#35 Qs on Crucifixion and Atonement

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#35 Qs on Crucifixion and Atonement

April 11, 2020

Just in time for Easter we bring you a show (recorded before lockdown) in which Tom answers listener questions on the crucifixion, the nature of atonement and forgiveness.

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Transcript

the ask and he write anything podcast. Hello and welcome to another edition of the show and Easter edition today with me just in bright theology and apologetics editor for premiere and brought you in partnership as ever with SBCK and NT-RITE online and I was hoping to get this show out actually a little bit earlier in Lent but what with everything going on in the world it had to wait a little longer than I had hoped but here it is just in time just before Easter Sunday actually arrives a special show in which I sit down with Tom to talk about your questions on Atonement and Crucifixion and as you'll hear this was all recorded well before the coronavirus crisis really came into force so you're going to be hearing well how things were normal frankly but I'm sure you'll enjoy hearing his answers to some of your questions and on the next edition of the podcast aiming to get some of your questions in on the resurrection too just a reminder that we're still running this competition whereby the end of April we will be picking winners out of the ask and to write anything mailing list for signed copies of Paul a biography so you could be in the running if you simply get registered over at our website that's ask NT-RITE.com make sure you sign up for the subscriber list and then you will be drawn from the hat or you'll be among those that we're drawing from from the hat to win those signed copies of Paul a biography and of course by signing up you'll get those regular updates from our newsletter and bonus content and more besides so all of the details again over at ask NT-RITE.com for now a very happy Easter and enjoy today's show. We'll be back for another edition of the show with myself Justin and Tom sitting down to take your questions today on the Crucifixion and atonement and that's obviously very relevant to the period we're in of Lent as we approach Easter.

Lent in some ways has been rather revived as a Christian tradition I've noticed in recent years I think whereas once it was seen as the domain simply of Anglo-Catholics and that sort of thing people outside of those traditions increasingly observing it in some way doing something to market the 40-day period up to Easter I suppose you've always yourself acknowledged and done something to reflect the Lent period. Sure I mean a lot depends on on what's going on in one's life and sometimes I've had to traveling for 10 days in the middle of it and going to different places and being taken out to meals and it's very hard to keep a strict discipline in the way that you might if you were at home all the time but yes I grew up in a very ordinary middle of the road Anglican church where it's just assumed Ash Wednesday introduces you to Lent and now we have these 40 days coming up to Holy Week and Easter and Holy Week and Dically Good Friday in Easter. What's always certain to be about that is that we often do Lent quite well in the sense of being intentional about either taking something up or doing without something or saving the money we would have spent on alcohol or chocolate or whatever it is giving it to some good cause but then we don't do Easter in the same way and I have a problem about that Easter too is a great 40-day time but that ought to be a celebration and so I think it's characteristic of Western Christianity to be very conscious of the penitential season and then we have a big party on Easter Day and then we forget about it all.

And actually the rhythm of Lent ought to lead to the new creation rhythm of Easter and that's a whole other story. So yes I mean everywhere that I have lived in every job that I've done demands a different kind of discipline for Lent and this year because we've only just moved house and tried to settle in and figure out what's going on and haven't even settled into a regular family pattern of church going yet we're still trying to figure all that out but yeah I grew up with people going to Lent and Bible studies or deciding to read a book for Lent whatever trouble with that is I'm always reading books I'm not quite sure. It wouldn't make that much different.

I mean and do you find yourself usually with a Nashan cross on your forehead? Oh often Nashwins. Yes not always but often and I mean when I was teaching in St Andrews if I had been class for a seminar early on I couldn't go and go and go and find some funny looks or debate people. Probably not because no because there would be other other people around likewise.

