What is Revelation?

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We're going to be looking at our books again.
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We've taken a little bit of a break from our theology book, but we're now back in Charts of Theology and Doctrine, which has sort of just been a springboard for our systematic theology lessons.
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And this morning we're going to look at an aspect of systematic theology that is often either overlooked or under-discussed.
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And it is the subject known as bibliology.
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Bibliology.
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That's not a name I've heard of.
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Bibliology is one of those subsections of systematic theology.
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You often think of systematic theology as being theology proper, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, the study of the church.
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You know, each sort of branch of systematic theology gets its own sort of subsection.
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Well, within those are also some smaller subsections, like demonology.
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There's an entire study that can be done on the subject of demons, demon possession, and how it was seen in Scripture, is it still happening today, and what's it look like, and those things.
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So there's a whole study of...
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Angelology is actually a course that I did in school.
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It was one of the New Testament courses that I had to take, and it was just a study of how we see angels, particularly at work in the ministry of Christ and the New Testament.
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So there are many, many, many subsections of theology, just like any other science.
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There's going to be your major headings and then your secondary.
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Well, bibliology is obviously, as it's so easily seen, is a study of the Bible.
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It's a study of Scripture.
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It's a study of the question of what is revelation, what modes has revelation taken down through history, what is inspiration and the theories of inspiration and how those work themselves out, what is inerrancy and how do the theories of inerrancy...
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And I know we've learned a lot of this before, especially Brother Lee taught on the doctrine of inerrancy not too, too long ago.
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So some of this will be a rehearsing of some of the things we've learned, but it's also going to be looking at...
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The key to this study is going to be looking at the reconciliation of discrepancies, because there are questions of, well, the Bible says this here, the Bible says this here.
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Does that mean it's contradicting? And we're going to talk about things like the difference between a contradiction and a paradox.
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And you know what a paradox is when you get two physicians together? Yeah, I know, it's a terrible joke.
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But anyway, you have this...
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And that's where the book is taking us.
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And again, I've been trying to be faithful to simply follow where the book is going.
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And this is where it is.
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It's talking about the subject of revelation.
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And so today we're going to talk...
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We're going to ask the question, what is revelation? What does that mean? But real quick, I do want to make mention of something.
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Bibliology is often...
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There are people who will use another phrase that's so close that I feel like I have to mention it.
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I was talking to a lady this morning.
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She'd never heard this word.
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Not bibliography, but that's also bibliography.
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Obviously, the listing of books used in a resource work.
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No, the one...
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No, that's wrong.
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Sorry.
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Bibliolatry.
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Have you heard that phrase, Lee? Yeah.
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Okay, a lot of people have.
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How many have never heard bibliolatry? Bibliolatry is the deification of the Bible.
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The deification of the Bible.
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In essence, making the Bible something to be worshipped.
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And even though we do believe the Bible is the word of God, we do not worship the Bible.
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We worship the God who gave us the Bible.
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We learn about Him through the Bible.
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But there is a difference between worshipping God by what we learn in Scripture and worshipping the Scripture itself as a divine thing.
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Well, the King James Versions can be that way.
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There can almost be an uplifting of that particular version, almost to a state of deification.
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But I tend to think more in line with the Islamic faith, which looks at the Koran as being an eternal thing.
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The Koran itself is eternal because it is the word of Allah, according to the Muslim faith.
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And thus, like, for instance, my brother had a man he worked with who was a Muslim.
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And the Muslim and him were talking about Islam.
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And this was much closer to 9-11.
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I think we were back in like 2002, 2003.
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So Islam was, you know, people were very interested in what they believed.
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And so this guy offered and gave my brother a Koran.
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But one of the things he said to my brother, he said, do not, do not take this into the bathroom.
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Now, we don't want to get into the debate of whether or not you should take any book in the bathroom or especially Bibles or whatever.
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But the issue was, it was this book itself, the pages, the ink, the binding, it becomes a sacred thing.
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And again, the Bible is a sacred thing in our tradition as well.
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But to the point of deification, that would be bibliolatry.
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And honestly, evangelicals, particularly fundamental believing evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, have often been accused of bibliolatry.
