19 - Angels - Holy and Unholy, Part 1

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20 - Angels - Holy and Unholy, Part 2

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Well, welcome back to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. Now, have you ever had those times where you just, you know you forgot something and you have no idea what it is because you forgot?

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Yeah, well, I'm going to spend the next hour trying to remember what it was that I should have done before now because there's something in my head that I'm supposed to have remembered and I don't have the foggiest idea what it is.

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Hope it wasn't to be teaching class because here we are. All right. We are in Lesson 14 and we are going to be talking today about angels both holy and unholy or holy and evil or angels and demons, but are demons angels?

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Well, what do you think about that? We're going to get to that actually. I think I've kind of given it away, haven't

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I? I would say yes. Angels are in two categories, holy and unholy and we're going to discuss both of them tonight but there is no way, no way that we're getting through all of it.

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Why? Well, if you look in your syllabus, which if you have a syllabus that is, the syllabus we are on Lesson 14, syllabus is for those who are enrolled in the academy.

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You can enroll by going to the website somewhere down there and you can actually go to that website and check out the new website.

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It's up, looking cool and it does look pretty neat, but we are going to be in Lesson 14 where we're going to talk about angels today and we are going to see that there is no way

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I'm getting through the 40 some odd passages that we have for this lesson.

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If you look at it, you would see that there's way more that we have than we're going to be available to do.

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So let us take a look and see that we're going to be in Lesson 14 and that is the lesson on angels, both holy and evil, which means that not all of them are angels, meaning good.

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So what we have here is a case where many people get confused.

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Have you watched that TV show, what was it called? They called it Touched by an

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Angel or you see some of those other TV shows. There was a while where angels were like a popular thing to have

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TV shows about and people would be talking about that and they'd have all these angels. There's a lot of confusion with angels.

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One of the most confusing things that people have about angels is they think that when people die, they become angels.

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By the time we're done at least with tonight's class, you're going to quickly realize that angels are completely different than people, totally different group, totally different creation from God.

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So we don't become angels. I know when some of you were growing up, your mother told you you were a little demon.

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Okay, it wasn't you, it was me. I'm sorry. I thought mom told everyone that but I guess it was just me.

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But we're not. We don't become holy or unholy angels and we're going to see that when we look at tonight's lesson.

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And so there's some confusion and there's actually a thing where many people think that the Bible doesn't have much to say on angels.

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Well, let's take a look at this little chart that we have and you'll see that when we look at the

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Bible, we see that we have 17

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Old Testament books and 17 New Testament books that we have that mention angels.

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You'll also see there that we have 108 Old Testament verses and 165

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New Testament verses that talk and discuss angels.

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That's a pretty good portion. That means that there's not a huge amount of passages but enough that we can see that there is some clarity that we hope to have after these next couple of lessons.

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We're going to look tonight at angels as a general category.

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We won't finish it so we'll probably do it in two parts. And then next lesson, lesson 15, will actually be specifically on one specific angel.

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We know him as Lucifer or Satan and we're going to spend one class just on him.

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And so what we want to do though is look at angels as the category that they are of God's creation.

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And so we're going to look at first the creation of angels, the creation of angels.

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And what we see here, if you have your syllabus, is we're first going to look, when we look at them, let's first take a look at their creation in Psalm 148 and a couple verses in there.

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And it says, praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his hosts, praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars, praise him, your highest heaven, your waters above heaven.

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Let them praise the Lord, for he commanded and they were created.

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Also in Colossians 1 .16, we see, for by him, this is speaking about Jesus Christ, all things were created in heaven and in earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers, all things were created by him, through him and for him.

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So what you see there, that's an interesting one, I want to leave this up for a split second, just to point out that if you speak to somebody who is a

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Jehovah Witness, what you'll quickly hear them say is that, when speaking of Jesus Christ, is that he was the angel

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Michael. But in that passage there, if you look at it again, you'll see it says he created, that this is

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Jesus, speaking of Jesus, that he created, and look what it says, thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

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The thrones and dominions, the dominions are often referred to as angels. So, Jesus Christ created the angels.

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Now, how could Jesus Christ create the angels if he was an angel?

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Good question. We see that in both Psalm 148 and in Colossians 1, angels had a beginning, they were created, they're created beings, but they're created beings separate from human beings.

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We're going to see that in a moment because they were actually created before human beings.

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So, how could someone create themselves? Well, yeah, they can't.

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And that's the point. Angels are not humans. They have a creation.

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So, let's look first at the time of their creation, the time of their creation.

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And when we look at this, we see that while we do not have a specific revelation about the creation of angels, we see that angels were created sometime before the creation for two main reasons.

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So, if you have your syllabus, the blank there is before. Angels were created before what we call the creation, the universe, humans, before the six days of creation.

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And we see that first because in Job 36, we see that they were singing while observing creation.

