1455 - Friday Q & A.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Chris.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1455. Today is Friday and it's Question and Answer Day. And over the last six weeks I have gotten question after question asking about travel to Israel, to Europe, to Turkey. And I want to try to answer your questions. As many of you know, next year will be fifty years that I have been traveling to the Middle East, to Israel, to Jordan. I made my first trip in 1977. And since then I have taken thousands upon thousands of people to Israel. I have taught people there, and I have learned there. I have studied there, I have researched there. And a few years ago, about twenty years ago, I took my first trip to Greece and to Turkey. And I traveled for days upon days in those countries and learned the lay of the land. Not just as I read it in the Bible, but I walked it, I drove it, I saw it firsthand. And there's nothing like going to a place and walking and living and seeing the people, seeing the sights, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds. You see, there's nothing like it. I have taken seminary professors, seminary presidents, university and college presidents. I have taken deans and professors, I've taken people who are young and people who are old. I believe my oldest person to take was 92 years old and they made it just fine. They had a determination. It was on their bucket list. They wanted to go and they said I may not can go and walk all the places, but I want to see it. I want to be able to say in this life, I have walked the land of Israel. I have walked the hills, I have seen the sights. You're not too old until you're the age to where you just cannot go anymore, but I can tell you the most trying time for me is just the plane ride there and back. That wears me out more than anything. But why is it so important to go to Israel? It is important because you experience something walking the land, seeing the land that you cannot do in a book. It's like studying something in a classroom versus being out in the place itself. Years ago when I was looking at doing PhD work, a major university in the Southeastern Conference was one on my list to check. And so I checked with them. I knew they had a great history department and a good rhetoric department, so I talked with them about those two degrees and doing a PhD. Now those were in the days when nothing was done online, there wasn't any uh online anything. And so I would have had to uh register three days a week in the library and so forth, and I simply couldn't do it. But as I investigated uh studying history and studying Civil War history, I asked them about the requirements beside the library and residency and so forth, and they said to me, depending upon what I wanted to study in history, if I studied Civil War history, I told them what part of the Civil War I would like to study, and they said, Well, one of the requirements is you've got to go to the battlefields, you've got to walk the battlefields, you've got to know what the strategies of the North and the South were, and you've got to walk the land. Well, I thought that was amazing, and I said, Why would I need to do that? I had a good idea why, but I wanted to hear them say it, and they said we don't want anyone graduating and teaching civil war from this institution that was educated here that had not walked the battlefields, had not seen the battlefields. Well, the reality is the same is true about the land of Israel in the Bible and the land of the New Testament and the journeys of Paul. The fact is you can read about these places all you want to, but until you have been there and you've walked there, you will never sense what those who do walk it and see it and hear it and smell it, what they really understand. I've had two seminary presidents, one university president tell me that other than their salvation experience it was the greatest spiritual experience of their life. And I truly believe that. One seminary professor told me of a very well known seminary, he said, Tony, this has been such an experience for me. He said, I believe that a trip with you when you do the intensive studies as you have done on this trip where he went, and we took many of the professors that just about the entire faculty went at a particular time. He said, This is worth a year in seminary. He said, We have been over here twelve days, and this is worth a year in seminary. And these are seasoned men who say that. Now I'm telling you all this to say that I am starting back up the trips again. The next trip is scheduled for October the twenty sixth, and it's all Israel. And we are going to go from the north and the Syrian Lebanese border all the way down to the Egyptian border and the Red Sea. And I've been traveling so much in Israel over the decades that I know the people, I know the guides, I know the land, and I know the industry. The travel industry is a small industry, and I want to say to you that many that I've talked to that have been 15 and 20 times will not see the sites that we will see on this one trip. We're going to go to places that most people have to go several times to see, and the reason is it's a 14-day trip from the time you leave, counting the day you leave until the day you get back. We're going to see Joppa and Tel Aviv, of course, and we land at Laud, or what would be Lida in the New Testament. That's where Bengirian Airport is. We're going to see all the sites that uh are normally seen at Caesarea and Mount Carmel and Megiddo and Nazareth. But then we're going also to places that normally you don't go. We'll be going up on Mount Arbael, and if you usually go to Mount Arbael, you can't see something else. But we're staying long enough to see it all. And then we're going to make our way down the Jordan Valley and we're going to go to we'll have time to go to Harod Springs. It's normally called Gideon Springs, but it's properly Harod and the Harod River, which empties into the Jordan just near Bethan. Bet Shan was called Schetopolis during the New Testament era, but in the Old Testament it was called Betshan, and many of you know that city and the old tale there, the tall tale, that's where Saul and Jonathan and their decapitated bodies hung after being killed on Mount Gilboa. But we're going to both of those, and then we're going down to all the way. We're going to drive down to Inbokek. In Bokek is near Masada, and we're going to spend the night on the Dead Sea, and we're going to be able to spend some time in the spas, and you'll be able to go into the Dead Sea itself, or you can go into the pools that are have Dead Sea water piped into those huge pools that's heated. So it's a wonderful time of just rest and relaxation. Then the next morning we get up, we don't have to drive a long way. It's about 10 minutes to Masada. And this keeps us from being rushed. We're the first ones there. We get to take our time. And then we'll go up to Engedi and then up to Qumran to Wadi Kelt, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and then we will go take our first look at Jerusalem from Mount Scopus. Mount Scopus is the northern part of the Mount of Olive range. The northern part is called Mount Scopus. Mount Scopus is where Josephus Flavius recorded and watched and scoped out. That's why it's called Mount Scopus. It's a Greek word which means to look. And that's where he watched the fall