Dennis Tuuri

# Q&A Session Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church – Pastor Dennis Tuuri

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Q1:

**Questioner:** Hello, Dennis. Thank you for the message. I really like the reference to Ezekiel. Is it Ezekiel 47, right? Wait till we get to the 153 great fish. I really enjoyed that passage in the past, and especially in reference to the fact that it flows out on the ground. It’s kind of an interesting concept. You’d have to assume, I suppose, that the blood and water came out of the side of Christ and that it actually did hit the ground.

It makes me think in terms of Romans 8:23, I believe, where it talks about how the earth and whole creation groans towards the adoption. Also, I’m thinking that there’s an aspect of the lifting of the curse, as it were, on all creation. And it also makes me think back in terms of Abel—that the blood of Abel cried from the ground. So I’m wondering: did you have any thoughts on any of this, or have you known of anybody who’s written on these types of thoughts? And what might you think of any of that?

**Pastor Tuuri:** No, it all sounds good to me. Yeah, Ezekiel 47 has been kind of a favorite over the years of postmillennialists. You know, the water goes higher and higher and higher and goes out and cleanses all the water, turns dead water into living water, and things flourish and grow. And it all comes out from the work of the temple. Clearly a reference to Christ. Yeah. And yes, so it has been a favorite text for postmillennialists, I think, over the years. And clearly, I think properly, it alludes to the coming forth of the water from the side of the Savior.

Another interesting thing is that in the tabernacle—I’m not sure about the temple, but I know in the tabernacle—the support beams for the tent use the same word “rib” that’s used for a rib of a man. So the idea, you know, it sounded odd to me the first time I ever heard about this, but really the whole tabernacle/temple being a symbolic body is really there all along. And so the water coming out from the side of that symbolic body is pretty clearly a reference to Christ.

So yeah, those are good thoughts. Thank you.

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Q2:

**Questioner:** Any other thoughts, comments, questions? Comment related to what was just said. You might have heard of Ron Wyatt, who died in ’99 but was attributed with finding many archaeological sites and artifacts in the Bible—Red Sea crossing, Sodom and Gomorrah. He’s got an interesting story in regards to the blood going down on the ground.

He claims to have seen and photographed, before he died of course, the Ark of the Covenant in a cave that he had to crawl through in Galata. So he claims that the blood went down into a crack, probably caused by the earthquake, and then rested on the mercy seat. And some select leaders in Israel apparently have the Ark of the Covenant now and have examined the blood on top of it and found that it only has 23 chromosomes. Anyway, interesting story.

**Pastor Tuuri:** [Acknowledges comment]

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Q3:

**Questioner:** So my question is: in your talking to the other pastors in Oregon City, do you have a feel for about how many of them believe and hopefully regularly teach this idea of not doing commerce on the Lord’s day?

**Pastor Tuuri:** Probably zero.

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Q4:

**Questioner:** Boy, it was a very helpful sermon—your connecting the blood and water to the sacraments. My first thought when I read that passage always goes to the movie Ben-Hur, at the end of the movie where the rain is coming down and it’s washing the blood of Christ down and becomes this river flowing out. And also, maybe think of the passage in Leviticus 14, where you’ve got blood and water for the cleansing of the leper—a live bird is killed over running water, and the blood of a second live bird is dipped into that blood and then released into the field, so it goes free.

**Pastor Tuuri:** Yeah, I alluded to that very quickly. I have the text for Leviticus 14 on the outline. And then also later in the passage, it’s the same basic procedure for the cleansing of a house of leprosy. And again, there it’s a definite allusion to the blood and the water being sprinkled on the house. I saw your text there. I don’t remember saying anything about it.

**Questioner:** And also, it’s very helpful to hear about the trampling underfoot of the Son of God. It made me think of the context of the passage—drawing near to God, and then you’ve got “not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together.” And then right after that it talks about not trampling underfoot and then not drawing back. So you’ve got: drawing near, don’t draw back, draw near and assemble together, and don’t trample underfoot the Son of God. Which is very good. Thank you for those.

**Pastor Tuuri:** It’s great. Yeah.

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Q5:

**Questioner:** It’s great. Yeah, I may have dozed off on this, but when you titled this “A Bride from the Side,” I guess I assumed you were going to talk about the fact that we have Christ as the second Adam. He’s in the garden. He undergoes a deep sleep, and then, you know, taking a piercing from the side, you take out the new bride, or the church. Did you talk about that at all?

**Pastor Tuuri:** Yep. You don’t remember? Okay. It was the fifth point of the outline, and I touched on it briefly. But yeah, I mentioned that the early church fathers held this as a very dominant perspective—not so much with modern commentators. I quoted from Matthew Henry, who thinks there’s a definite allusion to that. And to me, it’s hard to miss because our whole structure, you know, again, is moving us into the garden. Christ is being crucified in the garden. As you say, Adam stepping on the head of maybe old Adam, or at least the picture of the old man. New Adam. Bride from the side. Absolutely. Yeah.

And in a way, that’s kind of the point of the whole thing—that really what he’s doing is birthing the new creation. We could kind of roll all that stuff up together, you know: the atonement, the blood, the fulfillment of prophecy, God’s total control, judgment unto life. All that happens through kind of the birth of this bride, the giving of the bride from the side of Christ.