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They've been accused of deifying the Bible and looking at the Bible as something to be worshipped rather than God or in place of God.
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So that, again, because those two words are so similar, and you might in your studies this week, if you go out to Google and type in bibliology, you might pull up bibliolatry.
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And I at least wanted to kind of prepare you for what you might run into as a potential idea that might come in.
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And know that, again, there are people who would accuse you of that thing because you believe, at least if you're a member of this church because you've covenanted with us, that you believe the Bible is theanoustos.
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That means that it is God-breathed, that you do believe the Bible carries within it the Word of God, and that it is the Word of God, and that He spoke and men wrote as they were moved by the Spirit.
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And so the Word of God is true.
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And so these things that you believe about it do place it above all other works of literature, place it in a class by itself.
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Yes? If you ever listen to the...
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Catholic Answers? Yeah, I guess that's what it is.
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I've heard it, but I don't listen, obviously, regularly.
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They had a guy, you know, they all learned it in their own thing.
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But he was saying things like, Jesus didn't even think the Bible was that whatever.
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And I'm going like, yeah, but I'm thinking...
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Yes, he did have a Bible.
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He wrote the Bible.
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No, he had the Scriptures.
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He did have a New Testament.
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Well, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Netavim, and the Ketuvim, he had the Bible.
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This is what I'm going to talk about this morning in my sermon.
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People who said the New Testament, because this is what Andy Stanley has said, is that the early church didn't have a Bible.
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They sure enough did.
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But when Paul said all Scripture is given by Theanostasis is God-breathed, he was talking about the Old Covenant, the Old Testament Scriptures.
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The Old Testament Scriptures point to Christ.
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He had a Bible.
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He didn't have a New Testament.
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But the vast majority of our Bible is not New Testament, guys.
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But the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible.
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Sure, yeah, absolutely.
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And Christ and God and the Holy Spirit, you know, they're one.
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And then Jesus doesn't even give any weight or credence.
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But he says to, see, I would disagree with that guy wholeheartedly.
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I mean, he says to, he holds men accountable to what the Scripture says.
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He says to the Pharisees, he says, Have you not read what God wrote to you saying? You know, what God said? Have you not read what God said? That's always a key passage.
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This is something God spoke to you.
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It's been written down for you to read, but it's what God said.
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Oh, well, and that may just be his personality.
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But, yeah, there is somewhat of a sarcasm when it comes to the issue of, Well, you're one of those Bible believers.
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You're one of those fundamentalists, you know.
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And that's the, and I do, you know, I make a distinction between, like, the IFB.
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The IFB is Independent Fundamentalist Baptists.
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They have, they tend to be King James onlyists, not always.
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And I will make that clear.
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They're not always that way.
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But Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are different than such as Southern Baptists and things.
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And they can be very certain about things of which they are wrong.
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And people are willing often to give up certainty for, or give up truth for certainty.
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You know, they're more concerned to being certain about something than it being correct.
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So we don't ever want to do that.
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You don't ever want to give up truth just to have certainty.
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And so I could see his sarcasm if he's talking about them per se.
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But even then, what happens in Roman Catholicism is because there is this separated authority, the authority of the church, the authority of the magisterium, the authority essentially of the papacy, there is a giving over of the necessity of the authority of the Scripture.
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Now they all say the Scripture is authoritative, but that it's interpreted authoritatively by the church.
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And so the church then becomes the equal authority with the Scripture.
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And that which, yeah, and it's a dangerous, dangerous situation.
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But yes, for him, and I'm assuming because I don't know who he is, but I'm assuming for him, someone who would hold to the tenacity of the Scripture and to the faithfulness of the Scripture is just beyond reason.
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He would consider us to be unreasonable.
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So this morning when we look at our pages, you'll notice that there's actually three pages that's one long diagram.
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You'll notice that it says model, adherence, definition, and purpose of revelation.
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On the next page, if you have your book, you can kind of open it up.
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But if you have the two pages, you can separate them out.
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You'll see that revelation is doctrine on the left side, revelation is historical, revelation is experience, revelation is dialectical presence, and revelation is new awareness.
