Scripture and the Modern Day "Prophets and Apostles"

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The afternoon session after lunch is always dangerous, the speaker's tired, you just ate, and this is the time of greatest danger of snoring.
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So I would like to invite you all to show Christian love and compassion for your neighbor who if he or she begins to snore, have compassion on the rest of us and poke them in the ribs.
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You don't want me to have to make reference to you from the pulpit and forever be marked by that.
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Now I'm not certain what I'm supposed to do here, I was handed a copy of the King James Only Controversy and I guess
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I'm supposed to tell you that they're available. Is that what I was supposed to do? Where did Rudolph go? Boy, when
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Rudolph leaves then you know that something's going on. I didn't know whether you had them or not, looks like you actually have a,
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I saw the, oh there you go, so I'm supposed to let people know they are available.
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They are available, good, well they are, there you go. I'm not sure, there are other books available too, and in fact
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I just signed a copy of Letters to a Mormon Elder, which is one of my first books, and that particular one
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I still love the cover on because I designed that cover, and it has the young lady, it's supposed to be a missionary's desk, it has all the stuff that Mormon missionaries would recognize, and the picture on it is of my wife, so I've always thought that was sort of funny, that my wife ended up being the girlfriend of a
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Mormon missionary, but anyway, and the lamp on that one is sitting on my desk in my office right now, it has survived all those years.
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I wrote that in 1989, so it's still there.
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Anyway, our subject for this, I think, 40, 45 minutes, 40,
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I don't know, when am I supposed to get done again? 1 .30
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to quarter after, so 40 minutes, 40 minutes, yes? What?
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50 from now, so 20 after, 25 after, whatever.
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I can't be blamed for not being on time if I don't know what time I'm supposed to stop, so that's,
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I'm sorry, say what you need to say. Well, that's always a dangerous thing to do, that's a dangerous thing.
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I just want to make sure to leave enough time for questions, so I'll go for about 45 and see how that works out.
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The topic really sort of seems like a major shift from what we've been saying, but it really isn't.
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If you recall this morning, we looked at what the Chicago Statement said, and one of the things that it affirmed was the sufficiency of Scripture and the cessation of special revelation, and the cessation of special revelation is not something that is meant to protect a particular ecclesiastical body from challenge by new bodies that rise up or something along those lines.
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The reason that we believe in the cessation of divine revelation is because of the culmination, the fact that the final revelation in Jesus Christ is of God himself in the flesh.
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There can't be anything greater than that. Everything before the cross pointed to the cross, everything since then points back to the cross as the center point of history itself.
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The birth, ministry, death, resurrection of Jesus Christ, the very center point of history itself.
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And so once the result of that central revelation is recorded for us in the form of the teachings of the apostles of Jesus Christ, now
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I want to make a distinction here. An apostle of Jesus Christ is a specific office and calling that existed only in the days of Christ.
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Now there are people who are called apostles, and apostolos just simply means a sent one, and so you can come up with generic meanings of apostle if you wish, but apostle of Jesus Christ, there were specifics as to what defined someone who could be an apostle of Jesus Christ.
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And you recall that when Judas was shown to be what he was and was no longer with the apostolic band, that early in the book of Acts it was decided that they needed to choose an apostle to bring the number back to 12.
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They didn't choose 3, 4, 5, 10, or 20. There were to be 12 apostles.
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Now personally, the casting of lots and things like that, have you ever noticed from my perspective there's nothing said in that text about God commanding this to be done?
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And I am one of those folks, and this is not this is not an issue for debate or anything else.
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I'll bet you anything someone's been saying up here and preaching when an accident has taken place out there.
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What do you think? And he ended up being called as a witness, because you can see right out the door.
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So if I hear screeching tires, I'm going, oh, okay, all right. Don't want to be called as a witness.
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Anyway, there's nothing said in that text about God being involved. I'm personally one of those folks that thinks that number 12 came along in God's time a little later, and his name was
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Paul. And that number 12 remains important, because how many foundations are there in the heavenly city?
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Twelve, and what's written on them? That number 12 and the apostles of the
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Lord Jesus Christ remains an important issue for the church, and even Paul in writing the church in Ephesus talks about the church being built upon a foundation stone.
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The cornerstone is Jesus Christ, and the foundation is apostles and prophets. And it's a foundation.
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You build a church upward from the foundation, you don't keep laying the foundation. Now, this is an issue
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I've had to deal with down through my ministry, because as I was just mentioning in my book,
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Letters to a Mormon Elder, the Mormon Church, I've lost count now.
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I used to pride myself in keeping exact count as to how many apostles the
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Mormon Church had had. The last number I had was around 94, and they've had a few since then.
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So they may be getting close to over a hundred apostles. Not right now, but I mean, in Mormonism they have a
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Council of the Twelve, and then they also have what's called the First Presidency. So generally, when everyone's ticking and everyone's alive, there are twelve apostles and three members of the
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First Presidency. There are 15 living apostles of Jesus Christ in any one time, all of whom can receive revelation from God that could be placed into the canon of the
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LDS Scriptures. So there you have what it looks like when you have someone who takes, who took seriously, they don't take it seriously anymore, but who took seriously the idea, well, if we've got apostles, then we need to have an open canon.
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And theoretically, they still have an open canon. Theoretically, they could add further what are called revelations to what's called the
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Doctrine and Covenants. They haven't done that in forever because, you know,
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Joseph Smith got revelations every day, but they discovered that that's sort of a dangerous thing when you let other people do that because they end up being contradictory.
