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[Music] The Dead Sea Souls, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] We shall continue in our worship by giving attention now to the reading of God's Word

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as it is recorded in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the 20th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse number 28. Paul is speaking to the elders from the church at Ephesus. "Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you guardians,

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to feed the church of the Lord which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.

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Therefore, be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish everyone with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

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I coveted no one's silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said,

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"It is more blessed to give than to receive." And when he had spoken thus, he knelt down and prayed with them all, and they all wept and embraced Paul and kissed him." And may the same Spirit that inspired these words

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incline our hearts that we might understand. Will you pray with me? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I was one of the first ones to get to the bus,

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and I met Shafik, our guide. He was sitting in the front seat where tour guides usually sit. He said to me, "Welcome aboard," and urged me to take a seat on the right-hand side of the bus,

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suggesting that the sun would not be so bright there. He said we'd be leaving in a few minutes. Ten minutes later the bus was full, and we started off from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. Shafik immediately took the microphone in hand and began to coach us.

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"We'll be on the road about 45 minutes," he said, "and we'll be going downhill the whole way. When we reach the end of our journey at the Dead Sea, we will be 1,309 feet below sea level.

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Think about that, folks. It's probably the only time in your life when you will be riding below sea level in an air-conditioned bus." With that, he was quiet, and we continued on our way.

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Very soon we were in the desert, the blonde brokenness of the earth all about us, bent into submission by the scorching sun. And then suddenly before us we saw 500 square miles of slatey, gray water, the Dead Sea.

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The Hebrews call it Yam Hamalach, which means "the sea of salt." The Romans called it Lakat Asphaltitis, because great chunks of asphalt sometimes break loose from its bottom and bob to the surface, the oily, stinking surface.

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The Arabs say that a bird cannot fly from one side of it to the other because it will be asphyxiated on its journey. And that's the first thing we noticed when we got out of the bus, the terrible smell which clogged the nostrils and gave you a strange taste in the mouth.

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And all we could hear was the buzzing and the droning of insects. It sounded like a place that was altogether dead. And then Shafik began to speak. "Our first stop here is at Qumran.

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These ruins represent a community established centuries ago by a group we now call the Essenes, though they were not called that in that time. We learned about this group in 1947. A little boy by the name of Muhammad Adib was out with his goat.

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A goat scrambled into that cave over there, and to get the goat out of the cave he threw in a rock. He didn't hear the sound of rock hitting rock, however. He heard something break. He scrambled up and looked into the cave, and there were hundreds of jars.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the most impressive archaeological find of our time. In there we found many scrolls that explained the community that lived in this place. They were a group of people who made their religion out of a rigorous observance of the law. They had very strict regulations.

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If you laughed, ten days in solitary confinement. If you interrupted someone, twenty days in solitary confinement. If you spit in public, thirty days in solitary confinement. If you told a lie, no fellowship for a year, and one-quarter food rations for a year.

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They were a very strict and rigid group that came to live here in isolation, because they did not want to mix with the impurities of the world. For two hundred years they existed on this spot, and then they disappeared. Until that day when Muhannad Abdi threw his rock into that cave.

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Take a look around, folks. I wandered off by myself. I noticed that all of the ruins were specifically identified. Here was the kitchen, there the cistern, here the scriptorium, there the baptistry.

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Everyone identified, and as I walked through the broken stones and the dead dustiness of the place, I was struck with the fact that that kind of rigorous legalism in things of faith still exists today. There are people who see their faith as more an obligation than an opportunity, who look upon Christianity as more of a chore than a challenge.

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The Apostle Paul spoke of such ones when he said that the letter of the law leads to the death of the soul, but these people give themselves to legalism, to religious law, and law is dry as dust. I remember once seeing a law book on which someone had written, "In case of floods, stand on this, it's the driest thing in town."

