BIBLICAL TRUTH SIMPLY EXPLAINED

E PLAINING
De-Greecing the Church
The impact of Greek thinking on Christian beliefs

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This booklet is based on a talk. Originating as it does from the spoken
word, its style will be found by many readers to be somewhat different
from my usual written style. It is hoped that this will not detract from
the substance of the biblical teaching found here.
As always, I ask the reader to compare everything I say or write with
what is written in the Bible and, if at any point a conflict is found,
always to rely upon the clear teaching of scripture.
David Pawson

De-Greecing
the Church
The impact of Greek
thinking on Christian
beliefs
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De-Greecing the Church
The impact of Greek thinking on Christian beliefs

DAVID PAWSON

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 Copyright © 2017 David Pawson

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 De-Greecing the Church
The impact of Greek thinking on Christian beliefs

Contents

Part 1 6

Part 2 34
 PART ONE

We used to live in a small village in North Hampshire called

Sherborne St. John – about a thousand souls. There was
one huge mansion in the village. As you might guess, that
is a National Trust house, a Tudor brick mansion owned by
the Soames family until the National Trust took it over. It
is a beautiful old building with large windows and mellow
bricks, but at some stage in its history the Soames family
stuck onto the main front facing the lake a Greek portico.
Here you have these Corinthian columns with the triangular
pediment above, and it looks totally out of place.
It offends me deeply whenever I see it, whoever stuck
that on. It took me back to Geneva. When I visited Geneva
I wanted to see St. Peter’s Church where John Calvin’s
reformation took place. St. Peter’s Church was of course a
medieval Catholic Gothic structure with soaring archways
and buttresses – a typical old Gothic building. Inside it is
very bare because Calvin got rid of all the decoration, all
the statues, all the carvings, and replaced all the elaborate
decoration with simple pews. So it is nothing much to look
at inside. But when we came out of the west door, to my
horror, against this beautiful Gothic church, again has been
stuck on (I can only say “stuck on”) a Greek portico. Again,
you have the columns and the triangular pediment above,
stuck on to a Gothic building. It doesn’t even fit; it looks

6
terrible. As I backed off across the square to get a better
look at this monstrous carbuncle (to quote somebody else) I
came across a statue on a plinth at the other side of the little
square. On the statue is the bronze figure of a man recoiling
in horror as he looked at this Greek portico. Underneath, it
said “Jeremiah”. You know, I was quite unable to find out
who had put the statue there or why, and how he got away
with it. There are no picture postcards of it. I wanted to get
a photograph of this bronze of a prophet recoiling in horror
at the Greek addition to what had been an attractive Gothic
church, but it is very awkward to do so. It is a parable, and
I identify with that statue.
I recoil in horror at what Greek thinking has done to the
Christian Church over centuries. Immense damage has been
done to the Christian faith right up to today. I want to show
you that you and I have been victims of it, even reading the
Bible with a pair of Greek spectacles on. So the meaning of
my title (and you might have thought I couldn’t spell; the
meaning of “De-Greecing”) is precisely what I have said:
that we need to get out of the Church the Greek influence
that is alien to the Church, alien to our faith. Now of course
most people are aware that the Greek has had some influence
on our culture. Those who think the foundation of Western
civilization is Judaeo-Christian are mistaken. It is far more
Graeco-Roman. Let me just pick out at random four aspects
of our modern culture, our Western life, that go straight
back to Greece.
The first aspect I want to draw attention to is the
architecture. Until steel and reinforced concrete were
available to architects we had to build mostly with stone.
When you look at all the public buildings that have been
built of stone you are looking at Greek temples. Walk around
the City of London, look at the Exchange, look at St. Paul’s
Cathedral. Particularly since the Great Fire of London in

7
1666, which destroyed a couple of hundred churches –
Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt them on the basis of Greek
architecture. All Souls Langham Place is thoroughly Greek
as you will see if you ever go and worship there. You walk
around and look at the Wren churches in London – you are
looking at Greek architecture. Whether the columns are
Corinthian, Doric or Ionic it is Greek through and through.
We have based our architecture on them. Town halls,
museums, libraries, art galleries – up and down the land
you will find them.
Even more in America. Walk around Washington DC,
look at Congress, look at the memorials. They are all Greek
temples. Look at any large house in America and you will
find the front of it is a Greek temple. So architecture owes
a very great deal to Greece. Now I am not saying that is
wrong at this stage; I am just pointing out how deeply their
architecture has influenced our lives.
Let us move on from that to politics. There is not a trace
of democracy in your Bible. Every country in the Bible was
an absolute monarchy ruled by a king. It was a true kingdom
– not like the United Kingdom, which is neither united nor
a kingdom, but a true kingdom in which the king rules, in
which there are no political parties, in which there are no
elections, no votes, no debate about laws. The king makes
them and that’s it. That is what every country was in the
Bible, and the Bible doesn’t teach democracy. I remember
going to see the film “The Ten Commandments”. Cecil B.
DeMille came on at the beginning to make a speech and he
told us that this film was about the beginning of Western
democracy: the story of Moses. There is not a thing about
democracy in Moses’ story or the Ten Commandments – but
there it is.
We are now used to democracy. So Winston Churchill
was right when he said, “Democracy is the worst possible

8
kind of government, except all the others.” What he meant
was that it is safe from dictatorship when you can change
this lot and put another lot in. Though as Studdert Kennedy
said about a general election: “It’s one lot of sinners out and
another lot in.” Not only did the Greeks start democracy, it
is to them we owe an idea called “devolution” – constantly
pressing outwards and pressing down the opportunity for
people to govern themselves. But none of this is in the Bible.
A third aspect of our life today is sport. Where did we get
our love of sport, our obsession with sport? I might even dare
to say for many men in this country the religion of sport? It
didn’t come from the Bible; the Bible has very little about
sport. The only text that springs to mind is, “Bodily exercise
profits little”. A friend of mine said he got all the exercise
he needed climbing hospital stairs to visit his friends who
had been jogging! Where did we get sport from? We got it
from Greece, from the Olympic Games, and just over the
Aegean Sea, the Ionic Games in western Turkey. Sport was
an obsession of the Greeks. The cultivation of the body came
from Greece. Their statues tell you the ideal physique to
have, and greatly exaggerated biceps and so on. The display
of the human body was part of Greek culture, which is why
most of their sports were played in the nude.
Let us take a fourth aspect: entertainment. The Greeks had
everything we have got on television – except television.
They had theatres, they had debates and discussions. They
lived for leisure. They did not live for work. Work was a
necessary evil, but you found your true meaning of life in
leisure after you had finished your work. If possible, you
employed a slave to do your work so that you could be a
gentleman of leisure, so that you could pursue the interests
of leisure.
Whether it be in the great libraries they built, or in the
sports stadium which I have mentioned, or in the theatres,

9
or in the debating chambers, or the open air debating places
like the Areopagus, Mars Hill, where Paul joined in a debate,
or tried to speak. They were entertained; they had to be. The
leisure industry had to be a gigantic industry. Two-thirds of
the people in Greece were slaves to do the work so that the
rest could enjoy their leisure.
Now do these things sound vaguely familiar? We are a
people of sport; we are a people of leisure; we live for the
weekend. We find our real being in the activities that we
choose in our spare time rather than in the activities that are
chosen for us in our work. But I am concerned not so much
about the influence of Greece upon our general culture, but
about the subtle influence of Greece upon the Church and
upon Christian thinking, which is perhaps hardly noticed
by many.
The root of Christianity is in quite a different world from
Greece. Your Bible tells you where our roots are. Our roots
are in the Hebrew world – the Jewish world. That world was
almost the opposite in every respect of ancient Greece. The
Old Testament is totally Hebrew and was actually completed
before the Greeks appeared on the scene. The more you
read the Old Testament the more you study the roots of
Christianity, which were way down in the soil long before
Greece was thought of, though it is mentioned just once or
twice in the Old Testament. The Hebrews did not live for
leisure. They worked a six day week, and the seventh day
was not a holiday, it was a holy day, a day for God, not a day
for them. They lived for work and for worship. They did not
live for sport; they didn’t have time for it. They didn’t live
for leisure. They worked for God and they worshipped God.
The New Testament, it is true, is written in the Greek
language. But every writer bar one was a Hebrew. Though
the language is Greek, the thought is Hebrew. It is still a
Jewish book. The one Gentile writer, Dr. Luke, got all his

10
information from Jewish people and travelled with a Jewish
propagandist called Paul. So our whole Bible is Hebrew from
beginning to end, and that is why, for example, the Bible
has a very high view of work, and in particular a high view
of manual work, whereas for the Greeks manual labour was
for the slave and for the immigrant. The hard labour of the
hands was not for the Greek. It was for anyone else they
could get to do it. Does that strike you as familiar in modern
Europe? If you have got a German car it was probably built
by people who were not Germans.
Manual labour is considered down the scale in Greek
society. People who work with their heads are higher up
the social scale than those who work with their hands. In
the Bible it is the other way on. In the Bible, manual labour
has the top dignity. Most of those whom God called to full-
time service and to great work had already qualified in some
form of manual trade, whether it was shepherd or fisherman
(“tax collector” was an exception). The Son of God himself
was put into a carpenter shop for eighteen years. He was a
woodworker for eighteen years and a wonder worker for
three, and if my mathematics are right, that is a ratio of six
to one, which is the same as his Heavenly Dad. Isn’t it?
Read Genesis 1 lately? Eighteen to three, six to one. Fancy
putting the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, to work
with his hands for eighteen years as a preparation to save the
world! It is the last thing that the Greeks would ever have
even thought of doing, but it is very Hebrew.
Now here we have two completely different worlds which
developed quite independently of each other, though not too
far away from each other geographically, just a few hundred
miles across the sea. The Old Testament was completed by
400 BC. Though the canon, or recognised collection of books
of the Old Testament, was not settled until about 100 BC,
nevertheless by 400 BC the last word of our Old Testament

