22 - Satan, Part 2

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology This lesson covered the lesson on the topic of Satan.

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23 - Satan, Part 3

23 - Satan, Part 3

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Well, welcome back to the
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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology.
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We're glad to have you with us. We will be continuing again this week in our lesson on the person of Satan.
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And so we are glad that you are with us to join with us. And no, it will not be an autobiography for those who think such.
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But we do appreciate having you with us. We appreciate having all of our new students with us that are joining for the first time.
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If you are joining for the first time, just know that you really should go back to the beginning of the lessons.
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You don't want to jump in in the middle. But we look forward to having you with us each week.
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If you are an enrolled student, you'll have your syllabus there. That is one of the things you get as an enrolled student.
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And you will have your syllabus. We are in the last lesson of that syllabus, which means you must, if you want to get the next syllabus, enroll for next year, or actually this year,
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I should say. We have actually been working in the syllabus that you got from last year. And so if you are an enrolled student, you must enroll for this year.
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I would strongly, strongly recommend you do that like this week. Because I think the syllabuses will be going out this week, either this week or next.
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And if you miss, you will not have a syllabus when we start next class, if we finish
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Satan in this class. Yeah, I kind of do want to be done with Satan.
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Not just for class, but for good. Don't you? Wouldn't that be nice? Him and all of his dominions.
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But we are in lesson number 15. And that is the lesson on Satan.
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And if you remember from last week, we looked at the description. The description of Satan.
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And when we looked at the description of Satan, we looked at his origin, his personality, and his character.
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And we got done looking at that. And we then looked, we actually finished looking at that.
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And then this week we are going to start in your syllabus, under Roman numeral number two there, with the designations of Satan.
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The designation of Satan. So let's begin this class and go through what we have here.
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We will be looking at these designations of Satan. First, so a designation is, okay,
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I admit it, you got to alliterate. You know, preachers just always have to alliterate. It's basically his names.
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If you want to think of it that way, fine. But it had to start with a D. We had description, designations, you notice in your syllabus, they all start with the letter
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D. It's kind of a preaching thing, so maybe you'll remember the lesson.
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Silly me, thinking you're paying attention. You're probably in the chat room going, oh yeah, look at this, there's a blue sky out.
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The chat room goes crazy, talks about anything but class, I'm convinced of it. So we are on the designations of Satan in the very last lesson, lesson number 15.
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And we are first going to look at, looking at his designations, let's look at the name that we know him most by, and that is the name
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Satan. The name Satan. So this, the name
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Satan, if you look in your syllabus, you'll see a couple of blanks there. The name Satan characterizes
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Satan as an adversary, an adversary, okay, or an opposer.
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Those are two meanings of the name, adversary or opposer. We see this name used 52 times in the
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Old Testament. Let's look at one of them right now, and that is Zechariah chapter 3 and the first verse.
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Zechariah 3, 1 says, then he showed me, Joshua the high priest, standing before the angel of the
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Lord and Satan, standing at his right hand. And look what it says he's doing. He's standing at the right hand to accuse him.
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Gives you an idea, we continue seeing this. We saw last class, when we saw some of his character, some of his description, how he's a liar, he's an opposer.
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We see this in his name, Satan. Satan has the idea, the name itself, as an adversary or an opposer.
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This is what he's known for. This is what he does, all right? So, we see here that the second one that he is most often known as, when we speak of his name in the proper sense, we know him as Satan.
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That's actually the title of this week's class, but he's also known most often by a second name, and you can see that in your syllabus, letter
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B there, devil, the devil or devil. This designation emphasizes
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Satan's work of accusing and reveals Satan accusing believers before God.
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Let's take a look at a passage there. We'll take a look at Matthew 4 .1 for this, and you see,
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Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by who?
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To be tempted by the devil. You can look in, we obviously don't have time to read all of Job chapter 1 and chapter 2, but if you look there, you'll see the devil in this accusing role, where he is accusing not only
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Job, and this is on a note with this, he's actually accusing God. He's calling into question
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God's good nature, because what he's saying is the only reason
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Job is listening to you and following you is because you give him so much good things.
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Wait a minute, that sounds like the prosperity gospel. I guess we know where that comes from, oops, sorry, but it's true, it is where it comes from.
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It's exactly what Satan accused before God with Job.
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Well, Job's only believing in you because of all the good things you give him. You must give him these things.
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And yet, we see that here, really what
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Satan was doing, the devil, was accusing God of being unjust, because he's really implying that God has given things to Job maybe when
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Job didn't deserve it, and saying that Job doesn't really praise you for who you are, but only for what he can get from you, which is exactly what many preach in their gospel messages nowadays, in the prosperity gospel, that you deserve to have great things from God, and that God should give you these things, and you should expect great things from God if you believe in Him.
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Yeah, I'm not going to believe that because I know its source. We saw it before Job.
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We saw it before Adam and Eve in the garden, alright, just saying.
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There's another name that Satan, the devil, is often known by, and that is
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Lucifer, Lucifer. And this means literally, and you probably won't have room in your syllabus there for the full thing, but it means son of the morning, or literally a form of brightness.
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That's literally what it means, a form of brightness. But for your blank there, it means son of the morning, and indicates his beauty, alright?
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It indicates his beauty. Let's look at Revelation 12, oh no,
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Isaiah 14, 14 -12, let's look at that one.
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And we have here 14 -12 to 14, so we'll look at all of it later, but let's just look at verse 12.
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How are you fallen from heaven, O day star, son of dawn, which is kind of some figurative language we see there.
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How are you cut down to the ground, you who laid the nation?
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So this day star, the son of the dawn, that's a literal form of this son of the morning, or a form of brightness which we know as Lucifer, alright?
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This is who it refers to here in Isaiah 14 -12. We see it literally translated, but that's the idea of the name, alright?
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Which kind of gets us maybe a little later, but it tells us something about Satan as well.
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What is it that the New Testament tells us about Satan? He comes as what? An angel of light.
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It's one of the things I always kind of laugh when, I remember reading in the Doctrine and Covenants, that's one of the authorities and the
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Latter Day Saints would hold to, or Mormons, and they have the Book of Mormon, they have Pearl of Great Price, and they have
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Doctrine and Covenants. And it's really interesting because in Doctrine and Covenants they have this one little thing that tells you how you can identify a devil basically from a holy angel, right?
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So because if you see an angel like Joseph Smith did, how would you know it's really an angel?
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Well, he gives us a way of knowing that. You see, it says that a real angel, a holy angel, wouldn't want to deceive you.
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So you ask to hold its hand, and because it's only a spirit, it won't try to deceive you so it'll tell you, you can't touch me because I'm a spirit, but a demon will try to hold your hand.
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Now, I always was puzzled by that. Think about that for a moment. I mean, once you go to hold its hand, and there's nothing there, don't you immediately know it's a demon?
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I mean, yeah, duh. So what would a demon do to deceive? It would say, oh,
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I'm holy, right? So it would tell you, oh, you can't touch me. I mean, that's the irony of that is that it really doesn't make sense if you think about it because it's telling us, you know, oh, good angels wouldn't deceive you by trying to touch you.
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It's just far -fetched. I guess that's the only word I have for it. But what we end up seeing with it, though, is that demons come,
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Satan comes as an angel of light. He comes not in the, he doesn't need to be in the bars.
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He doesn't need to be in the strip clubs and places like that. The world system's taking care of those places.
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Satan's in the churches, you know, with the prosperity gospel and things like that. That's where he's going to be, going in as an angel of light, trying to deceive people so that they, even if they have a little bit of truth, they don't have the real truth.
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And if they do have the real truth of how to be saved and get right with God, then at least they're going to be ineffective.
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That's his goal, okay? So that's what he's looking to do.
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He's looking to, he is, though, beautiful. So it tells you something of him.
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He's a form of brightness. He's going to come as an angel of light. He's going to come sounding sweet like he did in the garden.
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He's going to come saying good and flattering things, and that's not always good, okay?
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He's going to appeal to pride, as we saw last week. That was his downfall, and that's how he brought the downfall of Eve and Adam.
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And so we shouldn't be surprised when we see Satan come with flattering speech or words that sound well, because this is one of his designations.
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This is who he is, alright? So we need to be careful when we look at things.
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We need to be discerning. It's another D word, but it's a good one.
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And so we're going to look at this when we look at the end of our defense against Satan, but discernment is one of them.
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Satan is not going to come and present himself as a little guy, a little red guy with a pitchfork and the horns and the red tail and, no.
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He's going to come looking like a preacher, a good preacher. He's going to hold the Bible and misquote it.
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He's going to come looking like he's speaking the truth. Remember what he did at the cross, sorry, in the wilderness with Jesus?
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Did he come saying, oh, let me deceive you, Jesus. Let me lie to you.
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Let me tell you who I am. No. Jesus knew who he was, but he quoted Scripture.
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Well, misquoted Scripture. We looked at that last week, last class. But that's what
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Satan does. He quotes Scripture or really misquotes Scripture. And we always have to remember that about him.
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He is a deceiver by nature. So we shouldn't be surprised.
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He's going to come as an angel of light, oh, the sweet sound of his voice telling you everything you want to hear.
