July 15, 2008
Today was ridiculously sweet! Today we went into the tunnels of all tunnels. Today we went into Hezekiah’s tunnel. This tunnel was built by Hezekiah when invaders were approaching to conquer Jerusalem. The tunnel was built from the Gihon Spring outside of Jerusalem to the Pool of Siloam. The same pool that Jesus healed a blind man. The tunnel is so sweet. It goes for like 1/3 of a mile. The water in the tunnel is so cold and refreshing and reaches almost to your waist at times, but mostly just hangs out around your knees. Considering my new obsession with tunnels, this was like the king of tunnels. The water just made it that much cooler. It would have been way more Indiana Jones if we would have found the tunnel ourselves but I loved marching through it with the class just the same. Also on that field trip we visited David’s city which is basically a portion of the original city that David inhabited. Also we saw Area G, which is this really phenomenal archaeology site. The cool thing about that site is that this lady originally came there who was a notoriously “unbiased” atheist archaeologist that came and declared that there was no evidence of David ever living. Well, despite that fact that her being atheist actually makes her just as biased as a Christian, she made an error. She stopped too soon. Had she have searched just a little farther to the right she would have found what she was indeed not looking for, circumstantial evidence of David’s existence, proving that he indeed did exist. What is the lesson there? Keep looking. There is always proof of God, in one way or another. Keep looking. The other cool part about the field trip was going up and seeing a sight that would have been equivalent to the size of David’s palace and about the exact location. This is where things got cool. You see, from that place, it is actually really really easy to see into other people’s houses and rooftops. Had there been a young lady bathing on her rooftop, you know what? It would have been really easy to see more that I wanted to. David did not have to necessarily been looking for trouble. He could have just stumbled upon it. That was not however, the error. The error was when David acted upon his temptation, kept looking, eventually called for Bath-Sheba, and etc etc from there landing himself in the Telestial. In the same way, we all come upon sin and temptation, like David we may just even stumble upon it on the rooftop. From there, it is up to us. It does not matter what righteous acts you have done in the past, consistency is the point. It is consistently fleeing temptation. Constancy. David gave in to temptation on that rooftop. Flee temptation.
After that we broke into groups and went to the Church of Holy Sepulcher. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the other traditional site of the Crucifixion and tomb of Christ. Well, I like the Garden tomb better personally, but there is a lot of cool artwork and mosaics. Then we climbed a tower and saw the whole city from it. That was also awesome. Another successful day in Jerusalem.