This podcast is about the foundational elements of salvation and peace with God as you start on the journey of life and as the essential gear for a Hobo Soul. We'll look at Ephesians 6, which talks about spiritual armor, specifically the gospel of peace and the helmet of salvation. These elements are not merely symbolic but serve as essential gear, when we correctly understand the term "gospel," which translates to "good news," emphasizing that this good news encapsulates the restoration of our relationship with the Creator. Through an exploration of Jesus' final utterance on the cross, I argue that the essence of His message conveys the completion of peace between humanity and God--which is the foundation of our salvation. Obtaining peace with God, accepting His salvation in Jesus, is essential for a successful life with Him and forever.

Takeaways:

1. The essence of our journey through life necessitates equipping ourselves with the gospel of peace.
2. In Ephesians 6, Paul emphasizes the importance of wearing the armor of God for protection.
3. Our salvation is fundamentally rooted in achieving peace with God through Jesus's sacrificial death.
4. The concept of peace in biblical terms represents wholeness, tranquility, and restoration in our lives.
5. To truly walk as Christians, we must first ensure that we have established peace with God.

Hi, welcome to the Hobo Soul podcast of road advice from the Bible. And from me, Yvon Prehn someone who's a little further down the road of life.

I'll talk to you every weekday for about five to 10 minutes, with periodic longer talks on serious Saturdays. Let's get started with our topic today, which is: For a good journey,get your gear in place.

Our Bible passage for today is from Ephesians 6, 15, and 17, where it says, "Put on the full armor of God with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace and the helmet of salvation."

No matter what journey you're preparing for, whether it's for your daily tasks or running a marathon, one of the first things you do is put on shoes that are appropriate for the day.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered the Bible passage in Ephesians 6, where the early Bible teacher Paul told Christians how to prepare to engage in a spiritually hostile world.

I'm not going to be talking about his entire section of advice, but two things are important as we begin where he talks about in this whole context of spiritual warfare and putting on the full armor of God that he tells us to put on our feet the gospel of peace and to protect our heads, with the helmet of salvation.

What I think he's saying is that the essential gear that we need to successfully travel through this life and into eternity is a gospel of peace which gives us salvation. In other words, we need peace with God. We need salvation for a good journey. That's the foundation of everything else. But what does that mean?

I want to take this podcast to define it, and then for the next few, I want to talk about the benefits of it. For some of you, the whole definition of salvation and the gospel and all that might be entirely new.

For others, it's a review, but I think it's one that I trust you'll find helpful.

So what do we mean when we talk about the gospel?

The word gospel means good news, and in this case it's about the good news of being at peace with God, or again, as Paul labels it, the gospel of peace. It's this gospel of peace that brings about our salvation. But how does that happen?

I was studying Jesus' last words from the Cross, which you're going to hear from many sermons coming up in Easter.

And one of the things that you'll probably hear pastors mention is that in Jesus final words from the cross, just before he died, he cried out, "It is finished!" Or the way many Bibles actually quote the Greek, which is the word "tetelestai."

Now it's kind of a fun word to say and it does mean "it is finished."

What was finished is Jesus work of salvation. His death on the cross healed the divide between humanity and God.

Our eternal God created us to love us forever.

But somehow, in a way I don't understand, when our first parents turned their backs on God and decided they knew better than he did, how to live, what to choose, how to become wise, all of those sorts of things, when they wanted something more than God and took it in defiance of his clear command not to, it brought about consequences more horrible than they could have imagined. It brought about death. Death in their close relationship with God and along with that, physical and eternal death.

Because they were now separated by their choice from the source of life. A do over wasn't possible.

A breach was created that humanity couldn't cross and the immensity of that spilled over into all their children and down to each of us today. Without God we'll live a life without being truly alive and when we die,we will be eternally in darkness, cut off from all that is life and joy. There are no do overs ever. I once heard hell described simply as a place of unending regret. I found that really horrifying.

But God--always, but God never quit loving his wandering, unbelieving spit-in-his-face creatures.

And instead of leaving them to the consequences of their decision, again, in a way I don't understand, God the Father sent Jesus to die on a cross to somehow heal the breach between us and our Creator and give us the eternal incredible purpose and joyful life we were created for. And when he did that, his final cry was "tetelestai! It is finished!"

I mean, that's what you always hear.

But it just kind of kept bothering me and okay, you'll need to know this about me as we continue in this podcast.

I can be obsessive and picky when it comes to studying the Bible, but when I did a bit of research, I confirmed something that was kind of bothering me. Jesus didn't say tetelestai on the cross. Now hang in there with me. This might seem unimportant and a bit convoluted, but it's really significant.

To begin with, Jesus couldn't have said tetelestai because he didn't speak Greek. Tetelestai is a Greek word. He spoke Aramaic.

The Bible quotes another phrase he said in Aramaic on the cross, where Jesus cries out in a loud voice just before he dies, where he says "Eli Eli lama sabachthani," which means "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Why Bible translators quoted this in Aramaic and not the other phrase, who knows? So if he didn't say tetelestai, what did he say now?

I did some more research, quite a bit of research actually, on this. And without getting into the weeds too much, I found that many scholars believe the word he actually said was "masalem."

The root of the word masalem comes from a word many of us are familiar with, shalom, which means peace.

The meaning of the biblical concept of shalom is not merely the absence of conflict, but an all encompassing wholeness, restoration and tranquility. It's a way of living totally at rest with and in God.

It's the kind of peace Jesus promised when he said, "I'm leaving you with a gift, peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is not fragile like the world gives. So do not be troubled or afraid."

When we add the Hebrew tense Jesus used from the cross to the root word masalem, the phrase could be translated "the peace has been accomplished" From this we see that masalem is a little more expansive in its meaning than tetelestai, as it tells us what is finished.

In this case, the conflict between humanity and our Creator. We're now at peace. That's why we can refer to our salvation as the gospel. The good news of peace.

That's our essential gear, what we need to put on before we can begin this Christian walk. We need to be at peace with God. That's the bottom line. That's what it means to be a Christian.

It doesn't mean you have it all figured out, or life is going well or prosperously, or all your dreams are coming true. But at the core of your soul, it's good with you and your God.

If it isn't, and if you aren't sure you're at peace with him, all you have to do is talk to Him about it. Let him know you're finished with going your own way. That's what sin really is in both big and little ways. It's doing what you want to do.

Let him know that now you want to do things His way. You want to walk with Him. You want the peace that only he can give by accepting what Jesus has done for you.

When you've got peace with God, you've got your essential gear. We'll talk more about what it means to walk with Jesus in our upcoming podcasts.

We'll look at the question of will he ever walk away from us? What happens when we completely mess up and how can we keep good communication in our relationship with Him and lots more.

That's all for this podcast, for transcripts, links to related material, and much more to help you learn to know, trust, apply and teach the Bible,go to www.bible805.com.

For now, let me end with this benediction and prayer.

May you walk each day surrounded by the gracious love of the Father, guided by the gentle wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and conscious of the astoundingly real presence of Jesus, who will walk with you until you're no more a hobo soul, no more a transient wandering heart, but at home in the Kingdom prepared for you with your God forever. Amen.