I suspect that if I walk around Oxford this Lent that way it would be the same. I read a fascinating story actually a bit off subject but of a young man who had as an atheist as a skeptic at least had started attending you know quite a high Anglican church and went along to their Ash Wednesday and said it had quite a profound impact on him this this act of receiving the cross and went into his workplace you know during the rest of the day and discovered actually it helped to identify who the other Christians were because and he got given it led to him being given a someone connecting him with him giving him a copy of Seis Lewis's books. He became a Christian in the end.

Well well well so there you go. That's God moves in many serious ways. Great.

We're talking about the crucifixion today. People always have questions on this obviously you've written books on the subject as well Tom but let's start with something that's come up in a couple of ways. Fred in New Market Ontario says can you explain the necessity of Jesus's crucifixion specifically as a blood sacrifice in inverted commas? Why the necessity of sacrifice at all from Abel on and how specifically was Jesus's crucifixion the end the telos the abolishment of blood sacrifice beyond a simplistic he was the perfect man so his sacrifice was enough.

How is it required at all and conversely how is it enough for the almost infinitude of humanity's sins both transgression and missing the mark? Simple questions says Fred at the end there. Yes thanks Fred really simple questions. There's a major problem here in that we are so distanced from the idea of animal sacrifice that that's not something that we do or have done in the ancient world most people live quite close to the land many people were either themselves or immediate family involved in agriculture and with animal husbandry and you just would be used to killing animals for all sorts of reasons either for food or because they were sick or offering them in some sort of sacrifice so that in the ancient world that this was perfectly normal for us it's like yuck I never killed an animal knowing me in that way and the other thing is that the idea of sacrifice we have assumed has the meaning that it has in some forms of pagan religion which is trying to please a deity by doing something cruel or certainly deadly to an animal or particularly having an animal being punished because of my sin something and when people hear the phrase blood sacrifice I think all of that stuff is going on in the back of their minds I want to say just let's rinse that out and start again where the bible starts because in the book of Leviticus and numbers where you get the ancient Israelite sacrificial laws it's not about this animal being punished for the sins of the people if that was so you couldn't offer the animal to God because it would be impure to be unclean the only animal that very definitely has sins placed on it is the one animal that you don't sacrifice to name the scapegoat exactly a strip not for Azharzil whatever that means different theories as to what that might mean but it's a way of saying yes we need to get rid of our sins it's a great visual aid for that once a year that's what you do on the day of a tenement so what is sacrifice about and this is where the letters of the Hebrews often get invoked and it's all about earth and heaven and about the temple or the tabernacle in the wilderness as the place where earth and heaven are joined and this relates to one of the biggest problems that we have about the whole conception of Christianity in the western world which is that the bible isn't about how do we sinners that we are get to live with God it's about how does God in his love and grace get to live with us sinners that we are and the temple is the sign that God wants to live with and amongst his people but if that is to be so then because God is utter life and utter goodness he cannot dwell with anything that reeks of death in the sense of sin corruption decay etc God is the life giver he says yes to creation not no to creation and so God provides according to Exodus of Istica's numbers God provides the life blood of the animal as the way of cleansing the sanctuary from all the pollution that would otherwise prevent him from coming to live there now when you fast forward from that and see the language that Jesus uses which is complicated and the language then that the early Christians use it's something to do with what Paul says in Romans 5 verse 1 since we're justified by faith faith we have access to this grace in which he says it's temple language and that God comes to dwell with us because Jesus has been in that sense the perfect sacrifice because his blood has cleansed the heavenly temple which now gets joined to the earthly world so that now even though we have been sinners God can dwell with us and that is what then kickstarts Paul's whole theology of the early spirit that the spirit dwells in and with us now now this is huge I mean I've just listed about 10 different layers of theological investigation could be a separate program exactly and I just want to say hold off from the modern anxiety about blood sacrifice and let's try and get our heads around which is difficult the whole biblical idea of the reason just note in Leviticus numbers the animals are not killed on the altar that happens in some pagan sacrifices the animals