Address—Rob House
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Well, the last couple of people are struggling in Why don't we start by singing #242.
Sing aloud to God our strength doubt not, for His Word is stable. 242.
And I've got my friend and saw our granite time to go out and say crap and turn.
And come out to God.
'S right?
And when it was, there are there was.
It allows us to be my eyes grand.
Theft and whenever we need to come.
Here we can Allah let's do a community planning. It's a completely cloud and I have to give you.
Well, welcome to this meeting tonight.
I, uh, finished my presentation of a slide preparation about, uh, 25 minutes ago.
And.
Uh, when I came back.
There is this remarkable picture that I've never seen before on that screen. I want to thank my brother, Mark Rogers for finding it and putting it up because I'm gonna talk about the word of God and some of the other books that are up there. You can see the Holy Quran. You can see the bag at Gita and, uh, those different books. But uh, what I found interesting was I left here and I went to my room.
When I came back, my presentation was way better than when I left.
And I'd like to ask the Lord Jesus for his help because let us help in the presentation tonight. Things won't go real well, and I really need his help even more than I needed Mark. So Mark, thank you very much. And let's ask the Lord for his help. Our God and Father, we just come to thee. Thanks thee for thy goodness to us. We thank thee for the time we can spend at Michigan Camp here.
And now we just confess that we need our help. We pray for help.
For me to be able to present the.
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Information that I wanna present. The truth is I word in a way that's respectful of other people and other faith and yet at the same time makes it clear.
That Thy word is stable, trustworthy, because the written word reflects the living Word, our Lord Jesus Christ and our God and Father. We pray that He might get honor from this presentation. Tonight. We ask for the help of Thy Spirit. We pray particularly for those who are in the audience that they might be able to listen. Pay attention.
And the day will be blessed as believers, as Christians, to be able to live a life that's more effective, more confident.
In following Thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and in walking in the Spirit, we ask for Thy blessing now in the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
Well, just to show you what you're supposed to be coming in with, this is the day which the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it. I think a lot of us have spent most of the day having fun and enjoying life, and I trust it will keep doing that while we're here now.
I have noticed that that screen is significantly smaller than that screen, so if there's anybody that has a vision problem they might wish to move to the exact side of the room. Feel free to do so while I'm talking.
Now what I wanna talk about tonight.
Is contrasting counterfeit?
With the authentic.
Ultimately, I'm gonna be getting to the Word of God as the authentic. That's, uh, where I come from.
But I want to tell you a story first.
Anybody recognize the person in that picture?
That picture, they're the same full screen.
It's me. It's me in front of my house, uh, last Thursday night on the way to, uh, reading meeting.
And, uh, the reason I want that picture taken is because.
I was thinking about this meeting.
And I was thinking back to a time about.
30-45 years ago.
When I was around 12 years old and here's what happened.
On Thursday night in Ottawa, where I live, my parents always went to the reading meeting and that Thursday night I was done early. I was cleaned up and all ready to go and I walked out my front door and I saw one of my buddies from school, Rocky, driving his bike down the road. I waved at him and Rocky way back started to slow down his bike, which means he wants to talk.
So umm, I went down to the corner of my driveway.
And I started talking to Rocky as a 12 year old. He was on his bike. I was standing in exactly that post.
And we talked for a couple of minutes and can you guess what? Rocky asked me.
Mm-hmm. Not where I was going. Look at that picture. What do you want to know? What do you want to know?
What's behind your back?
You know what was behind my back?
That book right there and in that picture, this book behind my back.
And umm, I don't know how many of you are like me when I was 12. I've had a problem with that my whole life, still have that problem. But I have learned that, uh, as you go through life, it's much better to show your colors right when you first enter into a relationship.
When you meet somebody new at school, when you start a new job, you start a new, uh, activity with different friends. Make sure you let your colors shine because you're gonna get that question, What are you hiding behind your back?
And it's much easier just to have it up front now what I'm going to be talking about tonight.
Is the word of God in contrast to, uh, other?
