Salvation Through the Ages - Part 3 — Revelation 13

0:00 Beautiful. What a beautiful name it is. Years ago, we published a story in the Sunday school paper. It was called What the Cannibal Was Hungry For. Yes, that was my title and it was it was a story of bishop Lee, well known bishop in the Church of England.

0:31 He was raised with a Christian mother, praying mother. His father was a scoundrel sea seaman, but his mother was a godly Christian, and he got sick and tired of hearing the gospel from her, and he ran away to see like his father. And when he left home, he said he never wanted to hear the name of Jesus again, and he was with this wild body bunch of guys that were living wicked lives, and he ended up down on the coast of Africa, and two of the fellow sailors said that they were going to jump ship. They had heard there was gold to be found in the interior of South Africa, and so he decided to go with them, and they found two natives to lead them, and they got into the jungle not very far, and the two men got black water fever and died, and the two guys ran off and abandoned Bishop Lee, or whatever his first name is, Lee, in the middle of nowhere. And he eventually was captured by a tribe of cannibals, and they led him down this passageway, this path that had stakes and had human heads all the way along them of their previous meals.

1:50 And he was put in this little hut and he was fed every day and he thought, you know, they are just waiting for the big event sort of thing. Was keeping track of the days, and finally it came to Easter Sunday, and they came and got him and he thought this was it, he was going to die on Easter Sunday, and God was going to punish him for what he had done. And they dragged him down this passageway of all these skulls and they bring him into this clearing, and there's the chief sitting there. And in Pigeon England, the chief spoke to him in English, and spoke to him and said, Tell us about Jesus. And he just fell out his face on the ground and cried out to God to save him. The

2:40 The name he never wanted to hear again. Tell us about Jesus. Anyway, Charles Stanley had been through that era, not Charles Stanley, what was his name? The guy who came and found David Livingston, Stanley. Henry? I

2:56 I forgot his first name, no. I'm not on a first name basis with the man, but anyway. He had been through and told them a little bit about Jesus, and he wanted to learn more. Well, our topic today, for this session, is divine light shining in the earliest ages. And the first thing I want to notice with you is that before ever a sinner needed a savior, God had already prepared for it.

3:33 The safety net was stretched in eternity past. The Lord Jesus was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. So when God had a plan, his plan was he wanted to have a family, and he wanted this family to share with him the joy of his son. Indeed, he wanted them to be sons and heirs in his family. In order to do that, he had to make creatures so he could ask them if they'd like to belong to his family.

4:12 And that's what we have in John one eleven and twelve. To those who responded to his invitation, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believed in his name. And so people might say, well, you know, I don't think it's fair, I was never asked if I wanted to show up in this sorry world. No, you weren't asked about that, but now you are asked if you would like to belong to the family of God. That's God's invitation, right?

4:44 And in order to have a family then, he needed a planet to put them on, and he needed a sun to warm them, and a moon to flush the oceans, and he needed a universe, and so he made one. And that's what it's all doing there. The universe is a temporary stage that God built in which to enact the drama of redemption. That's what Hebrews chapter one tells us, right? And when he's done with it, he'll fold it up and put it away like work clothes, project done.

5:16 So, God had made provision. He knew the story, He knew how the story would end, and God, in His story, always ends with they lived happily ever after. He knows how to have happy endings. And in order for that to happen, a price had to be paid, and his son volunteered to pay the price. And we're told this when we come to the book of the Revelation, that none of this was by accident, that the Lord Jesus had offered himself to bring many sons to glory by Christ Jesus.

5:58 And then we have what some call, if they like to use big words, the proto evangelium, the earliest gospel, and it's quite striking, isn't it, in Genesis three, that this promise is made to no one less than the devil himself. It's not made to Adam and Eve, they're listening, but God makes it to the devil. And he tells him, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. Now we're going to have a session, I think Sunday, about the two aspects of the kingdom that are confusing people these days, and the idea that God gave Adam a kingdom, and Adam failed and the usurper took over.

6:56 And so the devil has been the god of this world all through the centuries. But the Lord Jesus has left heaven, and one of the reasons he came into this world was to win for himself a kingdom. And he is going to destroy the enemy, he is going to defeat the foe, and he is going to reign in the place of David, on David's throne, he is going to rule over the earth, and the thousand year millennium that to come will be a demonstration that God has brought in the last Adam, the second man, who where Adam failed, Christ succeeded and defeated the enemy and has established once again a theocracy on the earth that is ruled by Christ himself. And we'll think about that a little bit, Lord willing, on Sunday. But I want to think a little bit about salvation throughout the scripture, and when we look back into the Old Testament, we realize sometimes people wanting to be saved are wanting to be saved only in a temporal sense, right? There

8:57 So Aaron, for example, he died, in the wilderness, but he obviously was a saved man. And so we have sometimes this confusion in our minds, because sometimes we say, well, all of Israel was redeemed, weren't they? Well, they were, in a temporal sense they were redeemed, but they weren't all redeemed spiritually, and we know that because the writer to the Hebrews tells us that, that many of them died in the desert, their carcasses dropped in the wilderness, because the gospel which they received was not mixed with faith, that's how the writer puts it, the gospel was not mixed with faith. And so there were some of those who left Egypt, they were temporally redeemed, but they were not spiritually redeemed. So we have to make a careful distinction when we're reading these things.

9:57 But I also think the opposite is true, or the other side of the coin is true. Do you think that all the infants that died in the flood perished? Well, physically they did, but did they spiritually? It's a question that we need to ask ourselves, right? And the same would be true of all those who were killed in Canaan. The

10:15 The little children that died physically in Canaan, does that mean that they also somehow God felt free to end their lives, but also to send them to a lost eternity, little children who had never rebelled against the Lord, right? So those are issues we need to think about. Not at the moment, but if you want to ask a question about that, there are some good things to think about there. But we do fall back on the words of Abraham, the friend of God, when he said, Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Everyone will see, not only that God is right, but that he does right.

