Welcome to Bible Believers Fellowship and the ministry of bbfohio.com. I am Pastor Greg and I welcome you to our current events update and in our study in Acts chapter 11 verses 27 through 30 titled, And in these days came prophets. The conclusion of this study can be found at bbfohio.com as we now begin part one of two. The current events update. Not brought to you by Pfizer. Israel at war. And of course, this is 12-31-23. If you didn't know it, starting tomorrow, you have to get used to writing 2024. A couple of years ago, I had a check returned to me because I put the wrong year on it. They'll do that. Incremental escalation continues. That's South Lebanon is North Israel, if you look on the map. That's heating up. Syria is heating up. Iran is getting more involved. The Houthis are shooting at ships in the Red Sea and heating things up. And there's rumblings elsewhere. So something to pray about. Keep your eye on. And as I said, especially if this turns out to be the Gog Magog War, you know, that's something that we've kind of been looking forward to. But 19 Iran-linked terrorists were killed in alleged Israeli strikes in eastern Syria. That is taking things right to the brink with Iran. So just keep your eyes on the headlines and be careful of the garbage you allow into your mind on this, because a lot of the reporting is garbage. As we discussed last week, recent propaganda tact is to claim that Jesus was a Palestinian, for example. The official state of Israel X, that's Twitter now, at some point we'll stop calling it Twitter, it's just called X now, but the official state Israel X account posted this response, and I thought it was pretty funny. Jesus was a Palestinian. What's a Palestinian? I was Jewish and born in Judea. But people on TikTok say that you were a Muslim. That doesn't even make sense. Islam didn't exist until about 600 years after my time. But how can people on TikTok be wrong? Oy vey. I thought that was a pretty good response. From a Jew, you know, from a Jewish perspective, I thought that was pretty good. And several weeks ago, we covered the reality of the fictional tale of the Palestinians. There's no such thing in reality, historically. It's a modern fantasy, this idea of Palestinians. We have posted this. It's still on the front page, bbfohio.com. You can go out and get it, but if someone You refer to them and they don't find it there. It will always be on our resources and go to charts and maps and on that page you'll find this. We have it both in a horizontal and vertical view. If you zoom it in there, the end of it there, we're not going to go and review it all, go back and listen to that current events update a few weeks ago. But you can see there that the land was under the control of the Byzantines, the Fatimid Mohammedans, the Latin Kingdom Crusaders, the Ayyubid Egyptians, the Mamluk Mohammedans, Ottoman Turks, and then the British, and then Israel. There's no point was there ever a Palestinian state, a Palestinian people. As a matter of fact, it's confusing if you go back and you look at the pre-1948 information, the newspaper was called the Palestinian Post, I think it was. It wasn't in reference to what we see today as Palestinians. It was in reference to the Jews. They were the ones who owned the paper. The Jews themselves were known as Palestinians up until 1948, and then when they became a nation, they became known as Israelis. And there's no point in history where there was a nation or people called Palestinians. You are experiencing, and if you buy into it, you're a victim of the modern Orwellian cult, where they just make things up, tell you it is, even though it's not, and dare you to disagree. And it's called gaslighting. It is now official policy of the Democrat Marxist, the progressive Republicans, and the mainstream media. It is their policy to look you in the eye and say, our border isn't open. COVID shots don't kill anybody. 7 million people died of COVID. They didn't. They might have been that many died with COVID, but they did not die of COVID and so forth. You see the point. That's when you look at a woman after she catches you cheating on her and you just say, what me? I saw you with my own two eyes. What me? That's an old comedian in the 80s who did a little skit on that, and it was pretty funny if you could get rid of the language. True story. So number two in our update is Rhino DeWine strikes again. Governor DeWine vetoes a bill that would have banned gender-affirming care for trans youth. That's a lie. Jenny, didn't you read the bill? Didn't that bill say that if that child had the approval of their parents and the medical. At least one parent. At least one parent and medical that they could get gender affirming care. The only thing they couldn't do is get surgery done until after they're 18. That's already the law. And he's, in his news conference, he stated that they're going to just expand the rules to make sure everyone understands that no surgery until 18. So he had no basis for vetoing the bill. He said he was vetoing the bill for that reason, and yet that's not a reason, because it's already law. You can't get surgery till you're 18. Gender affirming care just means things like going to a psychologist and that