Prophecy and the Bible

Well, we went to the Bible Museum in Washington, D .C. as part of the Christian Podcast Community's podcast event.

We are gathered there with some listeners and also with another podcast, the guys from Theology Driven.

We're going to talk about that today on today's Rap Report. Welcome to the

Rap Report with Andrew Rapaport where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is the Ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right, well we welcome you back to the Rap Report. We were at the

Museum of the Bible and we got to go down with some guys from Theology Driven. We met down there, had a great time going through the museum.

We did not get to see much. Actually, we spent most of our time only on about two floors and we didn't even see everything on that.

Most of it we did on the floor of the History of the Bible. We went through there.

We went and did a tour that they provided for us and then I had provided, well, kind of that same information but more detail.

I'm going to give you some of those details today because there's some really, really interesting things that they have on display there and a lot of it you're going to see has some huge implications on us as Christians and we see how for many who wonder why it is that the scriptures get so attacked.

We're going to look at that, why people think they're not reliable, and how at the museum you see a great display of the reliability of God's Word.

But first, before that, there was a traveling display that we had and I thought it was good to go down there because a lot of people get challenged.

Maybe you've been challenged with this whole idea of passages from the Slave Bible.

That's right. You see, there is a Bible that was made just for slaves and many Christians get attacked for saying that we supported slavery or that Christianity supported slavery and they don't even understand that there was a

Bible that was created where many passages were ripped out. In fact, 90 % of the

Old Testament and 50 % of the New Testament were taken out of this Bible.

So the 1 ,189 chapters in a

Protestant Bible, the Slave Bible only contains 232 of them.

And so they basically ripped out a lot of what they didn't like because they wanted to educate the slaves into being submissive but there's a lot of passages they didn't want to educate the slaves on because that wouldn't be good.

And so I want to give some, to play some of the interaction we had with the guys at Theology Driven. I'll say this up front just so you know, where we had the

Slave Bible, that display was not really conducive to audio quality. So you're going to hear a lot of background noise.

So just bear with it, but it's about two minutes long and just listen to some of the passages that were removed from this

Bible. And one of the things that they actually had on display there was an actual

Slave Bible. They're very rare to find these days, but they had that on exhibit.

That's something that they have there at the museum. It was fascinating to see. To think about all of Romans, the first 11 chapters, all of them, gone.

Obviously, for clear reasons, they had to remove Exodus where it talks about if you kidnap a person to enslave them that that's worthy of death.

Yeah, that can't stay in the Bible if you're going to try to teach people. So they actually created a

Bible where they didn't teach the African slaves how to read. So it wasn't so much a fear of them getting a hold of it, but it was something that they wanted to be able to teach from.

And these people thought that was the whole Bible. And what it is, is when you end up seeing the

Bible, is it the inscription on this is that it is states, quote, parts of the

Holy Bible selected for the use of the Negro slaves in the British West Indy Islands, unquote.

And so they basically wanted it so that they could read the Bible or parts of the

Bible. And people who don't know how to read, don't know that there's a whole bunch missing. Like where all of a sudden you start in Romans chapter 12.

Well, you don't realize that there's 11 chapters missing because they would just read. And so this was for slave owners to be able to read from the scriptures.

And Scott from Theology Driven actually had some really good insights on this. So I want to play what he had to say about it.

When you read the report from Southern, and you talk about the fact that they had guys who were inconsistently, you know, proclaiming the gospel to slaves while at the same time holding them as slaves.

But then there were white Southerners who were coming in and saying like, you shouldn't do that. For the exact same reason that says over here, they were afraid that if they were educated and if they were saved, that they would rebel against the slave owners.

And so these are the same guys that are preaching the Bible and preaching the word. They're also holding these guys as slaves. I mean, it's just crazy to think about.

Yeah, that was Scott from Theology Driven. And so I think that was some ingenious and very good insight because this is something we have to look at the history of the time and understand that there were people who had these, there were people that had mixed emotions over this whole issue, trying to live in a culture that taught something that was against scripture.

And yet they tried to still rationalize that with their Christian convictions. And that is something that we deal with all the time.

For those who struggle and sit there and say, well, that's wrong of them in those times.

And yet in our day and age, we see so many people struggling with the issue of homosexuality. That's our cultural issue.

That seems, I don't see why it's a struggle, but there's people who, what do they do? The same thing. They're reinterpreting the scripture.

If you give them a chance, they probably rip all those passages out of the scripture because they just don't like it.

Every generation ends up dealing with this. Now, we ended up seeing a presentation that they had there and we got to see them do something with a

Gutenberg printing press. Very, very just neat to see.

And it provided for these guys just a real appreciation for what we have.

And I want to play that for you after this. Can you prove that God is a Trinity? Can you prove that Jesus is

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to host a Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar in your area. All right, and we will come to your area and do a

Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar because, well, many people need to learn how to interpret the

Bible. It's one of the lacking things in the church today. Printing press was really a revolutionary device.

It radically changed the world. In fact, it was something that people questioned whether we really would have had a reformation had it not been for the

Gutenberg printing press. It allowed for people to radically print Bibles and other things very quickly.