are killed somewhere else the moment of killing isn't isn't important what matters is that the blood which is the life gift from God of life then cleanses and rinses the sanctuary now let me be quite clear this does not mean that I am denying something you could loosely call substitution reattonement that phrase means many different things to many different people many people have quite wrongly identified the sacrificial cult with substitution reattonement once you separate those out you can understand them both in their own way one other point which and there's enough agendas throughout three phd's the Passover sacrifice and the regular round of daily sacrifices particularly then the day of atonement are very very different things there's nothing in the Passover sacrifice about forgiven forgiveness of sins they come together in Isaiah 53 interestingly and Jesus himself seems to draw them together because the state that Israel had got itself into which Jesus is responding to and sharing is that Israel is in long-term exile because of her sins so that the exiles both need forgiveness of sins and a new exodus and so the sacrifice of the Passover and the sacrifice of the day of atonement which are quite separate things get joined together by Jesus and explored together by the early church and then forgotten about by later Christians because we're coming with the wrong conceptualities so it's a tough set of issues now you've you've implicitly mentioned that the book where you lay a lot of this out in one of your recent books the day the revolution began and I'll I'll skip to Victor's question here and we will come back to penal substitution as well short some questions on that but Victor is in Switzerland and says I very much appreciate several of Tom's books thrilled to hear him in person in Basel some years ago I've been struggling through the day the revolution began for over a year with gaps I think I've grasped the main points Jesus came to fulfill God's covenant promise to raise up a forgiven and liberated host of people from all nations and will one day establish a perfect combined new heavens and new earth for all of us but why oh why do the arguments especially Romans 3 have to be so complicated and I think even just hearing your previous explanation yes a lot of people will have said well it was always very simple you know when the gospel presentation was made yeah yeah you know your bad person Jesus took your sins now you're forgiven and now you can have life with God and and a lot of what you're expounding suddenly makes it sound more complicated yes yes I fully appreciate that and I've spent my life oscillating between simplicity and complexity and I've written three books with the word simple in the title one one of the times my publishing editor said to me Tom I need to explain to you the word simple to which my response was and I've made this several times if I'm in St Andrews as I was for 10 years and somebody says how do I get from here to Glasgow now please keep it simple I could say just keep going west and a bit south and you can't miss it but it would be kinder to point out that there is a very wide river in the way two miles wide at its narrow point and then if you try and avoid that there's a couple of ranges of mountains now am I making it more complicated yes I am but maybe that would help I mean the one thing I would say in all of this is I love exploring the depth and the complexity but we don't need to necessarily understand all that for it to be efficacious in our life absolutely a long time ago I heard a very wise teacher John Wenham who was in Oxford when I was not a graduate gave a talk on the atonement and he rattled through all these different theories and laid it all out brilliantly and somebody said at the end how much of this does somebody have to know in order to be a Christian and he smiled and said very little something about the love of God reaching out in Jesus and his death and embracing you so that's enough to get started it may not be enough to keep you going but it's certainly enough to get started and that's absolutely right you know Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so that that's pretty basic but then when things get tough you need to understand more and more and more and it's like many things in life it's like music you know somebody joins a choir and can't I just sing the tune and well actually you have to understand about sharps and flats and you have to understand about pausing and breathing and so on oh that makes it so complicated I just like singing in the bath well okay you go and sing in the bathroom please don't join the choir unless you're prepared to learn the details sure and the same with with anything that's worth doing but Romans 3 21 to 26 and there are several other passages in Paul like this it's as though Paul could have taken that and written a whole letter explaining it and I suspect that one of the reasons that people fell out of windows sometimes when he was preaching all night was that he was explaining it in great detail just explain for those who don't have photographic memory like you do what is the content of Romans 3 21 to 26 okay well Romans Romans is in is in four great movements and the first movement is chapters one to four and Paul sets up the problem and it's a multi-layered problem about how can God's purposes be maintained in the world