11
had been written – before the Greeks came on the scene.
Malachi was the last prophet to bring a word from God.
For the next four hundred years God was totally silent. It
was the second time he had been silent for four hundred
years. The first time was when the Hebrews were slaves in
Egypt. But the second time was between our books Malachi
and Matthew. For four hundred years God didn’t send a
prophet and didn’t speak, which is why we don’t have any
of the books written during those four centuries in our Bible.
There were Jewish books written, and we call them the
Apocrypha or “the hidden books”, but they don’t come in
our Bible because they are not God’s Word. They are human
words; they are true – true history, true ideas, but they are not
God’s Word. It is fascinating that there is one phrase which
occurs 3,808 times in the Old Testament but not once in the
Apocrypha. It is the simple phrase “Thus says Yahweh”, or
in your Bibles “Thus says the Lord”. That phrase does not
occur for four hundred years, nor do any miracles occur for
four hundred years. It is almost as if God withdrew from the
earthly scene for four hundred years.
Speculating, I think that is when the devil seized his
chance. Within decades of God having spoken his last word,
Greek philosophers were striding onto the world stage and
giving us their philosophy, their thoughts, their words. Very
quickly we had Socrates – almost immediately after Malachi.
He was followed by his pupil Plato, and later followed by
Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the Great. These three men
in particular gave us a whole new idea, a whole new ideal.
That word “ideal” is characteristic of them. So these
philosophers gave us new ideas, and new ideals. Socrates
wrote nothing, did all his teaching in dialogue with his
students – question and answer all the time – concentrated
on logic and ethics. All of them were concerned about
moral behaviour, about how you make bad people good, in

12
simple terms. But Socrates was condemned to death. He was
accused of corrupting the youth and of being an atheist. He
was condemned to commit suicide by drinking hemlock. But
as he drank the poison he discoursed to his students about
the joy of dying, about the release that it would bring.
However, Plato his pupil did write a lot, poetry and
prose, and opened an academy in Athens to which students
came from all over the then known world. Then Aristotle,
the third of the great three, wrote four hundred books. The
teaching of these three men has spread right through Europe
and through Western civilisation, and has had a profound
influence on all of us whether we like it or not. Without
even being conscious of it, the Greek influence came to us
through our normal education.
Now these three men were fathers of Greek philosophy
and that word simply means the way people think. They
also profoundly influenced their culture. But I am going to
draw a distinction now between the Greek culture, which
I have already mentioned and Greek philosophy, which is
my major subject. The Bible says, “As a man thinks in his
heart, so is he.” In other words, the way we are constantly
thinking is going to shape our behaviour, our character and
our lifestyle. The way we think is the key to the people we
are – both as individuals and in society. The way we think
about ourselves, the way we think about the world in which
we live, the way we think about the God above, all these will
shape our character, shape our lifestyle, make us what we are.
I want now to concentrate on the one particular aspect of
Greek thinking which has corrupted the Christian faith more
than any other. It is in the realm of ideas and ideals. When
you have ideals you have values. Everybody has values – but
when we have values we have a scale of values, a kind of
ladder. At the top we put those things we value most highly,
and at the bottom those things we least value. We finish up

13
with a scale of values, and everyone has such a scale.
If I just asked you to make a list, if your house was burning
down what would you go back into the house and bring out?
That would reveal immediately what is at the top of your
scale of values. I will tell you now what I would go back
for: my Bible. Not because I am terribly pious, but because
it contains years of notes and underlining, and all the fruit of
my thought for years and years, and I just couldn’t be without
it. I would run back in for that (well, my wife first). What
would you run in for? What is your scale of values? What
would you be most willing to lose in your present lifestyle,
or what would you want to hang on to like grim death?
The Greeks, those philosophers, taught a scale of values
and this was it. Imagine a ladder. The top rung we may label
“spiritual”. They put spiritual things as the highest value of
all. The bottom rung we would have to label “physical”,
because they valued physical things least of all – we are
talking about the philosophers now. Where would they
put mental and intellectual things? They would put them
probably on the second top rung, very close to the spiritual.
But can you begin to see what is happening? A gulf is
opening up between the spiritual and perhaps the mental,
and the physical down below, and though it was intended
simply to be a graded scale of values it developed into what
we call a “dualism”, which means a sharp division of life
into two compartments, one of which you value highly and
the other of which you hardly value at all. It became a split
between the spiritual and the physical, and once you have
made that kind of a division then all sorts of other things
follow from it.
You begin to divide a person up into two parts: body and
soul. It is amazing how many people think Christians do
this. But it is a Greek idea that I have a soul in a body. When
God breathed into the body of dust that he had made, the

14
body of clay, he breathed into the dust and Adam became a
living soul. People think that means that God put a soul into
the clay. No it says, “The clay became a living soul.” That
phrase “a living soul” may be found in Genesis 1 applied
to animals – the same phrase. Animals are living souls
because in Hebrew thinking a soul is a breathing body. It
is not something distinct from the body; it is a live body, a
living breathing body.
That is why when your body was in danger (using the
traditional distress signal) you didn’t call out “S.O.B!” you
shouted out “S.O.S!” – “save our souls”. What you really
mean of course is keep my body breathing! Now you are
thinking Hebrew. But the idea that we are made up of two
parts, the body, which has little value, and the soul, which has
real value, has led to Christians talking about saving souls
when we are really called to save whole people – to save their
living bodies as well. See how that changes your thinking.
Let us take a typical Christian song which is thoroughly
Greek. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave. John
Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave and his soul
goes marching on.” That is not what Christians believe; that
is what Greeks believed. But it is astonishing at how many
Christian funerals people talk like Greeks.
Not only is man divided into body and soul but life gets
divided into sacred and secular. I had an ex-missionary
come and talk to me in church the other day. I said, “What
are you doing now?”
He replied, “I’ve gone back to engineering. I’m in a
secular job again.”
I said, “No you’re not.”
“Yes,” he said, “I am. I was a missionary but now I’m an
engineer again.”
I said, “You’re in a sacred calling.” He looked at me as if

15
I was, well, from another planet.
I said, “There’s nothing secular except sin. All work ranks
the same to God.”
I’m going to come back to this, because we tend to divide
people into those who have a sacred job and those who have a
secular job. That is Greek thinking. There is no such thing as
a secular job. There are immoral jobs and illegal jobs. They
are secular. But Got would rather have a good taxi driver
than a bad missionary. I wonder when you last realised that.
I am coming back to that later. It is one of the areas in which
Greek thinking has ruined our Christian thinking about the
work that we do.
Life is divided into sacred and secular; the universe is
divided into natural and supernatural – which is not a division
you find in the Bible. Let me just ask you a question: would
you put the devil on the natural or the supernatural side of
the universe? You see, the Bible doesn’t talk that way. The
Bible talks about Creator and creature. Now which side is
the devil in that one? He is a creature. But as soon as you
think Greek you put him on the supernatural side alongside
God, and that is the wrong category for him.
Then we divide religion between heaven and earth,
between eternal and temporal, and this gulf seems to open
up. Death then becomes a friend rather than an enemy. In
the Hebrew Bible death is an enemy from beginning to end
because death is a restriction. You lose your body at death
and that restricts you. From now on you cannot communicate
with the living. From now on you are shut off from those
you love. It is a restriction, an enemy. It breaks up families.
But to the Greeks death was a friend. Go back to Socrates
drinking hemlock and saying, “I’m about to be released from
the prison of my body.”
Let me try to illustrate this. Imagine a glass of water. To
the Greeks the glass is my body and the water is my soul,

16
and my soul is imprisoned in my body. It needs release.
When I die it is as if somebody takes the glass of water,
pours the water back into the ocean, and smashes the glass
on the rocks. I am released from my body. My soul flows
back into the ocean of reality. The trouble is that it loses its
identity. The water doesn’t know who it is then. It is lost.
Yet the Greeks looked forward to death as a friend – as a
release from this prison body. I have heard that said at many
funerals – “What a merciful release”, as if the person is out
of all suffering. They could actually have gone into worse
suffering, but it looks like a release because the muscles
relax and the body is at peace. But death is a restriction. It
is an enemy. The Old and New Testaments always treat it
as the enemy: the last enemy we fight, and the one which
wins, the one who needs to be conquered by God. The good
news is that death has been conquered by Christ. But it is an
enemy. It is not to be welcomed – ever.
It is not even a natural event; it is an execution for all
of us. This body that I am using will one day rot, because
I want to be buried not cremated. It will become a stinking
horrid mass that you won’t want to look at, touch or smell.
Why does it do that? Because a rotten person has lived in
it. It is God’s sentence on people who are rotten: that their
bodies rot. Which is why he said, a thousand years before
Jesus came, that, “If ever a holy man lives on earth I will
not leave his body in the grave to rot,” which is why Jesus
rose before the fourth day.
Now let us go back to these Greeks. There are two major
effects of what we call this “dualism” – this division between
sacred and secular, temporal and eternal, physical and
spiritual. This deep gulf has effects on two major questions
of life. Number one: good and number two: God. This
dualism has affected Greek thinking about what is good
and who is God. Let us take the idea of “good” first. If you

17
value spiritual things very highly and physical things very
lowly aesthetically, it is not long before your aesthetic values
change into moral values.
I could give you a good example here: Sunday clothes.
Sunday clothes could be purely aesthetic. But I was brought
up to believe you were sinning if you didn’t get on your
Sunday clothes, and aesthetic values slipped over into moral
values. It is one of the hardest things for us to distinguish
between: what are aesthetic and cultural values, and what
are genuine moral values? They get confused.
The result of the Greek thinking on the good was that
people began to think spiritual things were good and physical
things were bad. You can see where that would lead. It
would lead to a belief that your body was the source of evil
and your soul was the source of good, and that the task of
your soul was to get free of the evil influence of your body;
that it is because we live in a physical world with physical
bodies that there is evil all around us; we need to be set free
from the physical in order to be good. Now that is a most
dangerous idea, but I am afraid we’re going to see that it’s
got right into Christian thinking. Yet it is Greek thinking.
When they thought about God they put him up there in
the spiritual as far away from the physical as possible, and
therefore they split the Creator from his creation. They
could not believe in a God who would get entangled in this
physical world, a God who would have anything to do with
it. He had washed his hands of it. He is spiritual. He is way
up there; he is in an eternal world far removed from this
changeable world of time and space, this physical world
in which we live. Now that leaves a problem. If God is far
above all physical things and never soiled his hands with
physical things, who created all this? They came up with
two rather funny answers. I give them to you because you
will see the point of them later.