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That's what follows across, not what's at top.
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Usually you think of the top is going to continue on, but it's not.
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It's the side of the little panel that's going to follow it all the way across.
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Essentially, the question that's being asked and answered, and it doesn't say it here, but based on what is written, the question that's being asked and answered by each of the panels is the question of what is revelation? What is revelation? Now, when I ask what is revelation, I'm not asking what is the book of revelation, obviously.
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But this is asking the question, the definitional question, of what do we mean when we say that God has revealed himself in Scripture? Because if you think about historically, from the moment of creation to this very day, God has not revealed himself always in the same way.
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That is not to say that God has changed, and that's not really to say that man has changed, even though we went from being created by God as good to being evil because of the work of Adam.
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But there has been a change in the way God reveals himself, because there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years before the time of Moses.
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And before the time of Moses, there was no Scripture.
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Unless, of course, you predate Job prior to the writings of Moses, which some place the writings of Job back to the time of Abraham, and thus would have been a traditional work of faithful literature that was held among the people later to be collected with the rest of the books that were considered to be from God.
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So you have how much span of time? We don't know.
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But if you take the young earth perspective, you have the time from Adam to the time of Abraham being only a few thousand years, potentially.
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So you have the time of Adam to Noah, and then you have the time of Noah to Abraham, and then you have the time of Abraham to Moses.
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So you're looking at those kind of swaths of periods of time.
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And so when we ask the question, what is Revelation? Some people would immediately say, well, Revelation is the Bible.
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That's what Revelation is.
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Well, let's first be more broad than the Bible.
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And I'm not agreeing with Andy Stanley.
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But I am making a point that we do have to at least accept that there was a time when faithful people didn't have Scripture.
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There was a time when faithful people did not have the Scripture.
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But they did have something else.
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They had revelation from God.
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Direct, immediate, verbal revelation from God.
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Adam had a direct, immediate, verbal revelation from God.
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And we'll stop with Adam real quick.
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What did Adam have? He had God telling.
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You know, you name the animals.
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Here's your wife.
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Don't eat of that tree.
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They ate of the tree.
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You're cut out from the garden.
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Put them out of the garden.
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Now you're going to work.
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Now you're going to, huh? But his revelation was direct contact, right? It was direct contact with God.
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What was Noah's revelation? Did Adam write a book? Not that we know of, right? Could have, but we don't know of any book that was written by Adam.
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So what was Noah's revelation? Direct contact, right? Same thing.
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Immediate, verbal contact with God.
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That was how God related to him.
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And then Noah became what? What does the Scripture of the New Testament say about Noah? He was a preacher of righteousness, right? Noah became responsible to proclaim that revelation that he had received.
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The same way we assume Adam would have told his son.
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You know, and that child would have told the next child.
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So there was what we call a verbal tradition.
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That's not bad.
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People don't like the word tradition.
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But in this sense, it's good.
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Because we're going to find out that this happens later in the New Testament as well.
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There is a verbal tradition which begins, we assume, with Adam.
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But we know, at least, with Noah.
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Because it calls him a preacher of righteousness.
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So we know that the verbal tradition with Noah continues on.
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Then to whom? Well, down the line to Abraham.
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That's where you were at before.
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Abraham receives the covenant from God.
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He receives the covenant of the promise of the seed, and the land, and the blessing.
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And so, how does Abraham relate to God? Is it through getting up every morning and reading our daily bread? No, he has communion with God.
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That's immediate contact.
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He doesn't have a Scripture.
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Isaac, same thing.
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I'm only pointing out that you go all the way to Moses before there is an inscripturated word.
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So, revelation as a thing, as a reality, does predate Scripture.
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That is true.
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And we want to be fair.
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Revelation as a reality, up until the time of Moses, was not Scripture.
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Revelation was direct.
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But it was also considered to be prophetic.
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Because, let's say, you are Abraham.
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You received a direct revelation from God.
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You are responsible for us.
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Because you bring that revelation to us.
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And the same way the Scripture brings a revelation, you become a walking revelation from God.
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Because he's spoken to you, and now you're revealing that to us.
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So Abraham teaches his child.
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Isaac teaches his child.
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Jacob teaches his children, and so on.
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All the way down 400 years.
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It's 400 years from the time of the moving to Egypt with Joseph to the time of Moses.
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So there's a 400 year period.
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But the people of Israel didn't lose their understanding of who God was.
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They didn't lose their understanding of the one God of Abraham who has made these promises.
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Because that verbal tradition had a tenacity that was maintained.
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You understand? Moses, yeah.
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It did.
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It became a codification in writing of what up until that time had been held in the verbal tradition.
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From the time of Moses, we have written revelation.
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Okay? So it goes from verbal tradition to written revelation.
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Which we would later call Bible.
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Bible simply means book.
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It's called Santa Biblia.
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That's Spanish for holy book.
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It's the sacred writings.
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It's not just any writings.
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It's the sacred writings.
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It's the ones that God himself inspired to be written or breathed out for us to know him.
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So you have verbal tradition that predates the scripture.
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Then you have the written revelation.
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But verbal tradition never dies.
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Because there's always moments in the history where there's times where scripture is being written.
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And so how is the scripture being written? What's being written as the people are receiving these revelations from God? And they're not just taking the revelation and going and writing it down.
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They're speaking.
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Think about Isaiah's prophecies.
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He's prophesying these things and writing them down.
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So there's a verbal aspect to it.
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Because he's the prophet of God.
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And the written aspect as well.
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So then you get to the New Testament.
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You get to the New Testament.
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You've already got now what was called the Tanakh.
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The Torah, the Netavim, and the Ketavim.
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That's the law and the prophets.
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What we see in the New Testament.
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The law and the prophets.
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That was the scripture at the time of Christ.
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So when you hear Jesus talking about the scripture, he's talking about that.
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He's talking about the law and the prophets.
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This is 2 Thessalonians 4.
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But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth, to which he called you by our gospel for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.
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Whether by word or by letter.
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That's an important passage.
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Thank you, brother, for mentioning that.
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Because he actually says this.
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The Apostle Paul says there are things that you receive by word and there are things you receive by letter.
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You know what I mean? There are truths that came to you in both ways.
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Now, the Roman Catholic Church has taken that and ran with it, because they've said now that every tradition that they've come up with in the last 2,000 years, from the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is their idea that she was born without sin, to the idea of her bodily assumption and the fact that you should pray the prayer of Mary, they've said, oh, those are traditions that were passed down from the apostles, which is not true.
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Yeah, yeah.
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These are traditions that find their way into the church but are not apostolic traditions.
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And that's where we would make a distinction.
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We would say, what traditions go back? What is Paul talking about when he talks about verbal traditions? I think in that particular passage, the gospel is the primary thing, because it's been passed on not only by letter but verbally.
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The people of God have heard.
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And here's what I'm trying to get to.
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Thank you.
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Here's what I'm trying to get to.
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We have written Revelation up until the time of Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament written.
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And then there's how many years between Malachi and Matthew? Yeah, about 400 years.
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There's about a 400-year gap between Malachi and Matthew.
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Now, there are some books written in there.
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There's debate over whether or not they should be considered scriptural Protestants because the historic Jewish people didn't accept them as scripture either.
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What are they called? Apocrypha.
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Or, as the Catholics would call them, Deuterocanonicals, or the second canon.
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So, you have 400 years of no writing.
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Then comes Jesus, breaks onto the scene sometime in the early 1st century.
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We have Jesus Christ comes onto the scene.
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How long from the time of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, and I'm drawing just a rudimentary little manger, from the time of the birth of Christ to the time of the first writing of the New Testament, what is the time span? About 50 years.
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The earliest I've ever seen dated, I think, is 44.
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And so, you figure if Jesus was born in year...
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Some people, because of the Quirinius governor of Syria and all that, it was probably more four or five years B.C.
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Jesus was born before Christ.
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So, if you put Jesus around 4 B.C.
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and the first book is written in 44, you're looking at, you know, 40 years.
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One generation is typically what we call a 40-year period as a generation.
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So, 40 years from the birth, minimum earliest book 44, 44 A.D.