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They were singing, that's your blank there. It says here that, Now, this is speaking in the context of creation, but what

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I want to point out, because we're not going to get to this maybe right away, but when we look at the names of angels, you see that morning stars, that's a reference to angels.

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Also look at it, it says sons of God. Notice it doesn't say son of God.

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Okay, that's important. The reason that's important is because son of God is a specific person identifying as God.

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The sons of God is a description of angels. Okay, so two different ways we see the angels.

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But what we see that's important there is that when God was laying down the foundation of the earth, angels were singing, they were watching.

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Okay, another thing that we see would be in Genesis 3, that's actually your blank there, 3.

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Satan, who was an angel, must have been created at least prior to Genesis chapter 3.

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Okay, Genesis chapter 3, why? Because Satan was present in the garden at the time of Genesis 3.

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Okay, so these are the only things we have as far as the time of creation. We know they were around to witness the earth being formed, according to Job.

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And we know that they were around at least before Genesis chapter 3.

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Okay, because Satan had to have been around to tempt Eve. Now, what also do we see?

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And we'll look at this in more detail later, but Satan had to have fallen sometime before Genesis chapter 3.

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So how long were Adam and Eve in the garden? I don't know. I mean, that's the thing, have you ever thought about that?

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They could have been in the garden for a day. We often think of the 7 days of creation, and by the 8th day,

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Adam and Eve sinned. Or maybe it was on the 7th day, God was busy resting and Adam and Eve were busy eating of the fruit.

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Some people try to argue things like that, but nothing in Scripture tells us how long it was between the time that Adam and Eve were created till the time of Genesis 3 when

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Satan fell at some point and then brought in the tempted

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Eve to fall. It could have been, as you see in Paradise Lost, in that book, which adds a lot of extra biblical stuff in there, but you see in there that it would be several days because the demons were supposedly causing dreams and doing different things to cause them to fall.

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But it could have been several days, it could have been several weeks, it could have been several months or even years. We don't know how long they were in the garden before the fall.

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And we don't know exactly when the fall took place. All we know is it had to have happened before Genesis chapter 3.

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So when we look at the creation of angels, we see first their time of their creation.

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Next let's look at the nature, letter B, the nature of their creation.

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And the first thing we see here when we look at this is they were ministering spirits.

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Ministering spirits, that's your blank there, they were ministering spirits. That kind of tells you a little bit about what their function was.

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Let's look at a passage of Scripture and that would be Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 14. 1 .14

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says ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who inherit salvation.

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So you see here that they were ministering spirits sent out to serve.

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This tells us a little bit about their function. This is about their nature. Their nature is to serve, their nature was to minister.

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Well, minister to who? Hold that thought, we'll get there. Something else that we see is that angels were, that each angel was individually created by God.

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Individually created by God. Let's look at Matthew chapter 22. Matthew 22 verse 28 -30.

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In the resurrection therefore of the seven, whose wife will she be?

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Now let me give the context actually, I should have maybe given some more verses. But in this passage you see they're trying to test

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Jesus and they give this story to try to trap Jesus. And this is an ancient argument between the

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Pharisees and Sadducees that a woman would die. She had several husbands.

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Whose wife would she be when she's raised from the dead? That's the context. Not important to this, but that's the context.

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Let's look at it now. In the resurrection therefore of the seven, whose wife will she be?

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For all seven had her. So she married seven brothers and they all died. But Jesus answered them, you are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

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For in the resurrection they neither marry nor were given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven.

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So the angels are individual beings. Now they are also, the third thing there is that they are distinct from both man and God.

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And they will be for all of eternity. In other words, angels are not people, people are not angels. So let's look at that.

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In Hebrews 2, this is a little bit of a longer passage here. Hope you can read that okay. If not, if you can't read that okay, that's okay.

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Because I know that you brought your Bible to class, right? Who am

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I fooling? Let's go back. Alright, we'll put it up there for you because you were not paying attention or bringing your

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Bible. What we have here is it has been testified somewhere, what is man?

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That you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him.

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This is out of Psalm 2. But you made him a little lower than the angels.

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You have crowned him with glory and honor. Putting everything in subjection under his feet.

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Now, in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control.

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At present, we do not see everything in subjection to him.

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So you notice in this passage that angels are made a little bit lower, or man is made a little bit lower than angels.

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That means that they are distinct. In Hebrews chapter 12, we see here, but you have come to Mount Zion.

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And to the city of the living God. The heavenly Jerusalem. And the innumerable angels in festival gathering.

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And to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.

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And to God. Now do you see that distinction there? They are enrolled in heaven and to God. The judge of all.

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And to the spirits. See, there is distinction there. So we see that there is a distinction.

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This is important, again, as you go through and you start thinking this through. This helps us to understand that angels are not men in a former life.

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So if you are a good boy, you don't become an angel. And if you are a bad boy, you don't become a devil.

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You don't have one angel on one shoulder and one on the other that fight either. That are both your personalities trying to fight to create you to be a good angel.

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So this is a thing where people get confused. This is also a thing where we don't see.