18
 The first answer was to believe that there was a kind of
demi-God, what we call a “demiurge”. It is a funny word.
It means a kind of half god, someone in between God and
the world. They postulated this being somewhere halfway
between who was responsible for creating and sustaining
the physical universe, but God himself was way above it
all. He had a kind of deputy, an agent who soiled his hands
with a physical world for him and on his behalf. That was
one answer.
The answer that Aristotle came to was that the world was
never created at all, that matter is eternal, that the universe
was always here, and that it manages itself. Interestingly
enough, Aristotle was the first man to teach the theory of
evolution. The universe, being eternal, controlled itself
and evolved itself. It is quite independent of God. That idea
wasn’t to surface until over two thousand years later through
a man called Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, who
was a thoroughgoing atheist and believed the same as
Aristotle, and taught his little grandson Charles the theory
of evolution.
In what I have been sketching very briefly and in­
adequately – simplistically, really – I think you can detect
the beginnings of secular humanism. The foundations were
laid in Greece for secular humanism today. The world in
which we live is the world of privatised religion in which
you can be religious as a private matter, but don’t expect it
to impinge on public life at all. It all began way back there.
Now I want to trace the history of the interaction between
the Greek and the Hebrew world, and after that I am going
to go through some examples of Christian thinking in
particular areas where we have been seriously misled by
Greek thinking. Finally, I want to tell you how to counteract
this, how to cure yourself of it, how to de-Greece yourself,
because we are not going to de-Greece the Church unless

19
we de-Greece the members of the Church. The Church itself
doesn’t exist apart from us, and so it is we who need to be
de-Greeced.
But first I want to give you a very quick historical sketch
of how these two worlds met – the Greek and the Hebrew
worlds – and what happened when they did meet. We will
go right back to BC, and we need to focus on two cities in
the ancient world where they met. One was Jerusalem and
one was Alexandria in Egypt. Let us take Jerusalem first.
There came to Jerusalem one day an invader, a Syrian king,
called Antiochus Epiphanes, or Antiochus IV. He came
charging down from Syria to invade the little land of Israel
and capture the capital. Antiochus Epiphanes was sold
on Greek culture, and he was determined to impose it on
every land he conquered. So he imposed Greek culture on
Jerusalem ruthlessly, and the story is terrible.
He built a sports stadium and introduced nude sports,
which could hardly be more offensive to the Jewish people.
He went into the Temple and erected a statue of Zeus, the
“king of the gods”, on the high altar. Then he sacrificed pigs
– pork – on the altar. Not roast lamb, roast pork. Then he
brought temple prostitutes into the Jewish temple and filled
the vestries of the priests until they became a brothel. It took
him three and a half years. In those three and a half years the
Jewish people were raped in every sense of the word. It was
a terrible time. It had been prophesied by the prophet Daniel
centuries before, and he had called it “the abomination of
desolation” – this dreadful imposition of Greek culture on
the Jewish people, the first real encounter they had with it.
Just as an aside, Jesus picked up both Daniel’s prediction
and Antiochus Epiphanes’ three and a half years. Jesus
spoke about a future time of distress such as the world had
never seen that would happen before the end of time. That
would be what came to be known as the Great Tribulation,

20
which would last three and a half years, forty-two months,
1260 days. It is all there in the book of Revelation, a kind
of future event foreshadowed by Antiochus Epiphanes – the
Abomination of Desolation. The reaction among the Jews
was utter horror.
There were two groups who reacted very strongly. One
was a family of seven brothers called the Maccabees. They
decided to fight. They fought a terrorist campaign and
managed to get rid of the Greeks, and for many years had
their own Jewish king again—the Hasmonean Dynasty,
which lasted until 63 BC when the Romans came.
The other group that reacted against this invasion of an
alien culture was a kind of Puritan movement; they called
themselves Pharisees. They were going to live separately
from all this. They would not go to the theatre; they would
not go to the stadium. They were going to live separately and
keep themselves pure and clean. That is how the Pharisees
began, who turned out to be Jesus’ greatest enemies at one
stage. But there it was. It is all history. Now that was the
first encounter between Greek culture and Hebrew culture.
That is how it finished.
It was a failure – to impose that culture on the Jewish
people. But turn now to the city of Alexandria on the Nile
Delta in Egypt, and here, in a much more subtle way, the
Greek influence came not into their culture but into their
thinking, because by now Jews were being scattered around
the then known world, the Mediterranean coast, into the
Diaspora, the dispersion. Jewish students were coming
to the second greatest Greek university in the world. The
first was Athens, the one that Plato had started. The second
was Alexandria, started by Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s
young pupil. He opened a university in Alexandria, built a
new city, and to it there came Jewish students then, later,
Jewish scholars.

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 Here was a point, a melting pot, where Jewish thinking
and Greek thinking mixed in the same school, the same
lecture theatres, the same university. Who would win
here? Who would influence whom here? Well, it was right
here in this Alexandria university that the Jewish scholars
decided to translate their scriptures into Greek so that the
Greek world could hear the truth about the God of Israel.
Seventy scholars translated faithfully the Old Testament into
the Greek language. It is called the “Septuagint”, after the
seventy scholars who did it. Or sometimes you see written
in Roman numerals “LXX”, shorthand for the name of this
Greek translation. So that was good. This would enable the
Greek world to hear about the true God, the only God, the
God of Israel.
But I am afraid the influence also went the other way
and a new method of Bible study was introduced to the
Jewish people, which you will hear in Christian pulpits
every Sunday today. It is called the allegorical method of
Bible study. What it means is that there are hidden spiritual
meanings in every part of the Bible; that the simple plain
sense of the statement is only one meaning and that behind
it there is a spiritual meaning. Especially the physical
statements of the Bible must have a spiritual meaning behind
them to be of real value.
So they began to read the Bible not just in its plain, simple,
literal physical statements, but they began to look behind
it for a hidden code. That began a way of looking at the
Bible which leads right through by a single thread, straight
through, to a book called The Bible Code, by a man called
Drosnin. I bet you have heard of that one because you have
seen it in bookshops and stationers. The Bible, according
to this approach, is coded – full of secret messages; full of
very spiritual things. Though it may make a simple statement
about a physical fact, the real meaning is behind all that – so

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this is an allegorical approach to Scripture.
Now clearly there are some parts of scripture that are
allegorical, that are symbolic. But most of scripture is in
plain, straightforward statements which need to be taken at
their face value. If you are always looking for some hidden
message, some hidden meaning, the big problem becomes
that there is no control on what you find. You say, “Well this
is what I think it means,” and somebody else says, “Well, I
think this is what it means” – and who is to say who is right?
You can then read into Scripture what you want to find. That
is called eisegesis, instead of reading out of scripture – which
is called exegesis – what is already there.
A man called Philo began to do this with the Old
Testament and introduced it to his fellow Jewish scholars.
He grasped that Greek doctrine of a demiurge between God
and the world, who created the world – not God himself but
a deputy, a demiurge, a halfway god who created the world.
He gave a name to that demiurge: “the logos”. You may know
that Greek word means “the Word” and you are going to see
the relevance of this shortly. Philo said the world was created
not so much by God, but by the logos – this demiurge, this
somewhere in between.
We are not even sure if Philo thought of the logos as a
person, or was simply personifying the force that created the
world. We just don’t know. We would have to ask him. Do
you know what I mean by personifying? When a man talks
about his new sports car as “she” – “She goes great!” That
is personifying. It is not a person, but you are talking as if
it is. So we are not sure whether he was personifying the
logos or saying the logos was a person. But these are some
of the things that were going on in Alexandria.
Let us look very quickly at the conflict between Greek
thinking and Christianity. All that I have said so far happened
before Christ came. After Christ came it was inevitable, as

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the Christian faith spread around the Mediterranean world,
that there would be a head on encounter with Greek thinking.
Of course for the first few decades, and possibly the first
century or so, Christianity was protected by the fact that it
was persecuted. Believers were regarded as different. They
were outlaws. They were illegal, a religio illicita. They were
not legally recognised as a religion; they were persecuted.
I don’t need to go into all that, but hundreds of thousands
of them had happen to them exactly what the people of
many other places have experienced – they were killed for
their faith. Of course that protected them in a sense from
being unduly influenced by those who regarded them as
enemies, and kept them at a distance. However, sooner or
later the encounter was inevitable. Yes – the culture and the
philosophy were all around them. The little churches grew
up in the Graeco-Roman world.
There were two places I want to draw your attention to.
The first is western Turkey. My wife and I had the privilege
of going out for a week with a film crew and fifty people.
We went around the seven churches of Asia, filming them,
talking about them, studying the letters that Jesus wrote to
those seven churches. I am amazed that people pay more
attention to Paul’s letters than Jesus’ letters. Isn’t that
surprising? We have only got seven letters Jesus ever wrote
to churches, and they are wonderful letters, but they are all
in a tiny area. You can see the area clearly, not just on a map
but from outer space. I have a satellite photograph of Turkey
and there is a little green strip along the top, on the Black
Sea coast. The rest is brown and dry except for a little circle
in the southwest, which is bright green. That circle of green
to this day covers the seven churches of Asia, or at least the
remains of those seven cities.
It was a fabulously fertile, wealthy area with rivers
running through. One of them was called the River Meander.