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That's a problem. So anyway, this is something I've had to deal with for a long, long time, is this idea of the foundational nature of who the apostles were and what their ministry was.
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And it's directly associated and directly connected with the concept of the sufficiency of Scripture.
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If it is God's intention to be constantly expanding the canon, and let's leave weird stuff like Mormonism out for the moment, which is clearly contradictory to biblical
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Christianity. Let's talk about people who would at least formally be
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Trinitarian, who would at least formally agree with the major tenets of the
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Christian faith in regards to monotheism, the cross, the resurrection, some things like that.
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What about those who would say that while there is not special revelation any longer, there is new revelation that isn't canonical, but it's still revelation and authoritative from God?
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What do you do with something like that? How do you respond to something like that? Well, of course, from my perspective, my immediate question is, well, where do you find this functioning or at least prophesied possibly in the pages of Scripture itself?
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Where do you see this functioning? Are you saying that the church is to continually function as it did under the apostles, so that the apostolic age is always what we are supposed to have?
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Is that what we're supposed to do? Or are you saying that this is a new thing that has only come into existence in the past number of generations, but maybe was prophesied of, or maybe there's been a reestablishment of the apostolic period or something along those lines?
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And so, is the idea that the apostolic period was the pure period? That's always been something that many revivalist movements have been based upon, is we want to go back to the days of the apostles.
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Well, is that what the Holy Spirit of God intended? Let me give an example. Remember what happens in the very first days after the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit of God? You have miracles taking place.
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You have the event of Ananias and Sapphira, and man, all they did was hold back some of the price of something.
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They just told a little white lie, and boom, dead. And Peter's walking down the road, and if his very shadow falls upon a person, they're healed.
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Now, ask yourself a question. Is that what continued to happen even in the life of the apostles themselves?
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In Peter's experience? In Paul's experience? Because remember, the
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New Testament is recording for us earliest books are written in the 40s, so if the events narrated in Acts are somewhere around 33, 34, then the first books start being written maybe 10 to 15 years later.
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We know Paul's epistles are in the late 40s into the 50s. We can even attach certain names to secular documents and things like that, so we have a fairly decent idea when these things took place.
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And all the way through, you know, what's the latest? There's different theories, but we're moving a number of decades down the road from the time of this miracle -intensive initial establishment of the church, and something changes.
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Something changes. In Philippians chapter 2, we read these words from the
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Apostle Paul, right in the church of Philippi, "...but I thought it necessary to send to you
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Epaphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger and minister to my need, because he was longing for you all and was distressed because you had heard that he was sick.
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For indeed, he was sick to the point of death, but God had mercy on him and not only on him but also on me, so that I would not have sorrow upon sorrow.
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Therefore, I have sent him all the more eagerly, so that you, when you see him again, you may rejoice and I may be less concerned about you."
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Isn't that a little weird? I mean, how do you go from Peter's shadow falls upon someone and they're healed, to a few decades later, the
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Apostle Paul, right in the church of Philippi, says, "...I am just so thankful God had mercy on Epaphroditus.
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I would have had sorrow upon sorrow if he had died." Paul, you're an apostle. You've been bitten by a serpent and survived.
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You've seen the miraculous in your own life, Paul. Why didn't you just heal him?
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It seems extremely obvious that that was not something that the apostle could simply do on a whim, or especially to keep himself from experiencing sorrow upon sorrow.
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Why not just hope that Peter would come by and walk by so his shadow could fall upon him? I don't know about you, but I read 1 and 2
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Peter, and there's a lot about suffering, there's a lot about persecution, and it doesn't seem that Peter's shadow is healing anybody, even by the time
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Peter writes his epistles. What's happened? Well, some people would say they lost their fervor, even during the day of the apostles.
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I don't think so. I think what we need to recognize is there is a very special period of time at the founding of the church where the apostolic authority and apostolic message had to be established in a particularly bold fashion, especially in the context of the
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You must remember, the message of a crucified Messiah was a scandal to the
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Jewish people. That was not what they were expecting. That wasn't even what the apostles were expecting.
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Even after the resurrection, there is still a need for the apostles by the ministry of the
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Holy Spirit to really come to understand what the church was to be about, who
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Jesus was really about. Even they still had their traditions. And so, when you keep that in mind, you see a development away from that initial period of time of miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle, to where the normative situation is seen when
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Paul writes the Philippians, and he is thankful God still is healing, but he's not doing it by Peter's shadow or by the command of the apostle
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Paul. God's still a healer. He will always be the healer. But the reality is that as the church becomes established, as the apostolic message has become established, as the
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New Testament documents are being written, the necessity of that kind of everyday miracle establishment of authority becomes less and less.
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And this is where the problem is, because a lot of people want to say, I want to go back to the way it was back then, but that purpose no longer exists.
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God is a God of order, and he has given us now his word. He's given us his word.
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He's given us his spirit. And I know there's a lot of folks that don't think that's enough. And when
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I look around, I see the church constantly grasping after new things. They don't find the message of the gospel and the ministry of the spirit applying that message enough.
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There's got to be something else. I need to have something more exciting and something new.
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Well, I don't see that happening in the churches, in the New Testament itself.
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And so, what should be the normative situation in our experience today?
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Has the spirit become less powerful than he once was? No. The spirit can't age.
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The spirit can't lose power. Is the spirit powerful enough to raise men to spiritual life today?
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Well, we better believe it, or we might as well just close the doors and go home. That's been your experience if you're a believer here today.
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There was a time when God reached down and took out that heart of stone and gave you a heart of flesh. That's one of the greatest miracles that could ever take place.
