time they say ‘comfort’ in place of ‘cheer’ ain’t doing it.  This is a word that means ‘courage.’

Exodus 14, Verse 13, is a passage that when I tell you what it is immediately will refresh your memory.  They’re fleeing, the Israelites, having been delivered out of Egypt.  They’re at the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army’s crashing down on them and Moses raises his staff and says to them “Fear thou not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord” and he parted the Red Sea.  And across on dry land they went and Pharaoh follows and is drowned.  And there’s a humor in that that I never pass by without thinking that God’s my kind of God because just before He brought the waves crashing down on them he knocked the wheels off their wagons and their chariots.  I mean, there they are racing after the Israelites, they’re walking, they’re driving chariots, the water’s piled up, they don’t know how but it’s dry.  So here they go, and just when they’re in the deepest part—Whissh, the wheels go off the chariots!  That’s my kind of God!  Hu-na-huu-huu-huu, and then the waves come down, the waves come down!

Now by hindsight the result of courage can be cheer, but what Moses said was not “Be of good cheer—take a look at the army of Pharaoh and take a look at the water.  I don’t know how well you swim but be of good cheer.”  Now I’m working this to death because doesn’t it remind you of so much Christian preaching?  You come on Sunday, you put on that ecclesiastical face, and you hear the grinning imbecile with the ecclesiastical tone say “The Lord said ‘Be of good cheer.’”  And I’d tune out, trying to figure out who I was gonna get in my ice truck next.  It has no relevance to life, “Be of good cheer”—that’s not what he said.  “Be of good courage!” 

I’ve been telling you for 22 years Faith is not some mystical happening.  Faith existed before God came along and put a capital

letter on a particular kind of faith.  I’ve been over this so many times you could preach it better than me.  God in the fullness of time sent forth His Son.  “No man has seen God,” John says, “Christ hath declared him”—exegesis: ‘led Him forth from behind a curtain and put Him on display.’  And the eternal Word—the one that was facing God and could tell us all we need to know about God, and a God that the Ephesian letter says means to convey His blessings to us through spoken word—comes as the Living Word to speak the words of life. 

These words brought onto the stage of history came at a time when a language ruled the world more precise than any language known to man.  I’ve said this to you many times—in the English a ‘post’ can be breakfast cereal, a mailbox, putting a letter in a box, fencepost, be many things.  Gotta have a context.  We’re under this roof.  It’s not falling.  If I were under falling leaves I would still say in English “I’m under,” as I just did.  In the Greek you’d use a different word for being under something not falling, under something falling.  In the Greek you have precision like no other language and God, fishing for meanings—the words in a land where sin had produced confusion of tongues back to the days of Nimrod the great rebel—God now picks a time to send from behind the curtain of eternity the One who would tell us all we need to know about God and declare Him into a stage and a scene where the most precise language ever known to man rules the minds of man.  And He hunts and picks the words that He’s going to give His emphasis to.  The word logos existed in the Greek language; it described an unknown mediator between an unknown god and man.  He picks that—“I’ll tell you who the logos is and show him to you.” 

Faith existed....  If I were a philosopher on Mars’ Hill I would teach faith—pistis.  Pisteo is the Greek verb; it ought to be a verb not a