Books that have been written, and I have another story for you in connection with that. But first look at first Peter.
Chapter 5 and verse 8.
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First Peter, chapter 5, verse 8.
It says be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.
I'd like to apply that verse this way.
The devil's got a loud roar. I've never been to Africa. I probably Tim and Tim have heard lions where maybe some other people. I understand it's intimidating. Is it?
Anybody else heard it? Nobody knows. I understand it's intimidating. The devil goes around like a roaring lion and he, uh, would try to 1St scare people and then destroy people. And here's, uh, here's what I want to say. Me behind with the Bible behind my back. That's the devil got me running scared. And it might not be me that he eats.
Might have been rocky, my friend.
And so we need to be prepared to give an answer to people. We need to live so that our light can shine, so other people will know that we have something that's worth having.
And not hide it. Don't let the devil scare us. And that's part of what that talks. The talk about is tonight.
Counterfeit.
And how we can be confident that God's word is stable and that we can trust it. So first Peter 5/8 important verse to remember.
And.
My objective tonight.
Is to strengthen all of our belief in the Bible that it's the word of God.
I'm going to be comparing Bible prophecies to prophecies of other main religions.
And I'm going to be considering previously fulfilled prophecies that are in the Bible.
Part of the reason why I'm doing this is because I sat across the table from a friend of mine who's a skeptic and atheist, almost an atheist, 99% agnostic, got that one little percent that he holds out, that he's showing some integrity, that he's still thinking about things. And the question he asked me was, how do you know what you believe?
Is any better than your Muslim friends?
Or your Hindu friend.
That was his question and it made me think, how do you answer that question because I didn't really have a solid answer for him.
Not that it would necessarily have done any good, and we'll touch on that later.
But how would you answer that question?
So let's consider these things. Let's look at what God's standard is, and let's, uh, think about what the, uh.
Other alternatives are now What does counterfeit mean?
It's, uh, made an imitation of something else with intent to deceive.
Being forged. I got that from Miriam Webster. That's a dictionary.
And imitation made an imitation of something else with intent to deceive.
Now you can check out my next.
Slide.
I need somebody who's a Canadian about thirteen years old.
Any 13 year old Canadians here?
None that are gonna admit or make eye contact.
OK. How would you like to make $5?
OK, $50.
$50 sounds a lot better, right? So I want you to look at those two pictures up there really carefully.
And especially note the top left hand quarter corner, OK.
Now if I had those two here.
I would let you look at them and feel them.
You can you tell me what Canadian money is made out of?
What's Canadian money made out of?
But nowadays it's made out of plastic. I'll give you one more clue. That $50.00 bill would be so nice to have in your wallet.
Is very new and it's made of paper.
Now, which would you rather have?
That one was at $5 or the one with $50.00 with all the color. Think of how much fun it would be to have $50.00 in your wallet.
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If you look at the one that I.
On the top, if you look at the back it's all white.
Which one would you rather have?
The American one or the Canadian one?
See, unfortunately I forgot my prop. It's back up in my room. I'm not gonna go get it. So if you get the answer right.
I'll give you whichever piece of paper you want.
You want the five? Why do you want the five?
Uh-huh.
That means it's what?
You're exactly correct. What does that mean? It is.
The forgery, right?
It's a fake. It's a counterfeit.
Can you see me later on before you go home or I go home? I'll give you the $5. Thank you for answering the question. You got the right answer. You picked the real one.
There's certain things you can look at that money and you can tell which one's real, which one's not and the the clear plastic because one of the clues why you wouldn't take the Canadian 50, because it's not a Canadian fifty, it's a fake now.
That's an object lesson.
What we have today in the religious world have a whole bunch of religion, Christianity, Islam, Muslim, secular, atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, and a whole bunch of others.
What really surprised me when I got this off of, uh, Wikipedia, was that one in every three people is a Christian.
At least in name, it's a very large group.
One in every four people is a Muslim.
But what really shocked me is that one in every six is secular slash atheist, either doesn't care about God or doesn't believe there's a God, doesn't believe in any of these holy books that our brother Mark had that spines up of before.