kind of thing. Now, I think the one stickler might have been hormone therapy, estrogen, and that sort of thing. Yeah, puberty blockers and all that. But in reality, just do a little research, you'll find out how many tens of thousands of dollars that Mike DeWine got from the medical industry. Sheeple and Mr. DeWine by the lies being propagated by the fake news media, and that makes a big difference. Why did they legalize pot? Why did they legalize abortion and put it in the Constitution of the state of Ohio? Because most Ohioans are stupid. And we're too nice to tell them that. They believe nonsense. They believe lies. The Bible calls them simple, calls them fools. And that's the only reason those things passed, and that's why the trans agenda is advancing in Ohio, because they believe all this lies. Let me give you an example. after it talks about his veto, shooting down the controversial bill. But Lewis says that first it's a lie, as I just pointed out. They claim that the bill would have prohibited transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care. The Capital Journal, but it was all over the place in different papers. That is a lie. It's a flat-out lie. goes on to say it would also stop middle and high school trans students from participating in athletics with cisgender peers. Anytime someone uses the cisgender word, tell them to shut their mouths. That word was invented by the pedophile and has been adopted by the homosexual union and is now being used as an insult for anyone who's normal. and straight. That's your news media, folks. That's the garbage you're subjecting yourself to if you go to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and yes, even Fox News. And if you go to Channel 10, and Channel 4, and Channel 6, and Channel 28 here locally, where more than half of the weather people are sodomites. That's the world we live in, folks. Look at this. What happens now? This is still the news. Trans youth, LGBTQ rights advocates and doctors are rejoicing at the decision. However, listen to this. The lawmakers against the bill have another option to take away rights from trans children. Just think about that. That's supposed to be news. They're not taking away rights of trans youth. They're protecting trans youth who are under the age of 18 who aren't allowed to buy a beer. They're not allowed to live off on their own. They would be put in a juvenile detention center for doing those things. They can't even get a tattoo. And yet you want to allow them to choose to take drugs and so-called therapies. That's what it's about, the love of money. Senate President Matt Huffman said, quote, I'm extremely disappointed by the governor's veto. Changes were made to the bill to accommodate his concerns, so he had no reason to veto it. And the bill was strongly supported in the Senate by the Republican caucus. overrides to a veto must start in the chamber where the bill originated. We look forward to the House taking the next step. So the House has to start the process, and we're hoping they do that January 2nd or 3rd. In the meantime, you go to ohiohouse.gov You'll see down here, you might have to scroll a tiny bit, who represents me? If you don't know who your representative is, put your address in, hit submit, then it'll bring up a map, and wherever you live, you click on that portion of the map, and it'll show you the face, name, and a link. to that representative's page. Then when you go to that representative's page, he has a contact or she has a contact. You just utilize whether it's email, phone, or whatever to contact them. You do the same thing with OhioSenate.gov. You put in under where it says who represents me, put in the information, hit submit. It'll bring up where you live, you click on that, and it'll show you the name and face of the person who represents your district. That's ours, that's why I'm showing you that. And it just takes a few minutes to do this, so I urge you, highly encourage you to put feet to your prayers, be a doer and not a hearer only, and contact your legislator. Anyway, with that, Acts chapter 11, 27 is where we're going to start. Acts 11, 27. Chapter 11 closes by giving us the background ahead of chapter 12. But it's something that in these verses we're going to look at. Chapter 12, Saul and Barnabas will go from Antioch to Jerusalem, and this is really the beginning of Saul's influential ministry, so things are gonna pick up with Saul, who will become known as Paul. But that's next week, if the Lord leaves us here. In the meantime, we're gonna read verses 27 through 30. I want you to join me in the even verses, so I'll begin verse 27. And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch, and there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world, which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar. Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judea, which also they did, and sent it to the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul. Amen? All right, so a man named Agabus. I think today he'd probably be known as Aggie. I don't know. What is an Aggie? Texas A&M are called Aggies. Is that for agriculture? I think it's for agriculture because they're an agriculture school. What's the M stand for? Texas Agriculture and Mechanical? Okay. So Agabus will deliver God's word. You say, why did you bring that up? I have that name association thing. It doesn't work a lot of times, but sometimes it does. So I try to make some associations with some of the names in the Bible. Aggie, Agabus. But we're gonna see as we read verses 27, 28, he makes a prediction as a prophet. We're going to discuss this thing about the biblical prophet, and then we'll look at biblical charity as we close the chapter. We'll start with Agabus' prediction, verses 27-28. Verse 27 said, and these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. Why prophets? You have the apostles, and you have a Bible, right? Actually, no. That's why prophets. You have the Old Testament, but you also don't have access to the Old Testament unless you're near a synagogue. I mean, they didn't have, if somebody estimated how large a Bible, if you had from Genesis to Malachi, you would need a trailer, a hookup on your car to put that in. And then you'd have to have a couple people unrolling it to read it. It'd be like, oh, let's turn to the book of Job. Okay, give us 20 minutes. Because it's a scroll, you know? So you gotta understand that's why God did some of the things he did was just because of practical purposes. Now today, what do you have? The entire Bible. Some of you, right here, I'm standing here, I've got an entire Bible right here, and that's massive, giant print, and look how small it is compared to, I don't need a truck. Some of you would pull a muscle carrying this, but I'm fine with it. I have an entire Bible on my smartphone. I have an entire Bible on my computer. A few dozen right here and over here and on DVD. I mean, surrounded by Bibles. We're so spoiled. We don't realize what it was like back during the Book of Acts when you didn't have that kind of access. And so what they do, they spend a lot more time in memorization. That's one of the things they did. People back then would rattle off. Thing is, they just would rattle it off. You had to know your Bible or you didn't know whether it was in there or not. That's why it says they searched the scriptures in Acts 17. We're going to see that Bereans would search the scriptures. I mean, it was like, you know, in search of. It wasn't just like you and I flipping the pages. It took some real work back then. So that's why prophets. There was no New Testament or complete Bibles available to anybody at that time. So God uses prophets when needed. That's another thing to keep in mind. How many times, back in the 90s, I would preach in different churches, I'd visit other churches, and how many times I'd have somebody in the church service stand up and say they're going to speak a word of prophecy. And there was no prophecy in it. I mean, if it was, it was just a generic, the Lord is coming again. Oh, hadn't heard that before. You know what I mean? They would never actually give a prophecy that we didn't have in the Bible to begin with. And so that's just, that's romper room. That's not of God. That's romper room. That's a bunch of people playing church. That's not the real thing. And the fact is, fakes are a blasphemous insult to him. The playing church and saying all that gobbledygook that really doesn't amount to anything is one thing, but then there's the guys that are out there claiming to be prophets. I'll tell you one, I believe he's a saved man. I have no reason to believe he's not a saved man. I hope he's in heaven, but Pat Robertson was an embarrassment to the body of Christ. This time every year, Pat Robertson would go on TV and prophesy a dozen or so things and never get more than one or two things right. and next year he'd do it again. I hope Gordon doesn't continue that. Prophet spelled with an F, yeah. But how many people you know mock Christianity because of Pat Robertson? He gave him reason to. That is not biblical Christianity, folks. That's the astrologists and the mediums and the New Age prophets and all that. They do that because they're a bunch of fakes to begin with. But a Christian, according to the Bible, if a Christian is speaking the Spirit of God, he doesn't get them wrong. He doesn't throw a dozen against the wall and see what sticks. And that's what Pat Robertson did every year. But he wasn't the only one. TBN is full of guys like that. Daystar Network, all those charismatic-based networks, TV networks, they all have these guys get on there and they'll prophesy. Kim, somebody who died, Kim Clement, I think his name, and he made kind of a vague prophecy but said he believed Donald Trump was going to be president before he became president. Well, fine, but he got a hundred other ones wrong. And he was by far not the only person to say they thought Donald Trump would be president. I mean, according to, including Donald Trump. But if saying you believe Donald Trump's going to be president makes you a prophet, then Ann Coulter was a prophetess. She was on TV saying that, and they were mocking the May Confederacy. You should see a clip on Bill Maher. Now Ann's gone off the deep end. I don't recommend her. But back then, she was, seemed to be, still had her marbles. And she was on Bill Maher, and they asked her, who's going to be