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So, if Jesus was crucified in, let's say, 30-ish, you know, 29-30.
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So, if the crucifixion happened in 30, where then...
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What do we have between 30 and 44 if there's no scripture? Huh? Yeah, you have the verbal tradition.
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It comes back into play.
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Philippians chapter 2, the Apostle Paul, "...have this mind among yourselves, which is also yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but instead made himself nothing, taking the form of a bondservant." You know that passage, right? Many scholars believe that that particular passage was actually a hymn of the early church, was part of the early church's verbal tradition because of the way Paul writes it, because of the way that he's expressing it in the flow of the writing, that he wasn't just making this part of his writing, but that he was reminding them of something they already knew.
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It was part of the verbal tradition of the church, that Christ, though he was in the form of God, did not account equality with God a thing to be grasped, made himself nothing.
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That was part of what the church had already been verbally sharing among itself.
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Think about 1 Corinthians 15.
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The gospel, that Christ died according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he was seen by over 500 people, and he was seen by Cephas and the others.
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He says this as if to say, you already know this.
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You know that he died, you know that he was buried, you know that he was resurrected.
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You know that because the scriptures foretold it, but also because you have been sharing this message for the last 20 years.
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You have been proclaiming this verbally for 20 years.
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So it's not to say they didn't have a Bible, because they did.
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They had this Bible.
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They had the old covenant scriptures.
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When Paul goes in, I'm going to talk about this in my sermon this morning.
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When Paul goes into the town, where does he go immediately? He goes to the synagogue.
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Why does he go there? To reason with them from the scriptures.
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Showing that Christ is the one who fulfilled, you know, Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 and all these passages.
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Jesus read from the scroll.
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Exactly, yeah.
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And he said, this is fulfilled now in your hearing.
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So there is a scripture in this time.
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There's never been a time when the church didn't have a Bible.
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In the sense that the church, if you want to say the church began with Christ, the New Covenant church.
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There's never been a time when the New Covenant church didn't have a Bible.
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But there was a time when the New Covenant church didn't have a New Testament.
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You understand? In fact, if you want to say that the Bible was written anywhere between 44, all the way up to some date as late as 95 for John's last letters in Revelation, I tend to put a pre-70 date on those.
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But even if you take it to the largest extreme and say, okay, 95.
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So you go to 95.
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So from 44 to 95, you have a period of about 51, 50 years, let's just say, just an average, a 50-year period where the scripture is being written.
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So, are people just waiting around? Well, I can't talk about Jesus until I get the book of Matthew.
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They don't even know the book of Matthew is coming.
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I can't talk about Jesus until I get that book of Romans.
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They don't even know the book of Romans is coming.
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They are in the midst of God's relevatory situation, and so they're dealing with Revelation as the apostles speak, and they hear, and thus the verbal commands and traditions are carried on as they're proclaimed.
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The missionaries are going out and proclaiming these things.
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So Revelation, the point in all this, what was the first question? What is Revelation? Revelation is God's active revealing of Himself.
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Now, we come to today, 2016, 2,000 years from the time of Jesus Christ and the time that He lived, and we ask the question, what is Revelation today? Well, historically, and I agree with this, historically, the church has made the statement that the active, individual, verbal revelation of God ceased when the scriptures were completed.
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Now, this is understood by many, many people, but not all.
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There are some, especially in the charismatic movement, who believes that God continues today to speak the same way He spoke to Adam, and the same way He spoke to Abraham, and the same way He spoke to Moses, that God is continuing to speak in that same way to us.
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I think Hebrews addresses that.
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It says, long ago, God spoke to the prophets and the fathers, but now He speaks to us through His Son.
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And so, I think that it actually talks about in various times, and in various ways He spoke to our fathers and the prophets, but now He speaks to us through His Son.
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It is making a distinction in Hebrews 1 about how Revelation has changed.
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We've gone from multiple sources of Revelation, because at any one time, there could be several prophets in Israel.
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At any one time, there could be several leaders that are receiving Revelation from God.
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You figure when David was on the throne, Nathan was his prophet, and yet they both received Revelation from God.
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And so, there could be multiple people receiving Revelation from God.