But one in six is Hindu.
One in six Buddhists, maybe, maybe a little less than that, and then just about, uh, one in 20 could be anything else.
So how do we get all these religions in the world today?
There was one God originally talked to Adam.
What happened?
We know the world got so bad at the time of the flood that God sent that flood and he washed away all of any signs of humanity except for eight people. Adam, I'm sorry, Noah and his wife, three sons and their wives.
They knew who God was. They knew how they've been delivered.
They got off the arc and they did what God told them to do. They replenished the earth and then they started to travel around. Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? God confused their languages and they went all different directions.
And they went very rapidly into idolatry. And Satan is using that. Satan is using his demons. People have a heart that's against God anyway.
And they were just going after these different things and so.
By the time of Abraham, Abraham was a Syrian ready to perish in a land of people who worshipped idols.
In not very many years at all.
From 2348 down to 1928, not even 500 years, they've forgotten about God.
And they turned already to worshipping demons through the idols that they had come to pass, that they created for themselves.
Well, from the call of Abraham, a couple 100 years after that, there was some guys in India that started writing down some things that they thought would define their religion. That's the oldest Hindu Vedas, about 1700 BC.
About 200 years after that, God called the children of Israel out of Egypt. We know that story, and that's the time when Moses wrote Deuteronomy.
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, those five books.
So it's a long time between now and the exodus. 3500 years, more than 3500 years.
So the oldest religious writings, maybe 200 years older than the Bible, first written record of God's Word. But there's a continuous human record from Adam all the way down to Moses of what God's Word was, what he communicated. You can see that if you follow through. How many people had to go through that? It was recorded in the Exodus.
At the time when Moses wrote it down.
Well, another thousand years went by and some guy named Buddha. He has a different name, but he wrote down the rules for Buddhism.
And then about 500 years after that, the Lord Jesus himself was here on earth.
And uh.
We know the story of the crucifixion. It's central to what we believe.
That Jesus died on the cross and that God raised him from the dead. And then about a little over 500 years after that, along came a guy named Mohammed, and he invented this religion of Islam.
I'm not sure he actually invented it, but we'll maybe touch on that later. And then another thousand years goes by and we have this subject up here called atheism.
A belief system. It's it's a phase.
Just to faith in not too much.
Now let's just umm, move on through the word of God. I'm ex. I'm showing you these things because we got all these options out here now and we have to figure out.
They can't all be right.
Because they all point different directions.
Only one of them can be right.
Only one of those bills was a valid bill.
And you're gonna get it later. The good one.
How we recognize what is the right holy book?
Because a lot more depends on it than $5, right?
Is really important to be following the right book?
Reading the right book, because it's not just $5, it's your whole destiny, it's your whole life. You need to get it right. So we're going to spend some time look at that. Obviously, I'm going to look at it from a Christian's point of view. I'm going to look at the two tests that are in the Word of God. I'd like you to turn to Deuteronomy chapter 13.
We'll start in verse one and read the 1St 5 verses.
If there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and give us the a sign or a wonder, 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.
Then thou shalt not hearken on to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams, for the Lord your God prueth you to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul. He shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him, keep his commandments and obey his voice. He shall serve him and cleave on to him that profit. Or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God.
Which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the House of ******* to thrust the out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put away the evil from the midst of thee.
So there are five things that I see in verse four that are essential to understanding what's true and what's false. The first thing is that God is a God of relationship. He wants to walk with us. He shall walk after the Lord your God. We need to walk with him. The second point is he's a God of miracles and judgment. He brought them out of Egypt.
That was a huge indication to the whole world.
And to the children of Israel, that God was the I am, the everlasting. We need to respect him. It's also the God of the commandments he gave them.
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We need to obey him. And for those of us who are Christians, one of his, uh, main commandments is that you love one another. There's a lot associated and connected to that. We need to obey him. He's a God of mercy. We need to serve him. Our brother Manuel talked about that on Monday night, and it's something that is necessary for us. And then he's a God of grace and love and we need to hang on to him.
