Colossians 2:1-3 - The Mystery of the Trinity

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Pastor David Mitchell

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Praise the Lord for this wonderful week of Thanksgiving. And most of us, if not all of us in the room have a whole lot to be thankful for because we may be seeing the
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Lord turn our nation back to the old ways. And, you know,
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I don't vote for any particular party, but I vote for platforms that match up with the scripture the best.
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None of them match perfectly, right? Because they're human. But I don't like any platform that says we're going to forget the past and move forward to something new because the scripture says to not do away with the old landmarks.
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Of course, that's an allegory that means the word of God and God's ways stick with them.
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Don't move forward into some new progressive style that moves further away from scripture.
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And so I'm happy. I know that Jesus is our savior.
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If anyone will turn this country back to the right way, it'll be him. It won't be any human, but he can use humans.
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He can use all of us. In fact, he prefers to do that. Even when he parted the Red Sea, Moses was holding the rod of God up and God works together with his kids and we're his kids.
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So it's one big family business, God's business. I'm glad all of you are a part of it. And that you're here today.
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Let's get right into the scripture. I'll have a short word of prayer and we'll begin. Lord, thank you for the service already today for bringing each individual who was supposed to be here here today.
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And may your word speak to each of us. May we each grow from it today and benefit from it and be able to contribute to your kingdom because of it.
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And we pray in Jesus name, amen. Turn with me if you would to Colossians chapter two, verse two.
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And we will get started there. We're going verse by verse through the book of Colossians.
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I wanna welcome our visitors today. We're so happy that you're here with us and our home folks.
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And I'm excited about the message. So let's get right into it. Colossians, you know what?
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I'll just start with verse one, Colossians 2, 1. For I would that you knew what great conflict
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I have for you, the apostle Paul says to his converts or his converts, converts.
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These are either children, spiritual children or grandchildren of Paul's. And for them at Laodicea as well.
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And Laodicea as well. And for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh.
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That their hearts might be comforted. Now here was his prayer for these converts. That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding.
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And listen to this, because this is where we're gonna be today. And to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God and of the father and of Christ.
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He speaks of a mystery. Now this word mystery is a sort of a word formula throughout the New Testament.
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You might think it has several meanings, but what you're gonna find out is really has one meaning and the others are just sort of subsets of that or else they contribute to it.
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And so we're actually in chapter two. So let me read this little portion. Oh, wait, that was chapter two.
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Let me go back though and read a little portion from chapter one that came right before this to look at the context a little bit and look at chapter one, verse 26, please.
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And I do like you to see the scripture if you have a phone or a Bible so that you can see it's
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God's word. So it says, verse 26, chapter one of Colossians, even the mystery.
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So you see this word mystery again, and this is what we're gonna be talking about for several Sundays. Even the mystery which has been hid from ages and from generations, but now has made manifest to his saints.
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So this is a perfect definition of what the word mystery means in the New Testament. It's Bible language.
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It's not the same as looking it up in Webster's or even looking up in the Greek. It's Bible language for the Greek, but what it actually means is exactly what verse 26 says it means.
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It is something that the Old Testament prophets and men and women of God looked into, but they could not figure it out or understand it or even see it.
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And in fact, God didn't manifest it into the world until he did so through the apostle
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Paul after Jesus spent the better part of three years with him in the desert in Arabia.
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And that's when Paul became an apostle. And so Paul got this straight from Jesus, and now he's teaching it to the world.
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And it's a mystery because in the Old Testament, they didn't have a clue about this. Now, what is this mystery?
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Well, look at verse 27. To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of his mystery among the
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Gentiles, which is, here's the mystery, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
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The idea and the fact of the Holy Spirit indwelling every new believer from the time of Pentecost until today and on until Jesus comes back, that is the mystery.
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No one ever thought of that in the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit came upon people in the
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Old Testament. He would come upon people like Samson and give him power.
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He would come upon people like David and give him the Psalms. And he would come upon people, but he could also withdraw from his people.
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And that's the way it was. And Jesus told the apostles this right before he went to heaven. He said, look, the
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Holy Spirit has been with you, but he shall be in you. That was a prophecy of just a few days into the future because a few days from there into the future at Pentecost, the
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Holy Spirit indwelt the bodies of all the believers. And from that point on, as you go through the book of Acts, as the word of God was preached and the gospel was believed, the believers were indwelt by the
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Holy Spirit at the moment of their regeneration. And that's how it is now. It's how it will be until he comes back.
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That is the mystery. So the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, I'm not talking about the filling. The filling is a whole different theological concept.
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The filling is something that has to do with your will and mine. We are filled with the
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Spirit when we choose to be. And the filling is like, be not filled with wine, but be filled with the
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Holy Spirit. The filling of the Spirit is when you, you could picture it this way.
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If you could picture being Peter in the boat and Jesus is walking on the water and he says, come out here with me.
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And you reach out and you grab Jesus's hand and you walk on the water with him. And then you look at the water and you take your eyes off of Jesus and you sink, right?
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So the filling is when you choose to hold Jesus's hand at any given moment on any given day, many times throughout the day, hopefully, the more we grow in the
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Lord, the more we want to be holding his hand all day. And when you are, you cannot and will not sin.
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First John tells us that. But when you let go, you sink, just like Peter. So unfortunately for us, it's not unfortunate because it was
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God's perfect plan, that we would live with an old man still attached, even though the
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Bible says he's crucified, positionally he's dead already, but we are the new man, but we go in and out of the new man.
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And when we're out of the new man, we can sin. And if you're born again, a really good symptom of that is that when you do sin, it bothers you so badly and you wish you hadn't done it.
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And you go to the Lord and you admit to him it was a sin. And he cleanses you from all unrighteousness at that point, every time.
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And you get up and you go again. That's the life. It's a little tiring because none of us in this room, if you're born again, none of us want to sin.
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Whereas before we were saved, we enjoyed it. And we ran with the goats. We did the same thing they did.