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The world could never conceive of the fundamental nature of the fact that the very same power that raised
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Jesus from the dead raised you and I up from spiritual death as well.
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But you see, that's not flashy, not in the world's perspective. And if our theology isn't right and we think that we somehow have to trick people into the gospel and trick people into following Jesus and give them a reason that's flashier than whoever down the road is trying to get them to follow their religious perspective.
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If our theology is all wrong, then we're gonna start looking for stuff that we shouldn't be looking for. And so there is a fundamental issue of answering the question, do we believe?
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Do we believe that the scriptures are sufficient, or do we believe that there is a necessity for further revelation?
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And then once you have that decided, well, who's gonna give this revelation? Who's gonna impart this new information?
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And so when you keep this development that is found in the New Testament itself in mind, then you start testing the people who claim to be apostles and prophets.
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And we see in the writing of the seven churches in the book of Revelation that there was a testing of those who claimed those names.
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So if you encounter anybody who resists for a second a testing of their claims based upon the already established and already given word of God, automatically you're talking about a false prophet.
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Automatically you're talking about someone who is seeking their own enrichment.
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In fact, it's interesting, in one of the earliest written documents outside the
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New Testament, it's called the Didache, the teaching of the 12.
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It's a very, very early manual of discipline for the Christian church.
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And it's not an inspired document. I don't agree with everything that it says. It's an interesting snapshot from church history.
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But what's really fascinating about it is that it says, if any traveling preacher comes to your church, comes to your town, and stays more than, it's a pretty short period of time.
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If I recall, they're only supposed to stay overnight, and they can possibly stay a little bit longer given certain circumstances.
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I'm sorry? One night, maybe two. I thought there was a possible circumstance for maybe two.
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They stay longer than that, false prophet, false teacher. Now, it didn't say anything about whether they would be picky about whether it was a
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Jaguar or a BMW that they drove to the church from the airport, having flown their own private jet to the airport situation.
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But, because back then, nobody had actually dreamed that up yet. But that's what we face today in many situations.
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But there was a testing. And obviously, therefore, there was an appropriate honor to the scriptures that was shown in Acts chapter 17.
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When Paul came preaching the gospel to the Bereans, it said they were more noble -minded than those in Thessalonica, seeing they received the word of the
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Lord with all diligence, and they searched the scriptures daily to see whether those things were so.
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Now, the only scriptures they would have would have been the Old Testament. And so there was a recognition of one extremely important thing.
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The Roman church, to this day, emphasizes the concept of apostolic succession.
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Now, what does that mean? Well, there were many heresies and divisions in the early church.
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It was a tough time. The church was under persecution. The New Testament was not yet collected into one body.
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That took time. And some people developed the idea that what they could do is they could trace their authority back to one of the apostles.
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And that makes my teaching right, and this other guy's teaching wrong. There's only one problem with that.
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Everybody traced themselves back to the apostles in some way or another, whether it was a true tracing or not.
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I mean, it's funny, and I don't do this, but people will send me links who do.
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If I Google my own name, it's frightening, first of all. If I believed one -tenth of what
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I can read about myself online, I'd slap myself silly. And I wouldn't like myself ever again.
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I mean, it's just silly, the stuff that's online. But there's so many, I run into these people who claim to have debated me.
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Now, I've done a lot of debates, but I remember everybody I've debated. And so there's been a couple times that I've run into folks, like on Facebook, who were claiming to have debated me.
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So it's sort of like, really, tell me about this debate. Could you describe James for me?
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Where was this debate at? And stuff like that. And what it really was is they had sent an email to my ministry once.
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And that became, they debated me. And then they used that to promote themselves.
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So there's all sorts of folks in the early church. Well, you know, I trace my authority back through the
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Apostle Thomas. Really, really, you were taught by Thomas? Well, no, but I stayed at a
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Holiday Inn, he stayed at once. So the problem is this claim of apostolic authority, how do you prove it?
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I mean, do you have a selfie with Thomas that proves it? See, I knew the apostle, and so I have his authority.
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But it developed eventually into an extremely important concept in the early church of tracing authority in a linear fashion back to one of the apostles that gave you greater authority than somebody else.
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And eventually, it just simply became something that Rome claimed that only she possessed, no one else possesses this concept of apostolic succession, this concept of apostolic authority.
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And to this day, one of the long titles of the Bishop of Rome is successor of Peter and the blessed
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Paul and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, quite obviously, anybody can make that claim.
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Even the Mormons today claim that, because John the Baptist came back and gave the priesthood to Joseph Smith, so there you go.
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And nobody saw it, but they claimed it, so it must be true, right? And Peter, James, and John came back and gave him the
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Melchizedek priesthood, so there you've got apostolic succession. Now, I doubt there's anybody in this room, unless we have some
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Mormons attending, who actually believe that Peter, James, and John came back and gave something called the Melchizedek priesthood to Joseph Smith.
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But it illustrates the idea that this idea of apostolic authority still carries a lot of weight in the minds of people.
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But wait a minute, how would you test that? How were the churches in Revelation to test someone's claim of apostolic authority?
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And what I'm trying to get to is that, as the Bereans did, they heard the message, now there were new elements to the message.
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There's fulfillment, there's something greater in what Christ has done than anything the
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Old Testament could be used to specifically, you don't have the cross, you have the death of the
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Messiah, Isaiah 53, but there's no description of a towel -shaped cross or stuff like that.