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These movies like Ghost, if you have seen that one. And some of the others where people become an angel.

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Or become a wandering spirit. They become a ghost. And that's what angels are.

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Totally different. We have a spiritual being. And we are going to look at this more as we look into the next section.

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When we get into the study of man. And we look at the nature of man.

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We will see angels are different than men. They are distinct.

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But there are some similarities. For example, part of their nature is that they have personality.

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They have personality. That's your blank there. They have personality. Some of the things when we looked at the attributes of personality within God.

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That we said all persons have. Some of them are things like intellect. Intellect.

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Let's take a look at 1 Peter. We see that they have intellect.

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It was revealed to them. That they were serving not themselves but you.

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In the things that have been announced to you. Through those who preached the good news to you by the

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Holy Spirit. Which the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Things that angels long look.

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Let me give you the background to this. Because this is just an amazing text.

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I love this thought. Even though we are going to get into it more probably next class.

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But I want to deal with it now because the text came up. So let's deal with it. It shows their intellect that they looked longingly at men.

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What were they looking at? They were looking at grace. Did you ever think about this?

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Angels never can experience redemption. That's something unique to the human race.

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This is amazing. This is one of the distinctions that we see between angels and humans.

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An angel was in the presence of God. They saw God. They were in his presence.

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But when they fell, they fell once and were confirmed forever in that state.

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So those that fell, they were forever fallen. They had one chance and then it was forever.

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Those that didn't fall were forever holy. We are going to look at this more in the next lesson.

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But when we look at men, they have a lifetime to hear the gospel and repent.

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And it is only upon their death that then they are either heaven or hell.

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Holy or forever tormented. Or punished really, not tormented.

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Bad choice of words, sorry. So what we have there is that angels have that distinction from us.

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That they had one time to choose where we have time and time again. For many people who believe in Christ, they heard the gospel more than once.

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I'm a weird bird. That didn't surprise any of you did that. No, I am weird.

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Yes, you knew that. But I actually got saved the very first time I heard the gospel.

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I repented the very first night that I heard the gospel. But not many people have that.

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Many people hear the gospel over and over and over again. And then they at some point receive that grace.

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And so what we see is that angels are different in that sense.

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But because they never fell and could be redeemed, angels actually look on to something that humans are the only beings of God's creation that can experience this.

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And that is redemption. Have you ever thought about that? Angels sit in heaven and cannot understand what redemption feels like.

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Because they never fell. Well, some fell but they can't be redeemed. And those that didn't fall are the ones that look on upon us that are redeemed with wonder.

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Do you value the redemption that God has given you?

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I mean, the angels do. They look at it with wonder. They're looking on and going, what is that like?

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What is it like? They saw their angel friends that fell and can't be redeemed.

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And they look at us and they see redemption and it's like, wow, what is that like?

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You and I know that experience. We know the awe and the joy that we can experience in redemption.

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But angels don't know that. Angels can't experience that. We can.

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Do we rejoice in that? I sure hope that your salvation is not like a, oh, yeah,

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I got used to it feeling. It should be something that gives you joy every day. Wake up and preach the gospel to yourself if you need to so you'll remember from where you came.

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Because the angels look on in wonder of that. Do you have great joy in the fact that God redeemed you?

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Now, I don't know about you. I know about me. And I just am amazed. I mean, like, okay,

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I sit there like, why would God save me? Okay. Yeah, I know Si is in the chat room or at least he was.

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And he's probably saying, yeah, I can ask that same question. Why did God save you? I wonder why

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God saved Si. But that's okay. But all of us should be at that wondering state, shouldn't we?

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I mean, shouldn't we be saying, wow, it's amazing that God would redeem me.

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He would regenerate me. He would give me new life. I mean, as we saw in the last couple of lessons with the

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Holy Spirit, God wasn't surprised by our sin. He saved us knowing everything we would do.

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That's amazing. It should be. At least it should give you a great joy. What would cause us to go through this life when trials come, when temptation comes?

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What's going to give us the fortitude to withstand those things? Well, it's going to be the

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Holy Spirit as we looked at last class or last couple of classes. It's going to be

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God's Word. But it is also going to be that one thing that the angels look upon. It's going to be the joy we can have knowing that nothing we do, nothing we've done, nothing we will do surprised

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God and He saved us anyway. Now, if you're one of those people who think, yeah,

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God should have saved me, you're probably not saved. Okay? If you think

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God should have saved you, you do not understand your sinfulness. I often think that if God gave me just like 30 seconds, no, maybe 15 seconds, actually probably 5 seconds in His presence here in this fleshly body, it would probably stop my heart because I, like Isaiah, would see the holiness of God and be like, oh, how wicked am

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I. If we don't see how wicked we are, we don't really understand our salvation.

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The angels have been watching mankind for 6 ,000 years. They understand the wickedness of man.

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And they look on and say, God redeems him. Wow. That's amazing.

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That's what angels get to do. But it also shows something about their intellect. Okay? They can look on with wonder.

