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.

When we get started in just a couple of minutes, we're going to be starting in Luke

chapter 16 verse 19. So before we get started, a couple of the usual things and then one

other thing. The usual things are, of course, if you want to hear the introduction to Luke,

it's in the first Bible study on Luke on the website.

And in terms of getting us caught up to where we are right now,

Jesus has made his trip down from Galilee. After beginning his ministry in Galilee,

he's come down to Judea. He's been preaching in the villages on his way to Jerusalem.

The closer he's gotten to Jerusalem, the more sort of conflict there's been. And the more he's been talking about the fact that

once he gets to Jerusalem, this whole thing isn't going to go well.

But as we've seen, the disciples are still a bit obtuse.

And the last couple of chapters, last few nights, he's been sort of surrounded by Pharisees

who are all sort of wolfpacking around him, trying to find a way to trap him out.

Because there has been some, to be fair, mutual animosity, as we saw,

when Jesus went to one of their dinner parties and took issue

with some of their behavior and some of their teachings and then of course the Pharisees did not

respond to that well and so there's been sort of this mutual animosity nonetheless

crisis continued to try to sort of win over the Pharisees.

Last time we read the parable of the prodigal son,

and in that, remember, we talked about how the older son, who was already there,

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