10:55 Everything he does is right. Sometimes we think he's altogether lovely, but we're not sure he's done all things well. But there's a day coming when we'll all confess that he has done, not most things, but all things well. And God has been more than gracious, more than merciful in his dealing with the human race. Now, the second point there, the human race lived as a community at least until the Tower Of Babel.

11:25 And how much did they know of the spiritual realm? That's a good question to ask, isn't it? We sometimes read quickly over those first chapters, you understand that when you get to Genesis 12, you're halfway through the Old Testament. Right? Two thousand years from Adam to Abraham, and then two thousand years from Abraham to Christ, but those first two thousand years are greatly compressed.

11:51 Bible is kind of scanning that quickly to get to the story of Abraham and the race, the nation that came from him. And so, we can be fooled into thinking that, for example, God got angry in a hurry, where if we read it carefully, we'll see that there were many, many thousands of years transported during that period of time. So when we think about these people who all live together as a community, we realize that, as I say a little bit later, as far as the longevity of their lives, that Shem lived long enough to have met Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If you walked with God for nine hundred years, would you learn a thing or two? We have this strange notion that we know an awful lot more than they did back then.

12:49 But just because the Bible doesn't tell us everything that they knew of God, doesn't mean that they didn't know him. So when, for example, you read the book of Job, as far as we know, this was the first book written in our Bibles. And you read what Job knew about God, what he knew about creation, what he knew about God's purposes and how he worked in history. It's astounding, isn't it? And for him to say way back then, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I know that even though my body dies and is eaten by the worms, in my flesh I will see God.

13:27 Wonderful. And so, when the Lord Jesus said concerning Abraham, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. I don't know exactly what that meant, but that sounds pretty good to me. I think he knew a lot more than we give him credit for. So not everything that God revealed to man is recorded in scripture, but there are things that are recorded, right?

13:50 So they knew that there was one true God. They knew that he was the creator of everything. Adam lived for almost a thousand years, of that first thousand years, halfway to Noah. And then his progeny lived up until the time of the flood. So it would only take three generations to tell the story of creation all the way through until the days of Abraham.

14:17 So in other words, if my grandfather told my kids a story, that would be the equivalent of telling first hand, telling the story of creation all the way to Abraham. So they were aware of these things, these were not raw pagans running around in loincloths not having any idea what was going on. They knew that the world was originally perfect, that sin entered humanity by satanic temptation and human rebellion, that there was a cursed earth as a result, every time they pulled up weeds, they knew what was happening. Weeds only grow where man cultivates, did you know that? Yeah, they only grow.

15:03 And every thorn and thistle was there to remind them what it was doing there. It was because of the sin of man, that's where the thorns came from. They understood about the necessity of a blood sacrifice, right? This would have been a well known story, people sitting around, they didn't have TV to watch, they didn't have the internet, and so they'd sit around the fire, tell us again grandpa, tell us about that, right? And the story of the sacrifice, we made fig leaves, coverings, it didn't work, God slew two animals, right? And

15:40 And then the story of your uncle Isaac, pardon me, your uncle Abel, what happened there. They would know these stories. And as I say, they lived as a community all the way through at least until the Tower Of Babel. They had a gospel message preached, spiritual and physical death entered requiring a blood sacrifice. They had a gospel message preached by Christ through the spirit from the lips of Noah for over one hundred years, right?

17:32 Jesus, by the spirit, through Noah, preached to the people while they were waiting for the for the the ark to be built. That's when they heard the gospel. They are now in god's prison beyond hope. Right? The scripture says that when the Lord Jesus came, great is the mystery of godliness.

17:58 The people who believed on him believed on him in the world. The only place to believe on him is in the world. But but here we see that the Lord Jesus was the preacher, and for about a hundred years or more, faithfully preaching, two people living as a community. These were people who were not scattered over the whole world, They were living as a community, and they heard the Gospel, not once or twice, not for a week of Gospel meetings or six weeks of Gospel meetings, but for a hundred years. And it was Jesus, you can be sure they were real good sermons, Jesus was preaching the message by the spirit through Noah to the people of that day.

18:42 That was the big deal. You you talk about going to see the ark today. That was the big thing going on in the world. What was this guy doing building an art up here? And so it was not only a mighty curiosity, it was a gathering center. People

18:59 People came and heard the gospel, and they rejected the gospel, but they heard it. We also see a covenant made between the Lord and Noah, right? Every time a rainbow showed up in the sky, they didn't think LGBTQ. They said God made a promise that he wouldn't destroy the world by a flood, right? The word got out. Let's

19:24 Let's remember, after the flood, how many people were living on the earth? Right? One family, and as that family grew, they would have these connections. So when we read about the Canaanites, these wicked people in the land of promise, who are they? Canaan is the grandson of Noah.

19:48 He grew up hearing the gospel. So, yeah, when we get to Romans chapter one, we'll see exactly how God describes what happened. Men like Enoch, right, they just show up on the pages of scripture. Who is this fellow? Enoch.

20:10 Did he have a godly parentage? Well, we don't know much about him. But we do know this, listen to the scripture. Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah. We driving down the Jordan Valley one day, we had about 22 young men with me, I actually was a young man back then too, and we were driving down and our guy didn't know the Bible at all, and he was so frustrated because he'd take us to these Catholic churches, we'd say, Look, we have zero interest in this, but tell us about that mountain over there.

20:51 And like, he didn't know anything except Catholic churches, so he gave up after two days, and he just let me do all the teaching. So we're driving down the valley, and people think it's a boring ride, driving down the Jordan Valley, and so he decides, he takes the microphone and he says, Fellows, you know when you read about these patriarchs, the people way back before the flood, and how they lived like nine hundred years and all? Well that's because they used a lunar calendar. So you divide that by 12, like nine hundred years, it's like seventy, you know, just like us. And there was a young fellow there from Vancouver, and he said, the guy's name was Anton, he said, isn't God amazing?

