cornelius, God has showed me that I should call no man common or unclean. It seems quite clear that Peter then is applying the regulations, the new regulations regarding food, as carrying a lesson regarding our, our, our attitude to man. That, uh, might make a beginning in our thinking o- of this matter. There is some general, uh, connection, symbolic perhaps, between the food laws and, uh, our attitude to Gentile man. Then again, I think we must help ourselves, as I mentioned yesterday, by observing that the Old Testament rules and regulations are exceedingly complex. They are not altogether of exactly the same nature. We made the point yesterday that the Old Testament regulations regarding sanitation are meant to be very literal and have to do with very earthy and mundane things, and are very necessary in an army on the march. Lots of the ancient armies in the ancient world were decimated not by the enemy, but by disease through lack of proper sanitation. And presumably, those regulations in the Old Testament law are not particularly symbolic of anything. They were meant to be taken in their literal sense. Similarly, the rules regarding, uh, uh, the degrees of marriage had some kind of, um, biological basis and were not particularly symbolic of anything. Or going further still, when the Old Testament rules that no man with a curvature of the spine and no man with other members of his body broken or mutilated was to enter into, uh, the temple and engage in the office, in the sacred offices. I presume we are not, uh, meant merely, if at all, to take that as symbolic. Any man who has a spiritual curvature of the spine, I wonder what such a man is, uh, uh, should be excluded from the church or something. Eh, we are presumably to take it literally, and though at first sight it seems to be a harsh regulation, why should God penalize a man for a physical deformity, uh, for which he is not responsible? Yet when you ponder it further, it holds out a glorious ray of hope and of gospel indeed. God is concerned about physical perfection. Incidentally, Her Gracious Majesty the Queen is too. You can't be in the lifeguards if you have a curvature of the spine. It's not that Her Majesty is unkind and lacks compassion, but for certain offices and tasks, she wants men whose physique is of the most excellent order. It's unfortunate if somebody is physically afflicted and can't be in that particular office, but Her Majesty maintains, for certain reasons and in certain circumstances, her demand for as near physical perfection as you can get. And if God, in the course of enunciating his ideas on holiness in the book of Le- Leviticus, insists that for certain things, physical perfection must be the requisite as far as it can be attained, it shouts in my ears a gospel message. For when God's holiness with us all is complete, it will not only guarantee holiness of spirit and soul, but will imply perfection of the very body as well. And I rejoice in a God that thus has set his standards of holiness and perfection to include physical perfection. And the more I degenerate from that, as you can visibly see, the more those regulations are a course of rejoicing to my heart and hope within my breast that one day I shall have a body conformed to the body of the glory of the Lord Jesus. And therefore I am disposed to take that kind of regulation about physical, uh, perfection, uh, necessary for certain functions in Israel. I'm propo- I- I'm disposed to take it quite literally without seeing any particular symbolism therein. On the other hand, it seems to me, and I agree with our, our first two speakers, that there is a good deal that was meant to convey symbolism, and we can tell that in this way. There is a great deal of overlap in the arrangements for the cleansing of people from physical defilement or physical illness, like those skin diseases that people were discussing yesterday, uh, called apparently slanderously leprosy, uh, but uh, in our modern versions, uh, about really skin diseases of some kind or another. The rules and regulations for their cleansing, water and blood find overlap with the cleansing necessary if you were, uh, to approach God in his tabernacle and temple. In the tabernacle, there was an altar where cleansing by blood was offered. There was a laver where cleansing by water was offered. Now, when you come to the New Testament, the New Testament does borrow those very terms to talk to us of the work of Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's son, cleanses us. We notice the Old Testament term. Or again, we, uh, are told in Ephesians chapter five that Christ loved the church and gave himself for her that he might cleanse her, having sanctified her by the washing of water. So in talking to us of the cleansing that is offered us through Christ in the gospel, the New Testament uses both terms, cleansing by blood and cleansing by water. It is now not talking of literal physical cleansing, as the Old Testament was, but it is borrowing the terms because they help us understand the cleansing that Christ offers us. And to put it briefly, the New Testament passages, some of which we read at the beginning, will inform us thus that blood, the blood of Christ, cleanses the conscience from guilt. Whereas when the Bible, New Testament talks of cleansing by water, it is referring to the cleansing of the person, the