Now, the first thing printed on the Gutenberg printing press was a Bible, but then shortly after that was a document that was ripped off of a door, a church door that was there for discussion, and they brought it to the

Gutenberg who started to print it en masse. What was that document? It was the 95

Theses of Martin Luther that they translated from Latin into German, and then that spread all over, and many see that as the kickoff of the

Reformation, though many things happened before Martin Luther's 95 Theses. But the fact that the 95

Theses were able to spread throughout the world because of the printing press, the

Bible was able to spread much quicker, people didn't have to copy it by hand as they did before, and yet as much as it is a revolution then, and as much as it was something that got the

Word of God and the 95 Theses and many other things out there much quicker, when we got to sit there and watch them do a presentation of how the

Gutenberg printing press worked, it gave us quite an appreciation for how long it took them then, which meant that copying it in the older way of hand copying was even more.

The fact is that the Gutenberg printing press, it wasn't a short -term process, and we ended up discussing that, and a little bit of the forerunner to the

Reformation in some discussion that we had at the museum with the guys from Theology Driven, so check this out.

Okay, so we just saw the way that the Gutenberg printing press worked here at the Museum of the Bible.

Let's get some reaction from the guys over at Theology Driven, what their thoughts were with the way that the

Gutenberg press worked. Guten who? Who's the other guy whose name you don't hear about anymore?

Do you remember what you just learned? I keep wanting to say Jan Hus, but that's not what it is. Johan Fus was the other one.

You're mixing him up with Jan Hus, who was a goose. Yeah, he was the goose.

That's right. Yes, the goose that was cooked. The goose that preceded

Martin Luther. That's right. And who actually, I don't know if you guys know the history of this, but do you know that when Martin Luther was ordained, he was ordained, and what they used to do was take the bishops in the

Catholic Church and bury them under the pulpit. So here is Luther being ordained over the burial spot of the bishop who cooked the goose,

Jan Hus. And so when they say, eventually there will be a goose that you can't, a flame you can't put out.

And so I love how R .C. Sproul says it. He always says that he just pictures Jan Hus saying, you know, there's going to be someone that's going to come and you're not going to be able to put out the flame.

And that bishop says, over my dead body. And there's Luther over his dead body being ordained.

So the Gutenberg, pretty impressed. Kevin, what were your thoughts of that? I don't even know. It's so prehistoric.

Like it's just, I don't know. You're saying it doesn't match with your iPhone? Yeah. She said it took three to, no, it was like three to eight hours for them, or five to eight hours or something like that.

Just to do one page. Just to set the press. Just to set it to, yeah, to print one page.

And Scott and I looked at each other and we were like, nope. Oh my gosh.

Can I get your autograph? Hey, well actually, Andrew, you can keep it live. I want to show you guys something real quick. Come here.

Okay, so Scott's bringing us over. He wants to, we're leaving the rest of the group while Scott finds something that he's.

Andrew, can you read that verse out loud for me? That verse? The verse he wants read is something that was written in the

Old Testament. You know, the Old Testament for the Jews. And he read it on the seventh day.

Did you just call me Andrew Stanley? Andrew Stanley. Wow, you didn't, and you haven't heard the podcast that's dropping tomorrow where I actually have

Andrew, Andy Stanley on the, I have Andy Stanley and Layton Flowers. No, no.

But Layton, Layton Flowers does know he's on because he already got the text message. Yeah, I sent him a text.

But it says, and this is the universal command to all people that we see in Genesis. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he created.

Now, here's the interesting thing with that for folks that don't know. In the Hebrew, where it says he rested of all his work, that work is bara.

In the Hebrew, it's the only time you see bara used is in creation. It is the creation out of nothing.

So when he rested, he rested of all that work. So, so we don't, we're not, you're not a theistic evolutionist?

No, I would not be a theistic evolutionist. Absolutely not. Because that was the seventh day.

But the thing that's really interesting is... A million years between those. Yeah. I mean, a day, a day could be like a million years and a million years like a day.

Isn't that how that verse goes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what that is. Something like that.

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What Do They Believe? When we witness to people, we need to present the truth. But it is very wise to know what they believe.

And you will get Andrew Rappaport's book at whatdotheybelieve .com. And so what we ended up seeing is that there was a tremendous teaching that we got.

We learned a lot at the Museum of the Bible. This was something that we did as part of the Christian podcast community.

It was sort of a meetup, sort of a gathering. Great time. But there was some that we didn't get recording of.

We ended up doing a tour through the museum. And keep in mind that the museum has got a goal of presenting the

Bible. They're not there to present the gospel. And I know there's many Christians that have issue with that.

But their mission is about the Bible. And therefore, they have a lot of Jewish people that come through.

And they will teach the history of it. And they don't always do it in a way where it is with a goal of sharing how the

Bible points to Messiah. One of the things that I wanted to do was do our own tour, as we did, to give some history as we went through and show how things point to, well,

Christ. And in doing so, what we ended up with is going through the history of the

Bible. There's some great things. If you get a chance to go to the Museum of the Bible in D .C., you'll end up seeing that there's some things they have on display.