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But there comes a point where the writer of Hebrews, and Hebrews being one of the latter books of the New Testament, saying, okay, we've had that time, but the time has come now when we're going to hear from the Word of Jesus Christ, and this is going to be the final and completed Revelation.
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And so, where do we get the information about Jesus? And this is where I take issue a lot with what Mr.
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Stanley said.
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Because where do we find our information about Christ? From the Scriptures.
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That's right.
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The New Testament not only tells us who Jesus was, what He did, and what happened to Him, but it tells us why.
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You see, if all you had was the Gospels, you would have all of the information about Jesus' life.
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But you wouldn't have an interpretation of everything.
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So, along comes the Epistle writers, Paul, James, Peter.
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They write an inspired interpretation of the life of Christ.
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Why did Christ live a perfect life? Well, it was because He is our righteousness, Paul says.
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He says, in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
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Because He becomes our righteousness.
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Why did Jesus die on the cross and none of His bones were broken? Because the prophecy was He would be the Lamb of God, and the Lamb of God wouldn't have a bone that was broken.
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So you have the inspired narratives of the Gospel, and then you have the inspired interpretation of the narratives in the Epistles.
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Now, do the Epistles have narration? Yes.
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Do the Gospels have interpretation? Sure.
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But the overarching way that it works out is that you have the narratives, which tell you about Jesus, and the Epistles that tell you about why what happened affects the church, and how it was established.
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So, this is what Revelation is.
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Revelation is God revealing Himself.
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When we ask today, where is God's revelation for Mike Ballard in 2016? It's right beside him in that book.
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It's right there.
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There are some people, again, who would claim, well, God reveals Himself to me personally.
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Okay, well, let's talk about what you mean by that.
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Typically, I make a distinction, and I think this is going to be important for us in the weeks coming.
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I know we're running out of time, so I'll make this quick.
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There is a distinction between Revelation and Illumination.
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And I know that some people would not make a distinction here, but I think it's important.
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Because Revelation is God giving an individual information about Himself directly, verbally, and in such a way that it's intended to be disseminated to others.
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If you think about the Scriptures, or even the prophecies, all of those were preached, proclaimed.
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Revelation, I believe, stopped in the first century.
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And this is another reason why I think AD 70 is important, because I think AD 70 sort of puts the end on it, because that's when the temple and everything was destroyed by Titus.
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But that's a conversation for another time.
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Even if it went on to 95, it ended with the generation of the apostles, those men who were called by Christ directly to bring His revelation.
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So, if Revelation has ended, does that mean God no longer speaks to me? Here's my answer.
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I do not think that God verbally speaks to us directly, but God does move on our hearts, and God does illuminate our understanding.
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And ordinarily, it's in conjunction with Scripture.
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Because, I don't know about you, but there have been times where I've read the same Scripture verse several times, and then finally God just really opens up my eyes to the meaning of this passage and how it fits within the context of the rest of the book.
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And people say, well, this was a revelation from God.
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I would say, no, that's an illumination, and I would make a distinction between that and God directly.
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For instance, I heard Jesse Duplantis say on the Internet yesterday, he said, yeah, Jesus is about between 511 and 6-1.
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I didn't think He'd be so tall, but He came over to me and put His hand on my shoulder and talked to me.
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I mean, this is the type of thing that people are claiming that I would deny.
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That type of revelation.
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Here is what one author stated, and I don't remember.
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It may have been Bonar, but I could be wrong.
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But essentially, he said this.
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He said, if someone is claiming to give you new revelation, and it contradicts the Scripture, then you know they're wrong.
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And if someone is claiming to give you new revelation, and it agrees with the Scripture, you don't need it.
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So why would new revelation be necessary? That's a question to end the class.
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When somebody is arguing for new or contemporary revelation, the question would be why.
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Why is that necessary? I would not believe that it is.
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And I think, hopefully, this has been an understanding of what revelation is.
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And we never did get to our notes.
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So it looks like next week we'll be back in the same place, because I do want to talk about how other people see revelation, and how it might be distinguished from how we understand what revelation is.
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All right.
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Well, God bless you.
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I'm glad you got here.