21 - Satan, Part 1

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

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22 - Satan, Part 2

22 - Satan, Part 2

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Well, welcome back to the
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Striving for Eternity Academy School of Systematic Theology. We welcome you back.
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We welcome all of the new students that we have with us this week. We are glad to have you with us.
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If you've missed any of the lessons that we've given so far, I strongly, strongly suggest that you jump back to the first lessons because each of these lessons build on one another.
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And so, we do encourage you to never start theology in the middle.
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It's a bad place to start because a lot of our theology, as I hope you've seen already as we've gone through these lessons, are really rooted in the attributes and character of who
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God is. And if you understand the nature and the attributes of God, a lot of the theological issues that many people have, shall we say, differences on, can really be resolved.
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Sometimes it's because we start our theology in the middle that we have problems. But if you have a syllabus, that's one of the things that you get as a student, as an enrolled student.
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All of these courses are free, online. You can always go to the YouTube channel and watch them. But those of you who have chosen to support us, one of the blessings you get is the syllabus.
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And the syllabus has all of the notes, a lot of verses of passages that we don't always have time to go over.
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The lessons we try to give have hopefully enough scripture in it for you to do your own homework.
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Yeah, that's right. Don't ever trust what I say or anybody else. Trust only what the
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Word of God says. And so with that, we give you the passages of scripture for you to look up so that you can check to make sure that the things that we say are actually accurate according to God's Word.
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So we want to encourage you. We are in your syllabus. We are in lesson 15.
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If you look there, we are looking at the lesson on Satan. Satan.
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Now I will say that as somebody already posted in Facebook, when
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I said that tonight's lesson would be on Satan, somebody thought they were funny and said that this would be an autobiography.
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Wow. And I thought this was one of our better students. No, this is not an autobiography.
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I know I may be close in your minds to being like Satan, but no, I'm not.
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He's actually far worse than me. As wicked as you think I am, Mr.
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Kunkel. But anyway, we do think though that as we look into this lesson of Satan, one of the things that you may end up, if you think through this and find,
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Satan is just an angel. So all of the things that we spoke of in the last couple of classes, when we talked about angels both holy and unholy, when we saw those things, one of the things is that we have to remember is all those things apply to the person of Satan.
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Now why is that important? Well, I think one of the reasons that's important is because what is it that Satan, and we're going to look at this, what is it that Satan wants?
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Satan wants to be like God. I mean, that's his desire. That's what caused the fall, and we're going to see that in a couple of minutes.
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And what is it that so many people, even Christians do? We attribute to Satan the very attributes he wants to have.
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We treat him as if he's omniscient, that he knows our thoughts and knows what's in our minds. We treat him as if he's omnipresent, like he's everywhere present.
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He's dealing with everyone. When everyone says Satan is causing everything, as if he could be in multiple places at one time, they even give him the attributes of omnipotence in the sense that they argue that like Satan made me do it.
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Satan is a being that was created by God, therefore he is at one place at one time.
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He is just as limited as the other angels, therefore he cannot read your mind and he cannot force you to do things.
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Can a demon put things in your path in such a way that it could become a temptation for you?
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Yes, just like the world system does. So let us not give
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Satan any more attributes that are attributes of deity than he deserves.
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And if you go back to the very first lessons that we did in this class, we talked about attributes of deity, we explained that those are attributes that are true only of God.
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So let us begin our lesson in understanding the doctrine of angels with a specific angel known as Satan.
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And we keep in mind as we go through this that he is a created being.
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And that as we look through the previous lessons, even though this one adversary of ours may be one we focus a lot on, he is no different than any other angel in the sense that he has the same nature of angels.
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So let us start with a description of Satan. And we'll begin with his origin.
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We're going to begin with his origin. Now, what I would like to do is to take a look at a rather lengthy passage of Scripture.
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It's always hard when reading a long passage of Scripture because I know some of the students that we have here that those that are watching live start chatting away and stop paying attention.
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Naughty, naughty. You shouldn't be doing that. You should have an open Bible and you should get your open
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Bible and read along with us or read on your screen there. All right. So let's take a look at this.