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Next, we see that they have emotions. They have emotions. And let's look at this in Job 36, verse 7.

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Oh, what were its bases shrunk, or who laid the cornerstone?

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We already looked at this passage. When the morning stars, I said that refers to angels, sang together, and all of the sons of God, again,

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I said refers to angels, shouted for what? What's that word? For joy. They had joy.

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You can also look at Luke 15 .10. Just so I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner that repents.

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Now, that's in a passage that talks about hypocrites. Okay? That's talking about these hypocrites that think they're believers and are not.

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They think they're righteous, the Pharisees who have a self -righteousness. But do you see that the angels have great joy over one sinner that repents?

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The Pharisees put themselves like they were righteous and the other, like the tax collectors and prostitutes, they were sinners.

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If you were a Pharisee, you were righteous. But the angels don't rejoice over the

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Pharisees. They don't rejoice over those self -righteous people. They rejoice when a sinner like you and I repents.

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There is great rejoicing in heaven. That gives a little bit showing of their emotion.

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It shows their emotion. Emotions are a good thing. That may surprise some of you guys.

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Okay? When your wife is emotional, you know, and you're going, I just don't understand this.

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You know, we tend to be like problem solvers. You know, it's like, okay, there's a problem here.

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Here's the solution. Just get the emotions out of it. Let's just solve this problem. Fortunately, I married an engineer, so she's a problem solver.

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You know, we don't have to deal with that. She likes to solve problems. And what we do have is, though, that we have a case where we have angels that rejoice because they have emotions.

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As a person, you and I are people, we have emotions. We have the ability to have emotions because that's part of personhood that comes from God.

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And so the passage talks about, that we saw in Job, talks about them singing and having emotion.

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Now, there is a question that's up in the chat room. And it is, well, there's two questions,

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I guess. Will we be able to talk to them? Will we be able to talk to angels,

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I guess, is the question. And a follow -up question that I see posted is, what about King Saul asking the spirit of Samuel?

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So let me deal with those. And I know this is kind of in the middle, but we do want to answer the questions that come up.

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Can we talk to angels? I would say, yes, we can. All right?

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Angels are spirits that we will see. There are times where we see angels that, you know, if you ever played with a

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Ouija board, I believe that's demonic activity. We're going to look more specifically into some things with demons later when we look at unholy angels.

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But when we look at, we do see that angels can speak. When they possess a human being,

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Jesus spoke to angels. He speaks to legion and they can speak back. We see it many times angels spoke to him.

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More puzzling is this scenario with King Saul when he goes to a sorcerer or medium and tries to conjure up the spirit of Samuel.

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From the Scriptures, it seems that this actually was Samuel. Now, did

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God allow Samuel somehow to speak through this woman? Well, one thing for sure.

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We know that the woman was basically a fraud. Why? Because when

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Samuel did come, she got scared. I mean, she was nervous and she then realized who she was, that this is now

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Samuel. Therefore, this is the king and the king is going to kill me. It's like, no, no, no, it's okay, right?

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So, we see this case. So, we do see that we can speak.

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I do believe that that probably was Samuel and in some way, God allowed

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Samuel to come. Is that normative? In other words, is that the normal behavior? No, it's not.

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But in special circumstances, God allowed that, alright? So, we see that they have personality. We saw that they have intellect.

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They have emotions. Third, we see that they have will. They have a will. Let's take a look at a passage here and that is

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Jude 6. Jude 6. That's not Jude chapter 6, by the way.

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Jude is one chapter. So, it's Jude verse 6. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling as he kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.

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Now, you see here that they had a will to disobey God. They had a will to disobey

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God, okay? And they rebelled against God. Now, what is this talking about more specifically?

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Hmm, do we want to get into this can of worms? Well, hey, why not?

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I open all the other can of worms. Alright, there's two main views of what happened in Noah's time and before with these angels.

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There are some angels that seem to be in bondage now and some that seem to roam free, okay?

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And so, what we have here, I believe, is some angels that were bound up that he's talking about.

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Ones that disobeyed. Some disobeyed and what we have is a case where there was some disobedience that occurred.

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And in that disobedience, I believe, Genesis chapter 6, 5 and 6.

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And what we should see is that there is a case that the angels could have gotten involved with humans in some way and somehow created an offspring.

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Now, there's two different views. Some people think that in Genesis 6, Philemon were just giant men.

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And what we see is that what were they about? Some think it's Greek mythology that demons could somehow cohabitate with men.

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But whatever it is, it seems to be the case that they were something that caused

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God to wipe out the human race. So, many think that there's a mixture of demonic human creation.

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That the demons are trying to ruin the human race so that there could not be a Messiah, could not be a

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Savior, okay? With that said, some people view the passage in Jude 6 talking about that there were some that indwelled humans or cohabitated with humans that were in prison now, okay?

