Paul is defending himself because they told him that he was not an apostle, that he had never met the Lord, and that's one of the requirements for the apostle, and so on and so forth, and he just, well, the reason for them to tell him this is because he wrote 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians condemned the church there at Corinth, and Paul because he condemned the church, some of them repented, which was good. He said, I'm glad that you repented. And that's what we're studying in 2 Corinthians this last week. And some would not repent. Some just left the church. And the Apostle Paul is writing here in 2 Corinthians now. He gives him some further instructions. He draws out some things that they need to follow a little closer and commends them for repenting, to them some for not repenting, and he builds himself up. He defends himself before them so that they will listen to what he has to say. And the first verse is, boasting is necessary, though it is not profitable. He said, I don't want to run around boasting all the time and bragging on myself. You shouldn't have to do that. Should you? Well, you shouldn't. What a man says about himself, it never matters what other people says about him, if it's for good, then that's what really matters. Though it is unprofitable, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. He said, I'm going to tell you about some things that I know about God, that God has told me. And he said, I know a man in Christ. Now, Paul's talking of himself as if he's in the third person. He's bragging on himself here, but He's doing it very humbly. Let's put it that way. In other words, he's talking about himself as if he was someone else. Have you ever talked about yourself like that? All right, talk about yourself in the third person. Paul talking about himself as if he was another person. It's an unknown man in Christ who, 14 years ago, whether in the body, I do not know, or out of the body, I do not know, God knows such a man was caught up to the third heaven. The third heaven. Now where is the third heaven? Remember? Paradise. All right? Caught up to the third heaven or paradise. The paradise of God. The first heaven. Let's go back. Do you remember? Did you all get this lesson? on heaven. The different, three different spheres of heaven, all of it. Alright, so I don't have to go back into that again. I was going to draw a picture. But since you are all here, I won't have to do that. In the third heaven, the third heaven, out is the abode of God. Paul says, I was caught up to the third heaven. And I don't know whether I was in the body or out of the body. Now what does he call heaven here in the third verse? You're going to find, I know such a man. Whether in the body or apart from the body, I do not know. God knows. He said, I don't know if I was alive or dead. Well, I do, because Paul was dead. He was stoned at this time. Before this, he was stoned in Lystra. That's where he was stoned. And he was taken out. He was pronounced dead and thrown into the garbage heap. That's where they took the criminals. They threw him out there. They didn't take him, bury criminals. They took him and put him just in the garbage for the dead animals, the young, dumb. kind of like the county dump or something, that's where they took him out and threw him in there with the dead animals. And every now and then you can find dead chickens and animals out in the dump, you know, like they used to, and they'd burn it. Well, that's what they do to criminals bodies, they just take them to one burial and they just throw them in the dump. That's kind of burial. The burial of a donkey, the Bible says. In other words, he was taken to drive the drug out there and just thrown in the dump. And it used to, when I lived up in Bishop, when we'd butcher cattle or anything, or if we had a dead cow, we'd just take the cow and hook onto the behind with a tractor and drag it out to a place where we just took the dead animals that we could dump. We just take them and roll them down in this gully and that's what they saved with whatever we had, that's when we dumped it. And that's what he's talking, that's where they put Paul when they started the mystery, they took him and dumped him in the dump. He was caught up in paradise and heard inexpressible words. The word there is It means unspeakable words. Words that I could not communicate to you. I don't have, Paul said, I do not have the language to tell you what I saw. I do not have the words to tell you what I saw. This was absolutely unspeakable. Another place he talks about joy unspeakable. Joy that cannot be explained. You have to experience it. You know, you do. Joy that has to be experienced cannot be explained. He saw things that had to be experienced. They cannot be explained. He said, I was called up to paradise. The word paradise means a encircled enclosure, a park, a garden. That's what it means, paradise. And this is the paradise of God, heaven, a beautiful place for his children. inexpressible words which a man is not committed, literally, which a man cannot speak. That's literally what it means, which a man cannot speak, he's not able to speak. He just can't tell you what he saw. Verse 5 says, and on behalf of such a man will I boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except in regard to my weaknesses. Paul now tells you, this was me that was caught up in the paradise of God. It was me. But I won't boast of my happiness now. But I'll boast of my weaknesses. Verse 6 says forth, If I do wish to boast, I shall not be foolish, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from this, so that no one may credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me. He said, I could tell you about things, try to explain some things to you, that no man has ever seen before and returned to the surface to tell about. As far as we know, Paul is the only one to ever die and return back to the earth that God ever raised and that he let him remember what he saw. I don't think Lazarus remembered what he saw when God raised him from the dead or any of the others that Paul did because he was taken to the paradise of God and shown some revelations, very special. Then he says, because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given to me authority in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, to keep me from exalting myself. What was it? What was Paul's authority in the flesh? Do you know? No one really knows. a seminary and get you a one or two year seminary student and he'll tell you exactly what it was. Matter of fact, I would have told you one time. Except, I don't know anymore. Because I've studied a little more. You know, sometimes you run off on things and you'll find people, you'll find people on the radio telling you, what was Paul's sword in the flesh? And they say, Paul's sword in the flesh was, and they'll tell you what it was. Well, it was some kind of physical weakness, I don't know what it was. Paul was almost blind, but Paul was sick all the time. He had to have a physician take