Be attracted to him and stay uh.
Cleaving to him.
But this?
Test is one that, uh, comes a little bit later.
I have it as the first Test here and uh, the one I wanna focus on is test #2.
So we're gonna make the transition to quest #2 but I wanna say in going there.
All of the religions except Judaism, Judaism and Christianity fail that task. I'm not gonna go into that tonight.
In any detail, because I wanna move on to the next one and that is a fulfilled prophecy.
So if we could turn over a few chapters to Deuteronomy chapter 18.
Deuteronomy chapter 18 and verse 21.
Thou shalt say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? That's the question we're asking tonight. How do we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?
Answer is in verse 22, when a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet that has spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him. So here's the task. According to prophecy, does it come to pass?
Somebody makes a prediction. Does it happen? Turn it over to Jeremiah, chapter 28.
Jeremiah 28 and verse nine. This whole chapter is fascinating from the point of view of prophecy and fulfilled prophecy. I'm looking at just this verse in the middle.
The profit which prophesied of peace, when the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall a prophet be known, that the Lord hath truly sent him. So that's the test.
If the Prophet speaks and it comes to pass.
Then you can be confident that the Lord.
Sent him.
But you always have to remember test number one is the person pointing you back.
To the Lord Jesus Christ, to God the Father.
Or is he pointing you somewhere else? So both have to be true. Now let's move on.
Just to have a quick look at this, there's one prophecy about the 70 years of captivity of the children of Judah in Babylon. Jeremiah chapter 29 and verse 10, one or two pages over.
I'm telling you, uh, this one right now and I'm gonna come back to it again.
Because I'm setting the stage, I'm giving you an expectation of what to expect from prophecy, alright? Because we're gonna go and look at some of those other main religions and we're gonna come and compare them against what you find in the Bible. You compare them against the evidence that God has given you for this test that he set up. So in, uh, Jeremiah chapter 29 and verse 10, it says thus saith the Lord, that after 70 years.
Be accomplished at Babylon. I will visit you and perform my good word towards you in causing you to return to this place. Now that's a very interesting prophecy. 70 years is a very specific amount of time.
And they were gonna have to be gone, and they were gonna be coming back 70 years, all right.
Now keep that in mind, because we're gonna be thinking about.
Atheists first.
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What, uh, prophecies do atheists have?
There's no God. How would they know the future? Everything is driven by random chance. So guess what? No God, no prophecies.
Psalms 14 verse one gives you God's opinion of uh, people who live like atheists think like atheists.
Psalm chapter 14 verse one says.
The food will have set in his heart. There is no God.
So the full the atheist can have the opinion that there is no God, but God's opinion of people who think that is that they are very foolish people.
However.
That's from God's point of view. They're also very intelligent people. And I went to the Internet to find some of these things that I'm going to be sharing with you this evening. And there was one fellow by the name of Krueger who's an atheist. And he said some criteria are needed in order to distinguish cases of lucky guesses from those of prophecy, of true prophecy. So let us define a genuine prophecy as one that follows the following five criteria.
Now I'm going to show you his five criteria. I think generally they're pretty good. Because just because you're an atheist and from God's point of view you're a fool, doesn't mean you're not intelligent, doesn't mean you're not considerably smarter than me.
And maybe most of you.
Here's the first one. The processing must be clear. It must contain sufficient detail to make its fulfillment by a wide variety of possible events unlikely. Second point, the event that can fulfill prophecy must be unusual or unique. The Third Point, the prophecy must be known to have been made before the event that is supposed to be its fulfillment.
The event foretold.
Must not be the source. That could be a result of an educated guess.
The event that fulfills the process cannot be staged or the relevant circumstances manipulated by those aware of the prophecy in such a way as to intentionally cause the prophecy to be fulfilled.
Now I'm gonna use these criteria.