And as you go through the history of the Bible, and if you do their tour, this will be a great episode to re -listen to before you go, or to share with friends as they go.

Because I want to give you some things that they're not going to share on the tour. Some things they will. But I want to give this to you so when you go through the museum, you understand the richness that's there.

And to see how things that they have on display there point to the fact that we have a very, very reliable Bible.

Now, as you first come in to the history of the Bible floor, it's really a whole floor where they have, and they have so much there.

We don't have enough time to go through everything. But I want to give you some snippets of what I had done on my own tour that I did with folks.

And if there's other people who would like to have a personal tour with us at Striving for Eternity at the

Museum of the Bible, you can get a hold of us at info at strivingforeternity .org. We take teams down there, and we do the tours with the museum.

And we also do our own tours through the museum. I was really encouraged, actually.

I'll put this as a plug, but I was encouraged at the end when we were leaving, we were trying to make our way out.

And one of their guards or people they have that kind of move around the museum and do security and just check on people, when

I was doing our tour, we had maybe about 25 or 30 other people that weren't part of us that gathered on because they heard me speaking.

And while I have an open air preaching voice, so I could be heard without amplification. And when

I went to leave, he grabbed me and pulled me aside. And he said, hey, I just want to thank you.

That presentation you did was so good. I learned so much. And that was encouraging for someone that works in the museum.

And here's these tour guides doing this over and over. And he felt that he learned from what we had presented.

And so as you enter into the history of the Bible, we go into looking at the first part where they talk about our shared foundation.

And what they talk about these different accounts like that with Gilgamesh things like this of shared accounts where we see records of a creation event, record of a flood event in different areas of the world.

Now, many people try to use that against us. Christians say, see, Moses, he's just repeating a story that's been told over and over and over again.

And yet, what you end up seeing is that the amount of similarity is striking in all these stories.

Yes, there's some differences. But the similarity is where we focus. Why? Because here, think about this.

Across a world where they didn't have the internet, you didn't have people that would be able to communicate with one another.

And all of them have such detail. A worldwide flood with eight people that survived through a boat with two of every kind of animal.

That's a lot of similarity to have in there. Much detail. And the argument is, well, they copied one person wrote it down and they copied it from another, copied it to another.

And that's why the story gets repeated. And the account of Gilgamesh, we think, is older in its writing than that of Moses' writing in Genesis.

And they say that, therefore, Gilgamesh was first and Moses just copied it. But if you think about it, would

Moses actually have access to these other writings? Not likely. These are not world travelers.

These are not people who had an internet and easy ways to disseminate information across long distances.

So to have documents that are in the east reaching all the way to the west and vice versa, not likely to happen.

More likely is that they're each recording actual events that they knew of, that after the

Tower of Babel, when they were spread, they knew of the accounts, they wrote these things down. And yes, in different areas, there were some differences.

But the similarities are what's so striking because the similarities across those areas, you wouldn't be able to see that without seeing the fact that there must have been an actual event that they're all reporting back to.

Now, the argument that so many people make that, well, if you have these similarities, it must be that one person copied it from another.

We don't have that any time in history. Think back to 9 -11. Some of us actually remember that time.

How many reports were there? A lot of them. Did they have a lot of similarities? 19 hijackers, two planes, two towers,

Pennsylvania, the Pentagon. A lot of similarity in details, but yet there was lots of differences too.

Why? Because they were all reporting the same event. And that's what you end up happening with the creation accounts and the flood accounts across the world.

You have people that knew those events, knew of those events, repeated those events.

And as they moved to different areas after the Tower of Babel, they ended up having those events where they wrote them down and they wrote them differently.

But we know that the one that's recorded in Genesis is accurate because, well, the author is God and therefore it's correct.

Now, we passed through there and we saw an amazing thing that is there. And they have these two cylinders.

And one of the things that they talk about is the fact that we don't have a lot of Bibles that are in parchment that are that old because, well, it deteriorates.

And we talked about the Dead Sea Scrolls. That was a tour we went on is going through the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient texts.

But the things that last are those things on stone. And so they show you these stones, the first stone where we end up seeing the name

Yahweh. They have the first stone that mentions the Israelites and things like that. But the one that's very interesting, there's two stones.

First was the Nebuchadnezzar. And in the Nebuchadnezzar cylinder, and cylinder because it's round and so you could read it and you spin it.

And the thing that's so interesting is that Book of Daniel has so much prophecy, so detailed of the prophecy that it has that the liberal scholars for years argued that Daniel was a much later writing.

They argued that Daniel was written after the time of Christ, that it would have been after the

Roman Empire because it details specifically and names by name the

Greek Empire and the Roman Empire. But it predicts the Medo -Persian Empire during the

Babylonian Empire. So in the Babylonian time, here's Daniel writing that there's going to be 70 years.

The Medo -Persians are then going to come in. After the Medo -Persians, you're going to have the Greece. Now it doesn't mention the

Medo -Persians by name, but it mentions the Greece, mentions Rome, describes their armies, describes details.

And you end up having all that. And yet so much of this was criticized because of two things.

One, the prophecies they said they must have been after the fact. The other thing that caused it to be criticized was the fact that Nebuchadnezzar hadn't been known in history until the

Nebuchadnezzar Scroll. When the Nebuchadnezzar Scroll was discovered, there was the first that we had a record of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and that supported what the

Bible said. That was one of two arguments made against the book of Daniel. Now by the way, Daniel gives us a roughly 490 year period from when basically you'd have

Messiah come on the scene. So not only was it criticized because Nebuchadnezzar wasn't mentioned, but it was criticized because Daniel says that when this

King Cyrus comes on the scene, you'd be able to start counting. Because he mentions that Cyrus is going to put this decree out.

When you have this decree, start counting 490 years. You're going to start predicting, here's how long it's going to take to rebuild

Jerusalem. Here's how long it's going to be before Messiah comes on the scene. And so you have that in there.

Now that's pretty detailed. It's a timeline. You could check it. Christ came right on time.

Here's the thing. There was a king called Cyrus that was questioned. You don't see him.

You don't see mention of this. And yet, if you remember, the

Medo -Persian Empire comes in. And during that empire, you had this event where there was a king that's mentioned.

And we know of Darius and Cyrus. And you look at this, and there becomes this question because Cyrus wasn't mentioned in history until the

Cyrus scroll. Well, the Cyrus cylinder, sorry. And you end up seeing that on display where Cyrus is now found in history.

Now, as you think about that, and you go through this museum, and you start looking at the Dead Sea Scrolls, another thing ends up coming about with the

Book of Daniel. And you end up realizing that when these shepherds found these scrolls, it predated the oldest copy we had of the

Old Testament by a thousand years. That's very important. Why? Because it pushes the date of the

Book of Daniel, for example, prior to Christ, prior to Rome.

So the argument that this was something that was written after Christ, and that's how come Daniel got these prophecies so right.

And the argument is that there's different Daniels. That's how liberals argue it, that there was an early Daniel, and then the later

Daniel that did the prophecies after they came to fruition. But he wanted to make it look like they were really prophecies.

But now that we have copies of the Book of Daniel that predate Christ, predate

Rome, that argument has problems. Yes. But the

Dead Sea Scrolls come into help in another way. Because as you go through the Museum of the Bible, we came across, after we got through there, to these different things that they have on display.

And one of them is called the Isaiah Scroll. The Isaiah Scroll is wonderful.

Because just like Daniel was criticized for all of its prophecies and its detailed prophecies of Messiah coming,

Isaiah is probably the book that most people think of when we think of fulfillment of prophecy.

Because so much of the Book of Isaiah talks about prophecies of the Messiah. And the liberal scholars, again, used to argue that there was two, three, even sometimes four

Isaiahs that wrote the Book of Isaiah. Some that were early. Some that would be further.

But the last one would be the one that wrote after the time of Christ. And he, of course, wrote all the prophecies, writing them back into the

Bible so that it looked like future prophecies, but actually it wasn't prophecies.

It was after the fact, and he wrote it back in. That was the argument that was held for 100 plus years by liberal scholars.

That there were multiple Isaiahs writing at different times and collecting these things, and then they were put together as one

Book of Isaiah. And what we end up seeing in the Dead Sea Scrolls is we see a copy of Isaiah, exactly as the one that we would have today.

Functionally no differences in an entire book. And that shows that this wasn't a later writing.

And what becomes important about it? That, again, is pre -Christ. So now we have a

Book of Isaiah that has detailed prophecies of the Messiah that are much earlier than the people predicted.

And therefore, we end up realizing that the Isaiah Scroll supports the argument that we have a

God who wrote His Word prophetically and provided for us a way to know that Jesus Christ was the

Messiah. So we realize that Isaiah 53 wasn't something that was written in later.

That was something that was written in the original Book of Isaiah. We have that whole scroll there.

It is wonderful to be able to look at that and see the writing and see that we have the same

Book of Isaiah that we have today prior to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And that's one of the things you end up seeing that Dead Sea Scrolls supported so much of. You know, as we continue to go through, we ended up also seeing things about the

Gnostic Gospels. And they talk about that. And the Gnostic Gospels are so clear. We loved the guy that we had.

He so clearly made sure to mention Gnostic Gospels were not part of the canon. They were never seen as part of Scripture.

Here's one of the interesting things that I presented to folks that maybe not everyone knows about. But there's so much talk about the

Gnostic Gospels and that they were taken out of the Bible. And somehow they should have been put in the

Bible. And what they don't realize is when we look at the Gnostic Gospels, there really wasn't a lot of them.

Why is that important? Because when you end up looking at the Scriptures, we look at what we call the

Bible and we look at them. That was a message that was so important that the early church was copying them as quickly that they could and passing them out as fast as they could.

Just like people today, we want to make Bibles available to everyone. We buy them in large quantities to hand out to people.

We have missions that go out and try to get Bibles around the world. We have people that do translations of Bibles.

And we're going to talk about that. Trying to translate them into multiple languages. We had the same thing in the first century because the message of the

New Testament was so important. They wanted to get that out. So what do they do? They copy it as quick as they can.