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Here we go. This is from Ezekiel. And this is
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Ezekiel 28, 11 to 17. This is one of two lengthy passages we're going to look at because much of what we're going to learn about Satan is in these two passages.
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Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me, son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre and say to him, thus says the
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Lord God, you were a signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
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You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was your covering.
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The sardis, topaz, and diamond, beryl, oxen, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle, and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings.
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On the day that you were created, notice that, the day you were created, he's a created being, they were prepared and were an anointed guardian cherub.
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I placed you, you were on the holy mountain of God in the midst of the stones of fire and you walked.
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You were blameless in all, in your ways from the day you were created till unrighteousness was found in you.
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In the abundance of your trade, you were filled with violence in your midst and you sinned.
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So I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God and I destroyed you, oh guardian cherub, from the midst of the stone of fire.
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Your heart was proud because of your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
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I cast you to the ground. I exposed you before kings to feast their eyes on you."
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And now let's look at another passage in Isaiah 14. This is a little bit shorter, but here we see, how you are fallen from heaven, oh day star, that's a reference there to Satan, son of dawn, how you are cut down into the ground.
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You who laid the nations low, you said in your heart,
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I will ascend to heaven above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high.
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I will sit on the mount of the assembly in the reaches of the north.
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I will ascend above the heights of the cloud. I will make myself like the most high.
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Okay, as we looked at those passages, I hope you gain a little bit of an understanding for this.
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These are the two clearest passages we have dealing with Satan specifically as we look at him.
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Now, if you look in your syllabus, you'll see three blanks there as far as his origin when we look at his origin described.
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And as we look at that, we see first at his creation, he possessed wisdom, understanding and beauty.
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Wisdom, understanding and beauty. This is what we see in that passage in Ezekiel 28.
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Ezekiel 28, 12 said that he possessed wisdom, understanding and beauty.
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All right. Now, we also saw there that Satan dwelt in the presence of God.
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That's your next blank there, presence. Satan dwelt in the presence of God. He was able to see
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God and understand what went on on the mountain of God. That's the description used there.
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So, we see that he was actually in God's presence. We also see next is that he was special to God.
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Did you see that in verse 13? In verse 13 of Ezekiel 28, he was special to God.
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He was a special, a guardian cherub. He was a very special creation.
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However, his fall was a result of his pride. Did you see that in both passages we looked at?
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One, it was very specific that his pride caused his fall. The second, and we're going to look at it later, is several,
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I will do this. I will do this. I will do this. Several things that he said he will do out of his pride.
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So, we see that when he was first created, he was beautiful, he had wisdom, he had understanding.
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He was in the presence of God. He was very special to God. As you saw, he was clothed with all of these special jewels and diamonds and topaz and all of that.
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He was given everything. But in his beauty, he thought too highly of himself and his pride caused his fall.
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Well, that gives us one thing right off the bat that we can learn as we look into a study on the lesson, in a study of the topic of Satan himself.
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Because one of the things I hope you see is that we, as human beings, are just as susceptible to pride as the angels were.
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And so, if we see this, it should give us a warning that we can be too prideful as well.
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You and I can fall into a similar trap that Satan fell into and allow our pride to think of us more highly than we ought.
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So, let's learn from Satan's fall and realize that if Satan, this very special creation of God who was so bestowed with honor and beauty and wisdom could fall because of his pride, then we have to be careful to make sure that we do not allow the same things to happen in our life.
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Pride is extremely deceitful. And it is such an issue that so many people that struggle with pride don't even recognize it unless, of course, somebody points it out to them.
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Yet, it is one of the most difficult things to point out to another believer because pride is blinding.
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We don't see it in ourselves because pride tells us we're right. If you at all have ever had anybody tell you you struggle with pride,
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I would encourage you to go to the website down there somewhere. Lower?
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Okay, down here somewhere. There? All right, down there. And go to the website, go under the audio messages and look for a message on the danger of pride in a preacher.
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If you want that in either CD or DVD, contact us and we'll give it to you free.
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Okay? We'll ship that out to you so that you can have that if you want that because it is that important to understand the danger of pride.
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The message was given to a bunch of street preachers. That was the context. So, it's not just the preacher of a pastor of a church.