You'll notice I have one to five down here. I've summarized them because I needed them a lot smaller. I didn't want all those words on a whole bunch of slides. So here I've I've got the five points and I added one more of my own. It's kind of implied in the five, but I wanted to be clear. So the first one clear details, 2nd unusual 3 before the event, four, no educated guesses.
Five, no staging, so you can't arrange to make it happen. And six.
Verifiable.
By verifiable I mean you can check and make sure it's happened.
So let's go back to uh.
The 70 years of captivity, is it clear he was talking about the children of Judah?
That's pretty precise.
70 years is the defined period of time. Is it unusual for our captive people to come back after 70 years? I'd say that that's fairly unusual.
Is it, uh, before the event? Yes, Jeremiah was long before the 70 years.
Could you have an educated guess?
That they would come back without the Bible. Every other people typically just scattered around. Look what happened to the 10 tribes. Nobody knows where they are.
So I don't think you can make an educated guess that they were coming back. Could you stage it? Well, your enemy has control of you. It's pretty hard to stage when your enemy is controlling you.
Is it verifiable? Well, you all know the answer because as a country called Israel today that has people who are Jews in it, you also know historically that 70 years later they landed back in the land. So from the way I look at that prophecy.
I'd say it met the fixed criteria.
Now let's look at, uh, the Hindu prophecies.
I had a hard time finding Hindu prophecies.
I only found one.
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And there it is.
Whenever there is a withering of the Law and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides, then I manifest myself for the salvation of the righteous and the destruction of such as do evil for the firm establishment of the Law, I come to birth age after age.
I don't see any years. I don't see too much to measure it by.
They have Hindu texts that describe stories of avatars that supposedly the Hindu gods when they come in animal or people form.
Including one named Buddha.
Which was supposedly the last one.
Is it clear in detail? I don't think so. Would it be unusual? Yes. Is it before the event? Yes.
Could you have an educated guess that this is gonna happen? No. Is it possible to stage it? No. Is there any way to verify that it's happened?
I don't think so. So from my point of view it would fail and I think the atheist friends would agree with it with me.
Well, let's move on to the Buddhist prophecies.
I had a hard time finding Buddhist prophecies too. I found one.
And it said that umm, after 2500 years, apparently Buddha said that there would be some event happen in Metro would come that was supposed to be 1957. I saw a little footnote to that that where they'd recalculated it to 2017. And as far as I know nothing happened in 2017 either.
So when you run the tests on it, they've got some detail, not terribly clear what's gonna happen. Unusual, yes. Pre event, yes. You wouldn't make an educated guess about it.
Don't know about staging, don't even know if it happened and can't really verify it.
So that one, from my point of view, is failing God's test.
For a fulfilled prophecy. Now the Muslims that have Muslim friends, when I talk to some of them, they sometimes talk to me about some of the prophecies that they have.
I'll show you. I think it's three of them.
Fingerprints.
They have a saying their skins will bear them witness against them as to what they have been doing.
And I think that that's a prediction of the fingerprinting system for investigating criminal and doing immigration work.
So when I go down the list, is it clear?
Their skins will bear witness against them as to what they've been doing unusual.
I gave it a yes but maybe I should have said no pre event yes. Educated guess.
Maybe yes, maybe no. No staging.
It's verifiable that that's what that meant. Their skins will bear witness.
In my mind it's a no. Let's move on to the next one.
Genetic engineering. They will alter Ala's creation.
It's not very clear what they were gonna do, not very detailed.
They're suggesting is plastic surgery, genetic engineering and cloning.
But it seemed to me that, uh, without being disrespectful.
I ate the center of a hard boiled egg today and I think somebody had altered God's creation from a soft yoke to a hard yoke.
But I don't think that was the fulfillment of any prophecy.
So I'm not too solid on that one either. Well, there's another one.
By the heaven full of tracks.
And my friends would tell me that, uh, that's talking about air traffic control systems 1400 years before they were ever invited, invented.
But I also think it could be shooting stars.
Umm. So I think it's clear. Do I think it's detailed? No. Unusual maybe to have that written in a book.