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If you just pray this prayer, God's going to give you everything you want. If you just believe and visualize
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God giving you everything that your heart desires, you're going to have those things. That's the message of Satan, not
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God. God's message is never one of selfishness. And that's one way you can always tell the difference between a man -centered, or actually that's more a satanic -centered gospel, because a man -centered gospel is all focused on what we do, our works, doing good things.
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A satanic gospel is one where everything's focused on your own pride and God giving to you because you deserve it and he owes it to you.
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It's a good way to identify a difference there. You hear people that are preaching a message that God owes you something other than hell and wrath?
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Be careful. You know what you and I deserve? We deserve God's wrath.
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We deserve the eternal lake of fire because we've broken his law. And anyone that comes and tells you that you don't deserve that, you deserve
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God's best? That's from the pit of hell. We do not deserve
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God's best. We receive that by God's grace and God's mercy.
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And it's an amazing thing. It is a glorious thing to think that we get to receive
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God's righteousness. When God the Father looks at you and I, he sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
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That is, if we are saved, okay? If we are believers in Christ. What happened, 2
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Corinthians 521, I just preached on this this weekend up in New York.
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But it's a great transaction. We gave God all of our sin.
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He gave us all of Christ's righteousness. So when God looks at us, it's not that we deserve anything good.
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It's because Jesus deserves everything good.
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Does that make sense? I hope so. Because this is an essential thing to understand this distinction.
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When people take the passages, try to take them out of context and say, you as a believer deserve good, no we don't.
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We receive good from God because Jesus deserves good, not you and I.
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But we have the righteousness of Jesus Christ when we receive him. We have the right to be called a child of God.
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We are adopted into his family. And it is because of what Jesus did that we have his righteousness that gives us the rights as an heir to the king.
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Not because we deserve it, but because Jesus, the Son, deserves it.
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And we inherit that. It is imputed to us, okay?
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It is accounted. That's what that word imputed means. It's accounted unto us in righteousness.
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Not because of us, but because of Christ. So if anyone gives you a message ever that says that you deserve something from God, that God owes it to you, flee from that and flee quickly.
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Because that is a message of Satan, okay? If that's hard for you to understand, look through the
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Scriptures and just understand. A man -centered gospel will focus on men, okay?
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On man's working. A satanic -focused gospel will focus on questioning
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God's character and telling you you deserve what is only deserved from God or to God.
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That's exactly what he did in the garden. He turned to Adam and Eve, well to Eve, and said, the reason
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God's telling you not to touch that is because you're missing out on something. God doesn't want you to have something.
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And if you just take of that fruit, you're going to have what God is trying to hold back from you.
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This is the thing that we want you to realize. You and I don't deserve anything good.
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We get it because God deserves, Jesus deserves something good, okay?
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Alright, let's take a look at his next one. So we looked at Satan, his name's
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Satan. We looked at Devil and we looked at Lucifer. Those are the three he's most often known as.
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But let's look at one other and that is Beelzebub. Try and say that ten times fast,
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Beelzebub, Beelzebub, Beelzebub. Okay, I'm not going to do it. Beelzebub, which also means
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Lord of the Flies, that's a very nice name. And Lord of the
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Flies is, well how do I explain this without getting too graphic and descriptive?
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If you go by a dung pile, you'll see a lot of flies.
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That's the Lord of it, okay? That's the idea of it, kind of the Lord of the dung pile, alright?
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The term was used by the Jews as a mockery of Satan, as a mockery of Satan.
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And we see that, let's look at Matthew chapter 12. Matthew chapter 12 and verses 24.
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But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, It is only by Beelzebub, the
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Prince of Demons, that this man casts out demons.
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So who do they credit the work of Jesus, the work of the Holy Spirit, who are they crediting that to?
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Good class, Beelzebub, it's right in front of you. I'm so glad when you read the text that's right in front of your eyes, that's very good.
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Yeah, you're too busy in the chat room, I know you missed that one. But Beelzebub is a name of mockery, that's your blank there.
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A name of mockery that the Jews had. And they attribute the work of the
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Holy Spirit, the work of God that Jesus did to Beelzebub or the devil.
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And so when we look at that, there's an interesting thing that we see.
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The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit was when we take the things that the Holy Spirit has done and attribute that to Satan.
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If that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, wonder what happens when we take the ministry of Satan and apply that to the
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Holy Spirit. Because that's what's happening in a lot of these churches. You know, these churches that take the doctrines of Satan, that you deserve to have your best from God.
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And they attribute that to the Holy Spirit. I'm just saying, that's what they're doing.
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When you say that the doctrines of demons are actually, you credit that to the
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Holy Spirit. I would almost say that might be blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Can't be dogmatic on that.
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But it sure sounds similar to what the Jewish leaders were doing with Jesus in attributing the works of God to Satan.