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It's a danger of pride in any of us. But this is what caused
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Satan to fall. Satan fell because of his pride. And it is a very, very serious issue, one that we have to take serious because we can fall the same way.
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All right? So, we saw in the description of Satan, we saw his origin.
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We next want to take a look at his personality, his personality.
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No, that doesn't mean he's got personality. It means he is a personality.
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All right? And if you're struggling with that, that means you weren't paying attention in the third lesson when we talked about the attributes of personality.
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Okay? Or was that the second? It might have been the second lesson even. All right? When we looked at the attributes of God as specifically his personality, all right?
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But we described what attributes a person has. Satan being an angel is a person, just like you and I are a person.
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And so, we have to remember that and remember that we want to not think of angels as being something other than people.
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All right? So, let us begin by taking a look at that Satan possesses, that's your blank there,
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Satan possesses all the elements of personality. And one of them that we're going to look at first is intellect.
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Okay? Let us not think that Satan is some foolish person who is unintelligent.
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Satan is a very intelligent person. He uses his intelligence for wickedness and evil, but he is intelligent.
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Maybe even one of the most intelligent beings. And so, his ways, though they're very wicked, are not something that we should take lightly.
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All right? Let's take a look at Ephesians 6, 11. Put up here both 11 and 12 because we're going to come back to those passages later.
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But for right now, we just want to look at 11. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
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Do you see it? It's described as schemes. These are the things we must avoid.
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The schemes, the plannings. Now, to have schemes, he has to be intelligent.
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Now, there's some other passages there that I have for you in your syllabus, if you want to look up some others. But I wanted to use that one because we're going to come back to it with reference to how to defend ourselves against those schemings of the devil.
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But one of the things that we have to be aware of is that Satan is an intelligent being.
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Okay? Second is that he has a will. No, I'm not talking about my pastor.
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I'm talking about a volition. Okay? He has a will.
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And that's not a last will in Testament either, for some of you wise guys in class that are probably passing notes back and forth.
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But he has a will that he used, as you saw in Isaiah 14,
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I will, I will, I will, I will. But if that wasn't clear enough, let's just look at 2
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Timothy 2. In verse 26, And they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.
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Now, do you notice, again, how is his intellect? How is he described as being and using?
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Well, do you see that? He's using his senses, his will, excuse me, as a snare.
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I hope this is already giving you some idea of how to view Satan. His intellect is used for schemings.
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His will is used as a snare to trap people. This is what he's looking to do.
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Now, when we see this, we also see one of the other things that he has,
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I have in your syllabus there, is that he has emotion. Yes, Satan is an emotional being.
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He has personality. Let's look at Revelation 12. Revelation 12, 12.
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Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them. But woe to you,
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O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath.
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Now, to have wrath, you must have emotion, because he knows that his time is short.
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You know, a lot of people look and go, well, as I had a conversation actually with my son's principal today when we were talking on the phone, and he was asking, you know, with everything he sees going on,
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I mean, is this it? Is this like, is the end times coming? Are we close? And so what we have here is we end up seeing that his time, as he knows, is very short.
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And he's using that with, he's had some wrath, which shows his emotion.
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So we see that he possesses personality, all right? Next, I want to show, to look at the fact that Satan performs all of the actions of personality.
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The actions, he performs, that's your blank there. He performs the actions of personality.
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Now, if you have a syllabus, I need to give a correction in your syllabus here, just so that you can correct that.
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The passages of scripture underneath this is Job 1, 9, and it says also
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Matthew 4, 11. That should actually say 1 through 11, okay?
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It's all 11 verses. And no, we're not going to look at all of those 11 verses right now. So let's turn to Job 1, 9, okay?
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Job 1, 9 says, and I put up 9 and 10. We're just going to look at 9 for right now.
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Then Satan answered the Lord and said, does Job fear
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God for no reason? Okay, so what you see here is that he speaks, and that's our first action of a person.
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He speaks. He has an ability to speak to God and talk back and forth to God.
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And what's he doing? Well, exactly what we've already seen he's doing. He's accusing Job. He's trying to set a snare to use his schemings.
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Do you see that? Well, that brings us to the very next thing. If you look in your syllabus, he accuses.