Pre event, yeah. Educated guests, Well, I don't know what it represents. No staging. I agree with that, but I don't think there's any way to verify that what was written there is what they say it means.
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So is it a fulfilled prophecy?
I don't think so.
Let's go on with some Christian prophecies.
And here I want to make a little bit of a point.
You can look in uh, you can find very easily in the Christian literature.
And with respect to the Lord Jesus alone, there are at least 200 prophecies concerning Him.
There is a gentleman by the name of Eidersheim who believes there are at least 456 prophecies concerning the Lord Jesus. I am not going to go through all of them tonight.
You'd probably have a hard time going through all of them this week.
But I picked a few that meet the criteria of my atheist friends.
That he might use and what I want to do is just look at them very quickly. Micah chapter 5.
And verse 2.
You probably know this, thou Bethlehem Ephrata. So thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel, whose going forth has been from of old from everlasting.
The ruler in Israel. We all know who that is and how this is fulfilled. Gospel of Luke shows us that, but it's predicting that the ruler of Israel will come from Bethlehem.
So it's stating a specific city.
But not giving us any time. Is it unusual? Yes, it's unusual to state exactly what city it comes from. Is it before the event? Yes. Michael was long before the Lord Jesus was here on earth.
Could it be staged?
Not easily.
Is it verifiable to check where the Lord Jesus was born? Yet we have a record of it in the Bible.
So from my point of view, when I look at this, I passed that one. Let's move on to the next one, the virgin birth, Isaiah Chapter 7, verse 14.
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.
You know it as well as I do.
It's a very specific statement about what he would be called and that a virgin would have a child. That's unusual. This is clearly before event, probably 500 years before.
Maybe more. No educated guesses about that one. No educated person in their right mind would guess that a virgin would have a child.
Can't stage that either.
And it's verifiable unless you call the people who wrote the Bible liars.
Next one is Isaiah chapter 44 / a few pages.
Verse 28.
That's that's the law, sorry, the southeast of Cyrus. He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem thou shalt be built, and to the temple thy foundation shall be laid.
Let's turn back to First Chronicles chapter 2036 and verse 20.
Actually the second Chronicles 36.
I was typo that I missed.
Verse 20 says, And them that had escaped from the sword carried you away to Babylon, where they were servants to him and his sons, until the reign of the Kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbath.
For as long as they lay desolate, she kept Sabbath to fulfill. 3 score in 10 years. For those of you who are young, a score is 20/10/20. If you do 3 * 20 you get 60 and if you add 10 you get.
00:45:03
How many 70?
What did the prophecy in Isaiah say long before this happened?
Let's keep going. In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, the word of the Lord spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished. The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his Kingdom, and put it also in writing. Thus that Cyrus king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given me. He have charged me to build him in house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among?
Of all his people, the Lord is God. Be with him and let him go up. So Jeremiah's prophecy came true because of 70 years later this happened. But Isaiah's prophecy came true because it was Cyrus that did it. Now for all you Americans who are really up on your politics.
I need you to, uh, tell me.
What the, uh, first name of the President of the United States will be in the year 20?
26.
It's only 8 years away.
I don't see anybody volunteering.
I don't even. OK, let me ask you an easier question will be the Republicans or the Democrats. That's a coin toss.
Nobody wants to answer whether it's going to be the Republicans or the Democrats in power in eight years.
Why? Because you don't know, and you sure don't know the first name of the president, do you? You don't even know whether it'll be a man or a woman. Hundreds of years before Cyrus was even born, God said a man named Cyrus is going to make a commandment to send my people back to the land of Israel.
And it happened.
I give it all check marks.
Well, there's another one to look at, Genesis chapter 15.
Verses 13 to 16.
God speaking to Abraham.
Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger to land that is not theirs, and shall serve them. They shall afflict them 400 years also. That nation whom they shall serve will I judge, and afterwards shall they come out with great substance. Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace. Thou shalt be buried in a good old age, but in the 4th generation they shall come. Hit her again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
Well, let's turn to numbers Chapter 26.