and the destruction of Jerusalem. The center mount of the Mount of Olives is called Mount Ointment and the Mount of Anointing, and it's the center hill. And then the southern part of the Mount of Olives, where the Palm Sunday Road is, and just behind it, Bethany Bethani, the house of the poor, where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. And that's where we'll have our first site. We'll spend four or five nights there in Jerusalem. We'll see all the sites from there in the environs of Jerusalem. We'll visit Bethlehem and Sheloh. That's right. We're going to both. And we'll see the Church of the Nativity, the Shepherd's Fields, the Fields of Ruth and Boaz. And we will go to Shiloh in Samaria. And we may have a surprise there, depending upon how things are going that day and the security arrangements. I may take you to a place where one in a thousand tours will probably go. And it is a very prominent biblical place that's not far from Shelo, but we'll try to go there if at all possible. But then as we do all the things in Jerusalem, I'll teach 4,000 years of history from Abraham and the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, where the temple once stood, the first and the second temple, and where the third temple will stand as well. We will visit all of the sites there. We'll visit the Garden of Gethsemane from Mount of Olives. I'll show you where Jesus, the area where he would have had his last Passover satyr with the disciples, the house of Caiaphas, the route they would have taken, Gethsemane, and then all the way out to Calvaria, Gogatha. Then we'll walk it, and it's going to be a great time. When we leave Jerusalem after the days there and the sights that we'll see, we will leave and go by way of the Ella Valley. That's right. Where David fought Goliath, and then we'll make our way down to Timnah, where a replica of the tabernacle is and the pillars of Solomon, Solomon's copper mines. We will spend two nights on the Red Sea at Elot. It was called Etsion Geber in the Bible. And it's going to be a great time. As a matter of fact, we'll have an opportunity to relax that day. Some will want to snorkel in the Red Sea. There's some of the clearest water. A coral reef is there. It's absolutely spectacular. And from there you can that place where we will stay, you'll be able to see Egypt. You can walk down to the border. You'll be able to look across the Red Sea to Aqaba, the Jordanian city that's there. And also from our hotel, you'll be able to see Saudi Arabia. Then as we have finished our time there, we'll make our way back up to Tel Aviv. We will see the Ramon Crater, the huge, beautiful, spectacular natural phenomena. And then we will go to Tel Beersheva. You'll be able to see Abraham's well and see the ancient ruins of Beersheva. Most people don't go to Beersheva whatsoever. I've already named three or four places that hardly any tours go anymore. Many have never been to. You can come and go with me. You can get college credit, seminary credit, you can get associates, bachelor's credit, and master's credit, seminary credit from a wonderful university, a Christian university in Georgia, where I serve as the executive director of the Center for Israel Studies. And you'll be able to get credit from that Sax accredited school. That's right. You could transfer it anywhere that Sax accreditation is recognized, which is almost every school in the nation. You've asked about it, and so we're doing that also. We're going to start doing, God willing, a trip following the journeys of the Apostle Paul. I just got off of uh one earlier this week, uh just two days ago. It was a tremendous uh time. It was 12, 13 days, and it was wonderful. We'll probably go uh during the same time period because Greece is absolutely spectacularly beautiful. And we do a cruise with that as well, either in May or earlier we will do that. And then in the fall of twenty-seven, I plan on starting in Ephesus, then cruising out to the uh island of Patmos, which I just was at earlier this week, and I'll teach the entire book of Revelation. We're going to spend a couple of hours in Patmos as I we go to the top of the hill, and we're going to be in a place that is just with our group, and I'm going to teach the entire book of Revelation, and then we're going to go back to the mainland of Turkey, and we're going to follow in the journeys of the Apostle John in the letters that he wrote in Revelation 2 and 3 to the seven churches. We're going to begin at Ephesus, and then we're going all the way around to all the churches and end at Laodicea, the seventh church that's mentioned in Revelation chapter 3. And I'm going to teach the peculiarities of each church, what how Jesus addressed them, how he described himself, the commendations to the churches and their warnings. And it's going to be a great time of study. It'll be a trip of only about 10 to 11 days maximum, simply because we're going to be more confined, going to be less walking, and so many of you will want to go on that. And we'll be posting that on TLC Holy Land Tours in the days and weeks and months ahead. But I already have the October 26th through November 8th trip on there. It is reasonably priced for all that you do, and I even put all the tips in, so all you have to do is take care of your flights and your insurance requirement. Everything else is added in, including the tips. Because to in today's market, you can get your own flights or use Miles. You can get your flights as cheap as I can, and we'll give you all the information that you'll need and make suggestions for you. But the group flights now are through the roof. You can watch and get deals as a group that we cannot get. And so the price is on there, and the only two things that you will need to add is the flight, your round trip flight, and uh your insurance, uh, because everybody has to have insurance now to fly, not just a trip cancellation, but also medical insurance. And so I hope that this is helpful to you and answer some of your questions. It's so important if you get the opportunity to go to Israel, people say, Well, I can't afford it, and yet they'll go and spend money at beaches for a week and all that goes with that. I know families that go to Disney World and they'll spend thousands of dollars, all included, and then say they cannot go to Israel. I think it's a matter of priority. And I pray that sometime in your life you're able to go. And I would love for you to go with me, uh, but if you don't want to go with me, I'll be happy to recommend to you who goes with you, who rides on the bus is with you. I ride on the bus, and many of the people that go to Israel and great Bible teachers, you get to listen to them about three times, and the rest of the time you're listening to a guide who many times doesn't know the Bible, or they know about it, but they don't know the God of the Bible in a personal way. So I know, I know it's a very small industry. I know many of the guys, and there's some great ones out there, and many of them know Jesus, but most of them don't. If they don't, they need to be with somebody who does, and you need to be with somebody who does if you're walking the land of Jesus. And so I pray this is helpful to you. We'll continue our study on Monday of the story of the Crimson River. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's Questions at Tony C R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.