21:37 He said, Why do you say that? Well, says, because the Bible says that Enoch had Methuselah when he was 65. So divide that by 12, like he was five years old. And Todd says, I give up on you guys. But notice what it says, he walked with God after he begat Mathieu.

22:06 You don't think there are men who carelessly think nothing of it, of having a little baby boy, when one day his little boy says to him, Daddy, I'm going be just like you. And it shocks him, And he realizes I'm leading my little boy to hell because I have no idea where I'm going. And he seeks after God. And it seems that that's what happened with Enoch. He walked with God after he begat Methuselah, and he walked with God all those centuries.

22:41 And he was a prophet of God, did you know that? He prophesied, and he was able to look from the earliest ages to the furthest ages. He said that he saw the Lord coming with 10,000 of his saints. So he knew about saints, did he? Not saints like in the Catholic church, he knew that somehow it was possible to have faith in God and to become saintly, to become holy, and that there was another world out there, and that the one who reigned there was coming into this world, and he was going to come with his saints, that must mean that he had already taken his saints to him.

23:25 And Enoch ends up living out the rapture. Right? When he says he comes with 10,000 of the saints, it means that he's already taken the saints there, that has to come beforehand. And so people say, well, can't it be that the church is going through the tribulation just like Noah and his family? Well, it is true that there will be an elect people who will be taken through the tribulation, yeah, the restored Israel, the remnant of Israel, but Enoch was raptured before Noah and his family went through the flood.

24:00 And so if you want to be consistent with the typology, we realize that first there's a rapture, like with Enoch, and then there are people who are preserved through the flood, like restored Israel. But these are things they knew, and Enoch, he talks about these things, talks about what it meant to be a saint, and that the Lord was going to intervene in history. He was going to return, and so he's called a prophet. Right? So we have these people popping up now and again to say, well, how did this happen?

24:47 So does God have other people in other lands that speak for him? God doesn't have a communications problem, you know. And I want to read a verse or two here that talk about how God works in this way. Here in Romans chapter one, the Apostle Paul is going to bring up the subject of salvation, and in order to do that, he lays the groundwork by saying, God has been very effective in communicating himself to the human race. He begins by saying, Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God.

25:38 Now later on, he'll call it the gospel of his son in verse nine, and he'll call it the gospel of Christ in verse 16. It's the gospel of God because God initiated the plan. It's the gospel of his son because the son was the gift who made it possible. And it's the gospel of Christ because it is a prophetic offer. It's made, the Messiah was promised and came right on schedule, and so it's rooted in the word of God, and it's rooted in history.

26:14 This is not a fairy tale. This is not a figment of someone's imagination. God laid the groundwork in the Hebrew scriptures so that when the Messiah came, you could check the notes. You could see exactly this was indeed the Messiah based on the prophetic words. So it's the gospel of the Messiah.

26:35 So this is the first thing we read, that he is separated to the Gospel of God, the good news of God. And you know, the Gospel is elsewhere other than just in our present day. And I mentioned to you that verse in Hebrews, where the apostle is writing to the Hebrew believers, and this is what he says, I'll just read it to you. He says that the gospel did not benefit them because, verse, this is chapter four verse two, indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them, but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. So he's saying the gospel was preached to the people who came out of Egypt, right?

27:44 Well, we've already learned that the gospel was preached by Jesus through Noah to the people in his day. And we've noticed that the gospel was preached in the Garden Of Eden with Adam and Eve. And the Gospel is always the same. There details, there's content that grows because the Bible is a progressive revelation, but the essential message of the Gospel is always the same, believe God. Take God at his word.

28:22 Right? That's the message. He believed God. And Hebrews chapter 11 is dedicated to this idea that right from the Garden of Eden all the way through history, there were people who believed God. What are the essentials for a person to come to God?

28:46 He that comes to God must, number one, believe that he is. And number two, believe that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Right? So, believing that God is and that God is accessible, and that he wants us to seek him, and that when we do seek him, he will reward us. He will give us, it will be worth our while to seek after God.

29:16 Those are the two essentials, right? And we'll see this when Paul talks at Mars Hill, that God established the nations, he set the bounds, he controlled the rise and fall of nations, that they might seek after him. Well, God was speaking to them. He speaks through providence, he speaks through creation, he speaks through conscience, he speaks through Christ, he speaks through the Christians, he has all these different ways, and that's what Romans chapter one presents to us. And it all begins with this first statement, the Gospel. So

29:51 So don't think of the Gospel as something, this is how I heard it, so this is the Gospel. The Gospel has been proclaimed all through history, all through human history. And it will be preached in the kingdom. It will be preached in the millennium. It will be preached all the way. In

30:08 In fact, there's something called the everlasting gospel. We'll never get over it, and the good news will be proclaimed. Wherever God is found, God speaks good, right? People say to one another, have a good day. They wish good on us, but God wills good.

30:30 Good will toward men, right? God wills good for man. So when people say, Have a good day, I say, Well, is there any way that you can help me have a good day? Like you tell me to, it sounds kind of bossy. Right?

30:47 How should I have a good day? If you read the book of Acts, you'll see all the ways that the Christians had a good day. They daily studied the word. They daily visited the widows. They daily shared the gospel.

31:04 They daily prayed for one another. They daily met with each other, had meals together, right? You go through the list and see all the things they did daily. That's how to have a good day. But God wants us to have not only a good day, he wants us to have a good forever.

31:19 And so he's the God of the Gospel. And then notice, not only the gospel of God, but then in verse four, that this message is concerning his son Jesus Christ, who is declared to be the son of God. And again, we may assume that people only know about the Son of God after he came, but that's not true, is it? I remember as a young Christian growing up, I worked on the assumption that I knew Jesus created the world. A lot of people didn't know that. They

31:54 They thought, well, God did it. But I had kind of peaked in John chapter one and figured out Jesus actually made the world. So I knew he was busy at creation, but then I didn't think he did anything until the incarnation. But then as I began to discover all of these Christophanies, these pre incarnate appearances of the Lord Jesus, right? We know it's the Lord Jesus because he appeared, and the scripture says that no one has seen God at any time, the only begotten of the Father, he has declared him.

32:35 So if you see God, it's the Lord Jesus that is being manifested. And, the Lord Jesus appeared in many wonderful ways. It's striking to me, in the light of what's happening in the world of Islam and how many people are meeting this glorious person in their dreams, who tells them that the answer is in the book, that the very first time we read of the Lord appearing, he appears to Hagar to tell her about her little boy, and that there was hope for them. Yeah, it's beautiful isn't it? And so we see time and time again the Lord appearing, and I don't say that this is an exhaustive list of all the time the Lord appeared, because we have other occasions where the Lord did appear that aren't normally included in that list, right?

33:29 So when the Lord appeared to Daniel, or when he appeared to Jacob, or when he appeared to Abraham. And so there were many other appearances or times when the Lord drew near, when God showed up to Job. Job kept saying, come on, come on, I'm ready. And then the Lord showed up, sorry, that was stupid. I'm not ready for this.

33:55 You go ahead and talk, you say whatever you want. Yeah, he met God. And we have many other such experiences, and actually Job will tell us this, that God actually meets us. Look down at, this is getting ahead of myself, but look down at point four. Job was either contemporary of Abraham or lived earlier than the patriarch. His

34:30 His book reveals a wonderful knowledge of God, his creation, his character, and these remarkable words of hope. Quote, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God whom I shall see for myself and my eye shall behold him and not another. But he says that God appears to people in dreams, and he speaks to them, and he warns them, so they don't go down to the pit. Job tells us that. So, when we see, for example, the story of Belshazzar, alright, if you had a man who did not deserve a special one on one with God the night before he died, it would be Belshazzar.

35:22 He was a scoundrel, he was an idiot, right? I said forget him, he's done for. But God arranges that night for him to have the Queen Mother come and remind him what happened to Nebuchadnezzar, and that you knew this stuff man, but you never took it to heart, did you? And then to bring in the best preacher in the world, Daniel. Right? So

35:53 So God interrupts Belshazzar's party, writes a special message for him on the wall, has the queen mother come in and pin his ears back, and then has Daniel come in and preach the gospel and warn him, this is it buddy. Why did God do that? Well, to give him a final chance, right? To give him a final, I wouldn't be surprised that God does this with every person, gives them one last chance. Because in the New Testament, we just don't have a historical figure, we have a parable.

36:31 And the parable is not intended to be a story, it's intended to be an illustration of life itself. And the story is of a man who is so busy making money that he doesn't pay any attention to God. And he's thinking about expanding his business, and God visits him. He says, excuse me sir, you have big plans for the future. Have you ever paused to consider whether you have any future for your plans?

37:04 I've got some inside information for you. You're going to die tonight. Okay, why would he tell him? So he would prepare to meet God. Right? That's

37:20 That's the Ninevites figured out. There was no good news in Jonah's message at all. It could have been good news, because in the next chapter he says, I know what kind of a God you are, you're patient, gracious, generous, thoughtful, kind. Why didn't he tell the Ninevites that? But all he tells them is, forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

37:44 Now I don't think it was the king, it started with the beggars, people on the street like, forty days? But the king expresses it and says, the only reason God told us forty days is so we had time to repent. Why'd he give him forty days? I mean, is a big city, there were a lot of people. God said, I'm not going to rush you, I'll give you forty days.

38:15 And everybody, from the king in the street to the beggar in the street, repented and God spared the city. So I wouldn't be surprised at all when we get to heaven, and God opens the books. You see there are a lot of people thinking, if my relatives end up in hell, I am going be a really unhappy customer in heaven. And guy says, no you won't, because I am going to open the books. And you are going to see every nudge, every kindness I showed that relative of yours, every time they were witness to, every gospel tract they threw in the trash, every time, every funeral they went to, I can show you exactly what they were thinking at that moment.

39:03 And I used all the tactics I had on hand, and you will know that they are going to hell because they just don't want to be around me. They don't want me, and I don't want them to have me imposed on them. And there is only one place in the universe where I am not, and if that is what they want, they are welcome to it. So as we see the overall message of the gospel, right, Genesis four, it's not halfway through the Bible, in Genesis four in verse 26 we read, then men began to call on the name of the Lord. And so here we see that the son of God was revealed, but he wasn't just revealed at the incarnation.

40:04 People say, why did God wait so long? Well, God was preparing the way. This was the fullness of time, but God was working, Jesus was showing up all through history, not just when he came at Bethlehem. Yeah, he'd been there before. When he came to Mount Moriah, to Calvary, he'd been there before. He

40:26 He was the one who spoke from heaven and told Abraham, don't harm your son. We know that because Jesus is the one who says, I know you fear God because you haven't withheld your only son from me. He is God, he promises to do things that only God can do, but he distinguishes himself from God as well. I know you fear God, because you've not withheld your only son from me. So the incarnation is clearly in the Old Testament, not just in the New.

41:55 He asked him to give thanks for the food, to pray for the food. Afterwards, this Christian minister asked the chief to tell some of the stories, some of the traditions of their people, and the first thing he told them was the story of the flood, And in great accuracy, that God was angry with the human race because of their sin and sent a flood, and one family survived because they had a large boat, he went on to explain the whole story. This is true all through the world. They knew this, right? And in Romans chapter one, we make this statement, right, in verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

42:46 Nobody has any excuse to say, I think I'll get away with it, because God consistently has revealed his wrath, not just revealed the gospel and revealed his son, he has revealed his wrath too. And why does he reveal his wrath? So we will flee from the wrath to come. It's a warning, isn't it? That God takes sin seriously.