And as they're copying it, they're copying what they knew was Scripture. So when we have the

Gnostic Gospels, we end up seeing there's not very many copies of them. In fact, the one that's talked about the most that should have been in the

Bible, as the liberals say, would be the Gospel of Thomas. And yet, what do we see when we look at something like the

Gospel of Thomas? We only have about three copies of them. That's not a whole lot. When you look at the rest of the

New Testament, we have hundreds, if not thousands of copies of different books of the

New Testament. And we only have three. And here's the interesting thing you see about those three. What you see about those three is that two of them are scrolls.

And one of them is a codex. What's a codex? A codex is when you take, basically, you end up taking it parchment and you would press these leaves together and be able to make it into a page.

And then you could sew those pages together into a book. So the Christians actually used a book, much like we have today, where people used to have scrolls.

These book forms were much easier to copy from, copy onto, pass around.

They were much smaller. And therefore, you could easily travel with them. So it probably, as Dan Wallace says, was the first and only time that the

Christian church was ahead of the technological curve because it was the church that used these codexes, these books, more than any other.

And so they used to use scrolls. So here becomes the thing. When we look at something like the Gospel of Thomas, we see that we have one copy of it in book form.

But because of all the notes that are found in it, they realize that this was someone's personal copy that they used for study.

It wouldn't have been something that was used in a church. Also, what do we find? We find that when we look at the scrolls that they have, one was very small.

And that would have been used more for personal use. So there was only one that we have that would be used not for personal use.

And again, it's a scroll. Why does that become important? Because what we end up seeing is that the first century church didn't use scrolls.

They used these codexes, these books. Which tells us that what we have, at least, of the book of the

Gospel of Thomas is that there weren't very many of them. It wasn't something that the church, the early church, felt important enough for us to copy down and make copies of over and over because we don't have a lot of them.

Furthermore, the copies we have mostly were used for personal use, not for that which would be in a church service.

So it's hard to believe that these books should have been included in the Bible when we have no evidence that they were used in churches or seen as important by churches, just comparatively.

And that's one of the ones we have more of. These Gnostic Gospels, we just don't have a lot of them.

We find them much later. We find very few of them because they weren't important enough to the early church.

Now, many people would say, well, the Council of Nicaea, that's when we got the Bible. Well, we have all the books of the

Bible before that, but what do you see at Nicaea? At Nicaea, they had a canon that they compared things like the

Gospel of Thomas to. What was it they compared it to? Well, the Bible that we have today.

That's right. The books of the Bible were already accepted at the time. That's how they could have a canon to compare against.

The canon was this way of comparing these other books to the books that were already accepted.

So when people try to say that we didn't have a Bible until the Catholic Church gave it to us in the Council of Nicaea in 324, the problem with that is, is that they already had the canon before that.

That's how they could compare these other books to the canon. If you don't have a canon, you don't have anything to compare to.

And so we had these books already. And so we got done through the history of the

Bible, and we went to one of my favorite rooms there. One of, because actually the history of the

Bible is my favorite room where we go through and we end up seeing so much of these ancient texts.

But that's probably boring for some folks because they don't like textual criticism. I do. But we got to one area that was great because you walk into this oval -shaped room and in this room, you see all of the, basically all the

Bibles, all the languages that we have in the world. And they're all color -coded. Everywhere in this room, about 40 % of the room, you see a

Bible and it's color -coded. It's color -coded in two ways, either where we have the entire

Bible, Old and New Testament translated, or it'll have a lighter brown where it's just the

New Testament translated into those languages. And so you can look at all the languages in the world where we have a

Bible translated in that language. And they have these graphics up, which are great, and I forget the numbers offhand, but they have a graphic to tell you how many languages were first written so that they would have a

Bible. When I was out at Justin Peters and Jim Osmond's church, Jim Osmond's the pastor out there in Kootenai Community Church, and Justin Peters introduced me to a friend of his who goes to that church, who is a missionary, and actually created a language that had never had a written language.

And he created a written language so that he could translate the Bible into a language that they would have the

Bible to be able to read. And so one of his Bibles is up there in the Museum of the

Bible where they've created a language just so they could have a written Bible. And you see all of these languages, and it covers the world.

And you see about 60 % where they have more color -coding from a tannish all the way down to a yellow where they have some of the

Bible being translated, where they've got at least a portion of the New Testament translated, and then another coding where they've at least started a

Bible translation, and then the whole bunch of them where nothing has started. And their goal is to fill that room with Bibles by 2030 to get the

Bible translated into every language. Why is that important? Well, that is important because if you've listened to my previous rap reports where I deal with people like Rabbi Tovia Singer or Ben Shapiro and their arguments that Jesus couldn't have been the

Messiah, Rabbi Tovia Singer makes the argument that when the Messiah comes, that the word of God would spread across the world, across the land like water to the sea.