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And that's something we have to be careful of. Check the doctrine you're being taught very carefully. And make sure that it is proper doctrine.
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Now some of you may be involved in things like, maybe you're involved in the charismatic movement, the
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Pentecostal movement, or more so the faith movement, or faith healing, or word of faith, it's called.
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Or the prosperity gospel, any of those things. Those latter ones are the more extreme cases.
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Where they're really and truly, I believe, taking doctrines of Satan and attributing it to the
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Holy Spirit. But it's stepping stones, it's sliding, is really in some of the things that you'll see in the charismatic movement and the
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Pentecostal movement. Now not everything in those movements are doctrines of demons.
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So I want to be very clear when I say that. I'm not attributing all of it. But when you have some of these groups and churches, not all of them, but some of them that attribute their own selfishness.
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And a desire to live for an experience. An experience based doctrine.
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An experience based worship. I would say that should be cautionary.
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Our worship should be to worship God, not self. And it is something we need to be cautious about.
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Because this is, remember, what did I say about Satan? He's subtle. Where is he doing his work?
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In the church. What does he want you doing? He wants you getting your focus off of God and putting it on self.
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That's what he desires to do. And in that desire, he is going to try to take these small slippery slopes.
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And if he can get people going to living for an experience, what often happens is their focus becomes on the experience.
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And they go from experience to experience. They have to have a greater experience. And they have to do things to have greater experiences.
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And that's why I say it's a slippery slope. Because not everyone falls in that slope.
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But some start to slide that way. Okay? Now, if you disagree with me,
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I'm okay. Don't tune me out. Okay? I'm okay with you disagreeing, but let's discuss it in what the
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Scriptures say. Give me the Scripture. Okay? Tell me what Scripture says.
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You can email us, if you want, at the email down there. It's there, okay? The academy at strivingforeternity .org.
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Academy at strivingforeternity .org. Let us know where you disagree. You can put your long diatribe, which will take us three days to read your email.
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Okay, not all of them are that way. But we do get some. And if you do, though, that's fine.
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Let's go through that together. And let's discuss it. But really, you know,
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I don't care, in a sense, if you agree with me. Because I don't matter. It matters what the
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Word of God says. Because that's where we must agree. That's where we must study to be right. Okay?
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So if you disagree with me, that's fine. Just give me the Scriptures. Does that sound fair? Let's go through the
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Scriptures to make sure we both at least understand where we're coming from. And again,
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I'm not saying everyone falls into that camp. But I do think the extreme sides are. Okay? When people are telling you to visualize
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God giving you everything your heart's desire is, I believe it's dangerous.
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Okay? Because Satan's going to come as an angel of light. Let me just share one story with you to see how devastating it could be.
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I remember someone I knew in college, a friend of mine, her mother, had a vision that she believed was from God.
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That before she died, God was going to give her a million dollars.
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And she trusted in that vision. And, you know, she had run herself into debt.
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But always thinking she was going to get a way of paying her way out of it and be able to provide for her children.
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In this million dollars God was going to eventually give her. And she lived the time that I knew her always expecting from God this million dollars.
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And sometimes even questioning why God didn't give it to her in the time that she wanted it. But she was willing to wait.
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The woman has now passed away and gone into eternity never getting that million dollars. With false hopes of this world.
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Alright? And that is hard to see with someone. I'd like to spare you and anyone you love that hardship that doctrines of demons do.
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Okay? Satan doesn't look to be pleasing. He comes as an angel of light. But the ends of where he leads are never good.
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Okay? Let's go on. Alright, I'll get off my soapbox there. Sorry.
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But we looked at his name Satan, his designation of Satan, and Devil, and Lucifer, and Beelzebub.
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Now let's look at the next one that we know him often of, especially in the Old Testament, is the serpent.
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Letter E there in your syllabus. The serpent. The serpent is, this designates
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Satan, Satan's connection to, connecting him to the Old Testament.
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And it applies to him in the New Testament, emphasizing, here's your blank there, his cunning or deception.
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His cunning and deception. Alright? This describes, we see this, let's look at the earliest when we see him.
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Earliest in the way our Bible is organized in Genesis chapter 3. Genesis chapter 3.
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We see here that now the serpent, and this is speaking of Jesus, and what does it say about the serpent?
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He was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the
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Lord had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say you should not eat of any tree in the garden?
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Now as we look at that, we see something about his cunningness.
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Do you see how he questions that? Do you see how he lays that? Did God really say?
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Do you see the questioning nature? Challenging the doubt, the subtlety of it.
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Alright? And so when we see that, we see how subtle Satan is.
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Alright? And so we must be careful with that.
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To make sure that we are being knowledgeable of what it is that we're looking at when we have things.
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We have something in front of us that we might think is from God. We have to be careful.