43:14 I mentioned here that when I was in China, you know, Mao changed the alphabet, simplified the alphabet, but in the original Chinese alphabet, you can preach the Gospel all the way through. All the ideas that came not only out of Eden, but the flood, all the way through until the Tower Of Babel, you can read the story in the Chinese characters. Like the word for redemption, which shows the character of a man with a lamb over him, right? And they have pictures for the flood, and for our first parents, two people standing behind trees and so on. So the gospel is there.

44:03 Here I was standing in the Forbidden City, and there was this Chinese Communist who was our guide, and she is explaining to us, first of all, why the Chinese think red is good luck. She said it goes back to this, that originally the Chinese worshipped one true god, Shanti, and once a year the priests would make a journey from here, there was one great altar, that all they had in the country, it was right here, but they would make a journey to the Western border of China, and they would offer a sacrifice to the God who lived over there, in the Middle East, right? They knew that that's where God's dwelling place was, and they would offer a sacrifice to him. And because of the color of the blood, this became known as good luck, the color of red became good luck. And this is Chinese communist explaining the gospel to us, and saying that originally the Chinese were monotheists who worshiped the god who demanded sacrifice.

46:25 And some of them would believe, and then it would spread, right? And this is what the Apostle Paul says, that God makes manifest the fragrance of his presence, the presence of Christ by us in every place. Years ago I was watching a series of TV programs on the underworld, the criminal world in Canada, and it started on the East Coast and it was working its way across, I didn't see them all, but I saw the last one, it was about Vancouver. And it talked about the fact that Hong Kong had the most corrupt police force in the world, and the crime was actually run by the police. And there were five sergeants, they were known as the five dragons, and the crown had sent in a team of people to interrogate, to evaluate the police department.

47:29 And these fellows took that as an opportunity to hot foot it out of there, and they moved to Vancouver, and they ran the drug and criminal business in Vancouver. And it had all these pictures of these five dragons meeting with high level government officials and so on, right? Well in the process, they were interviewing some ex policemen from the Hong Kong Police Department, some guys from Australia, New Zealand and so on that had served there. And they were talking to one Australian fellow, and they asked him, in your twenty years on the police force in Hong Kong, did you ever meet any police officer that was not on the take? And he said, well yes, there were two.

48:15 One of them was a madman, everybody left him alone. And the other one was a Plymouth Brethren. And I thought to myself, here's a man, and he's eating, you know, rice and beans. All his compatriots are eating steak and lobster. And he's living a straight up and down life in the Hong Kong Police Department.

48:43 And God said, I think I want to tell the world about this. Them that honor me, I will honor. I was sitting in Winnipeg years ago, they were opening a new mint, Royal Mint in Winnipeg, and all the big wigs were there. And after the festivities and all, they announced that they were going back for liquid refreshments, and everyone was welcome. All of course, except for Jim Gilmore.

49:17 Like a thousand people there. And he announces they're all going back for liquid refreshments, except of course, Jim Gilmore. Because Jim Gilmore was an elder in the assembly and he didn't imbibe in the liquid refreshments, but this man felt obligated to tell the whole crowd, the whole world, that Jim Gilmore was somebody that was a straight up and down Christian. He thought he was putting Jim down, but God was saying, Well, I want to honor Jim Gilmore. He was the only man in the city of Winnipeg that could sign a million dollar check on his own recognizance.

50:04 Everybody trusted Jim, because Jim trusted the Lord. I'll tell you a little story about Jim. He was a big, very dignified Scotsman, and he was the treasurer for the city of Winnipeg. And there was a little fellow there in Winnipeg, and he said, Oh God, I'm not very much, but I want to help people find Jesus. And he got a job being the custodian, cleaning these little apartments under a ramshackle building, they were half under the ground, and he would clean up these, and it was kind of the riffraff of society, old broken down people living in these places.

50:45 And he would go in and he'd look around, on his day off he'd go to flea markets and he'd buy lamps and paintings and carpets and things. And then he would go around to these people in these little dirty, filthy, rotten little places, and he'd bring them a coffee and sit and talk to them, and say, You know, I don't know what I'm going do with that. Just this week I bought a beautiful painting. I think it would look perfect over your sofa. Could I put it up there on the wall?

51:18 And he'd go and get it, and he'd put it up there, and he'd decorate their lives. He'd bring in some flowers to this little old lady that hadn't had any flowers given to her in a few decades, you know. And he said, I don't really feel able to share the gospel with them. I don't really know how to do that, but I can love them for Jesus. And then every once in a while, he'd ask Jim Gilmore if he would come.

51:45 And this little fellow, the little custodian and the treasurer of the city of Winnipeg, would go from place to place, and Jim would have a big carafe of tea, and they'd sit and have a tea and a cookie, and Jim would tell them about the Lord Jesus. I think of that verse that says, Erastus, the chamberlain of the city, and Cortus, a brother, salute you. Erastus, the chamberlain of the city, he was one of the richest men in Corinth, he was a brother in the assembly there. They found the dedicatory plate where Erastus donated the royal mile into Corinth, a mile of marble out of his own pocket. And Cordus, well that just means number four. He

52:35 He was a slave, no use straining your brain to come up with a name for this guy, just call him number four. Number four, get my chariot, right? So here there are these two brothers put together in the same verse because it's level at the cross, isn't it? The cross has this great leveling influence, but it does something else, it elevates God's people. They're the princes and princesses of heaven, the royal family of heaven.

53:03 And when you meet another Christian, you know, you can see it. And so God uses his people, unbeknown sometimes. I was telling the story about my friend Eric Cameron. Eric had Lou Gehrig's disease, and he was very badly crippled. By the time, this story occurs, he was just dragging around on two canes.

53:29 But there was a the first assembly that I used to go and preach to when I was a young buck was Straffordville Gospel Hall. It was one of the oldest assemblies in North America. They still had a pot bellied stove and they had the horse stalls where they used to park the cars in an outhouse, and the superintendent there of the Sunday school, his brother had also grown up in a Christian home, but had kicked over the traces and wanted nothing to do with the Gospel, and he was just unreachable. He happened to live in the same neighborhood as Eric Cameron, And one winter's day there had been a heavy snow and a lady catty cornered to this man's house, to get out, her wheel had slipped down into the ditch and she couldn't get out. And he thought to himself, I'm not going out on a cold day like this to help that lady.

54:26 But as he stood there and watched two doors down he saw Eric Cameron out with his coat and his two canes making his way across and getting down into the ditch, and getting under that wheel, and helping the woman get her car out of the ditch. And that day he said, that's it, God, I give up. I need to be like Eric Cameron. And he got saved. He'd heard the gospel a thousand times, but he saw Jesus there, and he couldn't stand any longer being without Jesus.

55:12 We don't realize, do we sometimes, the kind word, the the patience that we show people who are having a hard day, and to speak a kind word to them, it brings to them the the fragrance of Jesus. The gospel of God, the son of God, the beloved of God. And then we read in verse 17, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. Well, this is interesting, isn't it?

55:58 I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, it's the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek, for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed. Yeah. It's not just that we show kindness and love and gentleness to people. Perhaps unknown to ourselves, we show them the righteousness of God, that it's possible to be right with God. There was a man up in Sudbury, pardon me, in anyway, Canada, I forget where, it wasn't Sudbury, was up in Timmins, Ontario.

56:46 And he had done very well for himself, made a lot of money, and he really had no time for the Lord. But his niece and her husband, they got married, I think he was Anglican, she was Catholic, they had some little boys, and they took them to the Anglican church, and the Sunday school teacher said that the Bible wasn't true, at least in the Catholic church they pretended the Bible was true, and so she said, We can't go here anymore, where should we go? And they said, Well, the Anglicans speak real badly about the folks over at the chapel, maybe they're better, so let's go see them. So they showed up, and very shortly thereafter, the two of them got saved. And they tried to get their uncle to come out to hear the gospel, and he had no interest in doing it.

57:37 And this worked until his little nephews asked him to come to a Christmas program. They were going to be in the program, and so he felt compelled to come. Well he got so agitated he couldn't stand it. He got up and he went to the back, he didn't leave the building, he was just pacing back and forth. He was just in such a battle, and for days and weeks and months this battle raged with him.

58:02 And finally, one day on a business trip, he pulled the car off to the side of the road and he said, That's it, I can't take it anymore. If you want me, I don't know why you want me, but if you want me, I'm yours. And Jack got saved. Well, he had a large company, 200 employees. He called them all together and he told them what had happened, and how he had fought against God, and how the best day of his life was the day he was defeated.

58:33 And God won, because that was the day he And he said, Now I'm a Christian now, so you watch my life. And if I do anything that a Christian shouldn't do, I give you all permission to walk into my office unannounced and say, Jack McLaughlin, you shouldn't do that. You're a Christian. And that's what he did. And you know, he said, I had the biggest bar in Timmins. I

59:07 I actually got it, they were tearing down an old hotel, and I bought the bar. And there wasn't a drink, I couldn't mix you. And I came home and I looked at that thing and I thought, what am I going to do with it? And there were tens of thousands of dollars sitting there. And he called up one of the elders and said, what do I do? And

59:28 And the elder said, well, Jesus lives with you now, right? Ask him. He'll tell you what to do with it. If it's not right for you to drink Jack, is it right for anybody else to drink it? He said the whole thing went down.

59:42 He was gone, right? And he said, but when we got together as a family, he says, I brought some of this fancy, you know, with foil on the top, some bubbly grape juice or something. And he said, I brought it to my niece, and she looked at it and she said, Uncle Jack, is this what we need to be happy? Do we need to get as close as we can? He said, You're right. You're

60:07 You're right, Marnie. And out it went, right? And you know, that man, his influence on that town was spectacular. They saw what happened in his life, and so when we think about not just simply we're showing kindness and grace to people, but we're saying, I stand with God, and I take sin seriously, and I make mistakes, but I want to set them right. That's what it means to be blameless. I'm

60:40 I'm not sinless, but I want to be blameless. I want to be able to go and say, If I did something wrong, I'm going to set this right, as much as it's possible for me to do it, because the righteousness of God has been revealed. The just, the righteous live by faith. We already noticed verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed. God has recorded in history his judgment on sin.

62:10 Is that how you see the world? I said to my neighbor, You know, it's interesting to me because my daughter was able to help your wife when she was in a little panic situation, and then my son, he taught your two kids in school, and you really admire him as a teacher, and then I was invited to preach at a wedding in Jackson, and you ended up being there, and they actually put you and me side by side at the reception, and now you've moved in next door. I don't think you're going to get away. You know, I said, do you see that there's a pattern developing here? He said, I see the pattern.

62:49 Good. That's good, isn't it? Yeah. And so I said to her, Sneha, when you open your eyes and look around, what do you see? Like, if you look at the sun, what do you see? What's

63:00 What's the sun doing? The sun is giving. Giving, giving, giving. You know, religion, the gods are always asking us to give to them, But the true God is always giving us. And you look at the clouds, what are they doing? Oh,

63:17 Oh, they're giving. And what about the rivers and the fountains and the fields of grain, like what are they doing? And when you walk into an orchard and you pick an apple off the tree, do you realize that you're picking a whole orchard? Inside that apple, there's the potential for an orchard, because the apple is designed to give itself away, isn't it? In fact, your body, like every organ in your body, what's your heart doing? Your

63:46 Your lungs, your pancreas, what are they doing? They're giving. Giving, giving, giving, right? In fact, that's how you came to be. You used to be one fertilized egg, and that egg gave itself away.