president? She said, Donald Trump. They all laughed at her, cackled and everything. Prophets, prophetess and culter. Thankfully, Ann didn't claim to be a prophet, but a lot of these people do. So we'll come back to this in a minute. But verse 28 begins and says, and there stood up one of them named Agabus. And there's a baby name, by the way, put that down. Agabus was accepted as a prophet because his predictions came true. He wasn't accepted as a prophet because he stood and said, I am a prophet. But that's what, go read the histories of these false religions. They're founders like Muhammad and Joseph Smith and all these people. They just told people, I'm a prophet. Well, prophesy. They would prophesy something and force fulfill it and then claim they prophesied it to be true. If I prophesied, My garage is going to burn down during the year 2024. And then one night I sneak out there and set it on fire and it burns down. That doesn't make me a prophet, it makes me an arsonist. And that's what these so-called prophets would do. They'd prophesy and then they would fulfill it on their own and then claim that it was a fulfillment of prophecy. Then there's other things prophesied that, you know, like I said, if you start prophesying tomorrow and you record them all, you'll get some things right. I mean, the law of averages, statistics, a broke clock is right twice a day. It's a prophet. You know? I just like how they sum this up. He foretold the famine, which historically is confirmed. Suetonius and others speak of that very thing. So it's historically recorded to be true. It's in the days of Claudius, AD 44. It was very severe in Judea, and that's why they're going to do what they do at the end of this chapter. We don't look to history to believe the Bible, but true history confirms the Bible. Keep that in mind. So we'll see Agabus again in Acts 21. We'll come back to that. I wanna take a minute and look at the office of the biblical prophet. Because today, especially if you're on YouTube, they're everywhere. And they're fakes. Go listen to their videos. Now what some of them will do is they'll put up a video and it doesn't come true, they take it down. So they're fakes and liars in that case. But we're gonna look at a few texts here. The biblical prophet. The Bible commands us to test prophets. One of the things I've seen through the years is when I'll say, wait a minute, they claim to be a prophet, but they said this and it didn't come true. Well, who are you to judge? I'm exactly who to judge. The Bible tells me to judge prophets. We're to test them. Let's look at the biblical standards, beginning with 1 Corinthians 14, 32, which tells us, and the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. If I'm prophesying today and I contradict the prophets in scripture, I'm false. Haven't done that. Someone will take that clip and put that out there and me declaring I'm a false prophet. As far as I know, I've never prophesied. Predicting isn't the same as prophecy, by the way. I have predicted things have been right, I've predicted things have been wrong, but I've always made it clear, I'm not a prophet or the son of a prophet. This is, a prophet is somebody who declares that they are speaking on behalf of God. And I don't speak on behalf of God when I'm giving my own predictions. I'm only speaking on behalf of God whenever I rightly divide the word of truth and preach it. That's the office of the pastor today. So in a sense, we're a prophet by proxy. I'm not speaking any new prophecy, but I am speaking what's in this book and as long as that's accurate, I'm standing in the place of a prophet because I'm speaking on their behalf. But I'm not giving additional revelation or new revelation. That's when we're crossing the line. If you claim to do that and anything you say is wrong, you're out of here. This isn't baseball. Being a prophet is one strike and you're out. Even if the prophet though gets it right, but then points you to false worship, he's to be rejected. There have been people who have prophesied things and it came true, and the next thing you know they're denying the Trinity, denying the deity of Christ, denying salvation is by grace through faith apart from works, or whatever rank serious heresy. I don't care if they get 100% right, once they go in violation of biblical truth, they're out of here. Let's look at that. Deuteronomy 13. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. We're going verse by verse through Deuteronomy in our office studies. We'll be picking up chapter 7 next week. They're uploaded on Saturdays. If you sign up at Sermon Audio and get notifications, you'll get those. Go verse by verse with us. You'll find a lot of great stuff in these books. Sometimes people read through, but don't really get what's in there. It's great stuff. But in Deuteronomy 13, verses one through three, verse one says, if there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, Now read two with me. And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them. Now stop there, see that? He got the prophecy right, but now he's saying, but let's go in this direction instead of this direction toward God. Read verse three. Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet.