And it looks like we're rolling. Welcome to the live stream portion of the Household of Faith in Christ weekly gathering. We're in our Revelation series. If you wanna get your Bibles ready and have them open to Revelation chapter 10, we'll begin to look there in a minute with a message that's titled, Another Mighty Angel is Here. If you don't have a house, a home church, a church you call home, and you're within driving distance of Frederick, reach out to me. and maybe we're a good fit for you, or if you're not within driving distance and you need help finding a good Bible-believing, gospel-proclaiming church, reach out to me and I'll see if I can help you find one that's closer to where you live. I want to start with a little bit of a preamble to set this up. We're 20-ish messages probably into our look at the book of Revelation, and a lot of them have probably felt like a hybrid, at least they do to me. It's kind of a hybrid between what you might expect in a traditional sermon and what you might expect in like an academic lecture. And that's going to be really the case today. I think you're going to really feel that hybrid today, so I'm just preparing you. There's going to be a bit of an excursus in the message today where I'm going to go away from the specific text for a minute to talk about a broader point, and there's a reason for that. We are under We're in an attack on so many fronts as a church right now. And one of those fronts is going right to the root of the issue and trying to undercut the Christian's confidence in the scriptures themselves. And so I'm going to spend a little bit of time in the message today addressing that kind of a question. So there's something that happens in chapter 10 that gives me an excuse to bring that up and go on that. We've already had some praise and singing, worship time together, some fellowship time, some prayer, that sort of thing. So we're gonna get into our message. And if you're interested, you don't have to read along, but there's a very short passage from Daniel I'll be reading during the sermon too. So if you want to bookmark that, you are welcome and encouraged to have that at the ready. It's Daniel chapter 10, verses five and six will be read during the sermon. So, oh, I need my little, uh, what do you call this? Yeah, my little tray, my little, uh, the sermon tray. Yes. That's the, that's the official, that's the official word for it. So anyway, so we're heading into chapter 10 of the book of Revelation. And as we do so, we're going to absorb some fresh new combinations of symbolism. But at the same time, we might feel like we're covering some familiar ground. Remember the end of chapter six, we had just completed our reading about the six seals and their related judgments. And so we turned the page. to chapter seven, and we expected to find the seventh seal judgments described for us there. But what did we get instead? We got an interlude. There was a pause in the flow of the action as the imagery shifted to two scenes of God's people. You might recall that I was making the case that these two scenes, we see there Christ's church militant and Christ's church triumphant. Well, now we have completed our lengthy look at Revelation chapters eight and nine, which detail for us trumpet judgments one through six. So as when we turned the page from seal six, expecting to see seal seven, we again turn the page this time from trumpet six, expecting to find trumpet seven. But once more, we run into an interlude, another pause in the flow of the action with the imagery, once more shifting to two scenes for God's people. In this case, the two scenes, they begin in chapter 10, they carry over into chapter 11. And we'll be talking about these scenes over the next handful of weeks. Today, particularly, we're zooming in on Revelation chapter 10, verses one through three. I saw still another mighty angel coming down from heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was on his head. His face was like the sun, his feet like pillars of fire. He had a little book open in his hand, and he set his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and cried with a loud voice as when a lion roars. When he cried out, seven thunders uttered their voices. You've just heard the reading of God's inspired, inerrant, infallible word. It is fully sufficient as the rule and guide for our faith and life practice. So those are theirs to hear. left them here. For those who are studying ahead, and hopefully that's everyone, you've probably noticed during your reading that there is a third interlude that awaits the reader when we get to Revelation chapter 16, but it's likely to be a few months, I would imagine, before we get there in our sermon series. So for now, we're just gonna maintain our focus on chapter 10. And we begin, as is often our habit in this series, by sifting through the images, pretty much in sequence, working to understand the symbolism as the author, John, intends. And the first thing that hits us here is yet another image of an angel, and we're practically compelled to try to figure out who he is. Now, some, often influenced by the Greek fathers of the church, they would say that this mighty angel is Gabriel. because Gabriel's name literally means mighty one of God. Some who are often influenced by the Latin fathers of the church, they would say that this is Christ himself. And some, looking back to Revelation chapter five, they say it's the exact same angel that was asking who was worthy to open the seven seals. But here in chapter 10, we see here that it's another angel. So I don't think that third option is really on the table for us. I think it's fair to say that John isn't equating the two angels from chapters five and 10. But okay then, what is John saying here? And does he really even give us enough to know for sure who the angel is? Let's examine. Verse one of the chapter. Makes it clear that this isn't any old ordinary angel. It's a mighty angel. And he's arriving directly from heaven. The way he's described, it's rather reminiscent of Daniel 10, verses five through six, which say, I lifted my eyes and looked and behold, a certain man clothed in linen whose waist was girded with the gold of Uphaz. His body was like barrel, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like torches of fire, his arms and feet like burnished bronze in color, and the sound of his words like the voice of a multitude. So clearly there's some sort of a parallel between Daniel and Revelation, but they're not exact parallels. And the controversy that surrounds how to best interpret and understand Daniel's apocalyptic imagery, for us today, I think it's likely going to add confusion to our study rather than bring any additional clarity. So for now, let's just keep our eyes focused on Revelation 10. Well, Daniel will come up again in the study on Revelation, trust me. When we see the mighty angel clothed with a cloud in verse one, It immediately, in my mind, begs the question, is this God's glory cloud? And it begs the question to me, anyway, for lots of reasons. One of those reasons is, as you might remember from your Bible reading or from old Sunday school lessons and classes you sat in, there was a bright cloud that enveloped Jesus, as well as Moses and Elijah, at the transfiguration in Matthew chapter 17. And also in the Old Testament, there are loads of examples of God's presence represented with a cloud of glory. There was the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites through the wilderness after they left Egypt and before they entered the promised land. And God spoke to Moses through a cloud at Mount Sinai and also at the tabernacle. And God's cloud of glory fills the temple. Plus John uses the word cloud seven