character, the personality from blemish. The two things are not the same. A man who has got drunk and in the brawl has murdered somebody has a guilty conscience, at least we hope he has. If ever he is going to, uh, be put right, he will need to have his conscience cleansed. And if he is granted a royal pardon, he may, as far as the law of this country goes, have a conscience that that now is cleansed from the guilt. The cleansing of the conscience from guilt does not automatically cleanse that man's personality, his makeup, from those blemishes of lack of self-control, anger, and dissolution that led him to the crime in the first place. And if you're going to make a perfect man of him, you will need not merely to cleanse his conscience from guilt, you will need to cleanse his personality from those blemishes, spots, wrinkles, and any other such thing, as the New Testament has it, that deformed him as a man and, uh, exposed him in weakness, uh, to these crimes. So the New Testament borrows the language of the Old Testament ritual, cleansing by water, cleansing by blood, to illustrate to us that double cleansing that Christ offers us. And even those believers, and there are some, who are diametrically opposed in their thinking to allowing any s- any symbolic significance in the Old Testament, nevertheless appear to be happy to sing that glorious hymn. Let the water and the blood from thy riven side which flowed be of sin the double cure. Cleanse me from its guilt and power. And so singing, they sing with the hymn writer terms that are based on the Old Testament, uh, ritual, now taken symbolically. Then we must allow, perhaps, that the Old Testament rules and regulations are not simplistic, but complex in this sense, that they can be both symbolic and prophetic. The ancient Jew was taught that without the shedding of blood, there was no forgiveness. In his context, it was the blood of bulls and goats. We now know, because the New Testament tells us, and perhaps some perceptive Jews perceived it, that the blood of bulls and goats never did put away anything. In spite of that, it did become a symbolic gesture and taught the Jew a great deal by way of symbol. It taught him, for instance, that sin is a very expensive thing if you were a Jewish farmer, or an Irish one for that matter, and when you sinned, you had to sacrifice a bullock, you soon learned that sin was an expensive business. Not a bad lesson to learn. Then you learned that sin led to death, and if you were to escape the penalty of death due to your sin, then some innocent victim had to stand in your stead. But sin led to death. That was a very good lesson to learn. Likewise, sin is a killer. And thirdly, he learned, uh, that you can't go on living a- as if sin didn't matter. God wouldn't have it so. God cannot possibly take the view that when you've sinned, oh well, it's past now, so it doesn't matter, let's forget it, brush it under the carpet. No, something has to be done about it, something very serious before that sin can be written off. This all, the regulations of the time taught the Jew, even supposing the Jew had no notion in his head whatsoever that the blood of bulls and of goats was pointing prophetically towards the blood of Christ. Similarly, we are told that the tabernacle and its arrangements was a copy of things in the heavens, and its symbolism taught the Jew sundry spiritual lessons in his own day. In addition to being symbols of spiritual realities, those things were also prophecies of the coming good thing, for the law had a shadow of the coming good thing. So those rules and rituals were complex. They were symbols for their own time, many of them, but they were also prophecies of the higher development of the gospel that could come through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We shouldn't forget that and treat them as though they were only at one level. They are at two levels, even at the symbolic. Symbols of present spiritual realities to the due of that time, prophecies of the salvation that the coming Christ will provide. Another consideration may help us in this matter of interpreting the symbolism of the Old Testament, particularly on the side of its ritual cleansings. As you know, for if a man was defiled by one cause and another, according to the laws, uh, laid down in the Old Testament, then very frequently his cleansing involved a sacrifice of some kind. And in the course of those sacrifices, the animals were cut up and their, their inward parts examined and laid on the altar. Now, when certain Christians hear other certain Christians saying that the internal organs of these sacrifices were pointers to the person of Christ and his great sacrifice, they feel a certain revulsion and incongruity. And they say to themselves, how can it be? In fact, it smacks to them a little bit of the disgusting. Grotesque at any rate. We should, I think, remember, and it may help us in this matter, we should observe that the ancient Jew very frequently used the physical organs of the human body to express psychological and spiritual states of mind. Let us observe that from the New Testament itself. I fancy some of you brought up on the authorized have already been guilty of using the same, uh, manner of speaking. Um, I long after you, says Paul in the good old authorized version thus translated, I long after you in the bowels