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There's greater fulfillment. And so why is it that the Bereans are called noble -minded, in that they receive the word of the
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Lord with all diligence, and they search the scriptures daily to see whether those things were so? They recognize that there must be a consistency between the teaching of these people who claim to be the representatives of the
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Messiah, and what the scriptures themselves taught about the Messiah, about what salvation would mean, about the holy standards of God, the law of God, etc.,
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etc. There would have to be a consistency between these things. And it is shocking to me that when you look at those who today are making, well,
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I hope, I don't have to argue with anyone in this room today, that if you have a man or a woman or a man and woman together or whatever, literally making millions and millions of US dollars, jetting around the world, knocking people over with their
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Armani suits, or doing whatever else they do, that these are not people who are following in the footsteps of the apostles of the
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Lord Jesus Christ, who did not seek the wealth of this world, did not seek their own self -comfort, but gave themselves completely to the mission that was theirs.
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If you have people who are fulfilling their own lusts and lining their own pockets, do we really have to have an argument about whether God has blessed them?
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I hope not. I hope it's absolutely obvious that that is enough to disqualify such a person.
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But then look at the teaching. Look at the utter lack of meaningful exegesis and knowledge of what the word of God actually says.
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An ability to engage in a defense of the Christian faith. We're called to do that.
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Every Christian is called to give a reasoned defense of the hope that lies within them, is what the
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Apostle Peter said. And yet, for some reason, I never find these so -called apostles and prophets demonstrating in mosques that Jesus truly died upon a cross or defending the deity of Christ, I don't find them in the
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Juma Masjid in Durban explaining John 1 -1 or John 8 -58 or John 20 -28 in the very mosque in which
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Ahmed Didat taught. I don't find them there. I don't find these people to be true students of the word.
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I find them to be students of themselves. And so there is a basis for being able to test these individuals and to find them wanting, but obviously from the very start, the question for most of us should be, well, if what we see at the end, in the last writings of the
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New Testament, is what's going to be normative for the church, we don't see this kind of go back to the beginning revivalism and the idea of shadows causing, you know, we hear about all the time, people rising from the dead and these kind of things.
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And we've got certain people actually saying that you should place your loved ones in front of the television set so that they can be caused to rise from the dead and this kind of stuff.
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We don't see that happening in the mature, developed
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New Testament church. And so in essence, what we're saying when we try to reestablish those things is, well, even when the apostles were alive, there was a degradation.
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We're taking you back to even a more pure form of Christianity than even the apostles knew.
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And I can pretty much guarantee you, when someone comes up with that idea, they're going to come up with all sorts of other strange and odd teachings along the way because they are not subject to the spirit of God who has given us the word of God.
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They may have a spirit, but it's not the spirit of God. Remember, the spirit of God is the very spirit that gave us the scriptures.
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And so we will always have that touchstone. We will always have that standard by which we can test anyone who comes along and makes a claim to be speaking in that way.
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But certainly, for the mature believer, there should be the automatic recognition that this is not the kind of thing we should be looking for anyways.
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We should not be investing our time in having to constantly be dealing with these people. Instead, as God brought great light during the
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Reformation, a great light of the gospel taking us back to the teachings of the scripture in regards to justification, in regards to the sufficiency of scripture, the great solas of the
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Reformation, so on and so forth. As we have seen that maturing and that throwing off of the tradition that had been placed on top of the gospel, there's everything good about always saying semper reformanda, always reforming, because the church constantly needs to be brought back to its sole source of authority and life.
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The word of God made alive by the spirit of God. Those are the things that have been given to the church.
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But when you start having people come along and saying, that's not enough, those are individuals that are extremely dangerous to the church.
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And dangerous to the Christian experience. And I know in dealing with Muslims, there are few things they enjoy more than video recordings of what many of these people do in their meetings.
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And I know in talking with some of you down here in South Africa, some of the amazing behaviors that have been illustrated by people who call themselves apostles of Jesus Christ, call themselves prophet or prophetess.
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Some of the things they have done that have been just so completely outside of the biblical standards of discipline, sound mind, self -control, denial of self, focus upon the proclamation of the gospel, focus upon personal holiness.
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Have been so clearly abusive as leaders over others, clearly simply desiring to have followers and doing anything to obtain those things.
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Those people have brought tremendous shame upon the name of Jesus Christ in this land. And I know one of the things
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I have to deal with in talking to Muslims is they're not gonna make the distinction between someone like myself and someone like that.
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They're all talking about Jesus, right? So let's just hold them all accountable. And let's be honest, by the way, in return, we normally do the same thing.
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In other words, how many of us just automatically assume that when we see a
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Muslim somewhere in the world do something evil, that means every Muslim is represented by that one
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Muslim. If we do that to them, don't be surprised when they do it to us. I try to make distinctions between Muslims.
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I know there are Muslims who do not want to kill me and do not believe there's any circumstance where that would be appropriate for them to do.
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I just wish they would recognize that when someone stands up, when
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Pope Francis speaks, he does not represent me. Pope Francis' understanding of the gospel is utterly different than my own and contradictory to my own.
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I do not believe that we have a holy father. I do not believe that there is one particular appointed head of Christians upon the earth.
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I find the papacy not only to be unbiblical, but dangerously anti -biblical. And so don't hold me accountable for that, and don't hold me accountable for,
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I'll name some names here, but the Benny Hinn's of the world, the Joel Osteen's of the world, the
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T .D. Jake's of the world, don't hold me accountable for those people. What they teach and how they live,
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I find to be completely contrary to the teaching and the spirit of the word of God.
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So allow me to be me, judge me on the basis of what I teach and how I live, not on the basis of somebody else.