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We were lost sheep. Then we got saved. Now all of a sudden when we do slip and we sin, we hate it.
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And we go to the Lord and ask him to cleanse us. And then we get up and go again. And the
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Bible says this treasure was put in earthen vessels, that's our body, our natural fleshly body, on purpose so that God would get the glory when we do get it right.
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And so we see it's God's will for us to be this way. So we're not going to be perfect. It bothers the world.
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The world looks at us and says, well, how can you claim to be Christians? I just saw what you just did, right?
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You know, I saw what you just said, how you just acted. So I don't see that it's real. Well, it's because they're blinded.
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So the Bible nowhere says you're going to be perfect in this life. When it says be holy, the word holy doesn't mean perfect for a human, it does for God.
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But for a human, it just means be different. Be different than the world. You should be different.
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Listen, if it's true that when you got saved, your body became the temple of the living
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God, which is the mystery we're talking about today. If that's true, you can't be the same as before that.
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You implicitly are different. And that differentness is holiness. You are less like the world and you're more like God every day.
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It doesn't mean you're perfect. So don't think you're going to be, but try to be. How about that for good theology?
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You know, you could go many days without sin, but you probably won't, but you should try to be.
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You should try to. So that's kind of the state we live in. Now, the mystery of the filling of,
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I'm sorry, of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the filling is a moment by moment decision that you make.
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All right? The indwelling is a decision that was made by God before the foundation of the world.
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And it happened to you at the moment of your regeneration, God did it to you. It's not something you did for him.
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So you had no decision to make. It was a gift. Along with about 33 other things, the
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Holy Spirit gave you at the moment that he saved you. So the indwelling is a gift
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God gives you and something he does to you that you can't change. He is sealed within you. There's nothing you can do to change that.
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There is no way that any born again person who's indwelt by the Holy Spirit could lose his salvation because he didn't gain his salvation.
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It was a gift from God and God is not an Indian giver. He does not change his mind, nor does he withdraw his gifts.
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It's just that the world, we all grew up thinking it's all about works. I don't care what church denomination you grew up in, you thought you had to do good to be saved.
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You thought you had to be good to be saved. And the problem with that is no one is good enough. And thanks be to God for the gospel and the good news, which is what gospel means.
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The good news is this, you don't get saved by doing. Because if you did, we would all lose it.
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Because tomorrow we may not do right, right? You get saved as a gift from God, whereby the father always knew you as his, the
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Bible teaches, before the foundation of the world, Ephesians chapter one, Roman chapter eight, and all through the entire Old and New Testament.
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Before the foundation of the world, he knew you with love and knew you by name as his child.
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And what happened on the day that you got saved was, you became aware of it because the
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Holy Spirit called you. That's called the effectual calling. Churches don't talk about it much anymore.
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You go back 150 years ago, they all talked about it. Didn't matter what denomination, they all talked about it. The Holy Spirit has to call a person or he'll never be saved and she will never be saved because we're not trying to be saved.
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And the proof of that is you didn't get saved three minutes before you got saved, why not? Or a day before or a week or two months before because you didn't want to.
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And when the Holy Spirit awakened you and opened your eyes and said, there's Jesus, he is your shepherd, you are a sheep and you're hungry, he's got the food, what will you do with him?
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That's when you made the choice because the Holy Spirit made him irresistible to you at that moment.
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Oh, you were able to resist him up until that moment and that's your spiritual birthday. And so the
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Holy Spirit awakened you and me. He opened our blind eyes, our deaf ears and that little dead kernel of a spirit came alive.
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And from that point, you're regenerated, everything else is an effect of it, not the cause of it.
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So since you didn't cause it, you can't lose it. Isn't that beautiful? Who would want to believe the other way?
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Listen, if you believe the other way that you could lose it, how would you even sleep at night? How would you sleep over your children or your loved ones if you thought that false doctrine were true?
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So anyway, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the fact that he is sealed within every believer by God, a man can't break that seal.
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I know I have friends in other denominations that say, well, yeah, but you can decide on your own to reject
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Jesus again. Okay, so you're gonna break a seal that God put on your life, impossible. They're just not looking at the whole of scripture.
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All they're looking at is what their putrefied denomination taught them. All of us as adults,
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Christians, should be more than willing to lay aside the false things any denomination taught us and just hang on to this book and let this book be the authority and let men's philosophies be way down here somewhere.
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It's okay to reason together. God says, though, we're supposed to be reasoning with him. So let me ask you a question.
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Logic is great, but only if it's biblical, where he says, come let us reason together. So if,
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I taught this to the kids, by the way. You heard me teach this part to the kids. If God is a person and you can reason with him, then reasoning means you've got two people talking with each other.
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They may not be agreeing, but they're talking back and forth. That can't happen, number one, if Jesus isn't alive today.
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And number two, if you can't talk to him and he can't talk to you, then you're not reasoning. But the Bible says you can, in fact,
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God commands it. So how do we talk to him? Prayer. How does he talk to us?
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Through his word. Read Hebrews chapter one, verses one through three, if you think he still talks in audible voices, because he doesn't.
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If you think you've heard God talk to you, you heard you talk to you. If you'll be honest, you'll say, yep, that was my voice.
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You didn't hear God talk. Because Hebrews one, one through three, the Holy Spirit says, I don't do that anymore.
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And I have people tell me, well, he did to me. And I say, okay, well, who's the liar? This person or the Holy Spirit when he said he won't talk?
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He won't do it. So listen, here's how he talks to you, is through his completed word. The perfect, that which is perfect has come.
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This is how he speaks to us. Now, can the Holy Spirit move us on the inside and give us a feeling of peace versus conflict if he wants us to walk through a door or not?
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Obviously, yes. So that's a form of him speaking to us. But we have to be very careful when we say, well,
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God told me to do this. I mean, we say that in our church here sometimes, but we know what we mean by that here.