63:59 It's called mitosis, and then it gave itself away and gave itself away until you ended up with 30,000,000,000,000 cells. You see why, as Christians, we believe that God is the giver of every good and every perfect gift, and that the ultimate moment in history is the moment when the giver God gave himself for us. And he wants to give you a gift, Sneha, the gift of a whole new life, forgiven of all your sin, heaven as your home, Jesus as your best friend, the word of God to guide you, the fellowship of people like me. As we got up to leave, she said to me, I think it's pretty obvious that the God arranged for us to sit together today. I said, Yeah, I think it is.

65:07 Yeah. The creation shouts to us that the God who is is a giver God, a generous God, you can only see 2,000 stars with the naked eye, God says, I'll throw in a few zillion more. You only need one kind of food to eat, the children of Israel never asked what's for breakfast for forty years. God says, look, I'll even give you a fruit with hair on it. Who'd think of a kiwi except God?

65:39 Every flavor and every aroma, every texture, every color, He just fills our universe with his majesty and his generosity, and why people can't see it and believe the lie that nothing plus nobody equals everything. Like, what kind of madness is that? God says, my problem with the human race is not that they don't know me, because what may be known of God is manifest. God has shown it to them. It can be clearly seen.

66:41 But anyway, he tells a story, early on about, being in this academic city up in Siberia, and everybody's an atheist in those days. This is before Paris strike, before the wall came down, no Bibles. And he's up there lecturing on mathematics, but one of the math professors said to him, I'd like you to meet my daughter and son-in-law, they're believers like you. And he got to meet this lovely couple and he asked the fellow, How did you ever become a Christian up here? And he said, When I was 16 I got this passion to know God.

67:15 But there were no Bibles. But we had these dictionaries of atheism, we were given them at school, in order to argue against the Bible they had to quote the Bible. And the quotations of the Bible were so beautiful, I knew that men hadn't written it. So I got some scissors and glue and a little notebook and I cut all the Bible verses out of the Dictionary of Atheism and glued them in my notebook, and that's what I read and that's how God saved me. I wish men would get this.

67:47 You can't defeat God. Why don't you just give up and let him love you? We read about the glory of God in verse 23. Glory is revealed character. And when God revealed his character, you know what they did?

68:16 They caricatured his character. They turned it into a monster. They said, God likes it when we take our young girls and make them temple prostitutes. He likes it when we throw our babies in the fire. God likes it when we're selfish and nasty, and when we kill each other in his name. He

68:40 He loves that. And what they did was they superimposed their own vile hearts and minds on their gods, and they worship themselves in all of their fallenness and corruption. They turned the glory of God into creepy crawlers. Yeah, I I I've been to Egypt. I've seen in Saqqara, a display of little frogs, mummified frogs wrapped up like pharaohs.

69:20 They worship these frogs. They didn't stop at frogs though, I mean they worship snakes, you know that the serpent has the Anka, the key of life. Sounds like the lie in Eden, doesn't it? Yeah, and they started off worshipping man, but they just keep going, they can't stop themselves, and eventually they worshipped bugs. You see these wealthy women go to Egypt and they come back with this nice piece of jewelry.

69:51 It's an oval shape and it has hieroglyphs on it, and this is supposedly their name in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and they pay big money to bring this jewelry. You know why it's oval? Well, it's the shape of a cockroach. They worship the scarab. The scarab is a cockroach that lays its eggs in camel dung.

70:14 If you won't worship the true God, you'll worship something. Everybody's built to be a worshiper. You can only hold your breath so long, right? These people who say, I don't believe anything, yeah, well that's what you believe, isn't it? You just can't stop believing. You

70:29 You have to believe something, and you either believe the truth or you believe a lie. And so they believe a lie, and they exchange the truth of God for the lie, verse 25. So we have the gospel of God, the son of God, the people of God, the the righteousness of God, the wrath of God, the creation of God, the glory of God, and the truth of God. God has gone out of his way to communicate himself to the human race, right? Like you can't open your eyes and not see the Trinity, can you?

71:19 Everything is time, space and matter. Time is the Trinity, future, present, past, and I'm already in the past as far as my message is concerned. Length, width and height, if you took one of the three dimensions away from this building, you wouldn't have a building anymore, would you? Everything is three in one, the light we see, it's red light, green light, blue light, all balanced, what we call white light, invisible light. You look in the mirror and you see spirit and soul and body.

71:54 It's not exactly the same, of course, as God, but it's his fingerprints. Everywhere you look, you see. Not just a God who's powerful, but a God who's kind and loving and thoughtful and generous, who gave and gave and gave and gave until he gave his only son. We have good news to share, and good news to live. May the Lord help us.

72:56 And Randy grew up in an ungodly home, knew nothing about the Gospel, but he was a big man on campus, he was a quarterback of the football team, and he wanted to make a million bucks by the time he was 30. And somebody gave him how to win friends and influence people, and in there he was told that every morning, like a mantra, he should say, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And so he started doing it. And he said, you know, it's not much gospel in that verse, but it was enough. I was driving home from Mississippi to North Carolina, my parents' home, and that verse got caught in my brain and I couldn't get it out.

73:42 And he said, It was enough to bring all my sins crashing down on me. And I was suffocating. I could hardly get there soon enough and get out of the car and ran in and said, Does anybody have a Bible? And they brought him his grandfather's Bible who had died some years before. He says, I never knew my grandfather, but I found out my grandfather was a believer all through his Bible. When

74:06 When he finished that book of the Bible, he'd write the date, and then he'd, little things that God taught him through the Bible, he never even knew his grandfather was a Christian. But I guess his grandfather's prayers all landed on his head that day. And he says, I don't know what verse it was as I was reading, but suddenly I looked away from my sin and I saw Jesus, and I was saved. Yeah, I tell you folks, it's going to be a thriller when we get to heaven. When the Bible speaks about enter into the joy of thy Lord, it's not just enter into the home of thy Lord, we'll all be there, but the joy is the joy of a job well done.