times in Revelation, always with supernatural purpose. And we see clouds act as heavenly vehicles of transport multiple times throughout scripture. In fact, it is the vehicle of transport that is described in Acts chapter one for Christ's ascension. And it is also true for Christ's return in each of the three synoptic gospels. And yet another point scored for this line of argumentation If this is not the son of God, pictured in verse one of chapter 10, then this is the one and only instance of a biblical figure being clothed with a cloud in all scripture, who is not God. However, those on team Gabriel, They will quickly point out that this cloud in Revelation chapter 10, it cannot be assumed to be a transport vehicle, and God does not in a precise sense speak to John from the cloud, and the passive participle in the sentence. This would seem to indicate that the angel was clothed with the cloud by someone else in heaven before descending into the vision. In other words, the glory cloud isn't necessarily his. Maybe it belongs to someone else who dressed the angel with it. Okay, well, what about the rainbow? It's on the angel's head. The team supporting the position that this angel is the angel of the Lord, as in the son of God himself, they highlight that there's a rainbow around God's throne. That's in Revelation chapter four. And when the rainbow, famously, it's a sign of God's covenant of grace with humanity. So obviously this is a picture of Christ, right? Well, not so fast, says team Gabriel. As we've mentioned before in our study of the book of Revelation, there are a couple of different words that get translated into English as rainbow in the original biblical texts. And the word that John employs in this passage is the word iris. Now those who are familiar with Greek mythology, which actually would have been a reasonably high likelihood for John's original audience living back during the first century, they would maybe know, likely know, about this messenger of the gods who bore this name, the goddess of the rainbow named Iris. to conjure up the idea of a supernatural messenger carrying a divine message. And it could be John had this particular thought in mind as he wrote. Because after all, he is the only person in the entire Bible to use the word iris for rainbow. And by entire Bible, I mean the entire New Testament and the entire Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament. Everyone else, everyone who's not named John, They prefer to use the word toxin for rainbow. These are all interesting ideas as team Jesus, but what about the angel's face looking like the sun? Revelation chapter one told us when speaking about the son of God that his countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. Matthew tells us at the transfiguration that the face of Jesus shone like the sun. And the very famous Aaronic Blessing, which we find recorded for us and preserved for us in Numbers chapter 6, it speaks of God's face shining upon you. I mean, what more evidence does one need? This is most definitely Jesus in Revelation chapter 10, verse 1. Case closed. What say you, Team Gabriel? Well, it's a good thing Team Jesus said case closed and not the prosecution rests or the defense rests because the argument doesn't end there. There are multiple angels associated with light and glory and sun throughout the pages of our Bible. You know, like in Luke chapter nine and in Acts 12 and Revelation 19, for example. Now granted, these aren't precisely the same as having one's face shine like the sun, but what about Moses? And for his face, it's shown so radiantly that they had to put a veil over his face when he was speaking to his fellow Israelites. And plus, when Jesus is said to have a face shining like the sun, in other parts of the Bible, it's his entire person, including his clothing, that are said to be glowing brightly as well. Not merely his face, but everything associated with him. This is something that's missing from the description that we hear in Revelation chapter 10. So far, it kind of feels like maybe these two sides could debate this to a draw. Perhaps his feet like pillars of fire could break the tie. Well, this one could actually prove to be tough for both sides to make their case because there is no such description like this of anyone anywhere else in scripture. This said, there is something that's kind of similar in Revelation chapter one, where it's said of the son of man, his feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace. And of course there is the very noteworthy pillar of fire introduced to us in Exodus chapters 13 and 14. But as with most of Revelation and also with the parallel passage in Daniel 10 that we read earlier, There is so much debate about the meaning of the symbolism, much, much, much debate. However, there is generally agreement that in these particular passages at least, these particular passages contain at least some literary application that is representative of the things that are described, not meant here to be exacting depictions of the things described. And so when we read of John seeing pillars of fire, perhaps this is simply meant to convey to us the image of resolve to execute the day of the Lord and to symbolize that the power of God tramples and burns up sin. Now, whether it's Christ or an angel like Gabriel, The cloud is most definitely a sign of divine presence. And the rainbow as a sign of the Lord's covenant of peace. A reminder that even in judgment, our Savior protects his people. And a face shining like the sun, well, that's a sign of God's holiness. And we can keep on doing this right on down the line. For instance, let's look now specifically at verses two and three. The book that's mentioned here in verse two Well, that's a word from the word. And we're gonna have a lot more to say about this book or this scroll, depending on your English translation, it might say book, it might say scroll. We have a lot more to say about that in a few minutes. So we'll jump ahead to the setting foot on both land and sea. This demonstrates the creator's rulership over the entire world, the whole earth, all of creation belongs to him. A voice like a roaring lion. That points to the strength and power of our Heavenly King, right? He's the Lion of Judah. He speaks with the authority of God. And the seven thunders, that suggests the seven-fold voice of Yahweh thundering over the waters in Psalm 29. And roaring like thunder in Amos chapter one. With the number seven specifically drawing attention to the presence of the Holy Spirit. and the perfect completeness of the message. Although there are those who want to make the case for the seven thunders predicting papal authority and the seven crusades. Seems like a stretch to me, but there are a number of people who believe that, so I mention it. After all of this, we're still left to wonder, is this mighty angel God himself? Or is it a heavenly messenger, perhaps an archangel like Gabriel? Or is it something else entirely? The truth is, as is always the case with these sort of things, we know only that which God reveals. And it appears that God has left open primarily two legitimate ways for interpreting the language here. And both of those ways bring us the exact same application. So is this representation talking about Christ directly? Could be. After all, with the mighty angel comes the accoutrements of the very glory of God and of his throne room. Is this representation talking about a messenger of Christ and therefore talking about Christ indirectly? Could be. After all, the word that we translate into English as another in the Greek, it means one of the same kind. Therefore, we would have justification for placing this another mighty angel into the same class