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And some think that that's what Jude 6 refers to those that were there. In that time, in the time of Noah, there's also a reference in 1

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Peter, I believe, that talks about this as well. Where people think that this is the angels in the time of Noah that disobeyed.

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So, what we have there though, the main point of that though, is that we do see they had a will. They had a will to disobey, alright?

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So, we also see that their powers and abilities are limited.

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That's your next blank there. They are limited, alright? Let's look at some passages here.

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We see here that in Ephesians chapter 1,

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Ephesians chapter 1, we see that it says that He worked in Christ when

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He raised Him from the dead, seated them at the right hand in the heavenly places far above the rule and power and dominion above every age, every name that is named.

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Not only in this age, but also in the one to come. And so, we have here, when we look at this, we see that they were limited by God.

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They were limited by God. If you see in this passage, it is God who seats them, alright?

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Second, we see that in 2 Peter 2 .11,

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we see that they were more powerful than men, but their power, knowledge, and presence are limited.

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Look at this passage. Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the

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Lord. So, you see that they are limited, but they are stronger than us. And this is a point to notice.

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They are stronger than us, and they have more power. Their power is limited. They are more powerful than us, but in some ways will be greater than them.

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Because we are going to be redeemed and glorified. So, there is a time coming where that might change.

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We also see that their abode is in heaven.

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Sorry, I read further. Angels are not to be worshipped. This is in Colossians.

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We see here that they are limited in their worship. They are not to be worshipped.

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Take a look at this passage. It says, Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up about the reason of their seditious minds.

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So, what you see here is that they were discussing the angel worship.

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And actually, a better passage would be in Revelation. In Revelation, we see that John bows down.

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We are going to see this later. He bows down to worship one of the angels. And he raises him up and says, Hey, I'm a servant like you.

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You don't worship me. Angels are not something to be worshipped. So, they are limited by God.

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They are limited in the sense that even though they are more powerful than us, their power is limited.

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And they are not to be worshipped. We also see that they are immortal beings, but they are not eternal beings.

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Let's look at a passage of Scripture and then I'll explain this in Luke 20. For they cannot die anymore because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.

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So, you see that this is speaking of that they cannot die anymore, but they are equal to angels.

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What does it mean? Angels cannot die. Angels cannot die.

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Angels are immortal, but not eternal. Now, there are some passages in English translations that speak of men and angels being immortal.

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But I'm using this in a precise language. So, people have the idea of immortality and they use this speaking in a different way.

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So, if you use this in a passage that talks about God being immortal, God is eternal.

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Now, the difference is this. Eternal, I'm defining as being without beginning and without end.

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Where immortal is a being that had a creation and does not end.

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So, immortality is angels, humans that were created and live forever.

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Okay? So, angels live forever, humans live forever.

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God is eternal. In other words, He had no beginning and no end.

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He lives forever because He never was created. That's the distinction. The distinction between them is creation. So, angels, just like men, had a creation date.

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However, angels, unlike men, were all created at one time and then lived forever.

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Humans have been created over time but then lived forever. Okay? So, that is some distinctions about angels.

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So, I'm going to not go on to the distinction of holy angels and then fallen angels, which is where we pick up.

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We're going to pick that up next time. Let's at least read Daniel 9 though. This is a little bit of a longer passage but this talks about their, the last thing here is that their abode is in heaven while having access to earth.

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Okay? So, angels, one other thing about angels is that they can go between heaven and earth.

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Let's look at this passage, Daniel 9. While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin, this is

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Daniel speaking, and the sin of my people Israel and presenting my plea before the

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Lord my God for the holy hill of my God. While I was speaking in prayer, then the man

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Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the first, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice.

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He made me understand, speaking with me and saying, oh Daniel, I have now come out to give you insight into understanding.

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So, I think this answers the question that was asked in the chat room. Can angels speak to men? Yeah, here we have one. Gabriel speaking to Daniel.

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Notice he even has a name. Verse 23. At the beginning of your pleas for mercy, a word went out and I have come to tell you for you are greatly loved.

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Therefore, consider the word and the understanding of the vision. The interesting thing that we have with this is that we see from the text is that it actually says it took three days for Gabriel to get to Daniel.

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Okay, so the interesting thing about that is it also shows about some limitation there. That there's a limitation of them within time, within mass.

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It took them time to get from heaven to earth. Now, we do know that Gabriel is being held up by some demons.

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So, there was a battle going on. But again, it talks about some of the limitations that they have.

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Therefore, angels are not God. Okay. Oh, so someone's correcting it.

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Sorry. They meant after we're in heaven in an alternative, can we speak to angels? I think so. But I don't think they have their own language if you took a look at last week's class.

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So, what we see is that angels have an ability to go between heaven and earth.

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So, that becomes the thing is that we do see that distinction. That there does seem to be a distinction there.

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So, let's take a look again. We see that we looked at the creation of angels. Now, when I speak of this, all this that I've done is true for both holy and unholy angels.

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Okay. And so, this is the case where we see both holy and unholy angels.