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But we have to be careful when we say it because others don't. Because what we mean is we feel that through the written word of God, the revealed will of God, what
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I'm thinking about doing is not in conflict. It's not against scripture. And I've been praying about it for weeks and I've got a peace about it.
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That's what we mean when we say, I think God's telling me to buy that particular house or whatever we say. We don't think we heard
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God speaking a voice because since he says he doesn't do that anymore, then he doesn't.
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So here's how he speaks to us. So if you're gonna reason with God, you gotta be in the word. You have got, listen, you have got to be in this more than just on Sunday morning.
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You've got to be in this in your house and start wherever you want to and just start reading through it again.
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You know, we own a company called Tradeway. So we get through that sort of a ministry because we teach the
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Bible and the gospel while we're teaching people how to trade in the stock market. But we get an opportunity to speak to people in every major market in the whole country.
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And so many people have sent me emails and said, you know what, I like the stock market stuff, but I really come to hear the rabbit trails.
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And what they mean by that is the Bible stuff that we throw in there. And we've had people say, you know, I've got revival in my life because some of the stuff that either me or some of our teachers taught made me want to study the
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Bible again. Because really I disagreed with you when you said it and I had to check it out. But now I'm in the word every day.
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It has happened scores and scores and scores of times. And so this little church is like the background for hundreds of thousands of people getting the gospel.
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That's pretty cool. So bless you and stay true because we don't want the
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Lord to take his hand off of what's happening. Now, as we look at these things, this particular mystery of God in us, the hope of glory is the indwelling, not the filling.
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Okay, everybody's got that. All right, now that perfect definition for what a mystery is, is there in Colossians chapter one, verse 26.
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And we talked about that quite a bit. The next thing was, we kind of looked at Colossians chapter two, verse two.
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Oh, I need to mention this. Do you remember there in the verse, look at Colossians two, two.
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See the very end of that verse. To the acknowledgement of the mystery of God and of the father and of Christ.
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You have the fact that God is one God who subsist as three distinct personas.
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All right, it's mentioned at the end of verse two in Colossians chapter two. We're in chapter two for the rest of the day, by the way.
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So right there in Colossians chapter two, an interesting thing, because notice it calls it the mystery of God and of the father and of Christ.
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And it's not the only place in the Bible where it speaks of the triune nature of God and calls it a mystery.
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And so here's what I want you to understand. This is a little bit of review. Is that this is not like a second idea, because the main idea of the mystery that we're talking about is the indwelling of the spirit.
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All of that, you're gonna see some other scriptures in the New Testament where it uses the word mystery and you're gonna think it's talking about something else.
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And it can be, but it all relates to the main mystery. So I like to say that there's one
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Roman numeral one and it's Christ in us, the hope of glory, it's the indwelling of the spirit. But there are a lot of A, Bs and Cs under it and they all relate to that main topic.
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So think about this. Could there be any way that Christ could live in you since we know he's physically at the right hand of the
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Shekinah glory in heaven right now, he's not here. Could he dwell in you without the Holy Spirit?
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And the answer is no, he couldn't. So God has to subsist as three distinct personas.
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So if God was just one God like the Mohammedans think or like the Jews think or like nearly every false religion thinks, he couldn't both be in heaven and be in your heart at the same time.
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And the fact is the more we study scripture, we see that the father is not in time and space. He's not on the earth, he's not even in heaven.
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He's outside of all of it because heaven has time in it, by the way, and it's a place. The father's not there, if he were, he'd blow it up.
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He would blow it up because he's now, he's I am. And if he came into time, everything would flee from him.
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The book of Revelation says that actually happens at the great white throne judgment. So you have to start learning a little bit about, it's not enough just to know about the
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Trinity, you have to understand that often in order to solve the most difficult
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Bible questions, you have to think of the distinctiveness of the persons of the
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Godhead. The distinct, not just the unity, but the distinctiveness. How is Jesus different than the father?
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How's the father different than the Holy Spirit? How's the Holy Spirit different than Jesus? And when you start to think this way, you can solve a lot of biblical problems that other people just argue about.
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And it's really fascinating. So here we have this sort of sub mystery of the
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Trinity that is the cause of the ability of God to dwell in your hearts and also
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Jesus to be in heaven and the father to be outside of space and time all at the same time. You see, that couldn't be that way.
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God didn't exist as a triune God. Another thing that our people have heard me say a million times is if it's true that God is love, do you realize that by definition, love has to have an object?
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So he would have to have always existed as father, son, and Holy Spirit. And each person loves the other or you couldn't have love.
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He wouldn't be love if he didn't always have an object of love. So he's always existed as a triune nature.
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In fact, I just, I'm a terrible teacher because I always answer the question that's on the test before you see the test.
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I was gonna ask you, how long has God existed as a triune being? I blew it because I wanted to see if you could answer that.
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The answer is always. There's never been a time when he didn't. All right, so there, then the next thing that we saw recently is the sufficiency of scripture.
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And we see that in verse two as well of Colossians 2. And then the next thing that we saw was the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.
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And we see that in verse three. And then in verse four, we see why all these things are needed.
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Why is it important to think about the mystery of the indwelling and the mystery of the triune nature of God?
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Verse four says, because otherwise, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words.
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So Jesus said, in the end times, we'll have many false prophets. It's true, we do. They're everywhere.
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They're in churches. They're all around us. They're all around the world, teaching things that have maybe 90 % truth, 10 % error, and that 10 % will kill you.
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It could kill you forever. And so it's bad. And one reason we need to keep in mind the triune nature of God is it knocks out almost all of the world religions of the world other than biblical
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Christianity. It knocks out all of them. So any false prophet that comes to you and says, well, by the way, the
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Trinity was created by the Roman Catholics. It's not really biblical. If you hear that, they're lying. Now, I'm not gonna get obviously very far into this study.
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I mean, I think I printed 20 new pages last night and already had enough for today. So, but when
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I do get to it, after I show you all the places the Bible teaches, don't worry, it's not thousands, okay?