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And when someone comes along and fundamentally undercuts the
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Islamic God, and yet all they bring is a shallow teaching that of financial prosperity or something like that, if there was gonna be another apostle or prophet, don't you think they would bring further, deeper understanding of the deep things of God?
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How is it that most of them are barely Trinitarian, if Trinitarian at all? How is it that most of them are barely biblically literate?
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Why is that? Well, because they're not actually apostles or prophets of Jesus Christ, that's why.
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And they're just seeking after followers themselves. Paul warned us about them. Remember when he met with the
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Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20? He's on his way to Jerusalem, he knows he's gonna be arrested there, he knows bonds await him.
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And he calls the Ephesian elders to him in Acts chapter 20. And he says, I know that after I depart from you, ravenous wolves will enter into the flock, not sparing the sheep.
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Well, thanks, Paul, we appreciate your encouraging words as you're leaving. And isn't it interesting, that's pretty much the exact same thing that Paul said to Timothy in his last letter to him.
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Timothy, difficult times are gonna come. Men are gonna be lovers of self, lovers of money.
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And there's gonna be false teachers in the church. Men grow from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you remain convinced of what you have learned.
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And you, the man of God, look to that which is theanoustos, that which is God -breathed, which will equip you for what
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God calls you to do in the church. Nowhere does Paul say, just keep your eyes open for the new apostles. They'll be along soon enough.
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Don't worry, Timothy, they're gonna be along. Nothing like it. Both to the
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Ephesian elders and to Timothy, what are Paul's words? I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to give you an inheritance amongst the saints.
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In both situations, Timothy and the elders, they are committed not to looking for some future leader.
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Paul doesn't say, well, hate to tell you this, church, but it's gonna be
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April of 1830 before God reestablishes his church on the earth. That's the
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Mormon thing. Or it's gonna be later than that until the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society appears in New York, and you can get your watchtower in Awake magazines.
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Nowhere do you have any exhortation, look for new prophets, look for new apostles.
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No, they are the foundation. You don't keep laying a foundation. Have you ever built a building by laying the foundation over and over and over again?
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How many buildings exist that are just nothing but foundation from bottom to top? Don't really work too well that way, do they?
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You lay a foundation, then you lay a building. The foundation, apostles and prophets,
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Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Now, 2 ,000 years later, we're a number of floors up, thankfully.
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God continues to build his church. But you know what? If someone comes along and says, you need new apostles and prophets, what they're saying is the foundation wasn't good enough, we need to start all over again.
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And if Christ is the one who builds his church, what are you really saying? And I don't see how consistently one of these individuals cannot then go ahead and stand up to the standard and say, and yes,
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I can give you revelation that you need to start, this will work with our electronic
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Bibles. It doesn't work real well with printed Bibles because it's sort of hard to continuously be rebinding your
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Bible to add new pages at the end as you get new revelation. You know, just rip the cover off and have to get a bigger cover, or the binding's a mess.
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Electronically, though, it's just a matter of cut and paste. You know, that would work pretty well on our phones, I suppose. But hey, if you're going to claim to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, then we need the 28th book of the
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New Testament. But what's going to be the standard of examining that? Now, of course, theologically,
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I go, no, no, no, no, no, you don't, that doesn't even make sense. You've missed the finality of the revelation in Hebrews 1, has in these last days spoken unto us by his son.
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You've missed the whole intentionality of God giving to the church everything that we need to know to live in life and godliness.
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If you have to come up with something new, that means we haven't been given all that we need to know for life and godliness, right? But so I really can't respect someone who wants to use the title without then fulfilling the role.
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But that's what we face today, our people who are making these strange claims that are then presented to us in that way.
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So it is, to me, directly related to what we were talking about earlier, because it does strike at the sufficiency of Scripture.
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Because when you really think about it, these individuals are not promoting the idea that what we've been given is sufficient.
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It's somehow, either it was only sufficient in the past and has now become insufficient by something that has taken place in time, or we only thought it was sufficient and now we're getting the rest of the information.
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We're a privileged generation more than the preceding generations of Christians or something along those lines, which
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I know that there are some people who basically make that kind of argument. If that claim is not testable, if there is no way of testing for the consistency of the message, flee, run, do not give money, do not stop at go, do not collect $200, get out of there as quickly as possible.
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Because you are in a place of grave, grave spiritual danger.
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Okay? Do you have some... Okay.
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All right, why don't you come on up? Let's do the Q &A. We're just going straight into the Q &A, is that okay? Did you want to take a break?
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Yes, no, maybe? I've got a thumb up over there, I've got a thumb up over there. Straight into the
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Q &A. Okay. Question number one, do
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Christians today have the authority to drive out demons? Well, obviously, there are two perspectives taken on this.
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And I'll just mention them quickly and then sort of answer the question. There are those who have an understanding of eschatology that believe that the specific activity of demons has been bound by the resurrection of Christ for a certain period of time.
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So I don't want to get into eschatology today because I don't know about you, but there are a few subjects in the
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Christian faith that generate more heat and less light than a debate on eschatology. And I've been in many a church where you're only allowed to have one perspective, and anybody who has a different perspective is automatically considered to be of Satan himself, probably, is pretty much how it's expressed.
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So I don't even... I don't do eschatology, you will never see me debating eschatology. Well, let me define one thing here.
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Eschatology, as I'm using it right now, are theories concerning the end times, specifically the major schools, amillennialism, premillennialism, postmillennialism, then you've got the breakdowns amongst those groups, dispensational premillennialism, historic premillennialism, and then even amongst them, you've got pre -tribbers and mid -tribbers and post -tribbers and all sorts of people who don't know what in the world they are, but they sort of enjoy books like Left Behind.