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The time of their creation was once at a specific point in time. We don't know the exact time. But it is a time that would have been before Genesis 3 at least.

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And would have been a time where they saw creation. They saw the forming at least of the earth. Okay. And so, we would have seen at least they were around before the first day of creation, we guess.

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The first or second. So, they probably would have been formed on the first day before the rest of the things.

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Is my guess. My theory. So, what we have is a case where they have their time.

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They are all created at one point in time. They were created, we see it from their nature. They were created as ministering spirits.

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They were all created individually and distinct from both man and God. They were created with a personality.

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That's some of their nature. They have an intellect. They have a will. They have emotion. We see that they were created with powers and abilities that are limited.

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Okay. And that limitation came from God. Even though they are more powerful than men, their power is still limited.

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Okay. We saw that angels should not be worshipped. We saw that they are immortal.

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In other words, they had a creation date and then lived forever. They are not eternal. In other words, they aren't like God in that way.

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Eternality is being without time. It's something that's true only of God. And we saw that their abode was in heaven, but they still have access to earth.

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Now, we have a distinction there. If you look in the book of Job, we see that their abode for demons was on the earth, but they have access to heaven.

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When people share the gospel and say, Oh, there can't be any sin in heaven. That's why

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God has to send people to hell. Because heaven is His perfect place. And there's no sin in heaven.

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And because we sin, we can't go to heaven. Have you ever heard people share the gospel like that?

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Okay. I did once. Okay. More than once. Fine. You guys are so picky.

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You want me to be accurate. But we sometimes share the gospel that way.

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And that's actually kind of a wrong way to share. It's inaccurate. Satan has access to heaven.

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He goes there to accuse Job. Is Satan full of sin?

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Yes. And unlike you and I, Satan can't be redeemed. He's the epitome of sin.

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He's the first of sin. And we're going to look at that in a couple of lessons.

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In a couple of classes. In the next lesson. But what we see is that God does allow demons into heaven.

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So there are sinful beings in heaven. So that becomes the thing that should get you thinking.

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Well, then what's wrong with this gospel presentation? The problem is that people don't get sent to hell or to the lake of fire because God can't have any sin.

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In other words, God would love to accept you just as you are into His presence.

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But He's got this problem. He can't have sin in there. No. The reason

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God punishes people is because He's just. And He's holy. And because He's just and holy,

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He's going to send people to be punished for their sin.

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That's why. That's why it's created. The lake of fire is actually a place where the demons are going to be sent.

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Where men that disobeyed God are going to be sent. And God is present there because He's everywhere present.

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These are things, when we share the gospel, we confuse these things. We allow the world's teaching to get into our thinking.

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Like as if God really, He's sitting there and He's really wishing you would just, would you please, please, please believe in Him.

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He really wants you to. And He did everything He could. He just wants you to do the last 1%.

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Yeah, there's some well -known famous people that actually say that. God did 99%.

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He's waiting for you to do the 1%. Like could you please just believe. No. Alright.

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And so what we have there is we end up seeing that God doesn't sit there like waiting for you to do something.

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Like He just wishes that He could just save people. Or that He needs them to do something.

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Because gee, what would He do if it wasn't for that? We need to make sure that when we look at what the gospel is, it's not about people sitting there and waiting for us to do something.

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Like we need to, we're going to be punished because somehow God can't have perfection in Heaven.

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Now someone in the chatroom brought up Habakkuk 1 .13. So let me read this. It says, You who are of pure eyes than to see evil, speaking of God, and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

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And so looking at this, what this seems to say is

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God cannot look at evil. And that doesn't, I would agree with that. I would agree with that.

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That God cannot look upon evil favorably. Speaking of God, what we should always do is read the context.

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Verse 12. Are you not from everlasting? O Lord my

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God, my Holy One, who will not die. O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment, and you,

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O Rock, have established them for a proof. And then it talks about the pure eyes and he cannot, pure eyes to see evil and cannot look at wrong.

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And I agree with that. I mean there's nothing in distinction I would say with that because when

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God is looking, He doesn't pass over our sin. This is the difference between Christianity and Islam.

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In Islam, God is just so merciful, He looks over our sin. He kind of passes over and ignores it. Where in Christianity, He does not do that.

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He cannot pass over it. He cannot look favorably upon our sin.

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And so the question there is, can there be evil in heaven? Well, there cannot be per se evil in heaven, but there can be evil beings like Satan who can abode.

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They in some way have access to heaven, but it is not their dwelling place any longer.

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We're going to see that when we look at the fallen angels. When they fell, they were cast out of heaven.

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That's why it's no longer their abode. They seem to have access to it, but it's not their abode.

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It's not where they have citizenship. It's not where they dwell and live anymore. That would be the distinction.

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Their abode is in hell, or in the imprisonment, and then here on earth.

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That's where they live, but they still have some sort of access. So, that is where we're going to finish up because it's a good stopping point.

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Next class, we're going to look at holy and unholy angels.

