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.

And when we start here in just a minute, we're going to pick up where we left off last time,

which is Luke chapter 2 verse 8.

And my non-introduction introduction is going to be quick this week because we haven't gotten that far into Luke so it's kind of shouldn't be that difficult so again as usual as I usually note if you listen to

the first Bible study on Luke you could go back and listen to my big long introduction,

if you have insomnia that needs curing or something.

And for now though, I'm just going to, as I said, get us cut up real quick.

We left off sort of right in the middle of the story of Jesus' birth.

Jesus was just born. And we had,

leading up to that, we met the parents of St. John the Baptist, St. John the forerunner.

We met Mary, Jesus' mother, and found out they were that Elizabeth, St. John the Forerner's mother, and Mary were cousins.

And we saw the two of them meet each other, and we've heard a lot of prophecies about who Jesus is going to be and what he's going to do.

And then right before we left off last time, we read about the decree that went out from Caesar

Augustus to get a census to have a headcount for taxes for the entire Roman Empire. And because of

that, because it's difficult to get a headcount when you have migratory workers.

You know, you have peasants who move from place to place, following jobs and following the harvest.

And so the order went out that they had to return to their familial place of birth,

and that way they could sort of get a snapshot of everyone at that one point in time.

And so having gone back to, from Nazareth and Galilee, having traveled down to Bethlehem and Judea, taking this long trip,

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