as the angels that came before it in Revelation chapters five and eight. So in other words, the class of created beings. If created, then it is by definition not the Son of God. Whichever side you might wanna take up, the point is the same. If it is Christ, then it is God. And if it is an angel, like Gabriel, then it is a messenger coming wrapped in power and authority that is from God. So we need to listen, pay attention, Respond accordingly. Like these words from Hosea, chapter 11, verse 10. They will follow the Lord. He will roar like a lion. And when he roars, his children will come trembling from the West. So what I'm telling you now is that all of the conjecture that we've explored during this sermon thus far, it's not ultimately what's important. of utmost importance is for us to recognize that no matter how we slice it, the message of this chapter is a commissioning to proclaim God's message. That's what the theme of this chapter is. And this commissioning is performed by God. So whether it's the Messiah in the guise of a mighty angel, or it's a created angel designated by the Lord to be his ambassador, the one who commissions John, and by extension us, is Jesus Christ the Lord. John is tasked with prophesying woe to an unrepentant world. This is like what happened with Sodom and Gomorrah. You might think about the fire and the smoke and the brimstone. As touched on in the previous couple of chapters in Revelation, we mentioned this two or three weeks ago in the sermon and actually came up last week during our discussion. It's also like what we read about happening with the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, which we're gonna address more fully next week. For this week, for most of the remaining duration of this sermon, we're gonna focus on an obvious aspect of why Bible students quickly recognize that there must be some sort of a connection between Ezekiel and Revelation. And that is the prominence of a scroll or a book. At the start of verse two, we read, he had a little book opened in his hand. Now the number of sermons, and lectures, and books, and articles, and videos, and television segments, and things like that, that have addressed the meaning of this little book, they're immense. So the final thing we're going to talk about today, before we get into the conclusion of the sermon, is this little book. What is it? What has that been doing with the other images? in this apocalyptic masterpiece that is the book of Revelation. I'm going to try to make mention of the most common views that are held by exposers of the Bible, and one of these views holds that this little book, it contains the words that are found in the book of Revelation, from the start of chapter 12 through to the final chapter of Revelation, Revelation chapter 22, up to and including verse 5. And people think this because, well, there is a major shift. in the presentation of the visions within this book, beginning with chapter 12. And depending on how one would outline the book of Revelation, the first verse of chapter 12, that could very well be a definitive demarcation point that might control the remainder of the message. And so an interesting theory to say that that's the little book. Another view holds that this new image of a scroll speaks of the apostle John being empowered to continue to prophesy. It's pointed to what's written in the final verse of this chapter, chapter 10. And some building upon this idea, they then make the case for this little scroll being John's gospel account, which really makes a lot of sense for those who believe that the gospel might have been written after Revelation was written. Now, yet another view holds that this little book, it's not just John's gospel account, it's the entire New Testament, with the scroll that was revealed back in Revelation chapter five being the entire Old Testament. And this new scroll, it's open because it lays open what the old scroll had concealed. But this view is at odds with those who say that the Old Scroll contains both the Old and the New Testament, with the Old Testament written on the outside of the scroll, the New Testament written on the inside of the scroll. So they say, because you might remember, the scroll has text written on both sides in division. Are there those who suggest that the little book or the little scroll, it's talking about something in history. It's talking about the Reformation. The idea there is that the book being open is meant to illustrate that the Bible is being opened to the people once more in church history. Still others, they ignore all these lines of reasoning altogether. They say these two scrolls, yeah, they're different from one another, but they contain the exact same message. And then there are some commentators that go out of their way to say whatever this little book is. It cannot be the original scroll that had seven seals because that scroll was sealed. And this scroll is wide open. However, other commentators, they respond by saying, well, that's precisely the point. The scroll was originally sealed, but now the one's secret plans of providence have been shown to us. And so we have the revealed teaching of God's will and the disclosure of his grace laid open for us now that the seven seals have been removed. Well, with variety being the spice of life, and you can see there's a lot of variety here, and I hope you do think that variety is the spice of life because There are also a number of variations among the ancient manuscripts, those that we have available to us today. There are slight differences among the manuscript discoveries, and this has led to some minor translational disagreements among the dozens of English Bibles that we have on the market today. We probably have too many English Bible translations on the market today. But this is why you're gonna find a few of the English translations, because of these minor textual variants, that they do not include the word little or small in verse two. However, these are extreme outliers. There's just basically a couple. So that's like 95 plus percent of the English Bible translations do have the word little or small in verse two. But the level of agreement, it's not quite so hearty when we get to verse eight. Now, we didn't read that today. We'll be getting to that next week. But in this context, I'm gonna bring it up now. Because somewhere between one fourth and one third of our English Bible translations do not have the words little or small in verse eight. And this would include some of the more popular editions of our English Bibles, the ESV, the NASB, the NIV. But still, this means that close to 30% of the English translations do have little or small in verse eight. And honestly, I think that the words little or small should be in verse two, and I think that little or small should not be in verse eight. And one of my guesses is that there might be only as many Bibles that have little or small written in verse eight as there are because, well, that's what the King James has. And there are a lot of English translators who are motivated to try to side with the King James as often as they possibly can justify. So what's that issue here? Are the Greek words, biblion, for book, and biblidarion, for a diminutive book. And also, Bibleridian, another word for diminutive book or scroll. And there's even a Biblerion in the mix. And you can see these all sound very similar. They're spelled very closely to one another. And in ancient days, these words, they were beginning to take on an interchangeable meaning. It's much like today, some people would call a very small literary work a booklet, but somebody else is still just gonna call it a book, no matter how small it is. Some would call a very large, heavy literary