And his argument is that Jesus couldn't be the Messiah because the word of God has not spread across the world through the

Jewish people. Notice the part that he added in. See, Ezekiel doesn't mention that it's the

Jewish people that are gonna spread the word of God around the world. And so when I walk into that room in the Museum of the

Bible, I'm amazed because here's what I see. I end up seeing in there that here was the word of God spread literally across the world like water to sea.

You see, that fulfillment has been made. The Bible has been copied all over the land into many different languages so that everywhere in the world...

See, you could go to China where there's many, many different dialects and you have all these different dialects.

And with all the different dialects that you have there, you still have the word of God in the main

Mandarin. Even though all the other dialects may not have it, most people in China can read Mandarin if they can read.

And so what you have is the word of God spreading across the world, across the globe. And that is just as was prophesied in the

Old Testament. So when Rabbi Tobias Singer says that, well, he couldn't be the Messiah. Jesus couldn't be the

Messiah because this hasn't been fulfilled. I look in that room and say, really, really?

The word of God hasn't spread across the world like water to sea. No, that actually shows you the fulfillment of that passage of scripture.

And that's the amazing, some of the amazing things we ended up seeing as we went through the Museum of the Bible. It was great just walking through.

Now, I know the museum has gotten a lot of grief because people want to see more of the gospel.

And they do it in different ways. When we first entered, I think it was the third floor. I forget if it was the second or third floor.

And they go through the Bible's impact on America. And you end up hearing over and over again, the preaching of George Whitefield calling people to repentance.

You end up going, they have a whole room dedicated to Billy Graham, where over and over, no matter where you walk in that room, you hear him preaching the gospel over and over in every room.

So yes, you're not going to see every single display presenting the gospel. But you have a whole floor dedicated to Jesus of Nazareth.

And you go through that and you're hearing what Jesus came for and why he came and what he did. So over and over again, the gospel is there.

Maybe not in the way that many of us evangelists would like to have it so overtly. But I'm hoping that they'll take a recommendation that I made to one of the folks there to basically put gospel tracts out more to outside of the area of Jesus Nazareth.

And I could just say, why did Jesus come? I may actually think about writing a tract and giving it to them so that they could put it out there.

But the reality is you do hear the preaching of George Whitefield powerfully preaching the biblical gospel and doing it wonderfully.

So we had a great time. I hope that you might be encouraged by some of what you might be able to see when you go to the

Museum of Bible. Because if you go there, you see so much rich history that we have in the history of the

Bible that tells us that our Bible can be trusted. And I didn't even get into all the textual criticism that I like to talk about as we go through that.

Maybe I'll save that for another podcast. But it is something that I hope you'd go check that out.

If you go down there, if you want to have us give you one of our guided tours, let us know.

We do take teams through there. Again, you could just email us at info at strivingforeternity .org or you could go to strivingforeternity .org,

go to the website there, go to contacting us and let us know you'd like one of our tours. By the way, give you some insights on what we're doing at Striving for Eternity.

We're preparing more tours like that. We're working on a tour to Israel that we're looking to do in 2020.

We're working on a tour that Dr. Anthony Silvestro is probably going to lead going through the

Great, sorry, the Grand Canyon. And also he might do some tours. If he does these now, if you're interested, if you'd like one of our tours through the

Creation Museum or the Ark Encounter, Dr. Anthony Silvestro will guide you through those.

And so these are just some of the tours that we have and do. And so I hope that you're encouraged to know that you can trust that the

Bible you hold in your hands is very, very reliable. Now, as we continue with our look at the attributes of God, as we're doing through our podcast, looking at different attributes,

I wanna deal with the next attribute right after this. Sharing the good news with Mormons includes 24 helpful essays from two dozen

Christian apologists, scholars, and pastors. Pick up your copy at the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore or order directly from mrm .org.

And I was privileged to be one of the 20 plus authors for that book.

I wrote a chapter on doing open air evangelism, not a popular topic, but I know that there are many different topics in there.

And you say, well, I don't really evangelize to Mormons very much. I think it's a great book for evangelism period because it gives you 20 plus different ways of evangelizing

Mormons, but you can apply many of them to evangelism period. My chapter on open air evangelism can be applied anywhere on a public street.

Matt Slick has one on the reliability of scripture and how to argue for that. That could be applied anywhere that you have these professing atheists argue that the

Bible's not reliable. There's a whole lot that you could learn. And the nice thing about that because of the way those chapters are done, you could pick up any chapter and read it completely independent of the others.

And so you could pick that up at strivingforeturning .org in our store if you want to get that. So this week, last week, we looked at the attributes of God and his incomprehensibility.

What I'd like to look at this week, so incomprehensibility is the idea that we can't know everything there is to know about God, but what he does reveal to us, that we can know, that we should obey and teach to our children.

And what we look at this week, as we look at this, we end up seeing that this week's attribute is the immutability of God.

And when we look at the immutability of God, this is the fact that God does not change.

That we end up seeing that God is, well, let's read what it says in Hebrews 13, because this is very clear for us.

And what we end up seeing there is that it will say that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So this is speaking of Jesus Christ though, but Jesus Christ is God. So Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

So once you recognize that Jesus is God, you have no problem with that. And it is the idea that God doesn't change.