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Satan accuses, and we already looked at that. Let's take a look at now at verse 10. It says, have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has on every side?
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You have blessed the work of his hands and the possessions have increased the land.
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In other words, he's saying to God, the only reason that Job would worship you is because of the good things you've given to him.
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You see, Satan would make a good health, wealth, prosperity gospel preacher. Right?
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Isn't that what he's saying? The only reason that Job is listening to you because of all the good that you've done in his life.
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That's his accusation. That's what he's accusing. He's trying to say that it's only because of the good.
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If you take that all away, he wouldn't worship you. Let's look at Revelation chapter 12 as another passage that I have for you in your syllabus.
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In verse 10, and I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, now the salvation and the power of the kingdom of our
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God and the authority of his Christ have come for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down who accuses them day and night before our
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God. Isn't that wonderful? I mean, won't that be great to hear when God calls that out?
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Satan has been cast down. It's so great. I mean, but you see how he's described.
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He's described as the accuser who accuses our brothers night and day before God, but his time is short and his future is secure.
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Victory is God's. Don't ever forget that.
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Don't ever get down and feel that you've been beaten up by demons.
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You're probably not being beaten up by the devil. No offense. I know you're important in your own eyes, but none of us are so important that the devil himself is dealing with you and I.
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He can only be in one place at one time. He's busy trying to create false religions, trying to get whole religions for people to follow after.
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But demons do throw things in front of us and their demise is sure.
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God's victory is certain and we can rest in that. That should give us such great joy to know that Satan and all of his demons will be thrown down.
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Oh, that accuser, his day is coming and it will be in a short time.
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Now, as the writer of of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan, had said over and over, if you've read that book, it may be longer than we wish, but it'll be shorter or longer than we hope, but shorter than we wish.
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I think it's how he worded it. It's coming soon. His demise is going to come real quick, though it's still far way farther off than we wish it would be.
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Let's look at the last is that he has the character of a person. He has the character of a person.
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Not all of these characters are all that good, but he has the character of a person.
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First is that he's a murderer. John chapter 8. I just preached on this at a church this past Sunday.
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But John 8, 44, you are of his. By the way, Jesus, this is a let me give the context.
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This is Jesus speaking to the Jewish leaders. OK, he's he's, you know, for those people who think that, you know,
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Jesus always had these nice things to say. He never said anything mean. He never said anything that would upset people.
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He was such a nice fellow. Really read
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John 8. I mean, he basically tells them and he just gets increasingly more difficult in his words for them to deal with.
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But he starts off by just saying so, you know, here he says, you guys are sinners.
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And if that's not enough, you guys are going to be punished as sinners.
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You're not righteous. All right. Now he's telling these Jewish leaders, oh, by the way, guess what?
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You're not only sinners who are going to be condemned, but now let's take a look at John 8 and he says here.
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You are of your father, the devil. Wow. That one's kind of rough.
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You are of your father, the devil, and you and your will is to do your father's desire.
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He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
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When he lies, he speaks from his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
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So we see two different characteristics here. One is that he is a liar.
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OK, Satan is a liar. That's actually your second one there. First, he's a murderer in the text. He's a murderer.
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Second blank is that he is a liar. He is a murderer and he is a liar.
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OK, and I was just told that I skipped one in the previous. So under the actions, he also tempts and that's
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Matthew 4, 3. So we'll come back to the characters. I don't want to leave anything out. And the tempter came and said to him, if you are the son of God, command these stones to become bread.
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Now in Matthew 3, you see he's a tempter there, but we're going to very shortly come to another issue that came up last week that we're going to deal with this week in the temptations that Satan gave.
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But when we look at this passage here, and there is a question that came up in the chat room is, so when it says that every knee shall bow, is that Satan and demons too?
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And I would say, yes, I believe that Satan's knee will bow as well and all the demons as they are cast into the lake of fire.
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Hell is not the final resting place for anyone. Hell is a temporal resting place where people that die, they go there in death and they are there until death and Hades will be cast into the lake of fire.
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That's Revelation 19, chapter 19 or 20, I think 19. But that will be cast into the lake of fire.
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OK, Satan and his demons will as well. And they will, they've already probably bowed their knee because they can't help to in the presence of God.