work a tome. Others would still just call it a book, regardless of its enormity, because small, medium, large, these are all relative terms anyway. So this could be part of why some of the textual evidence is just a tiny bit discordant on this particular question. But here's the thing. The happy news is it doesn't have any impact at all on the application of the text. And while these sorts of scholarly preferences, they can sometimes cause some discomfort for some people, I want to assure you that we can and should be glad about all of this. It helps us to defend, believe it or not, the trustworthiness of the Bible that we read today. How so? Well, sometimes mistakes happen, right? Sometimes a person making a handwritten copy of a Bible passage, they might get tired, they might mishear something, they might slightly alter the spelling of a word, something like that could happen. Well, the way the church has handled these things throughout its history is that slight alteration, it is forever preserved within the scope of the textual record. This is true for the Old and the New Testaments. There is no effort ever to hide these things, to run from these things. Everything is right out in the open for anyone to see. Everyone can see it if they just want to take the time to do so. And so this means we can compare the various manuscript streams over time. We can trace the transmission and we can wrestle openly over which one is correct over these small variant readings. And so this raw, brute, transparent honesty, it increases our confidence that what we read today is God's word to us. And making this point, I should add that this is unique to the Bible. There are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible. Thousands, exponentially more than for any other documents of the ancient world. It's not even in the remote ballpark close. For instance, some might wonder, well, how does this compare, let's say, with the Quran, which is the second most widely read religious book in the world? Well, Islam, they have a history of hunting down and destroying copies of their texts that they didn't like or that they thought possibly might contain an error. And that might sound good at first, but what if they destroyed the wrong copies? There's nothing left for us to compare and see if that is in fact what happened, that they kept the right ones. And despite their purposeful effort to memory hole all their variants, there actually still are a few variations of the Quran out there. But there's nothing like what we have with the mountain of Christian Bible ancient manuscript evidence. And this is greatly to the advantage of the Bible. and it's greatly to the disadvantage of the Quran. And I mention all this because this is something that might come up, particularly in today's pluralistic, antagonistic world. You're interacting with somebody who's a Muslim or some other critic of the Bible's trustworthiness, and they might point out some of these variants and try to get you off your game, make you doubt that you have God's word. And I want you to know, not only are there answers to the objections, But in answering the objections, we actually build a stronger case than we would have even thought was likely possible. Having our faith in our canon challenge, it allows us to exercise muscles we didn't even know we had. And this strengthens our faith. Now, as for what this means for our understanding of Revelation chapter 10, the big takeaway is simple. All the differences of opinion among God's people, and some of these complex textual concerns, they end up not amounting to a hill of beans. In the end, we all agree, God is giving his message to us. He's following his own ordained communication flowchart as he does so. The father gives the message to the son, who sends his messengers, the angels, to John. He bears witness to the message by writing it down, and then he sends it to the church, and then now we, the church, we share this message with others, empowered by the Holy Spirit. We've been talking an awful lot lately as a congregation about the five-fold method of thinking about sharing the gospel, right? Creation, fall, redemption, restoration, glorification. Well, here in Revelation, we have a five-link chain of transmission. The Father, to the Son, to the messengers, to the church, to the world, all superintended by the Spirit. So big picture, the overarching view of this message in Revelation chapter 10 is what? I'll recall the start of today's sermon. I reminded us of the first interlude in Revelation chapter seven, which pictures for us two scenes, which again, I've been advocating we should see as the church militant and the church triumphant. Well, with the second interlude, extending from the start of Revelation chapter 10 through the first two thirds of chapter 11, we have pictured for us two scenes, once again, the church commissioned and the church on mission. And we're gonna dive into the details of the commissioning of the church next week, and then the missioning of the church in the following weeks after that. For now, let's just focus on setting our hearts aright so that we respond rightly to the message of warning that comes from God. Because as we know, there are those who grumble angrily against him. Actually, there's a school of thought that interprets the seven thunders of verse three as the defiant responses of the people on earth. God thunders and they grumble back. They don't like hearing the voice of God thunderously war their warnings to them. I don't think that that particular interpretation saying that the rumbles are the grumbles of the people. I don't think that's, that's not how I see it. I don't think that's correct, but you know what, as an application, I think it's accidentally spot on. The Lamb of God, he ultimately protects his flock only. And for those who are attempting to enter their version of paradise, through some other sheep gate, they are in, I think the ancient Greek word here, they are in what's called deep doo-doo. And they stir up trouble. And the worldly powers, they stir up trouble. Trouble for themselves and trouble for us. They have to navigate their mess. And the powers of the nations, they bring agitation to themselves and even to us, those of us who are working hard to keep our eyes focused and fixed upon Jesus through the storm. And you know, this might be part of actually what's in view with the mighty angel standing upon the land and the sea. Our conquering king, He makes the powers of this earth his footstool. He's not deterred in the least by the chaos of the turbulent seas, the turbulent oceans. We're spending a lot of time examining all the details of the symbolism and all that sort of stuff. Let's not get lost in the details. The triune God subdues all enemies and he protects his children. and his children are commissioned to represent his kingdom. And God willing, we're gonna cover the specifics about that commissioning next week. But don't wait until next week to be doing what you already know he has called you to do. As we are told in Amos chapter three, the lion has roared. Who will not fear? Let's pray. Father, you're so great and glorious and grand. Your majesty is really beyond the extent of our imagination. Forgive us for not acknowledging this truth more readily, more frequently. We ask you to help us, your people, to be on mission, to have a reverent awe, a reverential fear, knowing that you have spoken, you have roared your word to us, It is a word of mercy and grace to those who belong to you. And it is a frightening warning to those who reject you. We ask you to keep us faithful to the mission you've tasked us with, that we would depend on the power, strength, insight, and wisdom we get from you through your Holy Spirit, resting on the full sufficiency of Jesus Christ at the cross, as we do all that you call us to, to bring glory to your name and the advance of your kingdom. It's in the name of our King, our Savior, our Lord, Jesus Christ that we pray. Amen. I think today I wanted to start with the excursus, the little section like two-thirds in where I drifted away from the text and talked about what are called textual criticism concerns, higher critical kinds of concerns. I'm curious. I travel in Compared to the average American Christian, I travel in rare circles. I do a faith debate radio show, I'm the pastor of a church, I'm interacting with people who, you know, I'm almost purposely entering into the fray with people that I know aren't going to really see things my way. Have you run into much of that? Have you had people, atheists or Muslims or secularists, who want to tell you that your Bible's full of nonsense because it has all these mistakes and things like that? Yeah, and it's a particular friend who, sadly enough, her family's Christian. She was raised Christian and has decided that it's all hogwash because she doesn't like that it says that gays are... but anyways. So she's not saying it has textual error. She doesn't like the message. That's why she turned away from it in the first place. That was her first reason for not liking it. So now she says it's all hogwash. And one of her big things is, well, it's 2,000 years old. Why in the world would you think that it's... And of course, she doesn't want to listen to any kind of reasoning for why I would think that it's still accurate after 2,000 years. But that is one of the things that her and another, ironically. So what are some of the things you attempted to try to say to her in response to something like that? She's like, what, 25 years old, something like that, probably? Yeah, she's... I would snarky and say, well, you're 25 years old, why should I listen to anything you have to say? Are you sure? That you were born then? You sure? Do you remember this? I mean, there's an expiration date on this truth stuff, and I think you're... It's gotta be like, what, five seconds, right? And you're 25 years old. Your attention span length, that's what it is. And I'm sorry. No, the point, I have another friend who's also gay who says the same thing. His favorite term is Big Sky Daddy. 2006 online APS. Yeah, well, he still loves it. Big Sky Daddy. Also raised Christian, but... So he's acknowledging that he has somebody in the Big Sky who should be his daddy. No, he says that that's what we worship is a Big Sky Daddy and it's stupid. But they're... At least he's artful at his argumentation. He does try... He's a very interesting character. He does try to throw some humor into it. He's very antagonistic, but he is also... He's almost equal opportunity antagonistic. Almost. But no, their arguments tend to be along the lines of, it is 2,000 years old, why do you think it's still accurately translated? The friend of mine who I first mentioned, She was like, you know, well, who even can read the Hebrew anyway? The answer to that is actually some people can. But the ones who can't, like, I can pull up a dictionary. The really pretentious ones were like, I can read Aramaic. But some of the things that, you know, So do you just kind of listen to their arguments, or do you try to engage them? No, so I'll say something like, the most recent one was the who can read the Hebrew anyway. So how can you really know that the English translation that you're reading is what it originally said anyway. Don't remember my word-for-word response, but it was basically along the lines of, there are scholars who can read it, and for those of us who can't, there are a ton of resources for, you know, translation and reading, you know, even, you know, cross-referencing and stuff like that, and she completely ignored it because she was on a rant and didn't want to. She didn't even acknowledge that I had responded to her question. She went on with a new rant, which is typically the response I get when that comes up and if I say anything, I was like, well actually, even though it's 2,000 years old, it was taken incredibly good care of. We have a ton of original texts, very old texts, you know, the scribes who transcribed it throughout the ages were incredibly careful, letter by letter, not even word by word, letter by letter. Typically, once I make those kinds of comments, they don't know enough history to say that is or is not true. They typically go right to, well, it's stupid anyway. I primarily end up running into two kinds of personality types, and that's one of them, the arguing from ignorance. Because I don't know anything, I assume nobody else knows anything either, because I would know if it was knowable. The next type, the one that just says miracles can't happen, doesn't matter if it claims it happened, doesn't matter if you can prove that it was written. in the first century. You're almost giving them too much credit there, Peter. No, but that's their default. It's because it's a supernatural event that's being written. Yeah, I would kind of lump that into that first group, which is kind of the nothing's knowable group. Miracles aren't knowable, they're not provable, they're not scientifically demonstrable. The other group that I run into are, and we're running into more of them, it seems to me, which is actually part of the motivation for me, inserting this into this particular message. We live in an era of specialty. Specialtists. Specialists. Specialty. Combining all these words. I knew what you meant. But all these specialists, we've got people that are hyper specialists. So a really good example that many of us might be familiar with would be Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't know how to read Greek. you know, ancient Koine Greek. But they're going to make a Greek argument questioning that Jesus is God versus Jesus is a God. And they can make that argument and nobody in this room probably reads fluent ancient Greek either. And so you're probably like, well, I don't really know enough to say you're wrong, but They don't know either. They're banking on the fact that you probably don't know. They only know that one thing. But if you said, oh, you read Greek? Well, here, let's open the book of, let's open Matthew in Greek. Read that for me. They couldn't do it. But they know specific arguments really well. And we see this on the- Kind of what they've been trained into. On the LGBTQ, you know, IA plus front. People know a lot of, there are a half a dozen verses that they know inside and out from a perverted perspective. From an out of context. But they know how to make arguments about those six particular passages or verses that talk about homosexuality. And most of us don't specialize on that front all the time, so they only know what they know about that. They don't know that they're wrong or why they're wrong, but they sound persuasive because they've got it down. It's a schtick. It's a sales pitch. They know their pitch. They're such hyper specialists. And so those are the two extremes. People that they know an awful lot about this much stuff and it can be very intimidating to deal with them because I feel like I know more than the average person in Frederick County about the Bible and the ancient languages and stuff, but I'm a pastor, so I'm more of a generalist. And so when somebody comes in with this hyper-specific specialty where they know everything, the textual transmission, the history, the various controversies about one verse in the Bible, I don't know all that off the cuff. You don't even necessarily know if they're lying or cheating. I'm not equipped to have this argument with you because I don't know