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 St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston,

West Virginia.

Okay, so I'm going to get started here in just a second.

We're going to be starting at the beginning of Gospel According to St. John Chapter 12.

And as usual, I'll make the announcement that by the time anyone's hearing this online,

the first Bible study on St. John's Gospel will be available already, so you can go back and listen to that to hear the introduction to the book as a whole, just to get us caught up to where we were.

As we mentioned last time, we're just past sort of the major shift in St. John's Gospel because, as we mentioned, chapters 11 through 21 in St. John's Gospel cover the last week, essentially, of Jesus' life.

So the first 10 chapters cover the rest.

So we've made sort of our major shift now.

We've entered into that week.

Last time we talked about and read about the raising of Lazarus.

And this happened in Bethany, which is not far from Jerusalem. So Jesus is sort of

on his way to Jerusalem when this takes place. And the raising of Lazarus is sort of a crystallizing

moment here in two ways, in a positive way in that this demonstration of Christ's power

resurrecting this man who's been dead for four days, sort of solidifies for his followers

that he is indeed the Messiah, that he is who he says he is, that what he's been saying is true.

And also, on the other side, for the people who are opposed to him, the people who hate him,

we've seen it sort of crystallized their desire to get rid of him.

And so immediately following the raising of Lazarus, we saw that the Sanhedra and the Jewish leaders

got together and agreed that Jesus needed to die. And we saw that Caiaphas sort of told the

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