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Did you ever hear of that? It has given its name to every
river like that. These rivers produced fabulously fertile
valleys. There was gold in there. That is where money was
invented. King Croesus lived there and invented money
to make exchange easier. Have you ever heard the saying,
“Rich as Croesus”? Probably not, but there is such a proverb.
Here in this area there is a fabulously concentrated example
of Graeco-Roman culture. To walk down the main street
in Ephesus and look even at the remains of the theatre, the
library, the magnificent Greek architecture, is to realise that
in this circle was concentrated the culture and the philosophy
of the classical world.
It was not only a wealthy, cultured area, it was right on
the main road from Europe to Africa and Asia. The road
actually split and went around both sides of the little circle,
joined up again, and on to India, China and Africa. It was
a key area, and there were seven little churches there at the
end of the first century AD.
The devil made that area his top priority. He actually had
his headquarters there in a place called Pergamum. When
Jesus wrote to the church at Pergamum he said, “I know
where you reside because that is where Satan resides.”
Satan can’t be in more than one place at once. He has a
headquarters and at that time his headquarters was in western
Turkey at Pergamum, on the top of the highest mountain that
overlooked the town.
If you go to Pergamum today on the top of that mountain
you will see theatres, a stadium, libraries; a most magnificent
collection of culture is concentrated on the top of that hill.
You have to go up a little winding road to the top – it is so
steep. If you have been to Pergamum you will have seen that
hill. Would you see the throne of Satan? No, you wouldn’t,
because it has been moved to Germany. If you want to see
it now you have to go to the Pergamum Museum in Berlin

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because it was moved there, stone by stone by a German
archaeologist. It was a gigantic armchair, a U-shaped temple.
In the middle was an altar, and black smoke used to rise from
that altar day and night. You could look up from the town
below and see this great huge stone armchair with hundreds
of Greek pillars, and the steps leading up to it. I have seen
it in Berlin. The steps go up very high.
You can only see the foundation now. But that is where
Satan’s seat or throne was – his cathedra – in those days.
That is why Jesus wrote to those seven churches. It was touch
and go. If those seven little churches could survive there, the
Church would survive anywhere. Or would they go under
with all the culture and philosophy pressing them down?
That is why Jesus wrote to those churches and no others. I
have made a video of the letters he wrote, with all the shots
of the towns themselves and the remains. Do get it. God is
using that as prophetic word to the Church today. Somehow
Jesus was saying to those churches, “You’re giving in. There
is idolatry; there is immorality even in your churches.”
One of the most astonishing things which I point out
in that video is that the distance of the churches from
Satan’s headquarters defined the problems they had. The
two churches that were nearest Satan’s headquarters were
corrupted from the inside with idolatry and immorality. The
two churches further away from Satan’s headquarters were
being attacked from the outside by Jewish people, whom
Jesus calls “synagogues of Satan.” But the two churches
furthest away from Satan’s headquarters – Laodicea and
Ephesus – Satan wasn’t bothering with at all. One of them
had lost its first love and the other was simply neither cold
nor hot, just lukewarm. It is fascinating to see that the
problems the churches were having were in direct ratio
to their distance from Satan’s throne. Be that as it may
– you must get the video and study it. And it is to those

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seven churches that Jesus revealed the future of godless
civilisation. The rest of the book of Revelation is simply an
unveiling of where godless civilisation finishes up. And he
is saying: Don’t go down with that. Come out of Babylon
before her sins destroy you.
Now inevitably in the realm of thinking, the first question
that would arise would be the person of our Lord Jesus
Christ. If your brain has separated the physical from the
spiritual, heaven from earth, eternal from the temporal,
sacred from secular – if you are thinking like that, where do
you put Jesus in your thinking? Which end of the ladder is
he? Are you beginning to understand the problem?
Or is he in fact the Greek demiurge in the middle, the
half and half? So it was in Ephesus, in the biggest city in
that golden circle, that the first indications arise in your
New Testament that people were beginning to force Jesus
into a Greek framework, thinking that he couldn’t be both;
that he couldn’t be right up there and right down here; that
he couldn’t be both God and man; that he couldn’t be both
spiritual and physical, but that he must be somewhere in
between, neither fully divine nor fully human, like the Greek
demiurge, somewhere halfway between. I am putting it very
crudely, but basically this is what the Greek thinking about
Jesus began to do.
It is not an unknown problem today. The Jehovah’s
Witness knocking at your door thinks the same way about
Jesus. He is a Greek thinker about Jesus. He cannot accept
that Jesus is fully God and fully man. So the apostle John,
who was the only apostle still alive, the only one to die of old
age, and who was living in Ephesus with Mary the mother
of Jesus until she died (and you will see in the film, where
I stand at the grave of the Apostle John, and just thank the
Lord for that man). He wrote one Gospel and three letters
to deal with that situation. The purpose of John’s Gospel

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can be very simply stated. It was to tell people: you must go
on believing that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. To
emphasise his humanity, the shortest verse in John’s Gospel
(and in the Bible) is “Jesus wept” – at the grave of Lazarus.
He was fully human.
In fact, Jesus is more human (if you can say that) in John’s
Gospel than the other three. But he is more clearly divine in
the other three. John brings seven witnesses to bear that he
is God, and seven miracles, more sensational than anything
in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and seven statements “I am”,
which is God’s name: “I am the bread of life”; “I am the
light of the world”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the
resurrection and the life”; “I am the true vine”; “I am the
door”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life”.... Sometimes
it was just, “I am,” by itself. John, in great daring, was
puzzling: what do you call Jesus before he was born?
Because he wasn’t called Jesus before he was conceived;
that is his human name. With a bold stroke of genius, he
said, “He is the logos.”
But the logos is not halfway between God and man. “In
the beginning was the logos, and the logos was face to face
with God, and the logos was God.” Not a demiurge; not
halfway up the scale. He was God, and the logos was made
flesh and lived among us. Do you see what John’s Gospel
is all about?
He is saying that he was right up there and he is right
down here. He is fully God and fully man. He is the Logos
who is both, not the logos who is in between.
I have been focusing on southwest Turkey. That is where
the first great encounter took place and where Jesus himself
stepped in with letters, and a revelation of the future, to
try and hold those churches pure, and away from being
swallowed up in the Graeco-Roman world. But now I want
you to turn your attention to Africa, where I am afraid the

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battle was lost. The battle was won in southwestern Turkey
and many Christians paid the price of martyrdom. Men like
the Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, modern Izmir, but come
with me first to the city of Alexandria, where Philo the Jewish
scholar had lived. Now came Christian scholars to the same
university, in particular two called Clement and Origen. They
swallowed this same allegorical method of Bible study, this
same not taking the Bible at face value, but trying to find a
spiritual meaning behind it, some hidden code, some spiritual
meaning. I call it “super-spirituality” because the Greeks did
become super-spiritual. These Christian scholars followed
Philo in this method, and many Christian preachers do today.
Let us take an example. Have you heard preachers talk
about the water that flows (at the end of Ezekiel) that is first
ankle deep, then knee deep, then waist deep – and use it as
an allegory, even of the twentieth century? Well the first
question I ask about Ezekiel’s vision there is: does water
mean water or something else? If you read it, you see that it
clearly means water—H20. That is its simple plain meaning.
This water actually flows in a geographical location. It flows
in a valley, down towards the Dead Sea, and it reaches a
specific place called Ein Gedi, and it fills the Dead Sea with
fresh living water. Fishermen go fishing along the shores
of the Dead Sea. It is a simple vision of what God could
do and wanted to do: freshen up the Dead Sea. Hallelujah!
Ah, but no, we must find an allegorical meaning! Well, I
ask you, what is the allegorical meaning of Ein Gedi? I just
think it means Ein Gedi. What is the allegorical meaning of
fishermen? Oh evangelists – who said so?
Or let me take another example. After the resurrection
Jesus said, “I’ll meet you in Galilee,” and disciples went
north. They hung around for a few days and Jesus didn’t
appear, and Peter cannot sit still. So he says, “I’m going
fishing.” John says, “All right, I’ll come with you.” He

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might as well be doing something as nothing. So off they
went, fishing, toiled all night, caught nothing. I have spent a
night with fishermen on the Sea of Galilee; it is a wonderful
experience. If you throw the net out you might get five fish,
seven if you are lucky. So you keep throwing it. But they
toiled all night and caught nothing. In the morning, the sun
comes up and there’s a man standing on the shore, and he
tells them that they are doing it all wrong. You know, if
ever you see a fisherman he is waiting for you to give him
advice. He is waiting for someone to come and he says to
them: “You’re doing it all wrong. Try this and you’ll get a
catch.” You try it with the next fisherman you see – they will
be so grateful to you!
The man said, “Throw it that way, not this way.” So they
threw it that way and they got 153 fish in one throw. You
wouldn’t believe what preachers have tried to make that
into. The favourite interpretation of 153 is: if you take the
twelve apostles and square them you get 144, if you take the
three persons of the Trinity and triple them you get nine, and
144 plus nine is 153. Therefore it is a symbol of the twelve
apostles plus the Trinity. And that is the most sensible of
the suggestions that have been made!
There have been dozens of allegorical meanings given to
153. I am going to give you the true meaning of 153. The
true meaning is: that is an awful lot of fish. We start reading
things into scripture, trying to find some hidden spiritual
meaning. Let us just praise the Lord that is a lot of fish. Are
you getting the message? We all do it. I am afraid Clement
and Origen began to do it for the Christian Church. And of
course you can make scripture mean anything you like.
But we must move along the African coast in a westward
direction to what is now called Tunisia, to a little one-horse
town. I am using that phrase advisedly because the town
was called Hippo and that is the Greek word for horse,

30
and “potamus” is the Greek word for river. So the horse
of the river is called “Hippopotamus.” But this was a city
just called Hippo. There was a young man sent there to be
bishop who is now the most famous man in church history.
His name was Augustine.
Augustine was brought up in Italy where he was given
a classical education in what was called “neo-Platonism”,
or the teaching of Plato brought up to date. But like most
products of that culture, his body and his soul went different
ways. When you divide a man up, that can happen. His
soul studied philosophy and sought the good, but his body
became promiscuous. He had a mistress and an illegitimate
son whom he later abandoned. He was a bad boy, but of
course they didn’t believe that what you did with your body
affected your soul. The two were quite distinct. But that was
his life. He even joined a sect called the Manicheans, for
whom physical matter was incurably evil. Of course, the way
he lived, what he did with his body, he could believe that.
With this background he became convicted of sin, had
contacts with a very saintly bishop, called Ambrose (Bishop
of Milan) who wrote a song which you may have heard
many times: “We praise thee O God: we acknowledge thee
to be the Lord; All the earth doth worship thee: the Father
everlasting....” Do you know it? The Te Deum. If you have
read The Confessions of Augustine you know that he was
converted quite dramatically and sat under the ministry of
this saintly Bishop Ambrose. But he was chosen to become
bishop of Hippo in what is now Tunisia, and he went there.
At first he preached a simple gospel, preached the Bible
as it was, but then he began to preach against things and
against people, and to write against them. Alas, you can
trace what happened. The more he wrote against people
and preached against them, the more his old thinking took
over. I want to say, to put it very simply, that Augustine