and how can God's covenant faithfulness to Israel to the covenant and to the creation be be fulfilled it looks as though it's all gone horribly wrong and then in 3 21 he says but now the covenant faithfulness of God has been revealed from God's faithfulness to human faithfulness basically through the death of Jesus but then what he does is he scrunches together his argument in a very tight little passage verses 24 25 and 26 but he says okay all of sin falls short of the glory of God justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption which is in Messiah Jesus redemption is an extra word whom God put forward as a and the Greek is Hylasterion the Hylasterion is the mercy seat in the tabernacle with the cherubim either side which is the place where God comes to meet with his people and meet with them in grace where the blood is sprinkled and it's to be received by faith so that he might display his righteousness his covenant faithfulness to prove that in the present time he is faithful to the covenant and that he justifies the one who has faith the faith in Messiah Jesus now phew that's a lot but he's hurrying on because the point he really wants to make at the end of chapter 3 and then in chapter 4 is this is how God has been faithful to the covenant with Abraham to create a worldwide sin forgiven family and now we can move on to chapters 5 to 8, 9 to 11, 12 to 16 but it's as though at several points he's got I mean think of it like a telescope he could have expanded it he could have written much more taken each of those points and spelled it out but for the sake of the logic of this argument he's telescoped it together and we have with labor and difficulty to spell it I was talking about a similar passage the other day in Oxford in 2 Corinthians 5 where he says the love of Christ constrains us because one died for all therefore all died and he died for all so those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised whoa wait a minute poor hang on can you just take us through that slowly and and again and again he does this so I think it has to be complicated because maybe it's something to do with the strange inspiration of Scripture that God knows and poor knew that we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds and I think sometimes the dense and complicated passages are given within an overall structure which is wooing us in to say hey stop on this wall dig around try and figure it out and then that's when you start to see it whoa it's it's amazing I I don't think you would have been a uticus leaning out the window and falling asleep if you'd been there with Paul unpacking some of this stuff who knows who knows um it was um two two related questions here as I promised on penal substitution now this comes around every time and obviously well as you're here some people have some sort of worries about utem on this front so Stephen in Austin Texas said I recently had a conversation with my pastor about listening to the ask anti-write anything podcast and was very surprised by the response I was told that I have to look out for anti-write because of his beliefs most notable was that mr. right does not believe in the idea of penal substitution re-attonement I found articles that dispute this accusation but they were published more than a decade ago could you please explain your views on the subject as they are today thank you and thank you for Paul a biography I found it fascinating inspiring and went through an entire tin of bookdars so and there's another one here and I'll just read this as well because it's it's much the same stuff um Parker in Malibu California says why has the church grown to favor substitutional atonement over christmas victor when dealing with the purpose of the cross it seems to me that both atonement theories are shown in scripture and work in tandem to display the power and purpose of Jesus's life death and resurrection so we've covered some of this ground before but let's let's just unpack it again penal substitution re-attonement um should we watch out for you do well you need to watch out for Paul because it's what I'm really trying to do here is to get inside the mind of Paul and to see precisely what he means and it's one of the worries that I've had for much of my adult life actually is the way in which the church has assumed that it knows what Paul must have meant and then rather forces certain texts to mean that rather than actually allowing Paul to state his own terms and develop it and I mentioned two krinthians five a moment ago and there's the famous text in verse 21 when it says God made him to be sin who knew no sins that in him we might become the righteousness of God people say well they are that's that's quite straightforward he takes us and we take his righteousness end of conversation unfortunately that's not what that passage is about the passage is part of that long passage from two krinthians two fourteen through to six thirteen which is Paul's apostolic apologia he's explaining to the krinthians why a genuine apostle is bound to look beaten up and suffering and and always in trouble which is not what their idea of a leader was about at all and it's because he is bearing about in his own body as he says in chapter four the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifest so that passage in 521 comes where he said God reconciled the world to himself