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We're going to look at holy and unholy angels. Now, one thing I do want to make a point to say is that next week there will be no class.

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There will be no class next week. That's not because I have no class.

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I figured I'd get that in before Cy gets it in. There won't be class next week because I'll still be traveling.

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I'll be out in Texas, and so if you happen to be out in Texas and you want to contact me and say, hey, we got a good place to eat,

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I'll be in the Abilene area. So, fly into Dallas. I'll go to one of our favorite restaurants,

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The Boiling Crab. If you want to join me for lunch, we'll be there. But I'll be out there, and I will actually be just landing,

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I believe, or maybe I'll think I'll have landed but still be traveling back by the time class should start.

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So, there will be no class next week. All right, and so we will say if you have any questions to contact us at the academy, you can email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org,

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and we will try to answer all questions that we get. And if you ask whether light has mass,

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I will redirect you to proofthatgodexists .org, and I'll let Cy answer that.

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All right, let me give you a couple things in wrapping up. Some of these are important, so we want you to pay attention.

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One of them is that we do have some events coming up that we want you to know about.

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The first is the Ohio Fire. This is part of the Spreading the Fire evangelism conferences that we do.

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They are two -day conferences, Friday night, Saturday. We bring speakers in. We bring some good speakers in.

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Okay, yeah, we're bringing Cy into New Jersey, but, hey, you know, we've got to throw a bone once in a while, you know?

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But, yeah, so we will have Paul Taylor coming in.

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He used to be with Answers in Genesis, now with Creation Today. He'll be speaking at the Ohio Fire along with myself and Michael Coghlan.

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And the really cool news is we just got word last night. I was jumping and rejoicing.

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Keri Atala will be coming out and be playing, and so we, unfortunately, her whole family won't be out, but, oh, well.

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But she will be in concert for that, and so we're very excited about that.

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So if you haven't gotten her new CD, that'd be a good, you know, drive out to Ohio just to get it, okay?

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We will then be going from that in May 24th and 25th in the

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Columbus area to the Jersey Fire that's on the New Jersey. That's the second weekend in July.

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It'll be on the Jersey Shore in Toms River. There we will have Mr. Cy Tenbrudenkate, the most esteemed, from ProofThatGodExists .org.

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We will also have Jason Lyle. I think we may try to see who has a more, who's brighter, who has a bigger brain,

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Jason Lyle or Cy Tenbrudenkate. I think that'll be a question that we should ask during the Q &A.

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Myself, I won't be in that, like, you know, after there's Cy and Jason and then somewhere far down is me.

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We also have Will Costello who will be there. Now, who is

54:27

Will Costello? Well, I'll branch into a different before I get to the other fire, and that is Will Costello is the pastor at Faith Bible Church in Jackson, New Jersey.

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That is a church revitalization that I've gotten involved with. Pastor Will is there.

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He's from Master's Seminary, Grace Advance. This is a Grace Advance plant, if you're familiar with Grace Advance.

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So if you're in the New Jersey area, you don't have a good church, come on out and visit us. But he will also be speaking at the

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Jersey Fire Conference there. He's going to focus on presuppositional apologetics, what is it, how to use it, some things with that, so that's going to be a really good conference.

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Then if you're in Northern California, someone's asking about Southern California. There's plenty of things you can do in Southern California, so drive on up to Northern California, San Jose area.

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We are going to have Tony Miano and Matt Slick from CARM. Tony Miano from Cross Encounters Radio.

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He used to be with Living Waters. Matt Slick is from CARM. If you're familiar with that website,

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CARM .org. And myself will be speaking, answering some apologetic questions, and doing some things on open air preaching.

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So those are some things that we have. We want to encourage you to come out to one of those events, either the

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OhioFire .org, JerseyFire .org, or NorCalFire .info, and come to one of those events.

55:59

All right? We are trying to get Carrie to also come out to Northern California.

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If those in the chat room want to encourage her or on Facebook, let her know what you think of her music, especially if you live in the

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Northern California area and want her to come out, let her know that. But now we come to the part where we want to ask you to encourage someone.

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And I do want to let you know that the people, even though they may not be able to on Facebook or in email get back to you and let you know about their encouragement, the encouragement you've been to them, we want to let you know that they do get back to me and are encouraged.

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Last class we brought up, and actually the class before last

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I should say, we brought up Brother Bruce Cummings, and he's not able to really get on Facebook and respond as much as he'd like, but he was encouraged.

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I saw him at a banquet, and he said he's encouraged by the people on Facebook that are encouraging him.

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So we have a person we want you to go and encourage, and it is Brother Jonathan Barbie.

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Barbara. Did I say Barbie? Wow. Jonathan's just going to beat me up for that one.

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I'm sorry. Brother Jonathan is, and I give you his website there, and I'm going to tell you why we want you to encourage him, and I have a specific way that I want you to encourage him.

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Okay? And you can friend him on Facebook if you're in our Striving for Eternity group.