anything about all those specifics. The homosexuality question is pretty funny because it's like, oh you ignore all the mention of male prostitutes. You ignore the male prostitutes that are all throughout the Old Testament. It's like, well they weren't women don't need to pay prostitutes actually i will say the strongest argument i saw in favor of that was them just entirely disregarding what the bible says and saying that they're the fulfillment of the text of various texts. Wait, the gay community is? I'm the fulfillment of the text? I thought arrogance couldn't get worse. I think the context was like the gay married Christian was saying that he fulfills the text. He's able to fulfill a text. How do you fulfill a text? How do you fulfill something that was called abhorrent? How do you Because they'll probably just say it was referring to a religious practice of some or man-on-boy like again That's how but how is it a fulfillment like Christ is the fulfillment of the wall? It's so where they have fulfillment up. Well. I mean, I mean they're pretty much arguing illegal that the marriage between any two people is the same, is providing the same loving... That was pretty much the deed's argument. I mean, I've heard the argument of... Who claims he's a scholar? They're not making biblical arguments, really, at that point, right? You can't address it with the scripture because he's basically saying he is the scripture. And that's part of the game they play. Some will try to argue with you on scriptural grounds because they're going to bank on you not really knowing all the true ways of understanding certain passages. And they're going to take advantage of you not knowing that stuff. He knows a lot better than me. He must be right. There are others that they run into you and they feel like, oh, this person actually maybe knows the Bible. They're going to try to not make it a biblical argument. So they're going to try to ixnay the bible. That's what the one friend, the big, the big sky daddy friend, he typically, if I respond to anything, I usually don't respond to him because it's, he just posts a rant almost every day anyway. But if I respond, thank you. Um, like a school. If I respond to him he typically He'll have like a little bit of a discussion usually it's stuff that he thinks he knows and But doesn't really but usually after a very short period of time. He'll try to steer it more philosophical than the biblical because what he will put out on his social media is is he'll be like, Christians believe this. The Bible says this. And I'm just like, buddy, it literally doesn't. Like it might literally say the exact opposite. No, for real. And like one time his, um, uh, I was, these are family, childhood friends of mine. And his sister was visiting with me once a couple of years ago and she said something, she's like, well, in the Bible said this. And I said, hold up, I'm going to ask because I want to be sure. But where did you hear that from? I think I know. And she's like, oh, my brother. I was like, yeah, I know. That's wrong. She kind of looks at me and I was just like, it doesn't say that. It says the opposite. And it was, she's, she told me, she's like, well, the Bible says to hate gays. And I said, oh no, it does not. No, it says to hate the sin like any other sin. You need more than 90 seconds to flesh that out because there's so many aspects and facets and nuances to that. Because there is a way in which they could say something like that and you could say, you know what? from a certain perspective, you're actually right. It does say that, but it doesn't say only that or merely that. You're misapplying that one very narrow truth in a way that's unfair. And in the context that she was saying, you know, she was saying that we should, that the Bible says we should hate gay people like again in the context that you know we shouldn't hate any other sinners just gay people and Well, that's right right and that was the context of the conversation It would take much too long to to go into here, but you know I said hold up I was like I'm not sure where exactly your brother's trying to say that came from from the Bible But it's incorrect no matter which area you try to take it from if you're talking about the fact that all people that that homosexuality is a sin and therefore not of God, yeah, all humans then are sinful and have fallen short, okay? All bad. If you're talking about the sin itself, no, we're supposed to be able to love the people. And one of the problems we have with some of these is language begins to drift a little bit in how words are applied and what they mean. And our understanding of the word hate has grown to be too narrow. And our understanding of the word love has grown to be too unbiblical. You know, Jesus says, you know, he will know that we love him when we obey his commands. And so love is really about being in accord with God's law. That's how we love, right? We live a life that's in accord with God's law. A life of obedience is a life of love. And so the only question is that, okay, how am I to be obedient? But now we've made it about, you know, squishy, like highly emotive. A little emotion, I'm not trying to dismiss that completely, but in our culture, it's like, oh, if you hurt somebody's feelings, you hate them. No, sometimes hurting the person's feelings is the most loving thing you could do because they need to have their feelings to wake up. They need to hear the truth. Would you tell your kid, oh, I love it when you run in traffic? Oh, no. No, not unless you love dead children. One of the challenges we have, and it's related to something that's going on in Angela's life these days, we get taken advantage of by the culture, by the news media, by our governing authorities, because we do not know our rights, we don't know the Constitution, we don't know the laws, we don't know, and you're studying law. and I can only imagine that you've had your own eyes woken up like, I never realized that was the law, right? And so it's the same with the Bible. We're legally illiterate, and the church has grown to be increasingly biblically illiterate, and the enemy will take advantage of that illiteracy like crazy. So we've got to become more literate. We've got to spend time with the word, we've got to spend time asking questions. in Ephesians, it's all of it. And that's where the church, not the true church, but the church has fallen short. They're not, I mean, they're just not. They're not putting on any of that, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness. They're not walking in righteousness, the shield of faith. They're not really operating out of faith. They're not using the sword of the spirit. They're not using the word of God, none of that. I mean, you know? Oh, the belt of truth, it can go on and on with all of them. And when we think about it, that entire outfit, every single element is Christ. Exactly. Right? He renews our mind. That's the helmet, right? Belt of truth. Christ is the truth. The sword is the word. Christ is the word. Like every element. So when he's saying to put on the full armor of God, what we're really being told is put on Christ. And if you've rightly put on Christ, you're living a life of obedience. That's what it means to put on Christ. So that's a simple postcard version of that. One of the things that I wrote was, you know, the weapons are the word of God. That is the most powerful weapon that we have. If you're not in the word, how do you have your arsenal? Our faith is the shield, which is a weapon, functionally. Here's your gun. You don't know how to shoot it, but here's a gun. It's like, what are the weapons? Faith and then the word. Yeah, everything else is just for making sure that we're able to use