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You know the law is dry. If you want to teach a child patriotism, would you teach the child by reading to it the laws of the land? Oh no, not for a moment. The law lacks power to convince, it lacks enthusiasm, it lacks passion,

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and those who give themselves to a legalistic interpretation of the faith lack these same things. They become very mercenary in their religion. They try to stack up little legal honor points which will somehow justify them before God. They know that scripture admonishes them to love justice and to do mercy and to walk humbly with their God,

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and they understand that these are difficult things to do, but they don't worry about their failure because they've accumulated a lot of Bible verses that they've memorized, or spectacular experiences that they've had, or worship service after worship service, or some particular theological system or order which they have utterly made their own,

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and on this basis they hope somehow to get God into their debt so that he will owe them something in terms of salvation. The people who lived in these broken ruins here at Qumran wore their fingers to the bone in menial service, burned out their brains in study, beggared their souls with devotion, trying to get God obligated to them,

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and it failed utterly. Legalistic religion, you see, is too negative. It is built on "Thou shalt not." It says the way to get through life is to close all of your doors and your windows.

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The trouble with that is that evil, if it's pushed away from your door, will find another way into your life, usually up through the very center of you. And if you're going to try to escape the difficulties of life by closing all of your doors and your windows, understand that by so doing you'll also close out all the joys and the beauties, the sunlight and the fresh air of life.

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These things will be crowded out as well. There's no lifting power in that kind of religion. Oh yeah, Paul had it right. The letter of the law leads to the death of the soul.

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The spirit of God alone can give life to the soul. And as I walked up and down through those broken ruins, I thought of those that I know who are very sure because they've adopted some theological system, who are very arrogant because they've built up some kind of theological score,

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who are very demanding of the faith of others, judging themselves by themselves, or who are insensitive to the needs of others. The cold, icy wind of legalism having blown out the flame of love in their lives, I thought of those people, and I recognize that you never find happiness through that kind of legalistic faith.

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It ends up broken ruins by dead sea. "Time to re-board the bus," said our guide. And as I started toward the bus, I kicked over a pile of stones, and a startled scorpion skittered away.

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"The next place we're going to see," said Tafik, "is very interesting because we'll be at the deepest part of the Great Rift." The Great Rift is the most conspicuous archaeological fault on the face of the earth. It begins up north in Turkey, continues down across the Fertile Crescent, and goes all the way across the face of Africa. But right here at the Dead Sea, we're at the deepest point.

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And if you look across right here, on the other side, the eastern shore, you'll see a little Arab village. It's the village of Muqawir. It's still very popular because they've got some thermal pools there. Hot water, it's fresh water, it doesn't smell like the Dead Sea does, and people come to take baths there.

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Now just beyond Muqawir, that little hill, on top of that was the fortress of Herod Antipas, called Makarios. And the king used to come and stay there, and then they would carry him in his royal litter down to the hot baths, and he would starve himself with the black mud, like people still do today, for their arthritis and their rheumatism, sometimes even for infertility, and other amazing cures are supposed to come.

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And they come today as yesterday. Can't you see the king being carried down? "The pleasures of power." Yes, "the pleasures of power."

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I thought about those words. John the Baptist was imprisoned over there at Makarios. At least that's what Josephus, the most noted historian of the time, teaches us. Herod, you see, exercising the pleasure of his power, entered into an incestuous marriage.

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And John the Baptist criticized him for it, so Herod, exercising the pleasures of his power, had John put in prison, right over there. Herod sought to find happiness through his power, and we can understand that, can't we? There's a little bit of the totalitarian in every one of us. We like people to go when we say go, and come when we say come.

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We'd like to be able to wish something and have it immediately come to the fore. The danger with that kind of power, of course, is that it corrupts us. It leads us to the exercise of the ugliest aspects of our will. Whenever we can get what we want, it isn't long until we start wanting things we shouldn't have.

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That's what happened to Herod. He imprisoned John right over there when he wanted to, and he killed John, the one whom Jesus called "the noblest man ever born of woman." Beheaded him right over there because he wanted to. Power.

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Later, when Jesus began his ministry, Herod suggested that Jesus was John the Baptist resurrected again. It may have been because there was some physical resemblance between Jesus and John. Origin says that was true, and they were cousins, so it's completely possible. But more likely it was so because what Jesus said was the same thing that John had said, the truth.