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You already see him tagged in Facebook as the Brother of the Week to Encourage, or the

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C -Bro, and he is the C -Bro this week. And the reason I want you to go and encourage him and the specific way

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I want you to encourage him is this way. He has been working for many years with the ministry,

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Change Collegian Network. He's been doing two full -time jobs. He's working with Change Collegian Network full -time, and then he teaches full -time.

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And that can be very difficult to do. Well, Jonathan is trying to raise enough funds to be full -time at Change Collegian Network.

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So this is what I'd like you to do. Would you commit to donating just $5 a month?

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That's not too much for most of us. Would you at least go out to his website, which is down there somewhere, and not only let him know that you're encouraged by what he's doing, training college students, training up the next generation.

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I mean, you can go to changeyourcampus .com and see some of the stuff they're doing, but go specifically to his page, see what he's doing.

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He's mentoring future leaders. He's mentoring men. He's doing things with these men on college campuses and training them not only to go out and share their faith, not only to open -air preach, not only to handle the

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Word of God with good apologetics, but he's doing all of this right now in extra time.

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He's not getting paid to do it, or not paid full -time. I would like to see if you'd help me to get him to be full -time.

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Now, this is a ministry I donate to monthly, so I'm not asking you to do anything I don't do, and I'd do a whole lot more than $5.

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So I'm saying that not to praise or boast or anything like that. I'm saying that to say I'm not going to ask you to do something

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I don't do. Okay? I'm asking you just would you consider giving $5 a month?

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All right? We had Jen Pepling, who also works for them and is being supported.

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If you don't want to give to him and you prefer supporting her, support her. Support both if you really want and give $10 a month.

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All right? If you could just give $2 a month, they would probably appreciate it. Okay? But please consider that.

01:00:00

And speaking of funds, I do want to say, if you want to consider donating to us, we were so blessed with some folks that gave some one -time offerings because we would like to see.

01:00:11

Maybe some of you have seen that some of the ads have disappeared for some of you. I guess that's an incentive to coming into class early.

01:00:19

Those that get there early, from my understanding, the way it works is the first one's in, the 100 hours of ad free get it in free.

01:00:27

Although if everyone jumps in too early and you try to beat everyone in, you get in when there is no class, and then you watch the ads during class.

01:00:35

So we would really like to be able to go completely ad free. The problem is that would cost us about $300 a month to be able to go ad free.

01:00:48

So what we really need is if you'd commit to giving a monthly donation, you can even set that up through PayPal, but you can contact us at the website or email us if you want, and we'll tell you how to do this to set up something monthly.

01:01:04

But if we can get some monthly commitment, enough people that would give a monthly commitment, we can do this ad free on Ustream.

01:01:12

We understand how difficult it is to watch live with the ads, and I understand that's why so many of you watch on YouTube later.

01:01:19

I think you'd join the chat room just so that you can do the chatting and then you watch YouTube later when you really pay attention to class.

01:01:25

I understand that, but what we'd really want to encourage you to do is if you'd consider giving monthly.

01:01:31

Even if you're just giving a couple of dollars, if you could give $5 a month, enough of us doing that would cover our costs so that we could know that we could do this.

01:01:44

For us to get the cost at $300 a month, we have to pay it all up front annually, one time.

01:01:52

And so we don't have the money to be able to pay the full amount up front.

01:01:58

We're really hoping that some of you would come alongside us. If you're gaining something from these classes, we do it free for you, but if you're gaining something from it, we don't make much off of those that enroll as students.

01:02:12

Those that have enrolled as students, just so you understand our overhead, we make about $2 to $3 per student.

01:02:21

And we end up giving out things throughout the year to different students, different gifts.

01:02:27

Some of you are going to be getting some things that we've purchased for you that cost more than $2.

01:02:33

In other words, we actually lose money per student. I told you I'm crazy. I'm wondering how my board lets me get away with it.

01:02:40

It's probably because they already knew I was crazy. But as long as money comes in, they let me do it.

01:02:48

So if you would help us out, if you would consider giving even just a little bit on a monthly basis, if we know that we have enough people, if we have 100 people that commit to $3 a month, and we know we're going to get that, we would be able to pay it up front and get that.

01:03:11

Because if we don't do it with that cost, it costs us $500 every month to do that.

01:03:18

And we're trying to weigh between giving some of the one -time gifts that we were given and spending it just for one month and going ad -free for a month versus trying to raise enough that we would be able to go for the whole year.

01:03:30

We don't often ask for money. We try to do things for free. And we do that because we really want it to be something that money doesn't become an issue to get

01:03:41

God's Word out. We want God's Word to be out there.

01:03:46

There's many ministries that charge people money to get the kind of teaching that we're giving you for free.

01:03:52

It does cost us something. This doesn't happen for free. But we try to raise money to do that.

01:03:58

And we don't often ask for it. But I think I would be amiss in being good stewards if I don't ask.

01:04:05

So we're asking for you if you would consider helping us out as we strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.