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Eve was not discerning with this. She wasn't careful. And she was deceived by his cunningness.
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And so when we are having something, some teaching, we must be careful.
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We must be evaluating. We must be comparing things with Scripture. Even what
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I say. Yes. Don't believe me. Believe God.
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Okay? He's the one that we should focus on. And so we must be believing
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Him. Okay? It's for that reason that I say you must study to show yourself approved.
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Because Satan is looking to deceive with subtlety.
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Not boldness. He's not going to just throw it out there. It's always subtle with him. I hope you're seeing this as part of his character.
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Let's look at his next name and that is Beel. Beel. This title means lawless person.
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That's your blank there. Lawless person. Or lawlessness. It literally means good for nothing.
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It's really what Satan is good for. Nothing. Okay? All these people that, oh
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Satan, Satan, Satan. Satan is good for nothing. Alright? So, let us take a look at 2
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Corinthians. 2 Corinthians and we're looking at 6, oh we're not looking at that one.
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Okay. We don't have 2 Corinthians 6 .15. That would be the one you should look at. But we don't have that.
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So we won't look at that one. How's that? Alright. Alright. Let's look at the next one then.
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Apollyon. Apollyon. Apollyon or Abaddon is both of these names are names of Satan that identify him as a destroyer.
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The destroyer. And that is in Revelation 9 .11.
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Revelation 9 .11. Alright? And let's move on to the next one though to take a look at his, so we see him, he's not, you don't see that one as often.
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But we also see him next as the tempter.
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The tempter. Let's look at this one. We see him as the tempter in 1
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Thessalonians 3 .5. In this passage here, we see,
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For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you, and you labored in vain.
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Do you see that? How he's described in this passage? He is the tempter. The tempter.
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Okay? And so we see him fulfill this role in the life of men as well as Christ.
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And you could turn, we don't have the time to look at it, but if you look at Matthew 4 and those first 11 verses, you'll see
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Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. And you see there that the temptation and how
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Satan tried to tempt even God even Jesus.
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Alright? So, we see there, let's look at one more designation, and then
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I'll try to answer a question that has come up in the chat room. But another is the prince of this world.
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The prince of this world. Let's look at Ephesians 2 .2. It says there, in which you had once walked.
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So, I'm not giving you verse one, it's the middle of a passage, but we're going to see the importance of it.
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Following the course of this world. Following who? The prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now in the work of men, in the sons of disobedience.
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He's described here as the prince in the power of this world.
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And what we see here is that this title, and those related to it, which is
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God of the world, prince of the power of the world, or power of the air I mean, these identify
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Satan's controlling influence in our society. In our society. Let's take a look at some of those others that we had there.
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2 Corinthians 4 .4, we see in this one, we'll see him described here.
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We see in their case, the God of this world, you see him described that way.
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And then in John 12, we see here he is described as the ruler of this world.
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Alright? So we see that he is described this way.
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These are the designations of Satan. Alright? These are designations of Satan.
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Now, a question came in that I see here. A person on Facebook has told others that she had a dream, and that Jesus was greeting all people's dead pets.
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And they were all happy. She also says
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God talks to her. I told her that the Bible is the way.
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Alright? And so, that's good counsel. The Bible is the way
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God speaks to us. I love what Ray Comfort says, I believe it's him, maybe others.
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But he says if you want to hear from God, read your
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Bible. If you want to hear God audibly, read your Bible aloud. That's God speaking.
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If the Bible is not enough for you, and there's nothing in the Bible, anywhere that says that our pets are going to be in heaven.
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Now, does that mean that our pets are going to be in heaven? I don't know. Does it mean our pets aren't going to be in heaven?
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I don't know. You know why I don't know? Because God didn't say. But if somebody had a dream that God is speaking to them, you know, you've got to test those spirits.
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You've got to examine those things. Alright? How do you examine those things? How do you test those spirits?
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With Scripture. That's what 1 John says. Test the spirits with what God says.
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He's already spoken. But this does bring up a different thing that I want to address, because this is very important in how to know whether you're falling into a doctrine of demons.
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Maybe you haven't gotten into a doctrine of demons yet, but people get there.
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And it is when they do not see that the Scriptures are sufficient. That's one of the things Satan's always going to do.
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Did you see it when we looked at the passage in Genesis 3? Satan is always asking, like, is God's Word enough?
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Don't you need something more? Is it really enough?
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Always keep that in mind. When we look to what God says is right,
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He's never going to disagree with His own Word. And He's always going to hold up what
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He says as absolutely sufficient for our time and our age.
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We don't have to have the answers to everything. But what
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God has revealed to us, Deuteronomy 29 .29, God is beyond our ability to understand, but those things that He has revealed to us, that we should study, that we should obey, that which
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He's commanded us. We won't know everything about God, but we have to always make sure that we're only looking to His Word, that His Word is sufficient.