through the Messiah and he gave us the ministry of reconciliation God was in the Messiah reconciling the world to himself and entrusting us with the word of reconciliation God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that we might become might embody the covenant faithfulness of God in other words this is about us apostles are looking like the crucified Jesus and that that's what it means so don't be surprised when you go on immediately very interestingly chapter six verse two he's quoting from Isaiah 49 one of the servant songs and which goes on the very next line to the one he quotes to say I have given you as a covenant to the people and then he goes on into this riff about as unknown and yet well known as dying and behold we live it's an amazing passage and the trouble is because people from the 16th century onwards particularly have taken 521 out of its context it makes it look as though oh there we are this is quite simple sin righteousness done deal sorry righteousness didn't mean what it in the first century what it meant then so pan back from that to the big question because a generational tourgo there was a guy called Gustav Allein who is a Scandinavian bishop who was obviously a bit fed up with the way that a rather cheap and cheerful doctrine of substitution reattonement was being preached by clergy that he knew etc which was all rather brutal it was just worse sinners God needed to punish somebody here is Jesus happened to be his own son that'll do bang he gets killed we're all right and people are looking at that and saying hang on just how does that work is that fair is that moral is that right and so Allein argued strikingly that actually that's not the center at all and that's not really the main point the point is that in the cross God won the victory over the powers of darkness and so he polarized substitution and christmas victor Christ the vanquisher of the forces of darkness and ever since then people on both sides of the equation have assumed that those two are antithetical yes and as one of your questions here parka from Malibu says they're not they work together and that's exactly right let me show you how in john chapter 12 Jesus it's john's equivalent of the gethsemane moment the Greeks come to the feast to and what see Jesus and Jesus doesn't go and see them he says this is a sign that the moment has come and he says should I be afraid of this are no for this cause i've come to this are and he says now is the judgment of this world now is the ruler of this world cast out and if i am lifted up from the earth i will draw all people to myself in other words what i'm about to do is to win a victory over the dark force that has usurped god's rule over the world this is why i called my book Jesus and the victory of god and he five years ago and but how is that done and john makes it quite clear through the narrative rather than through theological theory that it happens through Jesus taking the place of the sinner whether it's barabbas or whether it's peter or whoever it is and and luke does this particularly again and again this man has done nothing wrong we're receiving the just punishment for our misdeeds etc there's substitution is woven into luke's narrative even though the reader knows because Jesus says in luke's gethsemane scene this is your hour and the power of darkness in other words it's a battle with the forces of darkness but the way the victory is won is by Jesus taking the place of the sinner so the two work together victory through substitution how does that work this is fascinating um i think it works like this this is difficult to describe but i think it's central that when we worship idols which we all do to a lesser or greater extent but repentance is always a turning away from idols we give to those idols whether it's money or sex or power or particular things or people or whatever we give them power over us and that power causes us to sin in various ways deep down inside in our imaginations and in acts and speech etc and every time we sin we are increasing the grip of those powers on our lives so the way to break the power of the dark powers that we have invoked by worshiping idols is for sin to be punished and to be dealt with as it needs to be dealt with sin itself so that then the thing which is enabling the idols to keep their grip on us has been dealt with and and is done away with the place where paul says this most clearly and i want to say this to steven in austin texas and to his dear pastor is roman's eight verses three and four where paul says in verse one there is no condemnation for those who are in messiah jesus and the ultimate because there's several because is there but the ultimate one is because on the cross god condemned sin in the flesh of christ now that is definitely substitutionary it is definitely penal but it works within that larger scheme of god dealing with all the powers which is why at the end of chapter eight neither death nor life nor anything in all creation shall separate us from the love of god in messiah jesus our lord in other words the victory has been won but it's a victory through substitution if you take substitution out of that larger picture then you put it into a different basically medieval picture of we've all been naughty god has to kick somebody in the teeth it happens to be his own son but obviously that the passage that's often brought