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

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies. And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay. So we will go ahead and get started.

And we will be, when we get started in just a moment, we'll be picking up at the beginning of the Revelation of St. John chapter 15.

And I'm not going to spend too much time doing catch up because we're about to start another one of those cycles.

So as I've been repeating at the beginning of almost every class,

as we've talked about before,

the Book of Revelation is sort of structured around this set of cycles, right?

Where St. John will introduce ideas, and then as the cycles go forward, he develops those ideas more and more.

And so we just came to the end of one of those cycles, and we saw the grapes of wrath.

We saw angels trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

Insert other cultural sub-references here.

But we sort of saw the, this last cycle culminated in another image of the final judgment.

And this used imagery having to do with a harvest,

right, that it's imagery that is used fairly frequently in the Gospels

when Christ is teaching, because most of the people who are sort of

following Christ in his ministry and hearing him preach were

peasant farmers. And so this is why so many of the parables have to do with farming, right,

and these kind of things that were part of their daily life. And one of the recurring images

is that, you know, you have a field, right? It's growing and in it, there's growing

the wheat, the good stuff that you're trying to grow, and then there's also other stuff,

right, weeds, other plants. And in order to not harm the wheat, right, in order to not harm the good stuff that you're trying to grow,

...