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more than anybody else, recast the Christian faith in a Greek
framework and has influenced the entire Church ever since.
I am going to give you examples in Part 2. But Catholics
look back to Augustine as their father in their thinking, and
so do Protestants. Both Catholics and Protestants look back
to this man as the greatest theologian of the Church.
Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk and so was
brought up on Augustine. Calvin studied Augustine in Paris
at the university, and his magnum opus, his huge volumes
called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, have been
described I think accurately as “systematic Augustinianism”.
I was brought up as a Methodist to think that the four great
figures in the evangelical tradition were Paul, Augustine,
Luther and Wesley. Then I met others who thought of
Paul, Augustine, Luther and the Puritans rather than the
Methodists. But Augustine appears in every family tree
of every part of the Church. Everybody looks back to him
and yet, I declare this sincerely, I believe he has done more
damage to the Christian Church than any other man. I marvel
at his conversion – that was wonderful. But to recast the
Christian faith in neo-Platonic terms instead of Hebrew terms
has been a disaster.
The Church has been pulling up its Hebrew roots both
before and ever since. Easter was quickly separated from
Passover. Whitsunday quickly separated from Pentecost,
and Christmas moved months away from the Feast of
Tabernacles. And as we pulled up our Jewish roots as a
Church we put roots down into Greek philosophy, into
Roman practice, and into pagan customs. Christmas has
nothing to do with Christ. It was simply because a Pope sent
another Augustine to Canterbury to convert those dreadful
English. He wrote back to the Pope and said, “I can’t wean
them off their midwinter festival, their orgy of eating and
drinking, when they sing carols and dance and for twelve

32
days one elected man in every village can have sex with
all the girls in the village. He is the lord of the Yuletide.”
(Think of: The Twelve days of Christmas, and “... my true
love said to me” – and you still sing it. You haven’t any idea
what you’re singing about).
The Pope wrote back and said, “If we can’t lick ‘em, join
them. Bring the festival into Christ. Baptise it into our ritual”
– and Christmas became a sacred cow. I have discovered
the hard way. If you dare to criticise Christmas you are
touching something so sacred, and yet it is nothing but a
pagan festival that was brought in because people wouldn’t
give it up when they came to Christ.
So there was Augustine, and there was another figure, a
man called Aquinas – his name was Thomas, but he came
from Aquino in Italy so they called him Thomas Aquino, or
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274). He didn’t bring Plato into
the Church, he brought in Aristotle. He brought in a natural
theology based on reason. He was unlike Plato as Plato saw
the spiritual world as the real world but Aristotle saw the
natural world as the real world. He laid the foundations for
science and for evangelical scepticism. There is a wonderful
essay in a volume dedicated to John Stott on his eightieth
birthday, showing how evangelicals go back to Aquinas
and Aristotle and are sceptical about anything non-rational.
So we are all affected, for better or worse, by this Greek
influence.
The second Part is more interesting because we are going
to look at some of the areas where our Christian thinking has
been diverted from Hebrew thinking even today, and how
to cure it in yourself.

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 PART TWO

I want to take five subjects of Christian belief and behaviour

which have been profoundly affected from Augustine
onwards without us realising. Number one, our bodies;
Christians don’t really know what to do with their bodies.
We don’t want to know about bodily functions. If we are
good souls trapped in evil bodies, then the last thing we
should talk about in church is our bodies or our bodily
functions. There was a vicar once who said, “I’m going
to show you that part of my body which causes me most
temptations.” There was a silence in the church and then
he poked his tongue out! But he was wrong: the tongue
doesn’t cause you any problems at all. It is you who cause
your tongue problems.
Do you say grace before you eat? I tend to give thanks
for the first course and ask forgiveness for the second. But
I was in a Christian home where there was father, mother,
two children, and me sitting at the table – and I think it was
roast lamb and mint sauce, which makes me drool anyway
before I get to the table. The father said to me, “Would you
please give thanks for us, Mr. Pawson?”
So I said, “Lord, I’m ready for this and it’s ready for me,
so thank you,” and I opened my eyes and the father was
looking at me in horror. “I thought we had a man of God
here,” you know? But I think a long prayer when you have

34
got a hot meal in front of you is sacrilege. God has given
us all things freely to enjoy. We are free to feast and we
are free to fast.
Do you believe that our Lord Jesus Christ had to empty
his bowels and bladder every day? You see, funnily enough,
non-Christians have problems believing in the full deity of
Christ, but I find most Christians have problems believing
in the full humanity of Christ. He really is both. He is, was,
and always will be, a full human being. In the Jewish book
of prayer, there is a lovely prayer to pray when you go to
the toilet. Now in Western congregations whenever I say
that, there is a titter, if not a giggle; fancy mentioning that
in church!
I go to many Christian toilets because I stay in Christian
homes all over the world. A Christian loo usually has a pile
of devotional books by the throne and there is a text on the
wall, framed – all designed to keep my mind on spiritual
things while I am in there. But the Jewish prayer is a beautiful
prayer. It thanks the Lord that your body’s working properly
and it praises the Lord that you now feel better. You are
relieved and you come out of the loo saying “Hallelujah!”
If you don’t understand that God is as concerned about what
you do in the loo as what you do in church, you are Greek.
He made your body. I’ll tell you this: one of the humiliations
of old age is when you can’t control your bowels and
bladder properly. You go back into nappies. It will happen
to some of us and it can be very humiliating. If that does
happen, you will wish that you had prayed when you went
to the loo, and thanked him when it was working properly.
Whenever I mention that in a Jewish congregation, they
don’t even smile. But of course, he is the Creator as well as
the Redeemer. He made the physical world; he made my
body. It is a concern to him.
Do you say grace before you make love? Why not? “For

35
what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly
thankful” – does that sound incongruous to you? You see,
ever since Augustine we can’t handle sex. It was Augustine
who said that sex, even in marriage, is lust, concupiscence,
and from then on the idea got a hold that somehow celibacy
is a holier state than matrimony. In fact, the entire church
became celibate in its priesthood not long afterwards. That
is totally contrary to Hebrew thinking, where a rabbi must be
married and must experience love so that he understands it.
I remember being invited to preach in a unique open-air
meeting in front of the Niagara Falls in Canada. It was the
first time they had allowed a religious meeting right there.
What a backcloth! There were three speakers – myself first,
then a Roman Catholic priest, then a Pentecostal pastor. It
was being televised to the whole of Canada and part of the
US. I got up and said, I’d love to talk about what you can see
behind me, because I know the man who made the Niagara
Falls. His name’s Jesus, and without him nothing was made
that has been made, and he helped to make that. But I’m not
going to talk about that. I’m going to talk about sex, and I
want to tell you how much pleasure God gets out of sex.”
There was a crowd of thousands, but you could have
heard a pin drop. Many of them were church people, and
they looked as if they had forgotten how they got into this
world. But I said, “It was God who thought up sex, that
exquisite pleasure. It was he who invented it. It was in the
world long before sin was.” I said, “When two young people
pledge loyalty to each other publicly and go away on their
honeymoon and seal that pledge in that exquisite pleasure,
God is with them, and he is saying, ‘I made that’ – and he
has pleasure in human love.”
The Roman Catholic priest got up second, and said, “I’m
not married, and I’m not likely to be, but I want to talk
about honeymoons.” The Pentecostal pastor got up third

36
and he said, “You’ll never believe this, but when I asked
the Lord what to talk to you about, he said, ‘Tell them about
your honeymoon.’” We found out later that Niagara is the
honeymoon capital of North America. There were hundreds
of honeymoon couples listening to us, and all the hotels
around had special suites for honeymoon couples.
Is all this incongruous? You see, since Augustine, we don’t
know what to do with our bodies, but my Bible says your
body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is God’s residence
– your body is, not your soul. This leads to an extraordinary
attitude to the sacraments. People don’t believe that doing
something with your body can have a spiritual effect, but that
is what a sacrament is. Taking physical bread and physical
wine into my body can have a profound spiritual effect both
ways. It could judge me, and I could be sick and even die
if I take it without discerning the body.
Washed in the water of baptism, just H2O, what can that
do for you? Well, there is a young man my wife and I know
of. He was a Hell’s Angel, and he had the devil tattooed on
his body as a Hell’s Angel. When he became a Christian, he
knew he should be baptized, but he had noticed that when
people were, their shirt went wet and became transparent
and he didn’t want people to see the devil on his body, so he
went to a surgeon and said, “Can you remove that?”
The surgeon told him, “Yes, I can, but it will take a lot of
money and a lot of time. We have to graft skin from your
thigh.” He said, “I don’t have the money and I don’t have the
time.” A friend of ours baptised him in a swimming pool in
the back garden and he went down into the water to bury his
past and wash away his sins, and when he came up out of the
water the devil had gone – washed off his back or wherever
it was. If you tell him that baptism is just a symbol, he will
laugh you in the face.
Sacraments are physical events with profound spiritual

37
effect, because we are one – we are not separate body and
soul, we are one being. At death we lose the body. Is that a
positive or a negative thing? If you believe in the immortality
of the soul, it is a positive thing. If you believe in the
resurrection of the body, it is a negative thing: to lose your
body and be “unclothed”, as Paul put it. But the good news
is we are going to have a new body. We are not going to go
floating on as spirit on clouds. We are going to get a new
body! I’m glad about that, because the new body is going to
be like his glorious body, and I can’t wait to be thirty-three
again. In your eighties you begin to look forward to getting
a new body. You see, if our business is just to save souls,
we have missed it. We are to save whole people.
Secondly, let us move on to work, which I mentioned
earlier. Work was a necessary evil to the Greeks. You had
to do it to get enough money to have leisure, or better still,
if you got enough money to become a gentleman of leisure
and you didn’t need to work again, which is why so many
people are entering the lottery today. “You know, I wouldn’t
need to work.” Live for leisure. Live for mental and spiritual
activity. Even Christianity has become a kind of leisure
activity, whereas the major thing that anybody has to do for
the Kingdom of God is from Monday to Friday – his daily
work. I have conferences for men regularly, all over the
world now, and the first thing I want to teach men is that
your daily job is your sacred vocation for the Lord, and how
you do that is going to settle your future.
But we have a graded list of work: missionary is at the
top rung; pastors and evangelists are a good number two,
and then doctors and nurses, maybe teachers, taxi-drivers,
computer operators. Do you know, without consciously
doing it, we are teaching this all the time in church? We
say, “If you will become a missionary, we’ll pray for you
regularly. We will put your photo in the church porch.” Don’t