into play from the old testament is the isiah passage in which you know absolutely but the isiah transgressions he was wounded and absolutely but look at the larger context the larger context if just track back the fourth servant song is isiah 52 13 to 53 12 track back from 52 13 just as a few verses back to 52 7 which is how lovely on the mountains is the one who publishes salvation who says to zion your god reigns what does that mean Babylon has been running the show something has happened which means that god has won the victory over Babylon your watchmen lift up their voices and shout for joy because in plain sight they see Yahweh returning to Zion shout for joy etc and now look behold my servant in other words victory over the dark power through the work of the servant the servant song you know when i was doing theology in oxen all those years ago the first question i answered in the first exam paper was an absolute gift for me said quote the servant songs can only be understood in the light of isiah 40 to 55 as a whole discuss and i thought yes it's exactly right these servant songs mean what they mean not within the context of a detached medieval atonement theory but in the context of the whole vision of the greatness and the victory of god which you have in 40 to 55 as a whole time's running away so i'm going to i'm going to skip some interesting questions that we could have got to um on limited atonement maybe we'll do a maybe we'll do a another podcast looking at some particular Calvinist uh interpretations of things but um i didn't want to get to this one edocia in scotland says in luke 2334 jesus said father forgive them for they know not what they do this of course all words from the cross i have several questions what did jesus mean who are these people that jesus interceded for the authorities that put him to death the jewish world the whole world were these people forgiven and if they need to repent to be forgiven then what was the importance of jesus's words for these people i mean anyone can get forgiveness if they repent so just some interest in in that particular phrase yes yes father forgive them yes they know not what they do yes um i think the very specific thing is we're talking about roman soldiers here and luke is probably writing for a gentile audience um who would include people like those roman soldiers they're just doing their job etc etc the really interesting thing which it also does not actually mention is what a radical innovation this represents within the whole jewish martyr tradition if you look at the book called second maccabees and look at second maccabees seven where there are seven brothers being tortured to death they say to their torturers and to the king who's commanding this torture to take place uh we're gonna get new bodies in the resurrection but god is gonna punish you you are going to have a terrible time and you'll see god's judgment on you and the extraordinary thing in christianity from that moment on from luke 23 through to act seven where steven says lord don't lay this into their charge and then into the whole later christian tradition is people praying for their persecutors and this is like oh my goodness nobody does this yeah why would you do it you'd surely call down god's judgment and then i think something about i think something about the nature of scripture did luke think he was writing scripture well he was writing a jesus story for the church to show how yeah i think he in a sense he thought he was writing something that we would call scripture is that scripture is multivalent once you get the original meaning here are these roman soldiers nailing into the cross then you can see resonances out beyond that and that phrase has been hugely powerful um again and again i mean in in in Coventry cathedral um you know it's a father forgive and it's an allusion to this um and the context of that of course being the bombing of the cathedral the bombing of the cathedral and i think it was the dean or the provost the next morning um found um some charred bits of wood and put them roughly in the shape of the cross and there they are and it says father forgive in other words they don't know what they're doing um and and that's why Coventry it's been such a symbol of reconciliation and peace yeah and so the words do resonate out to the jewish world to the authorities to the whole world so that's a good question was jesus prayer answered in a sense do we know that those roman soldiers were forgiven um we have no means of knowing that just like in many cases when you're in ministry you preach to people you counsel people only god really knows their hearts people can pretend people can pretend to be hard-hearted when in fact they're deeply penitent and vice versa um so i want to say that is god's business um i think there is a sense in which the gift of forgiveness just just like you know it's an old chestnut can you forgive somebody if they're not sorry and the answer is if you don't then their evil is still crippling you and i think that's now a well-known thing psychologically and i think there is a sense in which the same is true about god you know we look at the world as a god how can you allow your world to be like this and god says i have done absolutely everything to make it clear i love you and i forgive you and god is not therefore perpetually implicated by the evil of people