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But anyway, I don't get into any of that because I don't want hymnals thrown at me, and like I said, there are a few topics that are more emotional and yet don't have much to do with reality.
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Other aspects of eschatology include heaven, the nature of heaven, hell, the intermediate state, and those are important eschatological issues that I do address, but what
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I'm talking about here is there are certain of those theories concerning how the end times work that would see a binding of Satan during the church age, which would provide a different basis for answering that question.
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Leaving that aside, I don't think there's any question that the church in the name of Christ bears the authority to vanquish
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Satan, especially when Satan has taken any role that is in opposition to what
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God would have done. So, in other words, when the apostles were proclaiming the gospel and Satan resisted them, for example, in the young woman who was possessed by a spirit of divination, the apostle drove the spirit of divination out, even though, remember what the spirit of divination was doing?
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It was speaking the truth. These men are servants of the most high God. It's just that it wouldn't shut up.
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And so, Paul said, out, and they end up in deep trouble because then she was no longer a source of profit for her masters, et cetera, et cetera.
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So, there's no question that Satan is under the control of God, but I am concerned.
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Let me also express a concern here about people who become so focused upon that, that's all they do.
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I can think of one particular individual in the United States that used to be a fairly rounded apologist.
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And all of a sudden, he got into this demon stuff and demons started calling his call -in talk show regularly.
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I'm not sure if he was passing out business cards to demons with his number on it, I don't know what. But it totally destroyed his ministry, just went off into really, really, really, really weird stuff.
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And so, I would say that the concept of possession, the analysis of it and the proclamation of it should be the result of not one person who runs around looking for these things, but it should be the conclusion of the mature elders of a congregation that this is what is being dealt with and that it should be handled very sincerely as a matter of prayer and not some type of spectacular, magical type situation.
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Is speaking in tongues a form of prophecy or divine revelation? What was the tongues of the
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New Testament? Wow. I believe that the tongues of the
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New Testament was a miraculous sign gift. It was one of the sign gifts that were given to the church to demonstrate that the gospel had come into the world and that it was to go to all people.
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As Paul explains it in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, he draws from the
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Old Testament text from the prophecies of God speaking to the people of Israel with a foreign demonstration that judgment had come upon Israel.
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And given that it had a specific purpose, I believe God is a God of purpose. And if it did have a purpose and that purpose comes to an end,
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God is not going to continue something that is no longer purposeful in the church. It was a supernatural manifestation on the day of Pentecost.
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It was a means of evangelism. I would never say that if God wanted to grant to a individual the ability to speak another language without them learning it, that God could not do so for his purposes.
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If God can transport miraculously Philip to the
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Ethiopian eunuch, God can do whatever he wants. The question is, is there a normative role for ecstatic utterances in the church?
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And I believe those ecstatic utterances in the early church were a sign to the Jews. And once the nation of Israel was destroyed in AD 70,
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I cannot think of a meaningful reason why they would continue. And so I do believe that the apostolic sign gifts passed away with the apostles, which is what makes them apostolic.
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I have friends who speak in tongues. They were converted in systems that taught them that this was normative and this was an absolute part of the
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Christian life. And they are not in any position to examine that.
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And I'm not going to kick them out of the kingdom of God because I can't kick anybody out of the kingdom of God in the first place. But I'm not going to kick them out of the kingdom of God for disagreeing with me on this particular issue.
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I do have some friends that would. And since I don't, they almost kick me out of the kingdom of God, too.
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That's another issue we can't get into at the moment. But as long as they're willing to put up with me, who says,
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I don't think that's the spirit of God prompting that in you. I think that's something you've been taught.
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I think that's something you've become accustomed to as a part of your spiritual experience. But I don't think you're speaking in a heavenly language.
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As long as they know that that's what I believe and can accept me on that level, then we get along just fine.
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But let's be honest, that's pretty rare. Normally, it creates quite a division from both sides.
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One side says, well, if it's not of God, then it must be of the devil. And the idea that, well, actually, it's what they were converted under, it's what they're accustomed to, it's become associated in their mind with the presence of God, and therefore, it's something that they do.
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Doesn't cross the other people's minds. So that's where I stand, is that I do not believe that it is any type of normative experience.
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I'm not gonna deny that God can do what he wants in proclaiming his gospel. But I don't think that it's the apostolic gift of tongues that was in existence in the early church, especially because it had a purpose and that purpose has been fulfilled.
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Were signs and wonders solely reserved to affirm a new revelation? Were signs and wonders what?
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Solely reserved to affirm a new revelation. Well, that is central to their purpose.
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There's no question that the signs and wonders of the apostolic band were specifically intended to demonstrate their authority, especially in the proclamation of the gospel, the establishment of the church.
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The proclamation of judgment upon Israel that took place in, well,
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Jesus even talked about it on the way to the cross. Matthew 24, the coming judgment upon the nation.
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That was central to that, but I wouldn't want to limit it to the only reason for that. Because, for example, certainly the death of Ananias and Sapphira was one of those miracles.
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And that wasn't really for outsiders, that was for those already in. And that was a demonstration that God was with his people.
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And just as when the ark, touching the ark, and things like that in the old covenant, this was a new covenant reality of the fact that without all the trappings of the temple,
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God was now dwelling in his people. And so it gives special meaning in Acts chapter 5 when it says, you have not lied to men but to God.