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get me wrong in what I’m going to point out now, but I have
visited missionaries overseas. They are living in a missionary
village with a Christian hospital and a Christian school, a
Christian population; and there is another member of their
home church who is the only Christian on the shop floor at
the factory where he works. Who needs more prayer? Who
is in the front line? I look forward to the day when we put
the photo of every member up in the porch and say, “This is
their mission field. This is where they work. Pray for them.”
But, you see, we have evaluated work; we have scaled it
like the Greeks – spiritual work is top. We even have divided
people. The whole Church divided people into clerical and
lay; professional and amateur Christians. Some are real
Christians, or we say, “These are real Christians—they live
by faith, while these others just have a wage or a salary.”
Absolute rubbish – we all have to live by faith. A small
businessman today, if he pays his debts on time, which is
Christian duty, to keep his cash flow, he needs more faith
than I have needed to live. He really does.
So we have divided people up into sacred work and
secular work, faith work and non-faith work, clerical and
lay, religious and non-religious. It has riddled the church
through and through. Martin Luther did get one thing right.
He said, “All work ranks the same to God.” It is not what
job you have, it is how you do your job that the Lord is most
interested in. Billy Graham’s wife had a notice above the
kitchen sink: “Divine services held here three times a day.”
She had got it right.
We even dress some Christians differently from others.
Clerical dress was never intended by the Lord Jesus. But
I came across an amazing letter by no less than a Pope in
428 AD. He’d heard that a monk had been made Bishop of
Arles in France and had started wearing special clothes. He
wrote a stinging letter to him. He said, “Clergy should be

39
different from other people, but by their learning and not
their garments, by their mode of life and not by what they
wear, by their purity of thought and not by their peculiarity
of dress.” Remember that letter was by a Pope, no less! It
needs to be sent back to the Popes, I think, today.
Third example: I have looked at the example of what our
attitude is to our body and our bodily functions—thoroughly
Greek. I have looked at our attitude to work as Christians—
thoroughly Greek. I now look at our attitude to Israel, God’s
ancient people. God gave Abraham a covenant and promised
him two physical things: firstly, physical descendants, a
people; secondly, a land, a place for those people to live
– physical promises, and God has never withdrawn those
promises.
Furthermore, even the New Testament says that the gifts
of God to the patriarchs are irrevocable, and they are still
physical. The land is still a physical land and it still belongs
to the Jewish people. The Jews are still a physical people
and they are still the brothers of Jesus, and they are still
beloved by God for the patriarchs’ sake. They are not saved
until they believe in their own Messiah, but they are beloved.
They are his chosen people.
He promised them blessings when they were obedient,
and most of those blessings were physical: health – none
of the diseases of Egypt touching them; fertility – plenty
of rain on their fields. But he also promised curses on their
disobedience which were also physical – sickness, flood,
drought; most of the miracles in the Old Testament, indeed
I think all of them, were physical miracles. There was the
dividing of the Red Sea. The kingdom of Israel was physical,
the king was physical, but we have made the new covenant
with Israel entirely spiritual. The Church has gone in for
what is called “replacement theology” and called the Church
“Israel”, which the New Testament never does; not even the

40
“new Israel”, though that is one of the most common phrases
used in the Christian church today, as if God is finished
with his physical people and he is only interested now in
his spiritual people.
Therefore, there is no use mentioning the land of Israel in
the current Middle East situation, because it is now irrelevant.
The main concern in the Middle East is simply how to get
peace, as if the land has been taken back again from God’s
people. Now of course they don’t hold it unconditionally.
I believe their ownership of the land is unconditional, but
their occupation is conditional, not least on the way they treat
strangers within the land. But nevertheless, God’s physical
promise still stands to his physical people of a physical land.
The word “Israel” is used over seventy times in the New
Testament, not once of the Christian Church.
It is still his physical people to whom he made a physical
promise. Well I move over that, but here is why the majority
of the Church in this country would not be interested in an
olive tree meeting. They just wouldn’t be. The Church, the
spiritual Israel, has replaced the physical Israel. You see,
once again spiritual is of more value than physical – it is
Greek thinking, and that is not to touch the anti-Semitism.
But I want to come to two major issues finally. The first
is the earth and its future. We live by faith, hope and love.
“Now abideth faith, hope and love” – but the weakest of
these is hope. I find that Christians are in total confusion
about hope for the future. I have asked congregation after
congregation over the last three years to vote on this
question: “Do you believe the next century will be better
than this, worse than this, or much the same?” Which do you
think the vote is? Eighty-five percent of Christian people put
their hands up for worse. There is a mood of pessimism. We
came into the twentieth century in a mood of optimism. The
word on everybody’s lips was “progress”. Now the word on

41
everybody’s lips is “survival”. There are many voices telling
us we won’t even survive another hundred years. 2040 is
the date that many computer programmes are giving as the
date beyond which human life will become impossible. If
population trends, food resources and fuel resources continue
as they are, then 2040 is the date they are talking about for
the end – pessimism.
Now Christians are people of hope. Unfortunately, the
English word hope means “wish”. “I hope it’s going to be
fine tomorrow.” “I hope I’ll win the national lottery.” What
people mean is, “I’m not at all sure; in fact, I’m very unsure”,
whereas the Greek word for hope in the New Testament,
“elpis” means that which I am absolutely certain is going
to happen. It is an anchor to the soul when the storm hits.
So what do we hope for the future? I am talking about
our hope for this earth, this world. What is your Christian
hope for this world? Is it ever going to be a world of peace?
Well it doesn’t look like it, does it? We could be in World
War Three. It was a little dispute in the Balkans that set off
World War One. Now Russia is uttering threats; who knows?
The thing just seems to gather like a snowball – more and
more people get more and more involved, and we ordinary
people just read the newspapers. What can we do? Our
leaders seem hell-bent on escalation.
Do you think there will ever be multilateral disarmament?
Do you think there will ever be world peace? What is your
hope? I am absolutely certain there is going to be, because
Jesus is coming back to earth. That is the focus of Christian
hope in the New Testament. He is coming back here bodily,
physically. He is coming back! There are two things that
have now almost totally disappeared from Christian teaching
about the future, and they were once very prominent. Christ
is returning to earth. You do believe that, don’t you? Do you
believe that you are returning to earth after you are dead?

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You are not so sure about that, you know. You believe you
are coming back here to this old earth to live again, a second
time here? That’s the Christian hope for the future, because
God will bring with him all those who have fallen asleep
in Christ Jesus.
I have only been to and spoken at four funerals in the
last few years: my mother-in-law (98); my daughter (36);
my sister (cancer); my brother-in-law (cancer). When I said
“They’ll be back”, people looked at me as if I was teaching
reincarnation. They will stand on this earth again. When
Jesus stands on this earth, they will. I told you I am looking
forward to getting a brand-new body, but I won’t get it in
heaven. I don’t need a body up there. I shall need a body
when I get back here because you can’t live in this world
without a body. That is where you are going to get your
new body. This is where the resurrection of the body takes
place – here, not up there.
The Bible is thoroughly down-to-earth in its hope for the
future, but why is Christ coming back? What is he coming
back to do? Why is he bringing all the dead Christians back
as well? Why are we all coming back here? Some people
seem to think we’re only going to stay for two minutes, just
long enough to get our new body – and off. Other people,
quite wrongly, say every Sunday at communion in the Nicene
Creed, or even in the Apostles’ Creed, “That from thence
he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.” He
is not coming back to earth to judge the quick and the dead.
He is not going to judge the quick and the dead until the
earth is gone.
In my Bible it is quite clear that when we appear before
the great white throne the earth has passed away already.
So he is not coming back to judge. Then what is he coming
back for? Just to take us all back again? Why bring millions
of Christians back from heaven to earth just to go back to

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heaven again? That seems a little bit of a waste of energy.
Well how long is he coming back for? He was here thirty-
three years the first time. How long is he coming back for
the second? For four hundred years the Church was utterly
clear in its hope of the future for this world and that hope
was, to quote Papias, the ancient Bishop of Hierapolis:
“We believe that Christ… in the corporeal reign of Christ
on earth”, meaning the bodily reign of Christ on earth for a
thousand years. I am amazed – the word millennium used
to be the Church’s preaching, now everybody else is using
the word except Christians. Isn’t that incredible?
My Bible tells me quite simply that he is coming back to
take over world government for a thousand years here, and
we are coming back to share it with him and to reign here.
It says, “Blessed is he, he’s redeemed with his own blood,
from every kindred and tribe and tongue and people, men
for God and they shall reign on the earth.” Not up there;
down here. The meek will inherit the earth one day. Jesus
said it would happen – not heaven, the earth. When we
were getting up to the year two thousand, everybody was
talking about the millennium, but they were talking about
the wrong millennium.
A week after the year 2000, things were exactly the same
as they were a week before. But the millennium – what a
hope for the future, that one day the devil will be kicked
out. The reason why we cannot have the kingdom on earth
established before Jesus gets back is that we can’t get rid of
the prince of this world, the devil. You can’t get rid of him
and neither can I. We can rescue his victims and get them
out of his kingdom into the Kingdom of Christ. The devil is
far too clever for you – too powerful. He will only be kicked
out when Jesus gets back, and then the world will have a
Christian government at last.
You may have sung the hymn “Jesus shall reign where e’er