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And power always gets frightened when it confronts truth. You see, when the truth is held up against the ugly in us, the ugly in us is revealed for what it is. Power encourages evil in us, and the truth stands in the face of that. That's exactly what happened to Herod.

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Eventually, his power led him to defeat. He ran off to Caesar trying to get power again, but Caesar banished him to a distant land, and there he died without any power at all. Power, in the end, is not the way to happiness. I stood and looked out over the mist from the sea and the haze of the desert, trying to pick out Macarius on the horizon.

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I thought of back in Chicago a few years ago when a number of men got together at a table in the Edgewater Beach Hotel. One of the Chicago newspapers said that so much personal power had never been gathered at one table before. The men who were gathered there at that time controlled more personal wealth than the treasury of the United States. The president of the world's largest independent steel company was there.

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The foremost wheat speculator in the land was there. The president of the New York Stock Exchange was there. A member of the cabinet of the president of the United States was there. The chairman of the board of the Bank of International Settlements was there.

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The most prominent broker on Wall Street was there. And the ruler of the largest monopoly in the world at that time was there. And everyone was awed with their power. They liked power, and they used power.

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Of course, now, many years later, we can look back on that gathering there at the table and see it in a slightly different perspective. We don't see it as they saw it that day. We see the lives of those men as they ended. For example, Charles Schwab, who was the president of the world's largest independent steel company, he died broke.

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As a matter of fact, he lived the last few years of his life on the generosity of others. And Arthur Cutton, who was the foremost wheat speculator, he died in Europe, insolvent, flat broke. And Richard Whitney, who was the president of the New York Stock Exchange, he died while serving a term in Sing Sing Penitentiary. And the member of the cabinet of the president of the United States, Albert Paul, he was pardoned from prison in order to go home to die.

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And the chairman of the board of the Bank of International Settlements, Leon Fraser, died a suicide. And the most prominent broker on Wall Street, Jesse Livermore, died a suicide. And Ivan Kruger, the leader of the world's largest monopoly in that day, died a suicide. They all looked so powerful that day, you see, but the nature of power is most revealed when power breaks down.

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That's the reason Jesus said what John said, "The first will be last. The strong will be weak. Those wise in terms of the world will be shown to be foolish." "Time for a rest stop," said Jesse, and everybody scrambled off the bus for cokes and souvenirs. But I sat there, still trying to pick out McCarty on that mountain so far away.

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And as I looked, I'll be frank with you, I began to rejoice in my heart. I began to rejoice that empires are collapsing and that nations are in confusion. I began to rejoice that parliaments and senates and houses of representatives don't seem to know what to do. I rejoiced over spiraling inflation and worldwide ecological and environmental problems.

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I rejoiced at all of these things because it came home to me with great power that man would not begin to recognize the power of God until all his human power had been shown to be futile, building broken fortresses by dead sea. Not until the last faggot of man's power is thrown onto the fire and burns out

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and all the darkness and the cold comes, unrelenting, not until then will men realize the utter inadequacy, the utter foolishness of human power as over against the power of God. So I sat and stared across the sea and the desert. And you know, no matter how hard I looked, I never did manage to see Makarios.

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"The next place we're going to has the most spectacular ruins on the Dead Sea," said Shepik. "It's that butte down there." He explained further as we rode the cable car up the side of the butte to a place called Masada. "Here on the top of this flat butte of stone, hundreds and hundreds of feet above the plain and the lake below,

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a group of Jews, Maccabees, built a fortress to hold off the Romans." And they did hold them off for a long time. Look down there. You can see the outlines of the six Roman forts which were built around the base of the mountains.

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"And then the Romans began to build a ramp up to the top of the mountain." They spent a year and a half trying to build that ramp. The Maccabees thought they would always be able to hold them out, that in defensiveness they would find their security and their happiness.

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But the ramp got closer and closer. And when the day came for the Romans to break through the Maccabean defenses, well, on that day, every one of the 960 Maccabees, under the leadership of Eleazar Ben-Yair, every one of them committed suicide.