Why is that important? That's important because if God is the same and doesn't change and is incapable of change, that he cannot change, then what you have is the promises he makes will be kept.

That he's not gonna be an ogre in the Old Testament and loving in the New Testament, as some try to argue.

No, he's the same God of the Old Testament as he is the New Testament. And you also can see this, such as in James 1, verse 17, when it says, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the

Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

So you see, he's not gonna change in any way. That is encouraging because what we end up seeing is that if he is not going to change, he's not going to say,

I'm gonna promise you this now and then change my mind later, or I'm gonna treat you one way now and treat you differently later.

Therefore, as I've said, maybe in the past on this podcast, I've told you that I pray through the attributes of God.

And this is what I have in my prayer list when it comes to this attribute. I pray the fact that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

God does not change. Therefore, Israel was not consumed. That's Malachi 3, verse 6, where he says, for I, the

Lord, do not change. Therefore, you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.

You ever wonder why you see all these nations of old that have disappeared, and yet they're still in Israel today?

Because God promised that. He doesn't change. And I don't need to fear that God's gonna change his mind or his promises.

I'm not gonna have to fear that God is gonna promise that I'm going to have a place with him in heaven. But, you know, he may change his mind later and that may not be what he's gonna do.

No, the fact is that as we see, we end up looking and seeing that God never changes.

God's the same today as he was in the New Testament times, as he was in the

Old Testament times, and as he will be for eternity. His nature is one that cannot change.

That is encouraging. When you think about the gods that men make up, the Roman gods, the

Greek deities, you look at them and what do you end up seeing? You end up seeing people who just would just be whimsical.

They could change on a dime. What do you do with that? You have no way of trusting in a

God that can be different in the future. Because if he could be different in the future, then you can't trust for what he says to you.

So when he makes a promise to you, you don't know that that promise is gonna be kept. That may be a promise for today, but not tomorrow.

You see, so it is encouraging for us to know that God never changes.

And so that's one of the things that we end up seeing about the attributes of God.

Now another thing that we want to do, I have shared this with you guys last week, I want to start just reading random things from Bible encyclopedias and Bible dictionaries.

Why? Because the more we end up reading these things, the more we end up learning.

If you do this every day, if you just get a Bible dictionary, or a Bible encyclopedia, and just read it, it is going to help you when you read the

Bible, you're going to have a better understanding of the background, of the culture, of the history, and the

Bible itself, the people. And so I've just opened to a random area. So, sorry,

I don't get to choose. Well, I do get to choose. I could choose to do something different. But here I've just opened up to my

Bible dictionary, and I'm using today the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. I opened to strong drink.

And so that is what we're going to learn about today on this segment. So what is strong drink in the

Bible? Well, according to Baker's Encyclopedia of the Bible, it says, strong drink, any intoxicating liquor, it was forbidden to Levites who were entering the tent of meeting,

Leviticus 10 .9, to those who take a Nazarite vow, to kings and rulers, and to John the

Baptist. The writer of Proverbs 20, verse 1, suggests that the wise men do not become intoxicated by it.

Isaiah pronounces a woe on those who are addicted to it. That's chapter 5, verses 11 and 22.

Strong drink was used as a liberation in the Levitical sacrifice,

Numbers 28 .7, and was permitted in the menu of the feasts at the time of tithing,

Deuteronomy 14 .26. And you could also see more in there about wine. So when it comes upon and you learn about strong drink, you now have a little bit more to understand that strong drink was different than wine.

It was something that was an intoxicating liquor. It was something that was forbidden by many to be able to have.

And it is suggested that it's something that you should not partake of. And yet it was used or described as being part of a menu for a feast.

And so that's something if you come across that in your Bible, you now know a little bit more about strong drink.

And I hope that's helpful just in getting a background of more that you can learn from Scripture.

So I hope you've been encouraged. I hope that you've been strengthened. Next week, we are going to be at G3. And I hope to have some interviews from G3.

And you'll be able to hear them here in the Wrap Report. If you've listened to Wretched Radio, you already know because, well,

Todd spilled the beans. We will be having Todd Friel coming on to the podcast to talk about discernment.

He mentioned that on his podcast. And so that's going to probably be coming soon after we end up giving some interviews that we hope to get at G3.

If you are at G3, please come up to our table. Why? Because we are giving away a lot of books.

I don't want to drive home with any of them. But we're bringing down about 2 ,000 books to give away.

And that is provided because we have donors that help with this. But we're looking to do two things.

We want to let you know about the Christian Podcast community. And we want to raise donors.

We want to see if we can get more support so that we could do more things and give away more products.

And also so that we could do things like going to the Philippines. Did I say Philippines? I said

Philippines. We're going to the Philippines. Both Justin Peters and I will be headed to the Philippines to basically do some discernment conferences down there.

And there is nothing but word of faith out there and bad teaching. And when you have some

Americans come, everybody comes to listen to the Americans. And so we want to capitalize on that.

The problem is the churches in the Philippines, they can take care of our housing while we're down there, our food.

They just can't get us there. And so we're counting on monthly supporters to be able to get us out there.