of Jesus Christ. Really? Some modern translations, thinking to do us a service, translate the psychological jargon of Old Testament days into modern, nice drawing room English. I long after you in the tender compassions of Jesus Christ. Well, that's what it means anyway. But you see, when the Hebrews wanted to express that tender kind of feeling that you get when you are longing and loving somebody or other, uh, they refer to it as the bowels. I don't know why that was, perhaps it was because sometimes that part of your anatomy is strangely moved, uh, in certain considerations. But that it is. They did use the physical term of the body, all innocent of psychosomatic medicine, I'm sure, to express, uh, psychological states. I the Lord, search the kidneys is a glorious, uh, glorious observation, isn't it? The risen Lord writes to the church, I think it was to the church of Thyatira. I, the Lord, search the kidneys, nicely disguised by the authorized version using an antique term for kidneys, reins. Nothing to do with horses' reins, anglicized form of the Latin reneis, medical term renal, colic and all that. Uh, I, the Lord, search the kidneys. Well, modern translations hides all that from view and says something like, I, I the Lord search the inner workings of the mind or something. But the New Testament, as well as the old, is content to use the physical term kidney to express whatever psychological state we are, we decide is being expressed by that, the inner workings of motivation and this, that, and other. Hebrew for it is the kidneys. Said our Lord in a note, in a, in a well-known parable, is your eye evil because I am good? He wasn't referring to witchcraft, not the evil eye in that sense. He was referring to envy. Are you envious because I am good? And the Hebrews used it, I suppose, because they have observed that if the cake is being distributed and one man gets a bigger piece than the other, whether it be the finances in the university or the literal cake at the children's party. You should look at those people, watch those people who think they've got a lesser slice than they ought to have. And the way, as we say in modern English, they eye the other chap. And from that physical gesture, the Hebrew takes the term and use it for the state of jealousy. The Hebrew, one of the Hebrew words for anger is nostril. If you haven't done it before, next time your friend gets into a temper, you watch his nostrils. The eyes of your heart being enlightened. The ancients thought you thought with your heart as much as with your brain. And so we might go on. Even in New Testament times, the physical organs of the body were used, uh, to express psychological and spiritual states. For the Hebrew, therefore, it is not a grotesque thing, when a sacrifice is offered as a substitute for a man, that the animal will be cut up and great care be taken about its internal organs, like kidneys and heart and things. Because in as much as the animal has these organs in common with a man, they easily form symbols for the man or pointers to the man's, not merely his physical organs, but to the moral and spiritual and emotional states that in the Hebrew mind are associated with those physical organs. And if once we perceive that and are prepared to accept that kind of way of thinking, then surely psychosomatic medicine has made it easier for us moderns to think in that fashion. We shall not find it so hard to see in those ancient rituals, those ancient sacrifices for cleansing and forgiveness, pointers to the moral and spiritual and personality excellence of Jesus Christ our Lord, who gave himself for us as a sacrifice. He being perfect in all the workings of his body and perfect in all those emotional states that are in part dependent upon the body, and being perfect in his spiritual control of his emotions and his body. Those sac- ancient sacrifices, with their detailed inspection of the organs of the animals, point us by clear symbolism towards the perfection, not only the physical perfection of Christ, but to his emotional, moral, and spiritual perfection. Finally, I want to take, and very briefly take, uh, one sort of example of what we may come at if, uh, with care we use the pointers that the Bible itself gives us, uh, in the interpretation of, uh, the symbolism and the prophetic symbolism as well of the Old Testament. And here, let me just remind you and point out that I am now, uh, traveling rather far from the laws of hygiene and the, the early food laws. I've now gone over, uh, to the ancient sacrifices, which are slightly, uh, separate division, aren't they? Though they overlap because for cleansing of defilement, sacrifices were demanded on time. But the symbolism is easier to see sometimes in the sacrifices than it is in the food laws and the supposedly hygiene laws. I'm going to take for my example the second sacrifice listed in the book of Leviticus, commonly called the meal offering, because it was compounded of two major ingredients and one minor. It was compounded of some form of corn, whether flour or flour bacon into some kind of cake, or the green corn in the ear. That was the one ingredient in this offering, corn in some form or other, one of its three stages. Along with it went oil that had to be mixed in with it or poured on top of it in each of those three stages. Finally, there was frankincense. In the