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The places the Bible teaches that God exists this way, that he's one God subsisting as three distinct persons, then
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I'm gonna go into church history and I'm gonna go back before Constantine. Now, why do you guys think
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Constantine's important? I didn't answer that one ahead of time.
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See, I usually do. Okay, who was Constantine? He was the one who was responsible for making
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Christianity, the national religion of Rome.
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He basically founded the Roman Catholic Church. And the reason that's important is we know when he lived and when he did this.
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So therefore, if we can find any church father that existed prior to roughly 300 AD, and they talk about the
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Trinity, then it's a lie to say that it was invented by the Catholics. You see my point? I will show that to you probably next
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Sunday or the next, but we'll get to it. So the point is the Trinitarian position is the only true
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Christian position. Anyone that says, oh, all this other stuff is true, but God doesn't exist as three distinct persons because that would be three gods.
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Well, most of the time when people say that, it's because they're trying to philosophically figure out how that can be true.
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And since they can't think of a great model, they just think, well, that can't be true because basically you're saying there's three gods.
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Well, no true Trinitarian says there's three gods. There's one God. Okay, but think of yourself.
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You're one person, right? But you have a body, a soul, and a spirit. You're triune because you're creating his image.
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There are so many trinities that God put in creation, I think probably to give us some models we can use to convince the naysayers because if you just philosophically think it won't work because you can't figure it out, but the scripture says it is that way, then you're an unbeliever.
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You don't get saved by philosophically figuring stuff out. You get saved by belief. You believe that what
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Jesus said is true. What his apostles said in the word of God is true.
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And you base your faith and your eternal security and your life in the hereafter on faith.
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So I will tell you for sure, the Bible teaches the Trinitarian position. The Roman Catholics didn't make it up.
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They do believe it. Maybe not exactly like we believe it, but great. I'm glad they do.
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But there's a lot of Judaism. We talked about that in Sunday school this morning. If you were here,
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Ben talked about the Judaizers where they want to bring legalism into grace, which you can't do.
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They don't mix. And a lot of those guys are trying to say, and I've got, I know acquaintances in this area in Mahea and in Corsicana, and the main leader
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I think is here, who is teaching. And I read his paper when he first came out with it back in the 80s.
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No, it'd be in the 90s, early 90s, where he said the Trinity is not true. And he claims to be a
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Jew, a Jewish believer. He used to call me little brother because he's 6 '4", big dude.
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And so I read his paper and I said, look, let's take a two night, three day retreat and study nothing but the
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Bible on what it says about the Trinity together. How about that? And he agreed to do it. And we looked up every verse that has it, even ones that allude to it.
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And we marked out a few where we felt like the context wasn't really teaching that. And we eliminated those, but there were still scores and scores of Bible passages that talked about it.
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And yet he said, no, I see it sounds like it says that, but I think the Catholics invented it. And I said, well, if I could show you an early church father before Constantine that believed it, would you then agree with me?
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He said, yes. I said, well, I know I've seen it, but I can't find it. So I went home and maybe two months later in my study,
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I found it. And I read it to him at work. And he looked at it and I said, so what do you think?
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He said, nah. And he walked away. So I never fellowshiped with him again after that because he's not honest.
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You see, he didn't care about the truth. He cared about his argument. I don't talk with people about the Bible that are like that.
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I have not time for that. I want people that care about the truth where they'll even change their position if they see theirs is wrong.
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I will change mine if I see mine is wrong. That's the kind of people I hang out with. That's why this church is so in the word.
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That's why, and the reason like we've had people say, well, that's a different kind of church. It's kind of like a family.
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You know why? Because we're in the word. When you're in the word, you have peace and you lack division. You lack it.
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Don't like it. You lack it. You lack division because the Holy Spirit hates division.
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So here we see that it speaks of the triune nature of God in verse three there in chapter two says, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, talking about Jesus Christ.
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And this word knowledge means understanding the way things really are in the Greek is what that means. And so why is it important?
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Well, because the idea of focusing on God's word rather than philosophy, it's smart to have philosophy, but it must be underneath the scripture, not above it.
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The rudiments of the world, the lies of Satan, the cares of this world, the lies of riches and other things coming in to quench the
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Bible out of your life. We can't let that happen. Why? Verse four says, lest any man should be guileless.
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If we're not in the word, we don't know if a prophet's false or true because they all seem true.
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Otherwise they wouldn't be a scammer. Scam artists are always believable by definition or they don't last long.
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And when they build the biggest church in town, I'm not talking about of course Canada, but when they built maybe Houston, when they build the biggest church in Houston, okay, just because of that doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
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He might be the best scam artist you've ever met in your life. And the only way you know is if what he says matches up with this and if his emphasis matches up with the emphasis of the preachers in this book, which
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I can say that they commonly don't. So that's why it's important.
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And then verse 10, we dropped down to verse 10. We'll come back to eight and nine because we skipped them. It speaks of the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.
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Now, if it's true that verse two says that the scriptures are sufficient to equip us, we don't have to have man's philosophy.
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The scripture is enough. And then verse 10 says, Jesus is enough. Our relationship with him, because what it says is we are complete in Christ.
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And that word complete means replete in the Hebrew. And what that means in English is fully or abundantly provided for and filled.
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We've got everything we need. If we have the word of God and we have Jesus in our heart, everything. Listen, Paul said very clearly,
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I don't preach with flowery words. I don't preach with the skills of men's speeches and beautiful verbiage and a bunch of stories and poems and things.
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He said, I preach the word of God in the power of the Holy Spirit. That's what Paul did. He was, you think about it.
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Paul had a kid listening to him. Of course, his average sermon was a couple hours. So was Spurgeon's only 150 years ago, by the way.
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I can't believe you guys can't handle me for two hours. But then again, I'm not Spurgeon. But anyway, Paul was preaching and some kid fell sound asleep, fell out the window and it killed him.