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All right. But now let's get back to his character. So we described in John 8, 44, that Jesus saying to these
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Jewish leaders that Satan is a murderer and a liar.
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Oh, and he's saying that they're just like Satan. Well, I guess for the person who thought that this class would be an autobiography on me,
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I cannot be Satan or a father of Satan because in that very text shows the difference that some are children of God and therefore righteous and of their father, the father that Abraham worshipped, the father
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God, as opposed to the father that the Jewish leaders worshipped,
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Satan. All right. Those are the two fathers that we see. One other thing is not only is his character that he's a murderer and that he is a liar, but also that he is a sinner.
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Let's take a look in 1 John 3, 8. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
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The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
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OK, so you see there that he is the father of sin.
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He is the first being in all of creation to sin. It wasn't Adam and Eve. Satan fell first to be able to tempt
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Adam and Eve or even Adam, actually, to get the order right. But we end up seeing that Satan even had the nerve and the gall to tempt
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Jesus, God Almighty. Like, really? Like he was going to fall?
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Are you kidding me? Like, I mean, that's what Satan must have been thinking. He was thinking, yeah, maybe
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Jesus would fall and then, boy, we would win out. Not gonna happen.
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But one of the things that did come up from last class, and I wanted to bring it up in this class because it comes in line with the lying nature of Satan and also the fact that he's a tempter.
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And we don't have this passage on your screen. So what does that mean? It means you need to get your
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Bible out and do not tell me that you came to class without a
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Bible. OK, maybe if you're a new student to this class, we're going to let you pass this time.
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Don't come to class without a Bible. Two reasons. One, it's
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God's Word. Two, how are you going to know if I'm wrong if you don't check it in the
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Word of God? If I give you a Bible verse, don't just read that verse. Read the whole context.
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Read the whole chapter. That's what I did. The question that came up is, what does this mean in Psalm 91?
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Psalm 91, and for those that are jumping to Bible Gateway right now to get their
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Bible online, that's acceptable. But I don't know.
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Is that cheating just because you didn't want to bring a Bible to class? All right, we'll let it go during class. But here is the specific question.
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The verse that says, For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
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Now, this is something that Satan used in Matthew 4 to tempt Jesus.
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He brings Jesus to a hill and says, OK, here if you throw yourself down, people are going to believe that you're
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God. There was a theory that some had that anyone that would throw themselves off this pinnacle and floated would be the
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Messiah. And somehow this became a thing that some people believed. There's some stories that this was told that people would look for the
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Messiah at a pinnacle mountain that he would not dash his feet. Now, I don't know how much of that really came at the time.
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I wasn't able to find much historical fact to back that up and support that prior to people discussing it after the temptation of Christ.
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And so many come to believe that this Psalm 91 is a messianic
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Psalm because of the way Satan used it and that there's some people who ended up seeing this as a sign of the
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Messiah. But the question is, are you going to trust the way Satan interprets
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Scripture? Really? I'm just saying, the guy's a liar, a tempter, an accuser, a murderer, and a sinner, just to name a few.
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I wouldn't trust his interpretation of Scripture, neither did Jesus, because all three of those temptations where Satan even used
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Scripture, Jesus corrected him by properly interpreting Scripture. So the question came up, what does this refer to?
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Well, let's take a look at the whole Psalm. If you read the entire Psalm, here's some things you're going to notice. I don't have time to exegete the whole thing.
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It means to expound it, to explain it all. But here's some things that I did from my study this week on this. What I did notice is that first off, this is a
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Psalm that is written by somebody who is dealing with seeing all this wickedness around him and asking the question, what gives?
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I mean, look at all that's going on. How could all these wicked people be prospering?
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And what about us? What about those of us who are looking to God and trusting in Him?
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And so you see the first about six verses, it talks about this, you know, for who he will deliver him, this is verse three, he will deliver him from the snare, from the fowler, from the deadly prestilence.
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He will cover his own pinions and under his wings you'll find refuge from his faithfulness, a shield and a buckler.
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Oh, by the way, does God have feathers? He's got wings. Is he a chicken? I always ask that of the
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Mormons. You know, they read these passages that says God has eyes, God had hands. So they say that God had to be a man.
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He had to be human. He had to have flesh because, you know, it says that he had these human parts.
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This one says he's got wings. Another Psalm says he's got feathers. Is God a chicken?
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I don't think so. This is a descriptive way, if you remember as we've gone through looking at different ways of interpreting
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Scripture, this is a kind of an anthropomorphism, but not really. It's kind of, I guess, would be a chicken pornomorphism.
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I don't know. Is that a word? But it's basically giving the attributes of a bird in this sense to God that he's got wings that he covers.
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He says in verse 5, you will not fear the terror of night, nor an arrow that flies by day, nor pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.
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So he's giving all these negative things that you don't have to fear if you trust in God. If you trust in God, you don't have to worry about these things.
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A thousand will fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, they will not come near you.
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Now notice here, I don't believe that he's giving a promise. Why? Because if you took the class that we offer on Biblical hermeneutics, you'd know that reading the
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Psalms is poetry. It's not to be taken in a literal sense. Okay?
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So what we have here is poetry, and we must read it as poetry. Okay? So as we see this poetic language, it's not a promise.
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Okay? So he says here, because you have made the
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Lord your dwelling place, the Most High who is your refuge, no evil shall be allowed to befall you.
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No plague shall come near your tent, for he will command his angels to guard you in all your ways.
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Now do you see the context of that? Just from reading the context, I think this then helps us to see this was not some promise.
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We have a guardian angel that's going to watch over us. Okay? This doesn't mean that somehow we're going to have a, someone just said, someone just said,
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Avonmorphism is a bird using a bird to describe
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God. We've got some funny people in our class, don't we? Okay, Avon, I probably am pronouncing it wrong too.
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Avon, is that Avionmorphism? Okay. So what you have though is that you see here in this language that we see in the
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Psalm, he's talking about somebody who is trusting in God, not having to worry about the evils of those around them.
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All right? That they can trust in God. The Psalm goes on to express that even more.
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And he's giving a little bit of the protection. This is how God is giving his protection on you.
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Okay? Now, how does that actually work out? I mean, have any of you had days where maybe the schemings of the devil seemed to work out against us?
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Yeah, that can happen. So does that mean that this
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Psalm is wrong? Well, no. Because it says, well, there's no evils that are going to, well, there are evils that may beset us for a time.
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Remember what we said earlier? Satan's day is coming. His days are numbered and his future is secure and it won't look good.
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Even though those of wrath, those of wickedness may at this time, this place, that they may have some advantage or gain in this life, it will not last for eternity.
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But there is a day and that day will be when we are in God's presence, seeing the victory of God fully given when we are glorified and we won't think about those evil ways of people.
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That'll be put aside. All right? And so let us rejoice in that.
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That's what that Psalm is referring to. And so the fact that what we see in Matthew 4 is we see
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Satan taking a passage of Scripture out of context and we see him using that to try to tempt
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Jesus. That doesn't mean it's a Messianic Psalm and it doesn't mean that we take what
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Satan says and how Satan uses it as correct. Okay?
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So what we have is we have a case where we see with Satan that he would take a passage of Scripture and misuse it for his own purposes, which do not glorify
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God. Why? Because what we've already seen of him, he's a liar. This is what he does.
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Okay? Let us not be surprised by the wickedness of Satan.
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All right? So we saw, let's take a look, we saw, let's back up that one, yeah.
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We saw the description of Satan and in that we saw his origins, we saw his personality and when we're looking at his personality, we said that he possesses the elements of personality, he performs the actions of personality, and we said he has the character, then we saw that his character has as far as his personality.
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So next what we are going to look at, if you look at your syllabus, not only his origin and not only his personality, not only his character, but next we're going to look at, and we're going to pick up next week on this, is the designations of Satan.
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The designations of Satan. All right? And when we look at this, what we're going to see is how he is designated.
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We're going to look at some of his names. Then we're going to look at his dominion and after that we'll look at his domain.
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Then we're going to look at his devices and then lastly we're going to look at our defense.
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All right? So I'm not going to be able to get through all of this lesson this week. Yeah, I didn't think
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I would with over 40 scripture verses that we have to look at in this passage and that's only the ones that we're going to discuss in class, not the ones we're not going to discuss.