I'm just gonna look at one aspect of this prophecy and that's the 4th generation, Numbers 26 and verse 59.
The name of Amram's wife was Jacobed. I think you all know that she's Moses mother.
The daughter of Levi.
Wow.
Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, who is the father of Levi?
Who is the father of Jacobin? That adds up to four.
And her son LED.
The children of Israel at God's command out of Egypt.
Again, it's very clear there's a lot more that you could follow up on here. That God made sure happened in his prophecy to Abraham. Is it unusual? Yes, it's unusual.
Pre event, yes. Would you guess that?
Unheard of. No staging. Verifiable, Yes. Established historical fact. Children of Israel left with Moses.
I passed that one. Let's look at Christ's entrance into Jerusalem. Zechariah, Chapter 9.
Yes.
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And verse 9.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold, thy King cometh unto thee. He is just, and having salvation lowly, and riding upon an *** upon a colt, the foal of an ***. You know the story. Jesus riding into Jerusalem the week in which he was crucified.
Go down the list.
Riding on a donkey.
King of Israel, So what they crucified him for put right over his head Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
We'll come back to this in terms of whether it's stageable or not and verifiable or not.
Whether you uh.
Believe what the people wrote then. Now let's look at one more Psalm, chapter 16 and verse 10. It's the resurrection.
Verse 10.
Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One, to see corruption.
It's this last phrase thine Holy One to see corruption. The Holy One I take to be the Lord Jesus, and we all know that God raised him from the dead.
Not allowing him to see corruption. That's the key part in here. And so when I go through it, this one is not as clear as some of the others. But if you look at the context and you look at this, umm, this particular expression here, the Holy one to see corruption. The Lord Jesus went into the grace and God raised them on the third day. You remember what Mary said about Lazarus the 4th day you think of.
So even from a natural point of view, by the third day.
He's coming out in time for no corruption and so I look at that and I say.
Yeah, is fulfilled.
Now I wanted to just stop for a moment and I wanna make the point that I cannot say that I can prove the Bible is the word of God. That can't be done and is very related to what our brother Tim was saying last night.
About creation.
Because without faith, it is impossible to please God. And I'm speaking to you as if you're all believers tonight. And I trust that that's the case. I hope that everyone of you has accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
So Hebrews 11 and verse six says without faith it's impossible to please God.
But what I want to make a point here, as we go into the next section of my presentation, is that we're not ignorant of Satan's devices.
We know he created a bunch of counterfeits. We know he's the father of lies.
That's what we expect of him. So we expect him to throw our challenges and we get them from, uh, our atheist friends. You can find them on the, uh, on the Internet. Let's talk about the virgin birth.
Well, we know from Matthew chapter one, verse 22 to 25. It's documented there exactly that Mary was a virgin.
What do they do?
While they try and change the translation of the prophecy to be.
A young woman.
How many of you mothers here were once young women?
I need to see a shorthand.
Not too many, I think. I think anybody who's a mother here was once a young woman. That's obvious. And so to make a prophecy that a young woman is going to have a child.
That's not a prophecy, that's normal. That's why it's important that it's a virgin, because that's a miracle. And to predict a miracle that meets all the requirements that we're talking about. So Matthew chapter 12225, unless you say the people that wrote it were liars.
You guys take it?
As a fulfilled prophecy that meets God's requirement. Daniel Chapter 9, verse two. In terms of Cyrus, what do they say about Osiris? Oh well.
Obviously that was written after the fact, after Cyrus had already let them go.
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Well, I got a bone to pick with that one because if you turn to Daniel Chapter 9 and verse 2.
They may find fault with it, but often the Word of God gives a solution to the complaints that they have.
Daniel Chapter 9 and verse 2.
And it says.
In the first year of his reign I, Daniel understood by book the number of years whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet.
So before it happened, Daniel was reading it, which means it didn't get written after.
Well, let's move on to the next one.