those two weapons. And if we're not, sometimes it can feel like what we do, we don't see immediate results. You know, in our micro-web culture, we're like, man, there's no instant gratification here. And people sometimes will go to their deathbeds thinking, my life didn't really make much of a difference. But think about it this way, I heard somebody talking about this, and I thought it was rather profound, talking about the cultural demise of America, where we were never as obedient to the Bible as we should have been, but we at least had a healthy regard that that was an ideal that should be pursued. We might not have lived that life as a culture, but at least we knew that that was the standard for the most part. And then this guy is making the argument that everything that happened in the 60s actually happened because of what happened in the 40s. And I'm thinking academia, media, those sorts of things. And that was purely behavioral, cultural stuff. And the argument that he was making was that All these good old boys on the farms, Bible-believing, church-going, conservative, Christian, traditional values, that was what they were raised with. They're 18, 19, 20, they get sent off to the war in Europe. and they're facing death and it's ugly. And so that begins to shake their faith a little bit. And so they're not trusting as much what they thought they knew. And then on top of that, they're like, I'm going out to battle tomorrow. I'll probably get my head blown off. I might as well go hook up with a hooker before I go die and get in a little sexual pleasure before I die. And apparently prostitution was like off the chain in Europe during World War II. And so all these boys come home, well boys, they leave as these Christian boys, they come home as these defiled men, and they've seen these horrible atrocities, and they're carrying this guilt from having had sex when they knew they weren't supposed to. And so... She wasn't happy about that. So they come home and they won't talk about what they did and they're carrying this guilt and this whatever. And then they don't raise their kids that way in the world because they've had all this guilt. And then that... observation was that? I don't know who made the observation. I know who relayed the observation. The person relaying the observation was James White and he was talking about a conversation he had with somebody and I can't remember who the conversation was. But anyway, all these people come home from the war, defiled and dejected and doubting God, and they get married and have kids, and their kids come of age in the 60s, and those kids grew up without God because their dads were so disillusioned. And I never made that connection. I was like, you know what? I can't prove it, I didn't do more study on it, but that feels like it makes a lot of sense to me. So those guys, if they had lived a faithful life and come back home and raised their kids as Christians, the 60s doesn't happen the way that it does. And if the 60s doesn't happen the way that it does, we don't have this nonsense going on in the world today. I mean, I think there's multiple angles. because I don't think that's the only explanation because you'll probably have people that were you know that had the heated more hedonistic route kind of like what you described then you'll have the people that went to the other extreme where they saw evil so they were more faithful But I mean, really, the 50s was the greatest time of American prosperity as far as the growth of the middle class and the rising of the American economy. So it's more, I mean, I compare it more to, because we prospered, we went into. No, it's way more complicated. Yeah, we have to go back. Kind of like, kind of like the. Going from Joshua to Judges, where they settled the land, and they were prosperous, and they were... Yeah, I don't mean to give the impression that that explains it all, because I would go back to the liberalism in the academy and how that changed everything, what people were hearing from the pulpit. being preached was not gospel truth anymore. Yeah, you get to the 60s and like, what were the seminaries teaching there? I mean, there's dozens of variables, so I can't... Yeah. Yeah, particularly, think about Fool's Gold. I'm connecting these, I'm thinking out loud now, but think about these guys that come back disillusioned, there's no meaning in life, but they get married and they start raising a family. And then because there's this big boom in population, the economy takes off, right? There's more need for goods when there's more mouths to feed. And so the economy starts really jumping and America's ascendancy on the world stage helps to contribute to all of that. And we have stability in the White House and all these things happen. So now these guys are disillusioned and turn their back on God. They reap the benefits that society has to offer. So it just reinforces their lack of need for God, the acknowledgement of, I'm good. That's one of the biggest problems we have in this area. Frederick County is a very hard county to reach with the gospel because so many people have their dual income houses and everybody's making $120,000 a piece. There's a lot of quarter million dollar household incomes in Frederick County. You try to talk to them about their need, they're like, what need? I got 17 cell phones and... I'm the ever-educated white woman that likes what Biden's doing. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to reach people that don't have a sense of need. Anyway, that was a bit of an excursus on the excursus. You have any thoughts or questions over there? No? I was like, yeah. You basically covered it all. Yeah. Well, it covered what I was going to say. Oh, really? Well, she always seems to cover what I was going to say. Oh, okay. Anybody have anything else they wanted to... Because the King James uses the, like, different manuscripts and, like, an anthem. Yeah, that's the textual criticism stuff. So there's the Alexandrian text, the Byzantine text, the Masoretic text. I know. Like, I know with variants, there's only like the big three that actually matter in terms of the adjustment. Like John 8? John 8, um, ending of Mark. I forget what the third one is. But, I mean, none of them deal with heavy theological doctrine. No doctrine is adjusted by any of the major variants. It's just, you know, what is the, you know, this story in John with the woman, um, the ending of Mark. And the thing is, we can grapple with that, honestly, as Christians, and we can look. We can actually go back and look at these ancient manuscripts that we have. And if you go to a museum or something, or if you're a scholar and get special access, you can actually see the actual manuscripts in person. They exist. They're not like something we dream about and think about. They actually exist. And because of all the archaeological digs that have been done over the last century, there's so much more, almost an invasion of riches in a lot of ways. And we can see, so people would have doubts like, how do we know it really said that? And then we find some ancient manuscript that predates anything that we had access to before, and it says exactly the same thing. It's like, wow. It just reinforces, we have every reason to have the confidence, and we have that confidence because we allow ourselves to live with some of those small little mistakes. And we know they're small little mistakes because if you've got, I don't know, 300 copies of a particular verse, And one of them says, little book, and one of them says book. Or one of them says little book, and all the rest say book. It's like, okay, odds are, the one out of the 250 that says this is probably wrong. We can say that with a pretty certain