And so if you want to support this, you can go to strivingforeternity .org slash donate and help us on a monthly basis would be greatly appreciated.

But if you can, even a one -time gift that helps us to get out there. And you'll be able to just market that it's for Striving for Eternity or it's for the conferences, whatever you want.

They'll end up knowing that we're being blessed by you. But what it really is, is you're blessing others.

I mean, think about it. Not many of us can get over to the Philippines to be able to teach them good biblical discernment.

You might not be able to go, but you can help guys like Justin and I get out there so that they can learn truth.

And that's some of the ways that we are hoping to raise support for our G3. So at G3, we're going to be giving away what do we believe, what do they believe.

Those were both written by myself. We're going to be giving away On the Origin of Kinds, which was written by Dr.

Anthony Silvestro. And then we're also going to be giving away the book that we just played the ad for,

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. So those are four books that we're going to give away depending on what we're giving those away to people who sign up as donors and say, well,

I just want to get something free. We're going to have things that are free. If you subscribe to all the podcasts on the

Christian podcast community, we're going to be giving away free CDs, maybe even some free DVDs.

We're pulling all that together. So we have free things for you. We have lots of books to give away for you.

If you're at G3, make sure you come up to our table and talk to us. And we'd be happy to give you some free stuff.

So we'll be away at G3. Come back with some great interviews, I hope. And we will have some very interesting podcasts coming up.

I have some interviews actually set up. One for folks who like mixed martial arts.

I don't know how many folks do, but I'm trying to work out. I actually went to school with someone who happens to be one of the well -known boxing coaches there.

We're going to talk about how he as a Christian ministers and shares the gospel with these guys and what his view is with martial arts and things like that.

We already mentioned Todd Friel's coming on. So be checking them out. Let your friends know if this has been a blessing to you.

If you got some teaching out of this, let others know. You can write a review for us on iTunes or any of those.

Now, let me correct this because I know a lot of people would say, oh, write a review because we get to higher in the iTunes charts.

Writing a review does absolutely nothing for that. You know what it does? It encourages our hearts. It is an encouragement to us.

We got a new review in that just says, thorough. Andrew does a great job of taking time and reviewing many different sides of a story as well as thoroughly explaining his beliefs.

That is an encouragement to me to see something like that. Now, does it help our ratings in iTunes?

No, actually it doesn't. It doesn't do anything for iTunes, but it does encourage my heart to see that.

Another podcast review that we had gotten, I don't know if I read this one from insightfulmoney .fm.

That's a podcast out there. He says, thoughtful daily ministry in two minutes. This is a great short -form podcast that explores pop topics,

Christian interpretations, and scripture. I like Andrew Rappaport's thoughtful approach and delivery.

If you want a quick daily dose of theology to feed your spirit, definitely subscribe.

He's referring to the Rappaport Daily. That's a Monday through Friday two -minute. For folks who just want something quick each morning, go subscribe to the

Rappaport Daily. That used to be on this feed. It's not anymore. It's now on its own. Those are two podcasts that you could subscribe to.

Let me mention some others since I'm mentioning podcasts. Some other podcasts that you can get on the

Christian Podcast Community, which actually is its own podcast. You should subscribe to Christian Podcast Community.

I'll tell you why. January 28th, it's coming. Christian Podcast Community is going to be having their 2018 podcast reviews.

We are going to be reviewing what we think are the best Christian podcasts and the best Christian podcast episode of 2018.

Most of you are thinking, oh, it's all the big -name people. No, actually, there's some folks, and they've already been notified who they are that have already been nominated.

We're going to reveal them and let you know who we think were voted as the best

Christian podcasts. Some of the other podcasts you could be listening to at the Christian Podcast Community, which you can get to at christianpodcastcommunity .com.

Sorry, I think that's .org. One of them, maybe even both of them. So, christianpodcastcommunity .org.

You can get The Apologetics Live. The Apologetics Live is a podcast that you could get.

That one is every Thursday night. My friend Matt Slick and I, we go and basically go online, do a live show where people call in answering apologetics questions, and then that gets turned into a podcast.

There's also a new one coming called So You Want to Be a Podcaster. If there's any of you interested in podcasting, check it out, because we're going to give you all the tools and techniques and teach you everything you need to know about how to podcast.

And as of this recording, not when it dropped, but as of this recording, we now have a new podcast, and that is

Theology Gals. Theology Gals has now moved over. And starting this week, they're on the

Christian Podcast Community feed. They used to be on their own, and they wanted to come over and be part of us.

And that wasn't actually originally, even though Colleen from Theology Gals is the administrator of the Christian Podcast Community, she wasn't sure she actually wanted to be part of the community.

People were like, well, how's that? And it was just because she wasn't sure what was going to be best for her podcast, and she ended up realizing that as she was working with the community and realizing what we were looking to do, she really saw the value in this.

So if you're a Christian podcaster out there, maybe you want to be part of us, you can go to the website strivingforeturning .org.

There's a page to fill out there and say, I'm interested in podcasting. Let us know you're interested in the application for being part of the

Christian Podcast Community. Look forward to seeing you next week, and remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.