You know, our brother mentioned the other day, you can hear the hiss sometimes when Satan's telling lies, sometimes you can hear that hiss, but very often it turns into a roar because he's trying to scare us away from the truth and the strength and the stability and from trusting the word of God. So we have the Lord Jesus Christ coming to Jerusalem. That prophecy said he was going to come in on a, on a donkey, on the cult of a donkey. And what I find remarkable about that is yes, you could say the Lord Jesus.
And find fault with it as a prophecy that he knew it was written so he made it happen. But what was incredibly interesting to me, the prophecy said it was to be on a cult.
And the Lord Jesus said is to be a cult. You bring me. That's never ever been written on. I've never ridden much on a horse. The one of the horses that I rode on rode so fast that I fell off sideways and my friend rescued me as the peas were whipping past my head. And another horse I was on didn't like the guy that was in front of me stood right up.
And tried to kick him and I almost fell off backwards.
Those were tamed horses trained for a rider, and I understand that donkeys have a lot much more cantankerous point of view than horses.
So as a real miracle, and the thing that to me solidifies that Christ indeed is the Christ, the fact that he wrote an untrained donkey perfectly, calmly and sedately into the city of Jerusalem.
Well, the last one that I want to talk about in terms of what?
Atheists or others might throw up against the resurrection. You turn to 1St Corinthians chapter 15, first eight verses, and I'm just gonna grab a few points out of there.
Because I'm already late Tim, I know First Corinthians chapter 15, and what I want to point out is in verse six that Jesus was seen of about 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present.
At that point in time, you go back, you talked to 500 people who'd seen Jesus alive.
You're gonna call them all liars now. It's easy 2000 years later to say they were all lying.
But I don't think that's the case now, along with what Tim was saying the other night.
It's not possible to intellectually persuade people to believe.
1St Corinthians 17 First Corinthians 1/17/21 Tim, you had those last night, I believe.
God in his wisdom made sure that human wisdom could never figure out the way to him because he wanted to be faith-based.
2nd Corinthians chapter 4, verse three says the God of this world, Satan, has blinded the mind. You don't expect a blind person to see anything in this room, and you can't expect a blind man who's got a blinded mind to understand anything about the Word of God. And so John 3, verses 5 and eight tell us that there has to be a work of the Spirit of God.
The Spirit of God moves like the wind.
When you're playing volleyball, you can't tell when the wind gusts is gonna come, what it's gonna do to your ball. And that's what has to happen in the heart of a man in order to give him life, to let him see the light of the gospel. Because Satan is busy blinding them. Well, that was another picture taken Thursday night.
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This is a much better place to start any relationships from right in front.
Let your light shine. Why? Because Romans chapter 10 verse 17 says faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God.
We had some discussion this morning about taste and see.
You ever talking to your friends and they don't believe? They're not Christians, they're Muslims, they're whatever quote the word of God, they'll get a taste of it.
And the word of God.
Is the truth of God.
Thy word is truth.
John 1717 God's Word is the Spirit sword. Start quoting it, you'll be amazed at what happened.
Can't argue with the Bible, Ephesians 617. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Don't be ashamed. Don't do what I didn't. Put your Bible behind your back.
Be strong in the Lord and the power of His might. His Spirit can help guide you and guide your thoughts on the moment when you need them.
Use the sword of the Spirit, your personal readings, your discussions with others. It's gonna help you in your service for the Lord, whoever He brings across your path. Well, in closing, I just wanted to sing this together. You join me in singing the Bible, the BI.
Thank you very much for your.
Attention, I'd like to just pray. Our gardener, loving Father, we come to thee. Thank you for thy word. We thank you that it is a rock that we can build on. We thank you for the truth that's in it, for the method that thou has given us to be able to know that it is indeed truth. Thank you for the prophecies that that has given us as well. And we thank thee that by thy Spirit that us work in our hearts to give us faith to believe.
Help us to remember this, help us to remember that, uh, those around us are lost without us, love them and that we have uh.
Opportunity to reach out to them and share with them the truth of the Word of God and the love of Jesus. We just ask for thy blessing on the rest of this evening. Pray for encouragement in our lives in Jesus name, Amen.