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When people need an experience that God has to audibly talk to them, either audibly or through dreams, then
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God's Word is not sufficient for them. They need something more. And when you start saying you need something more than what
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God has revealed, watch out, okay? Please, be careful, alright?
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So that would be one thing I would say. And if people are saying things that we don't have in Scripture or even more so are contrary to Scripture, really watch out, okay?
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Then you're really getting dangerous, alright? So I kind of hope that answers your question in the chat room, but it's also a general thing.
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We have to always be careful. We have to test the spirits with Scripture, okay?
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And one thing for sure, if anyone ever tells you that they saw Jesus or they saw
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God, whether it's in a dream or in a vision or any other way, one question you can ask is what did they do next?
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Because I'll tell you one thing, every single time that we saw somebody who saw
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God, they like fell to the ground to worship Him and all they could see is their own wickedness.
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Isaiah chapter 6. All Isaiah could see is his sin, okay?
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If you have somebody who says they've seen God or they write a book about the fact that they saw
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God, there's a book about a guy who was shaving in the mirror and Jesus appeared in the mirror. You know how I know he didn't see
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Jesus in the mirror? He kept shaving. If you saw Jesus, you wouldn't keep shaving because in light of His holy perfection, you would only see your wickedness.
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You would see your sin before a holy God and it would condemn you to yourself and you would see how great
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He is and how failing you are and you, like Isaiah, would say, no,
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I'm a wicked person, I'm a man of iniquity, a people of iniquity, okay?
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So you get somebody who says, hey, I've seen Jesus, I've seen God, had a splashing fight with Him, had a dream of a splashing fight with Jesus in the
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Sea of Galilee. I don't think you saw Jesus. Just saying. You know, these are popular books.
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They itch the ears and they get to be number one bestsellers. I heard that the latest bestseller is written by a four -year -old who supposedly went to heaven and his father wrote down his dreams and that's like sold 11 million copies.
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It's a New York Times bestseller. Like, really? Really, a four -year -old? How much are we looking to accept anything but truth?
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And isn't that exactly like Jesus said? Jesus said to the Pharisees, you don't believe me because I tell you the truth.
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I could tell you anything. I could lie to you and you'd be fine with it, but it's because I tell you the truth that you do not believe me.
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All right? Amazing. So let's see. We have here that we've seen now number one, we saw a description of Satan.
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Number two, we saw the designations of Satan.
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Now briefly, let's look at number three, the dominion of Satan.
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The dominion of Satan. Well, let's look. There's only two points under here, so I think
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I can actually get through these two this week. All right. First, he is the ruler of fallen angels.
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That's your blank there, of fallen angels. Let's look at Matthew chapter 25 for this.
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All right. Then he will say to those on his left, depart from me, you cursed into the eternal fire.
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Prepared for who? Who is it? Oh, the devil and his angels.
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Do you notice the dominion there? He is the ruler of fallen angels.
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Okay? That's who he rules. Now, second there is that he is the ruler of the world system.
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The world system. Let's look at Ephesians 2 .2. All right. Ephesians 2 .2.
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You'll see he is the ruler of the world system.
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It says there, in which you once walked, we saw this already, okay, that he is the prince of the power of, following the course of what?
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This world, following the prince of the power of the air. So Satan, okay, is the ruler of the world system.
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Okay? So I hope that that helps.
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Now, I do want to try to wrap up. There's some questions that, some more questions coming in to the chat room. So I want to try to answer them.
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And that is, what about this still small voice? I mean, people always talk about that.
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I have a still small voice. And they base that in the Old Testament. What is happening in that?
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This is a case where you have, let's put it in its context. Remember, I hope that all of you took our class, our school of biblical hermeneutics.
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Please do that. Go through those 19 lessons and learn how to properly interpret the
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Bible because that is one of the biggest problems. You know how people get into this whole mess? Because they interpret the Bible based on their experience and what they want to be true and not the things that are true.
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They don't follow the rules and the principles of good biblical hermeneutics, good principles of interpretation.
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And because of that, they get into these problems. Okay? Now, when we look at this passage that talks about a still small voice that is talking about Elijah and Elisha and you see in there that he's looking for God in what?
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In a whirlwind, in these big noisy things he's looking. But God's not there.
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God wasn't in those places. Where was God for him? In a still small voice.
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Now, this is a time when there were many miracles being done. Mary made great things. What is it that we are learning in that passage with Elijah and Elisha?
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When we look, and I believe it's in Kings, I don't know the exact passage, but we can look it up and check.
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But what we see there is that God is explaining to them that he's in these great things that they're seeing.