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They selected 100 men. Each of the 100 killed nine. And then of the remaining 60, they took six, and each killed nine. And then as the Romans came over the walls, the last six slit their throats,

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or threw themselves to their deaths. So that when the Romans got beyond the walls, there was nothing there but death and silence. I found it very easy to believe that. It still looked ghastly.

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And it was silent. You could feel a breeze there. We were so far above the plain that the wind was feelable. But it made no sound.

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Absolutely silent. And dead. That's what it's like when you try to find happiness behind walls, you know. When you adopt a defensive posture with regard to life, that kind of living is feral at best.

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I choose that word "feral" very deliberately. You've seen those cheap movies on television or in the motion picture theaters about the boy who was supposedly raised by wolves, or the child who was raised in the wilderness, and they grow up ignorant and utterly without the skills of communication,

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and far below what they have the capacity of being. That's what happens to people who isolate themselves from other people. Dante says in his picture of hell, that there was a special place in hell for the angels who were for themselves.

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That is, those who lived behind walls. We are made by God for communication with him and with others. Before man was created, all the other aspects of creation, the plants and the animals, were made in interdependence, but not mutuality.

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Man brought something new into that which was created. He alone was made in the image of God. He was so fashioned that the God who is not alone, and we do not have a God alone, a Deus solitarius, we have a Deus trinitatus, a God who is in trinity,

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Father, Son, and Spirit, in perfect fellowship with one another. And as God is in fellowship, so we are to be in fellowship with him, and we only discover ourselves when we meet him and when we meet others, and to the degree that we cut ourselves off by walls of one kind or another,

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to that degree we lose our humanity. I think the saddest word that any preacher can ever hear is when someone says, "Now I'm all alone." I went to a house where a man had just lost his sister through death.

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As I walked through the door he looked at me and said, "Bruce, now I'm all alone." I shared with him words of comfort and support, and then he said to me, "But Bruce, now I'm all alone." I pointed to a picture on his desk of someone I didn't know.

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I said, "Is this someone close, someone you can call now?" He said, "I'm all alone." And the tragedy was that he really was all alone. He and his sister had lived together an isolated life.

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They'd made their house into a kind of fortress. They kept everybody on the outside. They went out to earn their living, and that was all. They brought no one in. They never went out for entertainment.

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They prided themselves, and I heard them do it, on their rugged individualism. And now suddenly it wasn't rugged. It was ragged individualism. As I looked down I could see Shafiq far below waving his hat.

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It was the signal that we were supposed to all hurry for the bus. So I went down. The crowd was ahead of me, and as they moved toward the bus and started to scramble up the steps, it made me think of Stanley Milgram's study in New York City.

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He got 15 doctoral students in psychology together to study what it would take to get New Yorkers to give you their seat in a subway. New Yorkers, you know, are known as people who live behind walls, very separated, austere, inhospitable, cold.

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What they discovered, much to their surprise, was that in most instances, when you went up and asked a New Yorker for a seat, he gave it to you. You didn't even have to give a reason. You could be a man or a woman. It didn't make any difference.

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As a matter of fact, 50% of the people who were asked, without asking any questions in response, immediately got up and gave their seat. The reason it didn't happen more frequently is because people didn't think to ask. Milgram got the idea for the study when his mother-in-law returned one night,

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and she was very indignant because no one had given her a seat on the subway. He said, "Did you ask?" She admitted that she had not. We go through life, you see, not meeting people because we don't ask, not encountering the blessings in other people

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because we never let down the bars enough to express some need that is ours. We never reveal our vulnerability, and so no one ever has the opportunity to respond to it. When I got on the bus, I took my same seat. We were to return to the same seat all the time.

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I noticed that the fellow sitting next to me was a little shorter than I was, so I turned to him and I said, "Would you like to sit by the window for a while? I think you would be able to see better over here." "I would really appreciate that," he said. "I've really been having difficulty seeing."

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So we traded places, and I could tell that he was very happy with the trade, and I was very happy that he was happy I was taller and could see without any difficulty at all. But you see, throughout all the day, he's been sitting there not seeing, but never expressed the need to me.