44
the sun, doth his successive journeys run”, or my favourite
hymn as a boy: “Sing we the king who is coming to reign,
glory to Jesus, the lamb that was slain. Life and salvation his
empire shall bring, joy to the nations when Jesus is king!”
Do you believe it? He is coming back to rule, to reign, and
if there is one thing I long to hear the Church announcing
it is that Jesus is coming back to reign for a thousand years
here, on this old earth. You will see then “the nations beat
their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning
hooks. And nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war anymore.”
That half a text is outside the United Nations building
in New York on a block of granite, but the other half says
“when the Lord reigns in Zion”. He, Jesus, will settle the
disputes among the nations, and then they will beat their
swords into ploughshares.
Oh, but we can allegorise it, can’t we? We can allegorise
all the promises, such as that the wolf will lie down with the
lamb and the lion will eat straw like the ox. Do you believe
that, or do you think we should allegorise it? The wolf and
the lamb should be the vicar and the churchwarden getting
on well together. That is how we allegorise it away. And
“the desert shall blossom like a rose.” Why shouldn’t it?
The Sahara was once a garden. Why can’t it be a garden
again? Do you see what I mean by taking scripture in its
plain, simple sense?
The millennium has almost disappeared, and do you know
the man responsible? Augustine. In his early ministry he
preached that Jesus was coming back for a thousand years
to reign on earth, and that is what all the Church believed
and preached until then. There is not a trace of any other
view. Nobody discussed “are you amillennial, premillennial,
or postmillennial?” A friend of mine said, “That’s a-pre-
post-erous question!” We have got into all these different

45
views since Augustine. He taught the Church what is called
postmillennialism – that we are in the millennium already.
Well, frankly, if this is the millennium, and the devil is
supposed to be bound, sealed and locked up in a dungeon
so he can’t deceive anybody anymore, I want to know who
is carrying on his business!
I am deadly serious. I wrote this book to call the Church
back to the message it preached for the first four hundred
years. But Augustine could not believe that Jesus would
come back physically to a physical world and rule physically.
It was all much too physical. It wasn’t spiritual enough and
he persuaded a Council in the year 431 in Ephesus – and I
have stood in the ruins of the church where this was decided
– they condemned belief in the millennium as heresy. That
was an official council of the Church. That is why you have
never heard about it in most churches; why Revelation 20
is either completely ignored or totally twisted around to
mean something else. It is treated allegorically, but what
a glorious gospel to preach: Jesus is coming back to reign
and this world is going to see what it can be like under a
Christian government. And the responsibility you have in
that millennium will depend on how you do your daily job
now.
I was preaching on the millennium recently. A man came
up to me afterwards and was so excited, he said, “David, for
the first time I can relate my faith to my job.”
I asked him, “Why? What’s your job?”
“I’m in charge of de-polluting the rivers of England,” he
replied. “We’ve even got salmon in the Thames again.” He
continued, “I know from Revelation that the rivers and the
oceans are going to be dreadfully polluted before the end.
When Jesus comes back to reign, he’ll need someone to
clean up the rivers for him, and I want that job! I’m going
to learn as much as I can about it.”

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 Suddenly the man saw that his daily work was a
preparation for the millennium; that he was going to reign
with Christ.
We are going to rule the nations with a rod of iron. That
doesn’t mean with cruelty. It means undemocratically, a
benevolent dictatorship of a Christian government. One day
the television will be in Christian hands, the banks will be
in Christian hands, the courts will all be in Christian hands.
Can you imagine it? Brothers and sisters, we can’t even
run the church properly now. We had better get in training.
The other thing that has disappeared from Christian
preaching about the future is the new earth. Even beyond
Christ’s reign on the old earth, there’s a brand new earth.
When people ask me what my job is, I say I am in the
recycling business. They are always pleased. “What do you
recycle – metal, paper, bottles?”
“No – people, because they are the cause of pollution.”
God is in the business of recycling people, because one
day he is going to recycle the entire universe, he is going
to make a new earth. I love preaching on the new earth,
but whenever I do so, somebody accuses me of being a
Jehovah’s Witness.
I was in Sydney, Australia, and I preached on the new
earth and I said, “In the new earth, there will be no sun, no
sea and no sex.” Not a single “hallelujah!” They all looked
glum. We were about five miles from Bondi Beach, and they
looked as if they wanted to get out of the meeting and get
down to Bondi Beach where you can get all three in good
measure. You won’t even miss any of them. A new earth?
Did you think we are going to go to heaven and live with
God forever? No, heaven is only a temporary waiting room
between death and resurrection, then you come back here to
the old earth first, and then into a brand new one.
Do you know what’s going to happen then? God is

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going to move house. It is God who is moving, not us, and
he is coming to earth to live with us. That is the last page
of the Bible: not up there but down here. The angel says,
“Behold! Look! The dwelling place of God is with men.” Not
the dwelling place of men is with God, it is the other way
around. He is coming down here and the new Jerusalem is
coming down out of heaven – here – and the Lamb will be
here and God will be here. It actually says we shall see his
face – not Jesus’ face, God’s face. You are going to see it,
which brings me to the final point.
The Greek view of God is so far removed from the
Hebrew. The Greek gods were only too human and too weak.
If you study Greek mythology, you will find out they were
only too human, so the philosophers lifted God right away
from the human sphere, right out into a timeless eternity,
away from emotions, away from change and decay, away
from time and space, in another world altogether – a static
God, not a dynamic one; a God who had attributes, rather
than actions; a God who was omnipresent, everywhere; a
God who was omnipotent, who could do anything; a God
who was omniscient, who knew everything, but in my Bible,
God is none of those three things.
He is everywhere he chooses to be. He is not everywhere,
and he is already creating a place called hell where he will
not be. And God is not omnipotent. There are many things
God can’t do, powerful though he is, almighty though he is.
I made a list of thirty-one things that he could not do – a bit
shocked to find out how many I could. The first thing I wrote
down was he cannot tell a lie, cannot break a promise. But
here is one thing I wrote down: he cannot change the past.
God himself cannot change the past. He can change the
future, not the past. But the Greeks developed a static God
who was totally without emotions and who never changed
in any particular. He was immutable. Have you heard

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these words? But my Bible is about a God who can change
his mind, and who does, and even does so in response to
pleading prayer. Moses managed to get God to change his
mind. Amos did the same thing. You read it. And I don’t
find a God without feelings and emotions, I find a God who
can be sad and angry and happy, who can rejoice over us
with singing and even whistling – a God who whistles; and
a God who is described as having a nose, nostrils, a mouth,
eyes, ears, a face, hand, fingers, arm, legs, feet, even bowels
and kidneys, and even sperm. They talk of God as if he
is just a human being in the Bible. They know perfectly
well he is Spirit and doesn’t have a body. But what they
are saying is: if you want to imagine what God is like then
think of yourself.
Even your own body tells you what God is like. We are
made in his image, even our body is, and we can do with the
body what he can do without a body. You can see; so can he.
You can smell; so can he. You can talk; so can he. You can
hear; so can he. You can walk; so can he. You can whistle;
so can he. That is the Hebrew view of God. But the Greeks
thought that was a very primitive, simplistic, childish view of
God. They gave the term anthropomorphism to thinking that
God is like a human being. But that is the very best way you
can think of God, because that is what he is like. This Greek
god who is a changeless, immutable, distant, static god made
eternal decrees. He didn’t make temporal decisions, whereas
the God of my Bible changes his decisions in response to
human beings. He is in a dynamic relationship.
Think of the potter and the clay in Jeremiah. Have you
learned the lesson of the potter and the clay? Jeremiah went
to the potter’s house and he saw a potter with a lump of clay
on the wheel, and he tried to make it into a beautiful vase as
he pumped the wheel. He tried to make this lovely vase, but
the clay wouldn’t run in his hands. So the potter put it in a

49
lump, pushed it on the wheel and made a crude, thick pot of
the clay. And God said, “Jeremiah, who decided what the
clay became, the potter or the clay?” Now think that through.
Who decided what the clay became? The answer is the clay.
And God said: “Israel is like that. I wanted to make her a
beautiful vessel, full of my mercy. But they wouldn’t run
in my hands and I’m going to make them a crude pot full of
my judgment; but if they change their mind and repent, then
I will change my mind and I will repent and I’ll make them
a beautiful vase again.” But it is the clay that is deciding.
The next day, “Jeremiah, go back to the potter and look
at that jar again.” Now he found it, and now it was hard. It
had baked in the sun, and he was told to take it out and throw
it down into the Valley of Gehenna just outside Jerusalem
and smash it to pieces, because by now it couldn’t change its
mind. It had become too hard. “Jeremiah, have you learned
the lesson of the clay?” The clay can decide whether God
makes it a vessel of mercy or judgment. But there comes a
point where the clay has become too hard to change. That is
the relationship between God and human beings. You may
have sung the chorus “You are the potter; I am the clay”, as
if it is all up to you, God, what you make of me. No, it is
not. It is up to you what you let him make you.
It was Augustine who developed a doctrine of pre­
destination which is predetermination, and said that we are
saved if God has made an eternal decree – way up there in
eternity, way removed from time and space – and made a
decree that you will be saved and your next-door neighbour
will not be. Ever since then, predestination has been falsely
preached in a Greek sense, which is not the biblical view
of predestination at all. Find that in my book Once Saved,
Always Saved? because, again, if God has made an eternal
decree that you be saved and go to heaven, then there is
nothing you can do to change that, and you will never be