Henry actually refers to it as a deep sleep of Christ upon the cross—that decreative, deathlike sleep. So that is clearly pictured for us here. And probably, you know, I hadn’t thought of it before, but probably in that water coming out of the side of the temple in Ezekiel 47, that’s probably alluding back to the side of Adam as well. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff like that, but here it’s quite obvious.

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Q6:

**Questioner:** I think you had mentioned how the other thieves on the cross had their legs broken, and how we are those thieves having our legs broken. One of those thieves was saved and the other was not. What significance would you put on the legs being broken?

**Pastor Tuuri:** Well, that was kind of the point I made. And I know I make these points quickly, and I’m sorry for that. I probably try to put way too much of this stuff in, but you know, the point I was trying to make was that clearly there’s this fulfillment of this prophecy—that Christ’s legs would not be broken. And that’s normally where people stop. The righteous suffering servant in Psalm 34:20 didn’t have his legs broken. He was protected by God. So that’s it. So we get the picture of the sufferer being protected by God.

But the point is, you know, this other guy—who is righteous, you know, he’s not a righteous sufferer, but he’s certainly one of God’s elect at this point in time—he still gets his legs broken. And the psalmist in Psalm 51 says that the bones that you’ve broken, you know, please heal them. So the significance of that is that we are like Christ, but we’re also distinct from him. He is singular in his not getting his legs broken.

Our identification with him—you know, so often in movies—maybe someone will work this into his movie night—but you know, so often in movies, we want to identify with the hero. But a lot of times the hero is really godlike. That’s Jesus. We’re the guy who’s in the middle between the good guy and the bad guy, usually. For instance, in The Shawshank Redemption, you have the guy played by Tim Robbins, who is a definite Christ figure. He’s the one that gives a written message to Morgan Freeman, and Freeman believes the writing as scripture. And as a result, Freeman is brought to hope.

We’re not to identify with Robbins. He’s so weird and cool and all that stuff. Really, that’s not going to help us much. But we can identify with Morgan Freeman—that there is a hero, there is a Christ who gives us hope and moves us ahead. We’re like Morgan Freeman in the thing. We get hope and we live. We’re not like Andy. He’s way too cool.

Well, same thing here. Really, we like to identify with Christ on the cross. But really, we’re kind of that forgiven thief on his right-hand side. And more often than not, we’re going to go through things that are like breaking bones to us. And we have to recognize, as I said, that we’re now bone of Christ’s bones. He has strength, which we don’t have. God is sovereign even while he’s crushing our bones. So our identification, our recognition that Christ’s bones aren’t broke—

The other shoe that drops in the text as you’re thinking about it is, “Yeah, but gee, this guy over here who’s going to heaven, he had that big iron mallet crush his bones to smithereens. So what comfort is there in that he didn’t have his bones broken?” And the comfort is that we draw strength from Christ’s bones.

So is that what you were asking?

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Q7:

**Questioner:** I had a question slash observation. I’ve always thought of Pentecost as kind of the first time after the crucifixion where there’s a big conversion—the Spirit is let loose, so to speak. But it almost sounded like I never really thought of the multitude around the cross. Is there another mass conversion there before Pentecost, or what’s going on with the multitude?

**Pastor Tuuri:** Yeah. Well, I take it to be that these people are coming to salvation. I think it’s a prefigurement of Pentecost, you know, that we have these little pre-indicators of what’s going to happen. So it seems to me that when the text is quoted from Zechariah and these people that we already know from the previous gospel text have mourned and gone home—we’re to connect those things up. And God’s Spirit has been dispersed upon a crowd of people who are brought to repentance for their sins.

The same thing happens, by the way, not just at Pentecost but before AD 70. Later in the book of Revelation, you know, there’s two witnesses, and it says the people will look upon them for three days. They’ll watch these people that they killed, and then the language is symbolic, but seems to indicate that the same thing will happen. They will have discerned the pierced Christ by discerning the martyrs.

So we know historically that a few years prior to AD 70, there was a resurgence. There was a lot of evangelization going on that produced a resurgence of suppression and persecution of Christians. So that same thing happens here at the cross, Pentecost, and then finally just before AD 70 as well.

Some people think that’s what actually predicted the big destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70—that the Jews were driven by jealousy because of the ingathering predicted in Romans of Jewish converts leading up to AD 70. Their renewed persecution is what triggers the Romans coming in, and the whole thing going up in smoke in AD 70.

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Q8:

**Questioner:** One more thought, Dennis. In terms of the bones being broken, is the aspect of the faithfulness of Christ. If the one thing I come to mind is, of course, the word of God—Christ’s Son is faithful. And so when you say we draw strength from him, it’s in that we become like him in faithfulness, even in the midst of adversity. And even in the hereafter, when we become like Christ—because we become eternally faithful—we don’t necessarily become like God, as it were, but we actually become faithful as Christ was faithful. And we draw strength from his obedience and his walk of faithfulness here on the earth. And so we can now walk in faithfulness.

**Pastor Tuuri:** Yes, I agree with all that. I guess we should go have our meal.

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**Questioner:** Oh, I wanted to—I’m surprised no questions about observance of the Lord’s day.

**Pastor Tuuri:** Oh, well. Okay. Oh, thank you very much.