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But earlier it said you've lied to the Holy Spirit. So that indwelling presence of the
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Holy Spirit within the individual believers, which had been reserved for the temple and the
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Shekinah glory and so on and so forth under the old, now is the common possession of all the people of God. And so I would not limit the application solely to an external thing, but they're both there.
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There are three questions that are basically the same. It relates to the instruction given in Matthew chapter 28, verse 16 to 18, to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to all creatures.
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Mark chapter 16, verse 16 to 17, and then the spiritual gifts mentioned in 1
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Corinthians 12. The basic question is, is it still relevant today for today's church? Or has it ceased with the apostles and the instruction thereof?
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Well, two things. Matthew 28 is clearly part of the very charter of the church.
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And there's nothing there about, the only thing that can fulfill that is the end of the age.
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And lo, I'm with you to the end of the age. Well, we're not at the end of the age, so that remains absolutely vital.
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Mark chapter 16, after verse 9, is a major textual variant. And I have real issues with picking up serpents and drinking poison and issues like that.
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And I do not believe that Mark 16, 9 through 20 is what was written by Mark himself. And it differs completely from what you have in 1
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Corinthians. And again, you have to differentiate between, I should make mention of this.
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When you talk about the term cessationism, people would say, well, you're a cessationist.
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Well, what that means is I believe that certain gifts have ceased, yes. Because they had a particular purpose, and once that purpose is fulfilled, there's no reason for the continuation of the gift.
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But there are cessationists who are more radical than I am.
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And I didn't know this until probably about 15 years ago, maybe. Yeah, right around then, maybe, actually it was about 1999, okay, so 17 years.
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I found out that year that in one particular denomination, a minister was up on charges because he had taught his congregation that the
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Spirit of God gifts men for the eldership by giving them discernment and gifts of leadership and preaching and proclamation and so on and so forth.
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And so there are actually some denominations that do not believe that there are gifts of preaching or gifts of discernment or anything like that.
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And I was like, I didn't know. So I am not,
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I guess, a super cessationist, which is not a super sessionist, which gets really confusing.
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I am not a super cessationist because I believe that the Spirit of God does give gifts to his church as he wills.
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It's the difference between apostolic sign gifts, and if there are no apostles, you don't need apostolic sign gifts.
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And the regular gifts that are given to the church for its continuation down through the ages.
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But there are some, like I said, who take that so far as to say all. So what was, did
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I answer that or not? Okay, all right. Okay, I can lump this question together and you can discuss both of them.
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Is there any form of prophecy relevant for today? In other words, how can we define and apply prophecy today?
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And then another question just after that, should we expect to see dreams and visions today?
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Prophecy, unfortunately in our day, is almost always understood as some kind of predictive thing.
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Very clearly, however, the primary role of prophets in the
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Old Testament, and then in the New Testament as well, was a forth telling or a preaching. And so there is an appropriate way of speaking of the proclamation of the word of God as prophecy.
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And so if you want to use it in that extremely limited fashion where you're not talking about, and even in the sense of the proclamation of God's judgment upon a people, for example.
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I mean, I believe God's judgment is upon my nation. Does that mean I am prophesying judgment? In a sense, yes, it does.
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But in the specific sense of, for example, someone who says something's going to happen in the future, where they would then be tested on the basis of those things.
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That's the big controversy. You may know that there's a big controversy in regards to a fairly well -known reformed writer by the name of Dr.
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Grudem, who's actually from, now lives in the city where I live in, who is open to this idea of a limited form of non -scriptural prophecy that would include the possibility of future events.
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For the reasons I've already stated, I really have a problem with that in regards to the sufficiency of scripture and in regards to the role of how that kind of predictive prophecy existed.
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And why, if it's necessary for the church to know this now, this revelation has not been given before.
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So I have a real issue with that. But there was a second part of that. Yes, the second part was that, in other words, how can you define and apply prophecy today?
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Yeah, well, I did sort of answer that. In the sense that you can, I think, utilize a definition of prophecy that would match the proclamation of the message of God in a missional sense, for example,
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I think that would be an appropriate way to utilize that. And the other part was about dreams and visions.
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Should we expect that? I don't believe so. I don't think it's something that should be expected.
01:00:01
Am I saying that God could never do that? No, I'm not. But from my perspective, when it becomes something that, and again, it has to be, what's the standard by which it always must be tested?
01:00:19
Well, I know a lot of these folks that will say, yes, yes, yes, scripture. We always say the scripture is the standard. Yeah, but if you don't know how to execute the text of scripture, how can you actually apply it as a standard?
01:00:31
When those dreams and visions become the hermeneutic by which the scripture is read, that's when you have a major problem.
01:00:38
And I can think of a few alleged prophetesses who give, well,
01:00:46
YouTube would provide plenty of examples of where these individuals pretend to be giving an interpretation of scripture.
01:00:55
And it is just so atrocious, but it's attributed to some kind of vision or dream.
01:01:02
That's where you have the real danger. I remember Paula White once, I turned on the
01:01:08
TBN channel one evening. I don't know why, pretty rare, but maybe I wanted some entertainment,
01:01:14
I don't know. I forget what I was doing, but I turned it on, and she was doing this thing based on Psalm 69, that you were to send her $69.
01:01:32
Now, there is no meaningful method of exegesis that would substantiate the idea that the psalmist intended you to give $69 to Paula White.
01:01:46
If for no other reason than this, that's not the order of the Psalms that the Hebrews had.
01:01:52
They weren't even numbered the same way. So the whole idea, I mean, there were not chapter and verse.