50
lost – once saved, always saved. But I question whether
once saved, always saved is Bible teaching. God is not in
that kind of relationship with you. He doesn’t force anyone.
He is not an almighty giant who treats us like puppets. This
changeless, immutable god who makes eternal decrees is
not the Hebrew God. The Hebrew God listens to prayers
and says, “All right then, I hear your prayer. I won’t destroy
you. You change your mind and I’ll change mine.” What
a God – a God you can influence through prayer! But in
Greek you can’t influence God. He is way above it all and
you just must say “Your will be done.” That is Islam; that
is Insha’Allah. That is not the Hebrew God.
How can we avoid being ‘Greeced’? How can we avoid
being caught up in this Greek thinking which is riddling the
Church through and through? I hope you have been able
to recognise some of this just through the examples I have
given you. Well, there is a negative and a positive side. The
negative side is to be aware that this has happened. You need
constantly to be alert when you are hearing Greek thinking
instead of Jewish, Hebrew thinking. But there is a positive
thing you can do, and this is the real answer. Soak yourself in
the Bible. It is a Hebrew book, and if you pay more attention
to other books, magazines and TV programmes, and more
of that goes into your brain than biblical thinking, then you
will inevitably become Greek, because that is our culture.
If you soak yourself in the Bible, and particularly the Old
Testament, that is the only protection we have against the
Greek pressures of the world around us. But a recent survey
of evangelical Christians in England revealed that three
quarters of evangelical Christians are not reading their Old
Testament. They may occasionally dip into it, but they are
not soaking their mind in it.
Paul says: “Don’t be a chameleon, be a caterpillar”
(Romans 12:2). If you don’t believe me, look it up. It is

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slightly different in your version. He says, “Don’t let the
world around you colour your thinking” – because that is
what happens to the chameleon. Put him on red, he turns
red; put him on blue, he turns blue. If you want to kill him,
put him on tartan, then he explodes! So many people take
their thinking from other people, even from the preachers
they listen to, instead of getting into the Word themselves.
Be a caterpillar. Paul actually says, “Have your mind
metamorphised” – that is the word he uses in the Greek, and
the caterpillar goes through a process of metamorphosis. An
ugly little thing is a caterpillar, but a caterpillar is developing
the most beautiful colours inside – not taking his colours
from anywhere else, producing them from the inside, and
one day those wings burst out, and the colour is seen. Don’t
be a chameleon. Don’t take your thinking from around you.
Be a caterpillar. Let the colour of your thinking come from
the inside, but let the Spirit and the scripture colour you.
Soak yourself in the God of Israel. Study the Jewish
people. Try and have some Jewish friends to help you read
their Bible, because it is not ours, it is theirs. I have just
found the more Hebrew you become in your thinking, the
more you spot the Greek thinking, the more you notice it,
and it worries you that there is so much inside the Church.
Our roots are in Israel, not ancient Greece. Our faith is in the
olive tree, which is Israel. We are wild olives, grafted into
their roots. We draw our sap from their roots. Our thinking
is to be Hebrew, for there is only one God, and he is not the
god of Greece, he is the God of Israel.

“How odd of God to choose the Jews;

but odder still for those who choose
the Jewish God and spurn the Jews.”

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 ABOUT
DAVID
PAWSON
A speaker and author with uncompromising faithfulness to the
Holy Scriptures, David brings clarity and a message of urgency to
Christians to uncover hidden treasures in God’s Word.
Born in England in 1930, David began his career with a degree in
Agriculture from Durham University. When God intervened and
called him to become a Minister, he completed an MA in Theology at
Cambridge University and served as a Chaplain in the Royal Air Force
for three years. He moved on to pastor several churches, including
the Millmead Centre in Guildford, which became a model for many
UK church leaders. In 1979, the Lord led him into an international
ministry. His current itinerant ministry is predominantly to church
leaders. David and his wife Enid currently reside in the county of
Hampshire in the UK.
Over the years, he has written a large number of books, booklets, and
daily reading notes. His extensive and very accessible overviews of
the books of the Bible have been published and recorded in Unlocking
the Bible. Millions of copies of his teachings have been distributed
in more than 120 countries, providing a solid biblical foundation.
He is reputed to be the “most influential Western preacher in China”
through the broadcast of his best-selling Unlocking the Bible series
into every Chinese province by Good TV. In the UK, David’s teachings
are often broadcast on Revelation TV.
Countless believers worldwide have also benefited from his
generous decision in 2011 to make available his extensive audio
video teaching library free of charge at www.davidpawson.org
and we have recently uploaded all of David’s video to a dedicated
channel on www.youtube.com

TAKE A LOOK
AT YOUTUBE
 UNLOCKING
THE BIBLE

A unique overview of both the Old and New Testaments, from

internationally acclaimed evangelical speaker and author David
Pawson. Unlocking the Bible opens up the Word of God in a fresh and
powerful way. Avoiding the small detail of verse by verse studies, it
sets out the epic story of God and his people in Israel. The culture,
historical background and people are introduced and the teaching
applied to the modern world. Eight volumes have been brought into
one compact and easy to use guide to cover both the Old and New
Testaments in one massive omnibus edition. The Old Testament: The
Maker’s Instructions (The five books of law); A Land and A Kingdom
(Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings); Poems of Worship
and Wisdom (Psalms, Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job);
Decline and Fall of an Empire (Isaiah, Jeremiah and other prophets);
The Struggle to Survive (Chronicles and prophets of exile); The
New Testament: The Hinge of History (Mathew, Mark, Luke, John
and Acts); The Thirteenth Apostle (Paul and his letters); Through
Suffering to Glory (Hebrews, the letters of James, Peter and Jude,
the Book of Revelation). Already an international bestseller.
 UNLOCKING THE BIBLE
PURCHASE
BOOK
EBOOK
WATCH
DAVID’S INTRO DVD

Flash Drive including:

- All video (MP4)
WATCH - All audio tracks (Mp3)
- Charts (PDF)
Unlocking the
Old Testament USB
Unlocking the
New Testament

LISTEN
Unlocking the
Old Testament
Unlocking the
New Testament

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

TAKE A LOOK
AT MORE

NB. internet access is required

for the links above to work
 JESUS:
THE SEVEN
WONDERS
OF HISTORY

This book is the result of a lifetime of telling ‘the greatest story

ever told’ around the world. David re-told it to many hundreds of
young people in Kansas City, USA, who heard it with uninhibited
enthusiasm, ‘tweeting’ on the internet about ‘this cute old English
gentleman’ even while he was speaking.
Taking the middle section of the Apostles’ Creed as a framework,
David explains the fundamental facts about Jesus on which the
Christian faith is based in a fresh and stimulating way. Both old and
new Christians will benefit from this ‘back to basics’ call and find
themselves falling in love with their Lord all over again.
 JESUS: THE SEVEN WONDERS OF HISTORY
1. His Birth
2. His Death
3. His Burial
4. His Resurrection
5. His Ascension
6. His Return
7. His Judgement

WATCH
DAVID’S INTRO

WATCH PURCHASE
BOOK
EBOOK
LISTEN DVD

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

TAKE A LOOK
AT MORE

NB. internet access is required

for the links above to work
 OTHER TEACHINGS
BY DAVID PAWSON

For the most up to date list of David’s Books

go to: www.davidpawsonbooks.com

To purchase David’s Teachings

go to: www.davidpawson.com

SPECIAL OFFERS
PURCHASE PURCHASE PURCHASE
ONE USB FLASH DRIVE Unlocking the Bible ONE USB FLASH DRIVE
with ALL of Davids Audio Flash Drive including: with ALL of Davids Video
Teachings (MP3) - All video (MP4) Teachings (MP4)
- All audio tracks (Mp3)
- Charts (PDF)

USB USB USB

 THE EXPLAINING SERIES
BIBLICAL TRUTH SIMPLY EXPLAINED

If you have been blessed reading/watching or listening

to this book, there are more available in the series.
Please register to download more free booklets by
visiting www.explainingbiblicaltruth.global

Other booklets in the Explaining series will include:

The Amazing Story of Jesus
The Resurrection: The Heart of Christianity
Studying the Bible
Being Anointed and Filled with the Holy Spirit
New Testament Baptism
How to study a book of the Bible: Jude
The Key Steps to Becoming a Christian
What the Bible says about Money
What the Bible says about Work
Grace – Undeserved Favour, Irresistible Force
or Unconditional Forgiveness?
Eternally secure? – What the Bible says about being saved
De-Greecing the Church – The impact of Greek thinking
on Christian beliefs
Three texts often taken out of context:
Expounding the truth and exposing error
The Trinity
The Truth about Christmas

They will also be available to purchase as print copies from:

www.amazon.co.uk or www.thebookdepository.com
 SUPPORTING THE DAVID PAWSON TEACHING TRUST
The David Pawson Teaching Trust was set up and established by David
Pawson as non-profit, designed to protect and promote his teaching
for future years. Neither David nor his Trustees receive any financial
compensation from the activities of his Trust and all donations are used
expressly for the work of the Trust.
David Pawson’s vision is that his teaching library should be made
available to as many people groups as possible around the world, in
their own languages, for the lowest possible cost whilst maintaining the
highest possible quality.
In 2011 the Trust started the work of transcribing and translating David’s
Teaching Library into other languages. Including Mandarin, Spanish, and
Russian as well as many other international languages most recently
we have started translating into Arabic, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian,
Tamil, German and Polish and there is much more to do.
The aim of the Trust is to provide free Bible teaching to the global church.
David and the Trust have chosen not to build and invest in an organisation,
nor to continually make requests to the general public or other sponsors
for financial support. The Trust has no full-time workers and all of
the Trustees support the work on a voluntary basis whilst performing
professional roles in the marketplace.
Every time we meet we seek earnestly to pray that God will direct us
and supply our needs and the resources required to faithfully spread
His Word.
If you have been personally blessed by David’s teachings and wish to
support the ongoing work of his ministry we would very much appreciate
both your prayer support and any donations, no matter how large or
small. Please only give if you can afford to do so. Any support will be
received with genuine gratitude and will be used only for the work of
distributing David’s teachings.

If you have been blessed through these booklets and are

able to help support us please click below.
Donations will be used to fund the production of new teaching
media including translations and to support the free distribution
of Davids teachings.
Davids Teaching Trust is managed and supported by a small
number of volunteers. Please only give if you are able.

Thank you and may the Lord bless you

 THE
EXPLAINING
SERIES

David Pawson has a worldwide

teaching ministry, particularly
for church leaders. He is known
to many through Christian
broadcasting and is the author
of numerous books.

Each book in the Explaining series

examines an important aspect of
the Christian faith and is written in
a way that presents the message of
the Bible clearly and simply. In this
book David Pawson teaches what
the Bible says about the Christian
faith and the subtle influence of
Greece on the Church and Christian
thinking in our modern culture.

Anchor Recordings Ltd

www.davidpawson.com