degree. But even the word for book actually implies little book or something like that, isn't that also in these? It's still a book. Like the example I use, when you're talking about the Biblion and Biblionaryon and all, They all mean book, they're just variations of a specific kind of a book, size of a book. The reason it becomes contentious in debates about Revelation is, is it the same scroll making a new appearance, and the fact that it's got a different descriptor attached to it, makes it seem like John's making a point that this is a different book. And I agree, I think it is a different book. I don't think it's the same scroll coming back a second time, but I think the message is similar. So I think that part. So one of those scrolls, the word for one of those scrolls, it was the one that didn't have the word little. at least in my thing that has information on the original language and stuff like that, it's either the same or very closely related to the word that is used for a divorce document, which didn't come up with the word that said, that had little book or little scroll. I have no idea how it's connected. It was just interesting that it's apparently, one of them seems to be related to a divorce document, Yeah, well it could be if that's an actual true reading. I think that's something I want to take into consideration as I'm interpreting, but you gotta be careful hanging your hat on a disputed word like that. A lot of these challenges we have, Come through the King James tradition really leads to a lot of these challenges and this is where a lot of the infighting happens in the church. There's a lot of King James only advocates out there. It's the only English Bible that you can trust kind of thing and well that's really shaky ice to be trying to skate on because there are provable translation problems in parts of the King James. And that's why it's good to be familiar, I think it's good to have a Bible you read most regularly because that's the one you're gonna start to memorize passages and scripture will come to mind and it makes it easier to recall when you're in the same Bible a lot. But when you're doing deep study and trying to compare particularly difficult passages that you're like, hmm, this is a little confusing, it's really good to get in the habit of grabbing two or three other English Bibles and see how they're translating it. All right. I don't want to put you on the spot too hard, but can you do them in order this time? The gospel five points that we focus on? Just say them in the order. You got all five last time. Can you do them in order? That's not one of them. Yeah, I was going to say. Krayer? No. Oh, you're right. No, you said creator. I didn't hear you. You said creator. Yeah. What did you say? Creator? Not yet. Not yet. But we have girls, I think. In the last two we didn't do that. What's it? No, wait. Do you want to start? I'm not going to correct you and tell you what completely does. For glorification, because I think... Oh my gosh. But glorification is the last one. Nadia, please calm down, sweetie. You're getting so close I can almost taste it. Creator is fine, but the word that we've been using is creation, but there is a creation. So creation, fall, and I think you said resurrection? But it's redemption. Now the resurrection is connected with the whole idea of the redemption, so it's not wrong per se, but it's an aspect, it's a subset of the bigger umbrella idea. So what happens in the life of a Christian? So think of it in historical terms. The first thing that happens is God speaks everything is, right? He speaks everything into existence. That's creation. And everything's wonderful, and part of his creation is people. But then people, they mar, they screw up the creation with the fall of the sin, right? And so that gets made right with Jesus at the cross, through, not just at the cross, but in his obedient life, his obedience unto death at the cross, and then his resurrection, and then his ascension into heaven. So that's redemption. And then, between that glorification, there's a process that's happening. Does that help you remember what that fourth spoon might be? It still are, right? Yes. So it's restoration, right? Restoration. That's why I just said it. She said it a few times. I couldn't hear it, I'm sorry. It was fall that she didn't say. She said sin. Yeah. She said fall sin. I said fall. Pardon me. Because it's Ray's favorite? Yeah. So I'm going to take three minutes before we wrap up the stream, and then we'll head into the room. But I want to just take a few minutes and amplify a word. The first one is creation. And I don't want us to just remember the words. I want us to be able to know what these umbrella terms are really giving us. So creation. means first of all there is a creator so you're absolutely right to focus on a creator but it's a creator who has made everything and he's made everything intelligently there's this whole argument about intelligent design maybe you've heard and he made everything good And there's a purpose to his creation, he created for his own glory. And so all of these things, and it's because we're created in his image and created for his glory, that is what gives you, me, everyone, it gives us purpose, it gives us importance, it gives us value. And in today's day and age, it's so important, people are... questioning if they have value and if their life even means anything which is so much of what I think behind people like my life doesn't mean anything but it will if I have my breasts removed or it will if I go on hormone therapy and become a woman or it will if I take these drugs or if you know all of these things we're chasing because we want to have some meaning in our life. And sometimes that meaning is sadly as simple as, well, I want happiness. And when I get plastered drunk, I feel happy for a couple hours. And so that's the meaning in my life. Wow, like what a diminished view of what it means to be a human being. And so we focus on the creation and that we have a creator who's magnificent beyond our imagination and that he made us in his image. and he made us in his image because he desires for us to have a relationship with him. And because of that, we have value. We have value because he says so, because he sees us as valuable. That's a paradigm shift for so many people. That's a message so many need to hear. And so when we're saying, oh, creation, fall, redemption, restoration, glorification, I'm gonna focus on each one in turn over the coming weeks, but I want us to really understand we have, a creator who knows all things, he is perfectly righteous, he is perfectly holy, he is perfectly loving, and if we begin to think that we've got him perfectly figured out, we're misleading ourselves, we haven't even begun. His magnificence is beyond the fullness of human comprehension, really. And we understand that that's who made us, and that's who loves us and desires for us to have a purposeful life. That's a game changer. I think a lot of people benefit just from hearing that. That would be a game changer. Without them hearing the fullness of the gospel, just that truth would change lives, I think. Ray, would you mind closing us with a word of prayer? Sure thing. Dear Lord, we thank you for this gathering and fellowship that we're able to have this day and we pray that we continue growing in your word until we meet again as a church. In Jesus' name we give thanks and we pray these things. Amen. Amen. Well, thank you for watching the stream, if you're watching it or listening to it. And I got some stats I'm going to share with you guys about that in a minute. It was kind of interesting when I saw it. We'll try to start again next week around six-ish o'clock. Until then, God bless.