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I've never done that. That's why we have only one story in our church. But Paul went out, laid on top of the kid's body and life came back into the kid because he's an apostle and he can do that.
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We don't have apostles today. So people that tell you they can still do that are lying. Either they've been deceived by teachers or they themselves are a deceiver, but they're lying because they can't do it.
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I always love to ask them, where's your grandma? In the grave. How come? You're a faith healer. Did you hate her?
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Well, even if she's in the grave, why didn't you raise her? You're an apostle. You see,
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I hate to be that way, but you know what? In Sunday school, Ben taught that Paul said, when people are speaking lies, you don't deal with them for an hour.
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You shut their mouths. You can't do that without being a little bit forceful. Now, I like to be kind to people and meek as possible, which
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I'm growing. Don't laugh at me, Emily, my daughter -in -law. You're like me, so just be quiet.
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So, but sometimes when Paul says their mouths must be stopped, does that sound like gentleness?
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Or does that sound like in their face, blow them away so that the kids that are listening know that's an idiot? That's how you have to do it sometimes.
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Don't do it at Thanksgiving, around the table with your family, please. Brother Mitchell said, blow you away.
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No, don't do that. Don't do that. Let us do it from the pulpits, better, safer for everybody.
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All right, so we're complete in Christ and we see all of that.
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Now, how do we know? So I wanna go back to this concept, this little subset of the triune nature of God for a little bit.
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How do we know that God is one God subsisting as three distinct personas?
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And I wanna thank Dave Senior down here on the front, second pew here, for coming up with that word, persona, rather than person, because it's much better.
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And no one's been able to shoot down here, sink your ship on that yet. So I'm hanging on to it.
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How do we know God exists that way? And do you wonder why I just said that today?
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The way the church has said it for centuries, going all the way back to like 100
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AD, just barely after John the Apostle died, when you get into Polycarp, the next pastor and so forth, they've been talking about this that long.
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And they usually say God is one God subsisting in three distinct persons.
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And that is the theological way to say it. But for laymen who don't sit around and think about God all the time, probably, like some of us who have more time to do it, it can be confusing because when you think of people, you think of each other.
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And you say, okay, well now, if you take me and Dave and Maddie, we're three distinct persons, right?
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Three distinct people. How could we be one person? So that model doesn't quite work for the human brain, okay?
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But the teaching of the Trinity doesn't mean it like that. And I'm gonna be teaching you a little more of that as we go.
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But when you say persona, it's better because you're not picturing three people.
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What you're picturing is three personalities that are real, where one of them talks to the other.
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And one of them may say, well, the father sent me, Jesus said that, right?
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So you can't just say they're only one God in the sense of one person, because how could one send the other if they're just one person?
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Do you see the point? So they are two distinct personalities, but they are one God. And the way you look at it is they're the same essence, but they have distinct personalities that work differently with us and with each other.
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So you have to think that way, because the truth is God's always existed that way.
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And it's our honor to be able to study his word and try to think about that in a way that can make sense to us.
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And it's difficult, because I think God's on a higher dimension than we are. We're three -dimensional.
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We're trying to figure out maybe a 11 -dimensional or 12 -dimensional being, but he gives us information about himself so we can think about it.
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Now, how do we know he exists that way? Well, not by just some example like I just gave.
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That's not enough. We need to see the holy word of God say it's that way, right? That's how we know, okay?
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So then I might ask the question after saying, how do we know?
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We know by the scripture, but why is it important to know? And I think that bears really strongly on our topic of this mystery of Christ in me and Christ in you, the hope of glory.
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How can that even be true if you don't have a triune God? And it couldn't be, it could not be, because Mohammedans don't claim that Mohammed lives in their hearts.
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Did you know that? They've never claimed that. They don't talk about the Holy Spirit. Hindus don't, so it's because they don't know
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God at all. You know what's interesting? Do you know why Jesus is called the word of God?
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In John 1, 1, in the beginning it was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Well, with implies two distinct personas, doesn't it?
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You can't be with the same person, two distinct personas. And then it says the word was with God, then it says he was
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God, so that's one essence, one essence. Let me give you something that'll help you with the essence.
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I read this somewhere and I like it. All models fail if you really get to the end of it. They all fail when you try to use a human model of any kind to describe
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God, but some of them help us a little bit. This one helped me. I don't even remember where I was reading some theology book and the gentleman said this.
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He said, if we could think of God, and he was talking about God the Father, I guess, or he may have been talking about the
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Holy Spirit, doesn't matter, let's just say God. He said, if God existed as zillions of individual particles, if you could picture
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God as being made up of individual particles, billions and zillions of particles, he said, that's not how
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God exists, but if he did, just picture it that way. So can you do that for a minute? Just picture
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God as, you know, I'm not present, he's bigger than the whole universe, but it's zillions of little individual particles is
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God. He said, if God did exist that way, each particle is all of God also.
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You see? Let that sink in a minute. If he was zillions of particles, you could just take one of those and put it over here and he would be all of God.
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That particle would be all of God. That is how this theologian pictured the essence of God.
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So that Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father are the same essence. They are fully God and they're one God, but they are three distinct personas or persons or personalities, if you want to, whichever way you want to word it.
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And the fact is so obvious because for many reasons, but we'll look at scripture on that.
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So let me, I got just a little bit of time. Let's start on that right now. And I'm going to first start with the
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New Testament. Turn with me to the book of 1 John. We're going to diverge for a week or two on looking at the trinitarian position.
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And the reason I think it's important, one thing it's mentioned in the passages we're teaching in Colossians, both in chapter one and chapter two.
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But in these end times, I am seeing a lot of attack on this doctrine by people who are so -called
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Christians. And many of them are Jewish believers who are attacking this because you see a Jew likes to think of God as one, right?
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One of the most difficult things that you encounter when you witness to a Jewish person is he will immediately think that you believe in three gods, which you don't, you believe in one
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God. But if this is difficult for me to explain in a predominantly
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Gentile church of believers who are already born again, who have
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Christ living in them and the Holy Spirit teaching you as you read your Bible, think how hard it is to go to a lost
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Jew and explain this. And the very thing that makes them reject Jesus Christ is that they just think there's just one
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God and they know we believe Jesus is God. So you got to be able to explain how we believe that if you ever have any hope of leading a
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Jewish person to the Lord. And so this is why it's important. Now, here's the sad thing.
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There are a lot of Jewish Christians who claim to be Christians who are teaching in our churches, even in Central Texas.
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I know three of them were friends of mine, two of them. In fact, all three of them formerly in this church years ago in the 80s, one of them in the 80s.
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Actually two out of the three were in this church back in the 80s and then left and so forth.
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But anyway, they are teaching that you have to keep the law to be saved.
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That's called Judaism. And one of the things they're teaching is that God does not exist as a
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Trinity or as a triune God. So it is really moving around. So we're going to spend some time on it.
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So look at 1 John 5, 7 and 8. I'm going to, you know, some people say it's not in the Bible.
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In fact, these people that want to think the Catholics invented it, you know, it's not in the Bible. They just made you think it is.
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Well, let's just read the scripture and see what we think. 1 John 5, 7, for there are three that bear record in heaven.
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The father, the word, who is the word? Jesus and the
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Holy ghost. All right, so the scripture itself says they are three.
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All right, they are three. But then it comes right back and says, and these three are one.
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There's the triune nature of God in the scripture. Now, this is interesting. I spent,
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I forget, Ben, how many years did I spend studying manuscript evidence? I don't know, a couple of years focusing on where our
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Bible came from. Two whole years I studied that. It's very fascinating that the only
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English version that's accurate with the correct Greek is the King James. Even the new
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King James is a lie. It's not accurate with the Greek. And what's fascinating about it is many of the new versions of the
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Bible in English, like the New American Standard, for example, leave out 1
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John 5, 7, it's missing. Why would you think it'd be missing? It's the clearest teaching of the
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Trinity in the whole Bible. And they will say, oh, it's not in the originals. The oldest manuscripts don't contain it.
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Well, where does logic prove that the oldest manuscript is the most accurate?
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What if it was discarded in a trash bin in a monastery in Egypt, for example?
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By the way, one of the two manuscripts that all those Bibles come from was exactly that. It was found in the dump, the trash dump of a monastery.
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The reason it existed all this time is because there's no humidity there, so it didn't rot, but it had been thrown away.
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Why do you think the scribes threw it away? And the other one is called the Vaticanus, and it's from the
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Roman Catholic Library. Those two Bibles, all your modern versions of English come from.
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Can you trust those two origins? Just because they're ancient doesn't mean they're true.
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But if you take the majority of the over 5 ,000 manuscripts and parts of manuscripts of the
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New Testament that we have, and you looked at each word in this Bible right here, and you looked at which word does the majority of those 5 ,000 have that word, this is where this
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Bible would come from, more or less. And that is the method God used to preserve the word.
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And he said he would preserve it till the last generation. So you have it, but it's not in every version.
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So you're not even gonna find this verse, but it is in the original. How do I know that?
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Because I've gone back and looked at early church fathers, 300, 200
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AD, that quoted this verse. Now, let me ask you, how did they quote it if it didn't exist in their
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Bible? You see my, does that make sense? So these guys are liars, and they've removed this verse.
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Listen to it. There are three, they're a record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.
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So you have the three distinct personalities of God or persons of God, but you also have they are one in essence right there in that verse.
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I would love to discuss verse eight, but it's different. We'll do that another time. Now, let me just give you an
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Old Testament or two. Look at Isaiah 48. If you think, well, the Trinity is a New Testament doctrine.
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No, it's not. The most ancient place you find it is in Genesis chapter one, by the way.
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But look at Isaiah 48, 16. Some of you may have never seen this one. It's pretty powerful.
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Come ye near unto me, hear ye this, the prophet Isaiah says, I have not spoken in secret from the beginning.
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And now he's, you know, this is the Holy Spirit speaking through Isaiah. From the time that it was, there
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I am. Now, who do we know when Moses asked God, what is your name? So I can tell the
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Jews who talked to me, what did God say his name was? I am. So there's a clue.
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So hear me, hear ye this. I have not spoken in secret from the beginning, God says.
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From the time that the beginning was, there I am. And now the
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Lord God and his spirit has sent me. Now there you have three persons. You have
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God, the father, you have his spirit. That's the Holy Spirit. And the me that got sent is
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Jehovah, which was God with us. The God who existed in the Old Testament and walked with Adam and Eve and spoke from the burning bush, that's
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Jesus. Most people think it's the father, but it's not. If the father came into time,
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Adam and Eve would have been destroyed because he is now and they're in time. So this was
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Jesus. I'm not the only one that believes that. If you go back and read 150 years ago, preachers talked about it all the time.
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Nowadays, people don't even think about these things. So there you have the Trinity in Isaiah 48, verse 16.
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Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer. Who is the Redeemer? You sing about him, who is that? That's Jesus.
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So there's the second person of the Godhead. Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the
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Holy one of Israel. I am the Lord, thy God, which teaches you to profit. It's interesting how much practical stuff is in the
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Bible. He wants us to be entrepreneurs. He wants us to be profitable and lay aside enough for our kids and our grandkids, which is a certain amount of wealth we're commanded to do.
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That's something to think about. But Jesus teaches us to profit, and that word in the
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Hebrew means to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou should go.
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So God leads us in how to do these things. Oh, that thou hadst hearken to my commandments.
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Then had thy peace been as a river and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea. That's so pretty, it should be a song.
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In fact, we do have a Christian scripture song on that. Now look at Genesis 1 .1. We're running out of time, so this'll be the last one this morning.
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All right, look at Genesis 1 .1. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
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Now that goes back pretty far, doesn't it? It goes back to the beginning of time, at least on earth and our immediate environment.
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You know, at least where the birds fly. All right, so in the beginning was
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God. He created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the
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Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep. So now you see the Holy Spirit. So now you have two persons of the
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Godhead listed right there. Now it's interesting because in the first chapter of Genesis, the only word for God is
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Elohim, which we'll talk about what that name of God means in a minute, and Jehovah doesn't show up until chapter two.
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And that has, it has a direct relation to the creation of man, because man is created in Jehovah's image.
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And Jehovah is Jesus, by the way. So here we see Elohim mentioned, and God said, let there be light, and there was light.
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And that's before he made the sun. There was no sun yet. There were no stars yet.
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So who do you think the light was? Jesus, all right. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness night, and the evening and the morning were the first day.
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Now in that language, does that sound like a literal day? The evening and the morning was the first day, or does it sound like a billion years?
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It's a day. It's one day, all right? And Genesis, now drop down to verse 26.
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And God, Elohim, said, let us, now notice the plural. Notice the plural.
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I've shown this to many Jewish people. Well, a few, I won't say many, but a few
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Jewish people I've had the opportunity to witness to. God said, let us make man in our image.
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Why is that in the plural? You see? It can't, you know, it's interesting because in Hebrew, it's called a uniplurality, which means it's actually bad grammar, but it's written that way by the
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Holy Spirit, who is perfect, so it's how it's supposed to be. Why is it bad grammar? Because it's talking about one
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God who has three distinct personas, or three distinct persons, which makes it plural.
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So he's uniplural. He's one God, but he subsists as three distinct persons right there in the very first chapter of Genesis.
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Let us make man in our image after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish, et cetera, et cetera.
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Beautiful, isn't it? Now, so God said, that's Elohim, and that is a plural word in the
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Hebrew, by the way. Now, it does have a singular form,
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Eloah, but the plural is used here. In chapter two, verse seven, and the
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Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground. What's interesting here, the word God there is
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Elohim, but the word Lord is Jehovah, or Yahweh. Now, Yahweh means the self -existent one who reveals himself.
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That's Jehovah. Jesus is the one who reveals God to us. Jesus is the word.
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Why is he called the word? I started saying that at the first of the sermon, got on a rabbit trail and forgot. Why is he called the word? Because a word is like a truck that can take the stuff from Raymond's brain, bring it into my ear, and put it in my brain.
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That's what a word is. You couldn't be human without words. You couldn't know God without words.
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Vocabulary is the way we know God and each other, and the way God expresses himself to us.
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And so Jesus is the word of God. Now, it's interesting because the
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Lord God, God is Elohim, but Lord is
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Jehovah, which means the self -existent one, self -existent, nobody made him, he's always existed, who reveals himself.
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Elohim simply comes from the little word El in Hebrew, which means strength or the strong one, but Allah, Elohim, the last part of the word means to swear, which implies faithfulness.
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So Elohim means the strong one who is faithful, but it's in plural, the strong ones who are faithful.
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That's the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Okay, I lied to you, I gotta show you one more, okay?
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Proverbs 8 .22, turn there, because this will blow your mind. We're talking about the
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Trinity in the Old Testament. Now we've taken it all the way back to the first chapter of Genesis. So as long as the world has begun,
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God has existed as one God subsisting in three distinct persons. All three of the persons were listed in the first chapter of Genesis.
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And now we're looking at the book of Proverbs, one of the older books of the Bible, and it goes farther back, if you can say it that way, before Genesis 1 .1.
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Can you imagine that? Now we would debate whether there's even time yet at that point, or a place.
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Truly, all there is is God. But God subsisted as three distinct persons, thus he could love himself because he had the
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Father loving the Son, the Holy Spirit loving the Son, and so forth. And all you have is
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God, and God is perfectly fine, and yet he wanted children. Thus, here we are.
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Did he need them? Probably not, but did he want them? Yes, so that's what we call the will of God.
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And let me ask you this, is God's will always done? Absolutely. And so here we are, his children.
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And do you know that God uses us in marriage to produce more children for himself? All the way to the end of this age, all the way to the end of the thousand -year millennial kingdom, he'll be doing that.
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And then it says there's age unto age. So humans will be bringing more of God's children into the world for ages beyond us, because God wants a bunch of children.
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Isn't that great? But look at Proverbs 8 .22, this goes back before Genesis 1 .1. It says, the
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Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
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Now the works of old is the creation of the earth and time and so forth in Genesis 1 .1.
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So before the works of old, the Lord God possessed Jesus.
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He wasn't called Jesus yet, he was the eternal son. He was named Jesus when he was born into a human body, but before that he's always existed as the eternal son.
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And here the scripture tells us this, back before time began, the
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Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. The word possessed there in the
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Hebrew called Nah, it literally means he owned me as a son. Think about that.
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I own children, I got five of them. They are mine. I've got 14 grandbabies. They're mine.
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They don't belong to their parents. They belong to me. Us, us, us, us.
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There's the other grandpa. Yeah, some of them. But you take them all, you take those too.
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I tell you what, you better be glad I'm saved, because I'd be so jealous. You're such a great grandpa and a grandmom.
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I mean, but I'm not jealous. I just, it just makes, you know, competition's good.
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Is that a rabbit trail? All right, so the Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way.
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Beginning means the first place in time or order or rank.
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So actually before time began, Jesus, the eternal son,
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I can call him Jesus, but he wasn't called that yet. The eternal son was owned by his father.
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In the beginning of his way, what does that mean? Well, that's just the course of life or mode of action or journey, whatever.
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So you think about the father existing before anything existed, whatever his journey was, have you ever thought about it?
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Oh, I'd love to talk about that. Where'd he come from? Who made him? Nobody made him.
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He didn't come from anywhere, because there was no space. There was no stuff. He wasn't in a ware. He was not in a ware.