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"Got to keep up the walls," you see, "got to keep up the walls." And those kinds of defensive walls, they're places of death and silence, by gray and stinking seas. We had only one last stop.

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It was at a place called Al-Asan. Al-Asan is an Arabic word which means "the tongue." It's a peninsula of land that sticks out like a tongue from the eastern shore of the Dead Sea toward the western shore, licking at the gray water.

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At that place, the end of the peninsula, it's just one mile wide, the sea is, and the water's very shallow, so shallow that it's more like a swamp. It's the only place around the sea where you find green. It's not bright green or exciting green or vivid green.

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It's not vibrant green. It's just a kind of a reedy green, a swampy green, just a sign of some life. It stands out, though, against the salt flats and the hard, hard, crusted earth. And where that green is, that's where Sodom and Gomorrah stood.

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Shafiq told us about Sodom and Gomorrah in a typically Arabic way. He said, "Once two men were traveling here. One was very greedy and the other was very envious. And they met a genie on this spot.

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And the genie said, 'I will give one of you, whoever wishes, a wish. And whatever wish you wish, you will receive. But immediately after you have received your wish, the other will receive twice as much of what you wished for as you did.'

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And the greedy man knew immediately what he wanted to wish for, but he couldn't stand the thought that his friend would have twice as much of it as he did. So he said not a word. And the envious man, he couldn't stand the thought that his friend

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would have twice as much of anything more than he did. And so he didn't say a word. And they stood glaring at each other. So finally the greedy man, who was stronger, reached over and took the envious man by the throat and said,

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'Make your wish or I'll kill you.' And so the envious man, with a murderous sneer on his face, breathed out his wish. 'I wish I was blind in one eye.' And immediately he was.

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And immediately the greedy man was blind in both. And Shafiq said, 'Greed and envy are blind. And greed and envy are here, where Sodom and Gomorrah stood.' [bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. Church shocked a lot of the people on the bus, because when most Westerners think of Sodom and Gomorrah, they think of sexual perversion.

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And that's principally because they're ignorant of the Bible. You see, the Bible says very plainly that the principal sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were not sexual. Hear the word of God. 'Behold, this was the guilt of our sister Sodom.

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She and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, that did not aid the poor and the needy. They were haughty, and so when I saw them, I removed them,' saith the Lord. The marks of Sodom and Gomorrah were the marks of greed and selfishness.

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We're very quick to say that the principal problem there was sexual, and very quick to say that, you see, because most of us don't have those kinds of sexual perversities in our lives. It's therefore much easier to talk about Sodom and Gomorrah in those terms.

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Could it be that our economic self-interest leads us to distort our interpretation of Scripture? Well, that could not only be true, it is true. I have heard men get up and, in defense of their selfishness, argue that Jesus was a rich man, that Joseph was affluent.

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I've heard them twist and distort the parables of Jesus to suit their own particular perspectives. And I wonder, as I listen to them, is it because they are ignorant? Or is it because they are perverse and selfish enough to be willing to lay hands even on the Word of God to justify their attitudes?

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The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the sin of lust, yes, but not principally for bodies. But for all the things of the world, it was greed. A fellow sitting next to the window said to me, "Can you see all right?" "Oh yes, I can see all right, no problem at all."

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I thought to myself, we were falling into conversation now. As long as I'd held that window to myself, there hadn't been any conversation. But when I offered it to him and he accepted it, then communication began. As long as I wasn't so concerned with what I was to receive, then things began to happen.

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That's the problem with the prophet motive, my friends. The prophet motive, you see, can get down inside of us and tempt those things in us which are most greedy and selfish. Oh yes, the prophet motive does spur initiative. I don't know of anything that spurs initiative like the prophet motive, and this is good.

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But the prophet motive also stirs up in us that which is insatiable, that which is never satisfied. When I think of the prophet motive, I think of Al Capone. Al Capone was one of the arch criminals of American history. He was known as Scarface.