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They're doing all these miracles and they're going to see these things. But he's also in the small things.
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In other words, this is actually kind of a condemnation of some of those in the charismatic movement that are looking for experiences because he's basically kind of saying, don't look for the big experiences.
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God's not in the big things all the time. He's also in the little things. All right? Like your daily bread, in the daily provisions that he has for you.
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God's there. Okay? We don't need to have something big happen to us.
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You know, some people, I had someone once lovingly correct me because when I share my testimony,
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I've gotten in the habit of saying, it's really boring. There's not much there. It's not much to it.
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It's, you know, because I don't talk about being strung out on drugs and, you know, things like that.
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And, you know, I would think that when people give these testimonies that just sound really great and I'd be like, yeah, mine just seems really boring.
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And someone corrected me and said, when God does a miracle, when God takes a heart of stone and turns it into a living heart, that is never dull.
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That is never boring. And it's never something that we should think of that way.
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And I went, okay, I'm sorry. Okay? But that's something that we have to realize.
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Okay? God speaks even in the little things that we may not recognize it.
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Okay? So I hope that helps. I hope that you, if you have any questions, you can always post them online.
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We're always there for you. You can always email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.
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We will always be ready to answer your questions to the best of our ability, which may sometimes be,
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I don't know. That may be the answer. But that is some of the things.
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We will finish up this lesson next week. All right? We'll finish looking at the devices, or actually we'll look at the domain of Satan, the devices of Satan, and a defense against Satan.
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All right? So I hope those are helpful to you. Now, let me real quick just give some quick announcements.
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I wanna strongly encourage you if you're in the, whoops. What was that? Okay. In the
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Ohio area, May, end of May, Memorial Day weekend, we will be having the
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Ohio Fire. Ohiofire .org. And the,
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I think this year we're going to be having Paul Taylor will be speaking. I will be speaking.
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Michael Coghlan will be a speaker. There's a lot of exciting things gonna go on with that.
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We will have special music with Keri Atala. And so that will be a special treat.
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If you haven't heard her sing, go get her latest album. I think it's keriatala .com
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or .org. Just Google Keri Atala and you'll have it. But, or just come out to Ohio Fire.
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The Ohio Fire, all the spreading of fire events are for people who are uncomfortable sharing the gospel.
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We go out as teams, large teams, to evangelize with experienced people that will help you out of your comfort zone, even if it's just handing out gospel tracts.
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We'll provide training for you, some good messages during the day, and some sweet fellowships.
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So we strongly encourage you coming out. If you're not in the Ohio area, well, July 12th and 13th, come to the
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Jersey Fire. Jersey Fire is in Toms River, New Jersey. We go to where the
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Jersey Shore was casted and where everyone is being, is concerned about the Jersey Shore.
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We're going to go out there to evangelize afterwards. And if you say, well, I'm from the left coast, I mean, not west coast, come out to the
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NorCal Fire. That's in September. NorCalFire .info and you can get all the information there.
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Actually, Jersey Fire, I should mention, Jersey Fire, we'll have Jason Lyle, Cy Tim Bruningate of ProofThatGodExists .org
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speaking at NorCal Fire. Matt Slick from CARM. Tony Miano from Cross Encounters Radio and myself will be speaking and we have a wonderful lineup of messages there.
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Some great messages prepared. Always want to let you know, if you're in the Jackson area,
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Jackson, New Jersey, you don't have a home church or you're just passing through and want to go to a good church, come to Faith Bible Church.
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That is a church revitalization. Will Costello is the pastor. I'm there helping out, serving him in the ministry there and we are building up a new ministry and so it's an exciting thing.
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Want to strongly encourage you. Do want to remind you to get your donations in if you want to receive a syllabus for book two of our syllabus.
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It's $50 a year. You get two syllabuses. Just so you understand, that's $25 a syllabus and it costs us about $23 or $24 depending where we have to ship to to get you the syllabus.
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You want to save some money? Get it as a church. Talk to your church. Get them in bulk.
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We save the money because we are shipping all those syllabuses to one location so it saves us money, saves you money.
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You can do it as a church. Some churches project it in their sanctuary and some churches just give the syllabuses out to their people to watch at their convenience.
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Whichever way you want to do it, we encourage you to consider doing that. You can go to our website which is somewhere down there and look for the
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Academy page and it will describe how to go about doing that. Please consider doing that and supporting us.
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We want to also encourage you to help us get rid of all the ads. Go to our website. Go to the donation page and under monthly donation, consider donating monthly because if we can get enough donations and enough being that we need to raise about $300 a month.
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If we get $300, we've gotten some one -time donations but no monthly donations as of yet.
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So we need some of those monthly donations to know that's coming in so that we can cover that cost.