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You want those? Get yourself a syllabus. All right? They'll be in there. Those are for the students that are going to do a little bit more study and need those.
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All right? So we're going to pick up next week with that. I want to say that if you have any questions or comments about the lesson, feel free to contact us at the academy, academy at strivingforeternity .org.
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Academy at strivingforeternity .org. All right? We will always try to answer your questions.
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Some that come up in the chat room, some that come up on Facebook. We do try to be active on Facebook.
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If you have questions, post it there. It gets all the other students involved. We do post some thought questions from the lessons on our
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Facebook group. So it would be good for you to go out there and check that out. Now some of the things
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I do want to ask before you start tuning out is that we could use your support.
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I know a lot of you that watch on Ustream live, you get frustrated with the ads.
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We get frustrated with the ads as well. And we really wish you would come and help support us.
44:09
And we want to get that support. That was, oh, okay.
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I was just told there was a ad down here for something we're going to mention in a moment. I'm going out of script.
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But we could use your support. We've actually set up, if you go to the website, the strivingforeturning .org
44:31
website, and you go to the donate page, we set up a new thing so that you can have set up PayPal to donate monthly with whichever works best for you.
44:41
And if you want to set up something different than the options that are there, we can work with you as well on that, all right?
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But please consider donating monthly. Because if we can get enough, we are trying to raise enough support that if we can get enough, and I think what we need is about,
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I think it was like $300 or $400 a month specifically donated for this show.
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And if you, it's $500 a month, okay. Well, $300 is the first tier, $500 for the larger tier.
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So let's just go with the $300. $300 will get rid of all the ads, okay. And it will help this go forth.
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We do these lessons. You don't have to pay for them. Those who support us get the syllabus, which basically is that cost.
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We're trying to put these out, but it costs money to do. And we want to get this out for you.
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If you can help us to get rid of the ads and be able to do more with the Ustream, that would be a blessing.
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Soon as we get enough money in monthly donations that's specifically targeted, and just put it in the comment for the
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Academy, for Ustream, soon as we get the $300 a month, we're going to do that so that we don't have to worry about those ads.
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We would greatly appreciate it. So go to the new website. If you haven't been to the website, go check it out.
46:08
All right, now a couple of upcoming events that we have for you. First, the Ohio Fire, which is coming up quickly.
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In May, that is going to be Memorial Day weekend if you're in the Ohio area or within 10 hours driving distance.
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Because I'm doing a little bit more than 10. So if you can get out there, Paul Taylor will be speaking.
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He used to run Answers in Genesis UK. He is now with Eric Hoven down with Creation Today.
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He's got a British accent, so he sounds really smart, and he's got a brain to follow it. He'll be preaching.
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I'm going to be doing some preaching. Michael Coughlin will be speaking. We will be having a special guest musical with Keri Atala.
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If you have not heard her music, you must. Go to her website.
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I think it's keriatala .com or .org. Just Google her. Get her new album. You will not regret it.
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No one has yet. I've challenged people to get it. They listen to it. They love it. So second is the
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Jersey Fire, which is the second weekend in July. That is going to be, I think, 12th and 13th. Sai Tim Brunenkate will be speaking.
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Jason Lyle, who used to be with Answers in Genesis, now with Institute for Creation Research. I will be speaking.
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We will be discussing presuppositional apologetics. What is the right way to use apologetics?
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Do we use the word of God? Do we not? What are the presuppositions that we would hold to? Then we have the
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NorCal Fire in September. That's in Northern California, San Jose area. We will have
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Tony Miano from Cross Encounters Radio. We will have Matt Slick from CARM, C -A -R -M .org,
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Christian Apologetic Research Ministries. And I will be speaking.
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We will be discussing a wide range. When I discuss some of the topics with Matt, Matt was chomping at the bit to get to preaching.
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He wants to preach every single message. He just is so in love with the topics that we're coming up with. But we're talking there about doing
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Christianity right. We're going to deal with the major doctrines of Christianity that you must get right.
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And we're going to talk about where the other world religions and cults get them wrong. We're probably going to have a lesson even on Satan.