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He led the forces of illegality in Chicago in its bloodiest days. He was released from prison to go home and die of syphilis, and during that time when he was dying, he made this statement. "This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it whatever you like, it gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity.

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If only we will seize it with both hands and make the most of it." And he did. He seized what he wanted. He made what he wanted.

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And that's what can so easily happen to those who let profit be the motive of their lives. Let any nation or any individual that thinks to use profit as the motive of its existence recognize that together with that motive there must be internal discipline and external checks and balances. Other than that is the course to destructive greed.

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I remembered at Pompeii, seeing there in the ruins of that city which you remember was buried by the ashes and dust and fire from Mount Vesuvius, the body of a woman, she had literally been embalmed in ashes, and her body is there now on display. Her feet, when they found her, were pointed toward the city gate, but her head was looking backwards, and her arm was extended as if she was reaching for something, and just beyond her reach,

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and it was there in the ruins, just beyond her reach was a bag of pearls. I don't know if they were her pearls or those that had been dropped by another. She was hurrying to safety. Maybe her friends were calling her. But then she saw that, and she reached back, and she stooped, and she died.

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And it wasn't Vesuvius that killed her. It was greed. The color of greed and the color of envy is green. You've heard the expression "green with envy."

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And Sodom and Gomorrah there by the Dead Sea are green. Not bright green, not vital green, not exciting green, but the green of the swamp. That's where greed ends. Not in happiness, but in the swamp.

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I reached in my pocket and pulled out my pocket testament, and in my other pocket I pulled out a dime, and I opened the Bible and I took the dime. Try this sometime if you don't believe me. With a single dime you can cover up the very name of God.

00:35:44.000 - 00:35:57.000

"Time to go back," said Sephit. It's a three-hour drive. Most of the people fell asleep. I dozed a bit myself, but I couldn't sleep well.

00:35:57.000 - 00:36:09.000

The desert is such a good place to think. Everything is stripped away except the essentials there, you see. All the flora and the fauna, everything is brought down to basics. And when you're in the desert, well, thoughts come clear.

00:36:09.000 - 00:36:33.000

And it suddenly came clear to me as I rode through that waste by that sea, that trying to find happiness through religious legalism is the course of falling. And trying to find happiness through power and the exercise of power is the course of foolishness. And trying to find happiness through defensive living, in which you offer yourself to no one in vulnerability,

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is inevitable cause for despair. And trying to find happiness in greed is trying to find your way to a swamp. Each and every one of these attitudes is focused on the self, ingrown, and they all end dead. Dead sea souls.

00:36:54.000 - 00:37:03.000

"We're almost home," said Sephit. "Now tomorrow we'll be going to the Sea of Galilee. Don't forget your cameras when you leave the bus. We won't be on this bus tomorrow."

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Did he say Galilee? Galilee. Tomorrow we go to Galilee. Just 60 miles away.

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Fed by the same river that feeds the Dead Sea. But what a difference. Deep blue water, surrounded by eucalyptus-fringe shores, a fisherman's paradise. More different kinds of fish and plant life live in the Sea of Galilee

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than any other comparable body of water on the face of the earth. Think of it. Just 60 miles apart and fed by the same river. The Dead Sea and the Living Sea.

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And what's the difference between the two? Just this. Everything the Dead Sea gets from the Jordan, it keeps. It has no outlet.

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The water stagnates and dies. But everything that Galilee receives from Jordan, it passes on. What it gets, you see, it gives. And in the getting and the giving, it lives!

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That's the difference, you see, between death and life. That's the difference between living a legalism, or living in power, or living defensively, or living in greed, and living as Christ would have us live.

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It's the difference between getting and holding, and getting and giving. Jesus said, do you remember the words of our text? "It is more blessed to give than to receive." The word "blessed" means happiness.

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This is the law of life that Jesus holds down to us. This is the law of life that came home to me with such power by the Dead Sea that day. Happiness is to be found in giving. That's the secret of life.

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So long, said Shafiq. We all stumbled off the bus. I looked at my watch. Good.

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Just enough time for a shower before dinner. Let us pray. O love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee.

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I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.