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When we get to the point of getting $300 a month donated which is 100 people at $3.
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If you just say I'll give $3 a month and we get 100 of you doing that, we can do that.
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You can give more than that. If you can give $5, $10. If we have enough people, if we get 30 people giving $10 a month, we can get rid of all those ads.
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And we'd really like to get rid of those ads for you. Now, as you know, we always do in this class is we want to encourage you to encourage others.
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We as Christians often don't get enough encouragement. And we often, you know what, we often only encourage those people who, well, those people that are like the big names that everyone wants to kind of know and we encourage those people because we want to know them more.
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We want to, we know about them more. But there are times in our life where we need to encourage those people we don't know so well which means getting to know them.
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And so we try to give you some people who just maybe this week need some encouragement.
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And maybe we don't know why but they need the encouragement anyhow. Right? Don't you,
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I mean, look, some of you I know you want your name mentioned because you know you need encouragement.
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And that's why we're going to get mentioned some of your names. And so that's what we're going to do this week. And we want you to encourage a sister and that is
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Erin Coughlin. Now, you can pray for her and encourage her for no other reason than she's married to Michael Coughlin which means she needs a lot of prayer.
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Like my wife, when you're married to an insane person you need prayer. Yeah, okay.
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But in all seriousness, I mean, you know, she's a mother taking care of children.
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Any of you mothers know how important that is and how stressful that can be and how much encouragement you need in those areas.
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And right now she could probably use your encouragement because Michael is very busy as he's preparing the
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Ohio fire with us. And he's been doing a lot of work. So you're saying, well, why don't you encourage
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Michael? Because we don't care about him. No, I mean, you can encourage Michael but the real reason is because you know what?
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There are a lot of great women behind great men and they never get mentioned.
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They never get the encouragement. But the things that Michael is doing he's only able to do because his dear bride is allowing him the time in not burdening him and taking care of some of the things at home so that he can do those things.
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And so we want to encourage her as a godly woman, as someone who can use your encouragement maybe this week.
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The thing that always amazes me is people, even months later on YouTube when people watch these videos months later on YouTube and they go and give an encouraging message to someone maybe even months later and those people contact me and say, hey,
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I really want to thank you. You do not know what a blessing it was this week to have that encouraging word.
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Maybe just something someone said. We'll always try to tag those people if you're on Facebook. Go to our Facebook group.
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Aaron will be tagged probably already in Facebook as a
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Sebsis. A Sebsis is a Striving for Eternity Academy Sister of Encouragement.
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A Sebro is a Brother of Encouragement. And so someone came up with that and that's what we do.
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We want you to encourage others. Even if you don't know someone it doesn't take long to just send a quick note even on Facebook.
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Tag. Go to our Striving for Eternity. Pay the group and tag her. She's there tagged.
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And just say, hey sister, I'm encouraged that you're a godly mother. A godly wife.
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Alright? Because, you know, there's times in our life where all of us need that encouragement. So go do that.
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Alright? We thank you for that. We thank you for being part of this ministry. We ask you again, please consider.
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I'm horrible at asking for money. I know that. And as you see even with our syllabuses we actually don't make money off of this academy.
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Okay? Because even those that do pay so that they can get a syllabus and things like that you also know that you get other things throughout the year sometimes shipped to you sometimes sent in email that take time and money and you get things that, well, quite frankly cost more than the one or two dollars that we get off of that we make off of the syllabus.
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So consider donating. And what I'd also ask you is consider going there and go to the
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Striving for Eternity Academy page. Find the donate button that's specific for that page and donate there and you can put as a note it's a subscription for someone else.
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We have people that need or greatly desire, I should say, to be enrolled students but can't afford it and they could seriously, seriously would love for you to sponsor them.
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So if you can afford to sponsor others, consider it. If you just want to help us, go to the webpage.
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Go look at some of the articles that are out there. Check out the new website. You're going to see a storefront hopefully coming up soon where we're going to have some materials for you so that you can get even more training.
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We're trying to put a whole lot more articles out there on the website and restructure that whole thing in greater ways to be more useful for you.
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Some people just go to our doctrinal statement and find that as a quick reference for some of the theology that we talk about.
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Go read through that. See if it's helpful to you and consider helping us in keeping this going.
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Alright? So we are greatly encouraged when those people who try to, that are willing to come alongside us not just in prayer which is always needed, not just in encouraging words to us but also financially.
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We want to be able to hire more people to do more things and we can only do that with your finances.
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So please consider helping us. We are looking into things like putting together a radio program and things like that and we can't do that without your financial support.
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Alright? So please consider that and we'll look next class at finishing up Satan and then we'll look to be sending out your syllabuses soon and just remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.
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God bless you.