74:50 We'll have forever. They won't be trying to get me to shut up so I can have supper, go on forever. And can you imagine the Lord saying, let me show you something folks, you see this? She doesn't look like this now, but used to be a little old wrinkled up lady. Didn't look like very much at all down there, and she had a great big handbag, and she would skip lunch a couple times a week to get enough money from her pension to buy a pack of tracks.

75:22 And even though she had arthritis in both knees, she'd make this circuit, let's watch her, watch her here. Right, he's got the original CCTV camera system, right? And he'll show us, look, there she goes, see she goes, there's a phone booth, there she put one in there, okay? They went into the public bathroom, there's one there, put it on that table, look, all the way around. Okay, now see, the custodian threw that one out, and that one blew away, oh, but wait, see this man here? He's

75:53 He's going into this men's room there and there's a one on the table and he picked it up. And he took it with him into the stall and he just looked at it and he saw the Bible verses and he just stuck it in the paper dispenser. He wasn't interested. But now, okay, watch, you see this man here? Yeah, see he's got a little bulge under his jacket there?

76:16 Yeah, he's going in to end his life in the stall there. See, watch, here he goes. He goes in, closes the door. He's sitting there trying to screw up his courage, and he sees that little paper. Watch, he pulls it out, watch.

76:32 I can see what's happening in his heart, but you can watch in his face. Watch the moment when the light dawns. Yeah, okay, watch. Now we'll follow him. We can speed things up if you want, but he goes home and he tells his wife, he didn't realize she's not saved, but she's been crying out to God because her husband is so depressed and she doesn't know how to help him.

76:59 And now she sees God answered her prayer, and she trusts the Lord too, see that? And they have a little boy, and the little boy grows up and he becomes a missionary, he goes to Papua New Guinea. You want to see what happens over here? This little old lady, you never knew any of this, did you? But I've been tracking that gospel track.

77:21 I've been tracking it. I count hairs, I count tears, I keep track of it all, know. Every prayer, I'll give an account someday for every prayer that I answered every one of them. You can count on that. Yeah.

77:37 Well, that's a make believe story, but I can tell you real stories just like it. Right? Yeah. One of my dearest friends, he said, My father did the best thing ever for me, he gave me a job in his pub, because every day I saw the same sad tired men come in with the same sad tired looks, ordered the same drinks and leave the same way they came, and I realized this world was all a mirage, there was nothing here for me. And one day a young person came running in the door of the pub and ran over to me and threw a paper onto the countertop and ran out the door.

78:24 I never saw them again. But it was time for my break, so I took it and I went in and I sat in the stall and I read that paper. And it was true. I knew it was true. I knew it was what I was looking for.

78:38 And right there, I said, God, I want that paper to be in here. I want this to be true for me. And God saved me. First time I ever heard the gospel. Yeah.

78:53 And there are lots of stories like that, right? I had a team of young men down in, actually it was in Pensacola, Florida, Milton, Florida. We were sleeping on the floor of a print shop and we were going out during the day, knocking on doors, talking to people. It was blistering hot, and we got very little interest. And it was the little town of Milton, and we had rented a garden club building for our gospel meetings all week long, didn't see one person come in.

79:24 The last night, it was time to start, there was nobody there. And then the door opened and in came a man. He in a serviceman's uniform, like a plumber or something, and he had his name stitched on his shoulder. He came in and sat down, the most welcome man on the countryside, I think he got three hymn books. afterward we heard his story three months before his wife had left him and just that day he had lost his job and he was going home to kill himself.

80:00 And he took a little shortcut through the woods and one of our invitations had been balled up and thrown down and he kicked it and then absentmindedly picked it up and straightened it out and saw the invitation and said, Okay God, I'll give you one more chance. And he came that night and got saved. I don't know how many thousand invitations we handed out, the only one that was used as far as we know was the one that had been discarded on the ground. But there'll be stories like that galore. So keep at it folks, keep at it.

80:35 We shall reap if we don't give up. Yeah, keep at it. And you know, sometimes the people who fight the hardest are like a fish that fights the hardest just before it gets in the boat. Don't take that as negative. Just say, yeah, I understand.

80:54 This isn't a haircut. This is a big deal. But don't give up, because God's not going to give up. He's going to keep at it to the very last. So be encouraged.

81:10 May the Lord bless you as you sit having your meal. Talk about these things, talk about the things of God, stories, opportunities you've had, encourage one another, provoke one another to love and good works. Let's pray. Again, Father, we've just dipped our toe in the ocean, and we found out you are amazing. Everything you do, everything you do, we look at the universe, the creation, and we're just flabbergasted at how wonderful it is, and we live in a day where we have the microscopes and telescopes that no other generation had.

81:48 We can actually see what's inside a cell. No one's ever seen that before, And to see the magnificent, like a city within a cell, with all the power company and the garbage collection and the manufacturing, everything that's going on in the cell, and it all came out of your amazing mind. And if a cell is fascinating, to think what you else have to reveal to us, We are so thankful for the word of God, for every word. Help us, father, to use it, to scatter the seed. Does not the scripture say that if you sow little, you'll reap little, and if you sow much, you'll reap much.

82:38 Help us to find every possible way. As the scripture says, by all means save some. Find every possible way to share the good news with people. We look forward to the day when we enter into the joy of our Lord. What joy there will be for him to tell us the end of the story, to show us the answers to our prayer, and what he did with what we put in his hand.

83:05 And we'll say amen with the little boy and his lunch, and say Jesus did that with what I put in his hand just like he did it with yours. We give thanks and pray that you'll bless our time together in this good food that's been provided, as we pray in the Savior's name. Amen.