do but that that's quite a dark mystery at the heart and as we finish off this one i suppose for me i've always felt as well that phrase obviously does resonate down the centuries and and can be brought brought up by many christians since jesus who are facing similar persecution of course who are able to say father forgive them they know of course of course as we saw in commentary cathedral a concrete cathedral and and uh yeah just the last two or three years ago was it um a group of christians in in libya who were were lined up and shot or beheaded or whatever um by Isis yeah that's right and and just calling on the name of jesus and yeah and people in death camps offering forgiveness to their persecutors this stuff still happens it still happens and it's still extremely powerful yeah tom thank you very much thank you uh and uh next time we're going to be looking at the the other side of easter the resurrection so we're looking forward to hearing some questions on that and your thoughts for now thanks for being with me and we'll see you next time thank you thanks for joining us on this week's edition of the podcast a very happy easter to you wherever you're celebrating from lockdown i do hope that you can come back again for the next one to in a couple of weeks time we'll be looking at the resurrection yes a couple of weeks after the big day of course but uh some interesting questions that you'll be sharing with us and tom will be responding to as ever if you want to find out more about this podcast and get yourself signed up for all the content that's available and indeed the bonus prize draws and so on do go to the website askentiright.com but just before you go got an easter egg that we have already actually shared on the podcast a year or more ago but i thought i did get out again today it's a great little number by tom on the guitar and very relevant obviously to today's topic so to play us out here's tom with a song well we've got to that fun not too serious part of the podcast where tom pulls out the guitar it happens to me my guitar actually but tom the tom plays it for us now we all know some of the best known songs from cindy karta one more step along the world i go lord of the dance and so on in that sense his his songs have been sung in primary schools probably for the decades now um what i didn't realize until i came across a video of you online um playing this particular song that he obviously had quite a repertoire of different songs and poems as well tell us a little bit about how you first came across this one well in the 60s he was as you say writing things which then it was kind of flaky and exciting that one was allowed to play this sort of thing which had christian resonances and some people even bringing guitars into church i know that's now such a cliche and it's typical that old 60s rock that's still turning up greyhead but still strumming away so i'm very much aware of that and okay that the joke is on me there but in the 60s this is hugely exciting and um when i was in a gap here as we used to have between school university i was out in canada and i was working in a lumber camp in british columbia and um there was a folk club in prince george and which was about 50 miles away from where the lumber camp was and it used to go in on the weekend and i went one weekend and was chatting to people and they discovered that i played the guitar oh come next week do us do a set so i during that week working in the camp what what what should i how should i sort of nail my colors to the mast and so i had all sorts of things from dillon peter paul and marrie various the gordon lightfoot um but i thought actually i'll do a couple of sydney kato ones right up front just to say actually this is who i am so right at the top of the first set i played lord of the dance and then i played this friday morning let's hear it okay itself explanatory i think it was on a friday morning that they took me from the cell and i saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well you can blame it on to pilot you can blame it on the juice you can blame it on the devil but it's god that i accuse it's god they ought to crucify instead of you and me i said to the carpenter a hanging on the tree you can blame it on to adam you can blame it on to eve you can blame it on the apple but that i can't believe it was god that made the devil and the woman and the man and there wouldn't be an apple if it wasn't in the plan it's god they ought to crucify instead of you and me i said to the carpenter a hanging on the tree now the rabus was a sinner and they let the rabus go but you are being crucified for nothing here below and god is up in heaven and he doesn't do a thing with a million angels watching and they never move a wing it's god they ought to crucify instead of you and me i said to the carpenter a hanging on the tree to hell with jihover to the carpenter i said i wish that a carpenter had made the world instead goodbye and good luck to you our ways they will divide remember me in your kingdom the man you hung beside it's god they ought to crucify instead of you and me i said to the carpenter a hanging on the tree you've been listening to the ask and to write anything podcast let other people know about this show by rating and reviewing it in your podcast provider for more podcasts from premiere visit premiere dot org dot uk slash podcasts