01:01:59
You realize chapter divisions are a modern innovation. And the first time we even had the verse divisions in the
01:02:05
New Testament was 1555. So that's all new stuff. So all this numerology and 69 bucks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is pure hooey, it's just ridiculous.
01:02:18
It has absolutely no defense at all. But I'm not one of those people that then says, well, and that means that none of these people, none of these former
01:02:32
Muslims that have testified to having seen Jesus and been directed to the word of God, it's all fake.
01:02:39
I can't say that, I can't do that. I'm not gonna limit God in that way. And I have a friend of mine,
01:02:46
Nabeel Qureshi, who is a convert. And he says,
01:02:53
I was directed to the scriptures by a dream of Jesus. And when he first told me that, coming from a good staunch fundamentalist background,
01:03:05
I'm sort of like, I'll admit it.
01:03:13
But I looked at him and I said, I'll tell you what, Nabeel. If you were directed to the word of God, if you recognize the word of God is your final authority, and not things that you experience or see, but what is, as Peter said, what was the term you used last night?
01:03:36
The prophetic word made more sure, even more certain than Peter's own experience on the Mount of Transfiguration, is the written scriptures of God, even more certain.
01:03:47
If you agree with that and you persevere in the faith, then I don't have, I cannot have any objection whatsoever to the fact that God, in a supernatural way, directed you to his truth.
01:04:00
And he agreed with me 1 ,000%, agreed with me 1 ,000%. So can those things be abused?
01:04:08
Are those things abused to force people to give 69 bucks to some false teacher? Of course. But I recognize
01:04:14
I can't then take that and turn around and therefore say, God can't do any of those things. I can't do that.
01:04:21
Is it rare? Well, I certainly hope God keeps drawing people out of Islam to himself.
01:04:29
I'm not gonna limit the number of times he can do it, but I'm gonna tell you one thing. If it's really the spirit of God, those that are being drawn in that way will be drawn to his word, not to something else.
01:04:40
And if 20 years from now, the vast majority of those people are off in some other religion or something, well, time will tell.
01:04:48
But that's how I respond to that particular issue. Okay. When are we supposed to be wrapping up here?
01:04:54
Quarter to. One more. Okay. Please comment on the nature of the Azusa Street Revival and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of it.
01:05:02
I really can't. I'm not an expert on it. Obviously, in my experience in the United States, if I were to simply comment on the positive versus the negative in the long -term impact, the negative has been unbelievable, unbelievable.
01:05:24
In degradation of biblical studies, in the rise of false teachers, and things like that.
01:05:34
Can God draw a straight line with a crooked stick? Have there been people who have been saved in what
01:05:44
I would identify as movements that, in general, were negative? Can God even save in those contexts?
01:05:51
Yeah, he does and he can. But does that then excuse all the mess, just because God chooses to redeem some of the mess for his purposes?
01:06:03
I don't think that it does. But I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff and have not spent much time on it.
01:06:08
So we can throw one more in because we can still go on. This is a good one. Could you give a more scriptural evidence for the closure of the canon?
01:06:16
More scriptural evidence for the closure of the canon. I'm not sure what you, I haven't addressed the canon.
01:06:23
I've mentioned the reality of the fact that we believe that divine revelation has ceased.
01:06:30
But the fundamental evidence of the closure of the canon is to be found in the parallel between the
01:06:36
Old and New Testament. What was the evidence of the closing of the Old Testament canon? Did an angel come down and say, that's it, no more?
01:06:45
No. But even the people of Israel knew, long before the days of Jesus, that God had stopped speaking prophetically to the people of Israel.
01:06:56
It's one of the reasons they were looking for the Messiah. They were not looking for new prophets to bring more scriptures.
01:07:01
They knew that the bath coal, the voice of God had ceased amongst the people of Israel. Now, no angel came down and said, time out, 400 years out, we're done now.
01:07:13
There is direct parallel between the Old and New Testaments. And really, the evidence of the closure of the
01:07:19
New Testament is the person of Jesus Christ. God has, in times past, spoken unto our fathers by the prophets.
01:07:27
But now, in these last days, he has spoken by his son. And so, once you have the son, and once you have his church established, then you have to theologically say there must be some revelation needed beyond him.
01:07:47
And then you run into the problem of the fact that the New Testament actually teaches that there is a purpose for scripture, and it is for the edification of the church.
01:07:56
Okay, so you're saying that for how many thousands of years? For 1 ,900 years, 2 ,000 years, the church could have been edified, but God withheld those things?
01:08:09
That there's something new to be learned about Jesus Christ? Because if there's new revelation, it's only gonna be about one thing, his final word,
01:08:15
Jesus Christ. So is there something we don't know about Jesus we've needed to know for all this time? That's the same answer, by the way, that I give when people say, what if we dug up another letter from Paul?
01:08:27
Would it become part of scripture? Common question, common question. You know what my answer is?
01:08:34
No. You know why? Because I believe there is a purpose to scripture, it's the edification of the church.
01:08:42
And the only reason that you can then get around that, for some people, is that people don't see themselves connected to the church before us.
01:08:50
We don't see that continuation of God's work. I believe God has been building his church. And I believe that the church, even in 1 ,100, was just as important to God as the church is today.
01:09:03
I'm not one of those snooty modernists that thinks that we're somehow more important than all those generations that came before us.
01:09:10
So no, I don't think that it would be scripture, because God had not intended it.
01:09:15
If he had intended it to function as scripture, he would have preserved it and would have made it known to his church. So no.
01:09:22
So we're gonna take, what's, I hate to wake you guys up. I was watching all the guys in the back, and they're sort of, all that yummy soup and stuff like that.