Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so we will go ahead and get started.

And when we get started in just a moment, we'll be starting St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews.

Last time was just the big long introduction, which I'm not going to now repeat, because then we would just

keep doing that over and over again and never get to the actual book.

But by the time people are hearing this, the recording of that will also be available to go back and listen to.

The one thing that's very pertinent is, as I mentioned last time,

not really an epistle in the same sense as the epistles of St. Paul that we've been reading so far.

And the reason that's relevant tonight Paul that we've been reading so far.

And the reason that's relevant tonight is that when we pick up here in Hebrews 1 verse 1,

we're just going to drop right into it.

Right.

So we don't have the sort of usual introductory material that we've seen that all of St. Paul's epistles tend to have, right?

We identify himself, you know, Paul, an apostle, two, da, da, da, da, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

All that's not here.

We just go straight, straight into it.

The other thing I'll reiterate, because again, this is also pertinent, is we talked about how genre-wise, part of the reason for that is that this isn't really a letter.

This is more a written-down homily or sermon that's being sent to someone.

That's why we have some of the things you'd see at the end of a letter at the end,

but we don't have the things at the beginning.

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