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We've been talking about Satan too much. On atheism. Atheism is satanic, so why not? So we want to encourage that to you.
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Lastly, if you are in the New Jersey area, you're here maybe for visiting people, you're here for any reason, or you live in New Jersey and you don't have a home church.
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Anywhere near the Jackson area, which is central Jersey, you consider coming out to Faith Bible Church.
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The website is down there. And that is a church with Pastor Will Costello.
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He's from Grace Advance. Grace Advance is a ministry from Master's Seminary. That's a seminary where John MacArthur is president.
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And he is out planting, well it's a church planting, but we're doing a revitalization.
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Taking a church that was ready to close its doors, and I've been there, and we're trying to help out to revitalize it.
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And we are starting from scratch. Looking to write a brand new constitution and really start this ministry up based only on the
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Word of God, not the Word of men. And it has been a refreshing thing to be part of.
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And I encourage you, if you want to get some good preaching, come out to Faith Bible Church in the
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Jackson area. Now, the part that we get to with every class that I want to encourage you is to encourage others.
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It's one thing that you know, those of you who are students here, you know that we started doing this because we realized that most people kind of say really encouraging, very sweet and nice things about one another after we're dead.
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You ever notice that? And people would really like to hear these things while someone was alive maybe.
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And so we want you to encourage others. And so we are going to post the person in the
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Facebook group. But the person is Elena Grace. Elena Grace.
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Does that say Elaine? It should be Elena. Okay. So Elaine Grace is the person that we're going to have.
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And the reason I want you, if you've, have you gone to the new website? Do you like the new website? I hope if you, it is
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Elaine, okay. I hope if you like that new website, that you would let her know that.
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Because she is the one that did the bulk of the work. She did all of the design.
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Basically, she came to the Reason Rally with her husband, her husband's cousin and his wife. And we got together over lunch and she said, hey, you know,
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I got some time and maybe I can, you know, work on the site. And she did an incredible job with it.
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And so one of the things that we want you to do is encourage her. She is someone that does go out and evangelize.
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Yeah. She went to the Reason Rally with us. You know, that big atheist rally. Anyone willing to go there does not mind going into the heart of the lair of the dragon.
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Because that was a vile place to be. But we have her Facebook link there. So you can add her on Facebook and give her some encouragement.
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She'll also be linked in our YouTube or our Facebook page. And so we want you to encourage her.
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She's a sweet sister in the Lord. Get to know her and find some reasons and ways you can encourage her.
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She's taking her talents and gifts that God's given her to do websites and write website design.
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And she's using that for the glory of God. You know, maybe you have some websites that you know some people that need done.
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Maybe she can help you guys out and then you can help her to support her and her husband. So you could be looking to them.
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They do get out and share the gospel. Something that we all should do, right? So I want to encourage you to encourage her.
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So again, if you are, if you would, if you're not a paid student, in other words, you haven't enrolled, one of the things you get is you get a syllabus.
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So enroll at the website. Go to the Academy page on our website. Get yourself a syllabus so you can follow along.
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All right. And then there's other things that we send out. Now, one of the things I must tell you, and I was actually supposed to say this very first thing of class and I didn't.
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So I'll make sure I mention it first thing next week. If you enrolled last year, because we are still doing this as a yearly subscription.
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If you enrolled last year and you're still working off of the first syllabus, okay?
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This is book number one, which means book number two is coming out. You should know that because lesson 15 is the last lesson of the book.
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If you have not enrolled for this year, in other words, if you have not paid the enrollment for this year, then you will not get a syllabus.
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So please go to the website, go to the Striving for Eternity page. Make sure when you go there that you go to the
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Academy page, all right? And there is a donate button at the bottom, okay?
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You don't have to fill out the form again, but you do need to go and donate $50 again this year, all right?
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That will get you book number two. And when book number three comes out later this year, you'll get that one as well, all right?
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Encourage you to do that. We're soon going to be switching to a different payment structure probably next year.
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We'll be paid by syllabus or paid by class actually. And so we really want you to make sure you don't miss out on your syllabus, all right?
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So make sure you do that. And next week, we'll pick up again on the lesson on Satan. Until then, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.