Old Testament, the frankincense with this sacrifice was offered for God's enjoyment. It is explicitly said so. Man was forbidden, uh, to use it for his own pleasure. It was totally for God, and therefore this morning I'm going to leave that ingredient aside in my, uh, suggested exposition. Let's just take the two major ingredients, then, of this particular sacrifice. Corn in some form or other, whether in the air or as flour or as flour baked into some kind of cake. And each time, in each of those three grades, oil. What could it possibly signify if it were to be taken symbolically? Well, let's take the New Testament usage of these, uh, of these things. Our Lord used a symbol on one occasion. It may be that even this morning you will be participating in it. He took bread, and our Lord used bread. What does he use it as a symbol of? Well, obviously it was a symbol. You don't happen to believe, do you, it was his literal body, but it was a symbol of his body. This is my body, which is given for you. In one Corinthians chapter fifteen, Paul uses an analogy, and the analogy is what happens to a corn of wheat or of any other grain. When you sow it in the ground, you sow it a bare grain, and it rises. And Paul uses the analogy of what? Why, you say, of the human body. Thus far, consistent then. But this meal offering, consisting of some kind of corn or flour, or or flour baked into cakes, in one of its divisions, formed the offering of first fruits. As the green corn in the ear, it was offered as the offering of first fruits par excellence. And of course, the New Testament uses that, doesn't it, symbolically, or at least metaphorically. Now is Christ risen and become the first fruits of them that set. In Israel, the first fruits was always the third division of this particular offering. It was corn in the ear. And of course, when we think of Christ as the first fruits, we are thinking again of the resurrection of his body. Putting those bits of evidence together, we get a consistent usage of the symbolism of corn or flour or cake as a symbol of a human body. Take along with that the other major ingredient, which was oil. In ancient Israel, I quote to my authority, Zechariah chapter four, where oil, now used in the great oil lamp of Zechariah's vision, is explicitly interpreted by God as a symbol of his spirit. This particular offering, then, of two major ingredients, the one representing body, the other representing spirit. You put them together, you'll get a man, won't you? Now I tread very warily because I'm surrounded by theologians, let alone, let alone medics. Is man tripartite or bipartite? We'll leave that for another occasion. The New Testament frequently speaks in two terms, body soul, flesh spirit. And here is an ancient offering, which, if it be intended as a symbol, and we use the evidence of scripture for the interpretation of the symbol, we come up with a symbol of body and spirit. Man is both, and the sacrifice, which, like all other sacrifices, picture our, pictures our Lord Jesus, who was offered for our sake, points us to his body and his spirit. He had both. And of course, our being men and our behavior is built both, is it not, on both body and spirit. A good deal of our behavior pattern, as you medics tell us laymen, is, uh, controlled, or at least based on the physical organs of our bodies, adrenolines and all these mysterious marvels about which you speak. And sometimes the man who has a carefree spirit and is a hell fellow well met, uh, and thinks he's being very spiritual thereby, as distinct from the poor man who is always, uh, uh, sour looking and has got the arthritis and nervous exhaustion and good many other things. The man who's all happy thinks he's marvelously spiritual and thinks the other chap is awfully unspiritual. You know, look at his face, they say, what an advertisement for the gospel. Uh, when all the time they should perhaps be considering the physical basis, the one of the man's joyfulness and the other of the poor man's depression. We do not well to forget that we are part body, and a good deal of our behavior, our wrong behavior, is partly attributable to the fact that our bodies are broken and never were perfect and daily get worse. And we thank God for the coming into our world of him whose body was perfect, who gave that body, and in that body bore our sins, and oh, what a frightful mess our sins made of his body. Risen now, the first fruits of them that slept. But of course, man is not merely body, but he is spirit. Trouble with us is that we were born with spirits separated, cut off, so to speak, from the father of spirits, spiritually dead, not morally dead, and certainly not physically dead, but spiritually dead, dead in trespasses and in sins, inhabiting bodies where very often our bodies were master of us, instead of our spirits being masters of our bodies. We hail him whose spirit was unfolded, perfect, and in perfect control of his body, as was demonstrated in the temptation in the wilderness and in Gethsemane and the garden of torment. Now risen from the dead, a life-giving spirit, having begun the work of renewal in us at the spiritual level, so that if the spirit of Jesus dwell in you, while the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness. God, through Christ, has begun the work of renewal at the level of our spirits, and one day will