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He just existed. And he's the self -existent one, which is what his name Elohim means. Actually, Jehovah means that.
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So, you know, what was his way? Otis used to, if you guys are visiting,
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Otis was a man I met. When I met him, he had been teaching the Bible 50 years, and he ended up joining our church and taught another 13 years here.
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Amazing man. But it bothered him. What did God do, Brother David, before Genesis 1 -1?
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And I'd say, you know, if I had a pre -Genesis book, I would tell you, Brother Otis, but what's funny is
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I hadn't found this Proverb chapter yet, but this is pre -Genesis, where we're looking right now.
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In fact, before he passed away, we found it together, and we talked about this. But, you know, whatever his way was, the
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Son was with him in that way. Do you see that? So, Jesus Christ is God, because only
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God can be self -existent and have always existed. It means nobody made Jesus.
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In fact, in the New Testament, it says, by him were all things made, and for him. He made everything that exists, even the angels,
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Jesus did. So here, verse 23 says, I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
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In other words, before the earth was, Jesus said, I was set up. Now, some people, if you just read that in English, you think, oh, well, that's where the
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Jehovah's Witnesses get the idea he was created. But in Hebrew, it doesn't mean that. It is the
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Hebrew word, nalsak, which means to be poured out, as into, or actually, by analogy, it means to anoint a king.
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So it's like anointing someone with oil. So what the word means is, before God made anything, he anointed
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Jesus to be the one who would die for us. And doesn't the scripture say that he was crucified before the foundation of the world?
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So the Godhead, in God's wisdom, had chosen the Son to be the one who would be
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God with us and come and live as a man and die in our place, so that all of God's children could be with him forever.
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And that's what set up means in the Hebrew. It's interesting to show that to a Jewish person.
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Then he says, I was set up from everlasting from the beginning. Well, those words mean exactly what it means, from everlasting, that is, to me, it's kind of an interesting word, olam, which means, literally, the concealed thing or the vanishing point.
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So it's like, if we look back in time, as far back as we can look, even to where we can't see into that,
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Jesus already existed, the vanishing point. Verse 24, when there were no depths, I was brought forth.
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Well, see, that could be construed to mean he was born, but it doesn't mean that, or that he was created, doesn't mean that, because,
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I love this, in the Hebrew, it's the word kul, almost sounds like cool in English, and it means to twist or whirl or spiral.
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And we've spoken about this in our church many times, but if you can picture a time before anything existed, time didn't exist,
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I have to say a time, but we can't even speak this way. There's no time, there's no place, there's just God.
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And then, all of a sudden, God creates a place, which is the third heaven, which is where Jesus is now.
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So he makes that place where heaven is now, he makes a place, and Jesus, as this
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Hebrew word says, spirals out of God into time and space, and he's in heaven now.
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That's how it happened. Now, he started creating angels, he created
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Lucifer, who was not the devil yet, he was the son of morning, he was the archangel of God, he was in the closest proximity to God, and he protected
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God's holiness, but Jesus made him, and I want you to picture this for a minute. If I'm Jesus, and I appear in this place, and no one's in here but me, and then
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I make, I'm gonna use senior, I love using senior for this, and I make senior, he's
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Lucifer, the bright angel, the wonderful one, the bright angel, and I tell you,
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I'm God, and I just made you, but in your point of view, you showed up the same time
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I did. So why am I greater than you, right? This is why Satan didn't believe in why he fell.
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You see it? From his viewpoint, there's no proof that Jesus was there first, he thought they just appeared at the same time, along with all these other angels that Jesus just created, and this is why he's an unbeliever, and a third of the angels went with him, because a third of them were there that day, they had the same experience.
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Did you know they've never seen the father? Only Jesus has, and Jesus told them about him, I've seen the father, and they're going, yeah, right.
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Can you see that? It's how it happened, and all of that's talked about here, because in this passage, he was brought forth, or he spiraled into time, when there were no fountains abounding with water, none of this stuff had been created yet, this is before Genesis 1 .1,
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before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth, while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world, when he prepared the heavens,
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I was there, when he set a compass upon the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep, when he gave to the sea his decree, so it wouldn't go past the shores, when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then was
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I by him, as one brought up with him, I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable, sorry, it's hard to say, rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth, and my delights were with the sons of men, now therefore hearken unto me,
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O you children, for blessed are they that keep my ways. So you see, Jesus loved out of all the planets that God was going to make, that they could see with their foreknowledge, correct?
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Before they were spoken into existence, they saw it all, right? And of all of those,
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Jesus picked the earth and said, that's the planet that I love, and I love the humans that you're gonna make.
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And so when Adam and Eve fell, and the human race was thrown into sin and the fallen nature that we find ourselves in, and was bound for hell,
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God the Father, in his wisdom and prudence, decided to save a remnant of that fallen race and give those people to his son as a love gift because he loved the earth and he loved the humans, and that's why we're saved.
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Nothing that we did, it's because the Father chose to give us as a gift to Jesus to be his brothers and sisters and to live with him forever.
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This is what we believe, this is what Charles Spurgeon believed 150 years ago, and all of the particular
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Baptists, some of the greatest Christians in church history believe these things, and yet you don't hear this stuff preached anymore.
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So how long has the Trinity last been existing? Since forever, since the vanishing point.
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God has always existed that way. Since before forever, I like that. Let's stand and pray together.
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Sorry, I took a little extra time today. Had to come to a good stopping point. Lord, thank you so much for your word.
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We ask you to bless it in our lives. We know you will. Help us to be strong, salt, and light as we go out into this world in these last days, and Lord, give us peace and unity in our families during this
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Thanksgiving holiday. Bless our nation. We see that you are blessing it right now, and we thank you so much for that, for the sake of our grandchildren.
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And Lord, we just ask you to bless the meal we're about to have together. Thank you for it, in Jesus' name, amen.
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All right, we invite all of you to stay for lunch. We have plenty for everybody, including visitors who always plan for that.