behind a synagogue and when I pass the synagogue come out like a religious worshiper and follow me.”  He walks right over to this pariah—we can’t get flesh and blood on the Bible.

         The Fundamentalists would try to marry their daughters to me by contrast, in spite of what they think of me.  I’m saying “Fundamentalists”—I’m their enemy!  They don’t know it; I’m telling them.  They don’t know it; I’m telling them.  Legalists, legalists have put more people into hell with their self-righteous judgmental attitudes than all the bars in America.  I hate them!  I’m their unchanging enemy!  If they hate me I’m complimented, but their view of me, bad as it is—they would try to marry their daughters to me before Matthew. 

        If you can get the attitude they had toward Matthew, and here comes the Preacher of eternal truth who says to Matthew in his place of sin “Follow me”—called him.  And wherever He went He is friend of sinners.  He goes to Jericho; biggest sinner in town there’s the guy He goes to lunch with.  They called Him a ‘winebibber and a glutton’ because He had a good time.  He wasn’t some religious freak show at any time and He didn’t come to these people…to the man sick of palsy, “Be of good cheer.  Give Je-Je a little smile now.”  He didn’t say to the woman exhausted after years of wasting away with everything and her health, “Cheer up lady.  Cheer up honey.  Keep smiling.  Smile for Jesus now.”  You can tell I grew up in Church.  Just thinking about the kind of Jesus most people portray makes me wanna puke.  He didn’t say in the storm, “Smile.”  He was a man’s man.  He said to Paul “Get your courage up,” not “Be of good cheer.”  “Get your courage up.  I called you.  What is all this stuff against me?  I called you, I’m sending you, and you’re gonna make it.  Don’t look like it to you now, so I put myself between you and whatever it

is and I’m saying, ‘Be of good courage.  I’m gonna get you to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Rome.’”

Now those are the scenes.  To back up what I’m telling you about courage….  You don’t have to turn but if you want to, you can go to Genesis 35.  The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament is in Greek, translated in the immediate centuries before Christ came and it was, as you well know, the Bible that Jesus read from, the Disciples preached from.  It was the Bible of 1st century Judaism and it became the Bible of the Christians, the Old Testament translated into Greek.  So you can read the Septuagint—we have copies—and the Greek word chosen to translate Genesis 35:17 when Rachel, the favored wife of Jacob is birthing her second son, Joseph being her firstborn—she’s having difficulty and the midwife says to Rachel “Fear not,” a reverse way of saying “Have courage, you are going to deliver this child,” and she did.  She died—tragedy of Benjamin’s birth that made Benjamin even more precious to Jacob and more meaning to the story of Joseph’s revelation to his brethren and the keeping of Benjamin as a ploy to wake up his brethren to what they had done to him.  But the word is the same in the Septuagint, a form of the imperative “Have courage.”

You find in the last day prophecies of Jerusalem by Zephaniah—the prophet that tells them of the happenings in the last days and then when God will come and Jesus as Lord of Lords wipes their heartache and tears away—and in the midst of that prophecy in the 3rd chapter of Zephaniah, Verse 16, the prophet speaking for God says “Fear thou not.”  That’s the translation in the English.  The Septuagint has the imperative command “Have courage,” in essence because God’s gonna get it done for you.