finish it when he conforms our very body to the glo- to the our Lord's glorious body. If that symbolism, as I have outlined it, i- i- is correct, it does, of course, open up interesting vistas, doesn't it? Very instructive things to our imagination, if not to our intellects. Let me finally put one other feature from this ancient sacrifice, uh, into the pool of your thinking for you to go away and meditate on, if you haven't done so already. There were three grades to this offering. There was the flour, then there was the flour cooked into cakes, then there was the corn in the ear. But any schoolboy could perceive it. The order seems odd. Don't you start the other way around? Doesn't the farmer start with the corn in the ear and then proceed to mill it into flour? And the housewife, God bless her, bring up the finished product, the beautiful cake, upon the table. Is that not the natural order? Why record the old sacrifice the other way around, starting with the flour and proceeding to the cake, and then ending up with a corn in the ear? I can't think of any reason except the symbolical, because the corn in the ear was the offering of first fruits, and if it's a symbol and a prophecy, it's a symbol of Christ our Lord risen from the dead, and that, of course, comes last, not first, in the order of redemption. We start with Christ, born a man like us, part, uh, body, part spirit. We end with the full corn in the ear, the green corn. As Paul remarks, following the imagery, at the grave you sow a bare grain. You reap not one bare grain, but many grains, not a bare bare grains, but grains clothed in the glory of the full green ear, full of sap and on flour. If that be a symbol, it causes the heart to leap with rejoicing. We have known some magnificent specimens of human people, bodies and spirits here on earth, but they are a bare grain compared with that glorious body that shall be, with all its potential for eternal life and all its capabilities, when at the resurrection we are conformed in our bodies to the image of Christ. Comes last, not first. Then there is a middle bit. There's the flour first, and the oil, and at the end there's the first fruits, the green air. What about that middle bit, the thing cake, the the cakes cooked in the oven? I will not profess to know much about cookery, that is scarcely my line. I have tried it and failed dismally. But I have observed that when you get flour and your modern equivalent of oil, sunflower oil or something, or if you don't take any notice of the medic's butter, and you mix them all together and you put them in the oven, what you get out is the same as what you put in, but it isn't. It's the same flour, isn't it, and the same oil, and yet it comes out somehow different. The oven has done something to it. We're born, so to speak, body and spirit. We look forward to the resurrection one of these days, and in between what happens? Are you the same man as you were when you were, when you were born? You say, I hope not. What's changed you? Your body has grown, yes. Anything else? Well, you say, yes, of course, yes. Life's experience has changed me. As far as my organs go, I'm moderately the same as I was when I was born. But as a person, I'm different. For the heat of pleasure and the heat of adversity have cooked me. Sometimes the cooking is pleasant, sometimes it gets uncomfortably hot, but life has changed me. It was meant to. It perfected our Lord. And Hebrews tells us that he, in the days of his flesh, was perfected through suffering. I speak with due reverence. Our Lord was not the same by the time he reached Calvary as he was when he was born of the Virgin. It wasn't merely that his body had grown up. He was perfected through life's experience and suffering. It has marked him indelibly for eternity. What is a human being? He's not just made up of body and spirit. He's made up of body and spirit as processed through life. Hence the, um, seriousness of life and also its gaiety. Because I'll tell you one parting thing about cookery, this I know from dismal experience, that cakes can go wrong in the cooking. Sometimes they come out and they've risen and they're delightful, the cooking has improved them. And at last, sometimes stupid cakes, you put them in all good and wise they should be, and they come out fallen as flat as the walls of Jericho, and sometimes as heavy. They're very unpleasant, almost inedible. Do you know, life to some people improves them, doesn't it? And for some people, life's experiences sour them. I ask what life is doing to you. If life is in process of cooking us for eternity, it surely is important that the cooking doesn't go wrong in the middle. And sometimes it does, doesn't it? And sometimes, at ninety four like me, we are less pleasant persons than we were at thirty four. Pity. But I mustn't, uh, go on and sermonize like this. It's time I let you go to hear better people, and I cease. My, my task, as I conceived of it this morning, was not to preach your sermons. At the risk of being a little disorderly and incoherent, I have merely been suggesting ways and means at which we could possibly come at this idea that some, if not all, of the Old Testament regulations for cleansing from defilement or sacrifice were meant to have symbolic meaning as well as their literal meaning. I thank you for your patience and your kindness to me this weekend.