care of him, one of his friends kept him in shape all the time where he could preach, and worked on him constantly. His name was Luke. Constantly had him take care of him to try to keep him in enough shape where he could at least preach the gospel. Why didn't God heal him? Why didn't He let him be healthy again? Well, I don't know. But whatever his sickness or thorn in the flesh was, God left it there. And Paul says, concerning this I entreated the Lord, I begged the Lord three times that he might depart from me. I wanted this sickness or this thorn in the flesh to depart from me, and I begged God three times to do it. Three times I begged him. And he hath said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weakness, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, and with insults, and distress, and persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong." That's beautiful isn't it? In other words, Paul says here, I don't care how sick you are, there's one prayer request I want to bring to you today. And as we're thinking about this, Mitchell Smith, they think he's going to die today. And they're going to remove their life support systems on him. They're going to try. His family has asked them to do that so that he might die. Because he's just suffering. They cannot find any kind of brainwave signal or anything coming from his mind. and her family wishes you a prayer that if it's God's will that you will go ahead and be with the Lord at this time. Now Paul had many weaknesses. In this draft he was persecuted many times. He was stoned. He was whipped. He was beaten with a horse whip, so to speak. He was beaten with a catamaran pail. One time, three times I think, he said he was whipped nearly to death. His back must have looked like hamburger meat just about. Can you imagine the scars on Paul's back from just beating on him? Plus he was stoned. When you beat a guy with rocks, it leaves scars. When you plan on killing him, they planned on killing Paul. They stoned him to death. And they went down and checked him out and found out that he was dead and they took him and threw him away. Yes. I couldn't hear what you said. Could you explain the Acts 14 verse 19? Acts 14... Yeah, this is the same thing. Acts 14, 19? Yeah. Okay, now this is when he was actually dragged, when he was stoned. Okay, let me explain this to you. Verse 19 says, Now this is Acts, uh, 14, 19, and 20, okay? But the Jews came from Antioch, Niphonia, and, uh, literally, uh, having won over the multitudes, literally they kept on winning over the multitudes, they stole Paul, and dragged him out of the city. It means to just drag him out by force, you know, just drag like a dead animal out of the city, supposing him to be dead. The word supposing there is not supposing, it should not have been translated that, but sometimes when they would translate something to King James, then instead of being different, they would go along with it when they make other translations. But in reality, we don't have to go along with what somebody has said before. Sometimes they say the first guy is always right. You know, that's not true. The word supposing there should have been to deduct by evidence, to reckon by examination. And Paul was pronounced dead after he was examined. You know, they would take a guy, right now when they execute a criminal, what do they do? The first thing after they execute him, what do they do? They examined him to see if he was dead, you know. Here they shot this guy in Utah here a few years ago or a couple years ago, I don't remember what it was, and they examined him and said he died after so many minutes after they'd shot him and whatever it was, you know. They pronounced him dead after making a medical examination. The word there supposing could have been translated and should have been translated, after a medical examination they pronounced him to be dead. All right? That's what it could be translated. It's, uh, that's the word, anyway. And verse 26, But while the disciples stood around him, now they were standing around Paul, I imagine, weeping some of them. Here's our leader, our teacher, he's dead, you know. And they were probably weeping, crying, some of them, and also praising God that Paul stood for the faith and so on and so forth. They were probably standing around him and asking God to help them from now on. Kind of like a, not a funeral because funerals like we have today are not of God. They are not God's type of funeral. This comes down to Catholicism. Our church services or our wedding ceremonies and our funerals all come from Catholicism. It's just rubbed off on the world, okay, from that religion. Well, They were standing around here like the early Christians did when one of their people died. They weren't going through a big ceremony or anything, but they were probably asking God to be with them and thanking God for Paul as he stood for the faith, and all of a sudden something happened. Then he arose and entered the city, and the next day he went away with Barnabas to Derby. All right. It meant that the word that they were standing around, it means they encircled Paul's body. Yeah, they stood around his body. They encircled him. And they, just like everybody else, they knew he was dead. But God raised him up. He did not die. He was dead, yes. He was dead. Yes, he was brought back to life. He was brought back to life. He had died, but he was brought back to life. Because he was examined and pronounced dead. He was pronounced dead. That's exactly what the word means, to be examined and pronounced by the Dutchman. This fellow's dead. They probably felt for his pulse. He had no pulse. Looked in his eyes and saw that they didn't mean anything. There wasn't anything there. And checked for his breath. They used to take the mirror and put it there to the mouth and see if they were breathing still. He wasn't breathing. And they said, well, he's dead. Let's drag him out. So they drug him outside the city. They put him in the garbage cans. Huh? This is where you have the patient? Yes. While he's dead here is where he gets the vision. Okay. Alright. So, there we have it. Alright, does that help you? Yes. Alright, does that answer your question? Okay. I thought, well I've been reading so much that I'm imagining things that are there that aren't there. Yeah. You sometimes need to study a lot of things. Yeah, you see things, there's a lot of problems. You know, as we study the Bible, you know, we look at the word of God and we'll find out that as you study the Bible, there's going to be some things that will have a great effect on you. Your racial background and your customs will help you interpret the Bible your way. All right, so you got to watch that. That's the way you live, the way you think. It's not the way the Bible was written. The Bible is an oriental book written to Hebrews, Jews, that certain customs and certain living styles, and this was 2,000 years ago almost when the New Testament was written. So we've got to go back 2,000 years and understand the customs and the ideas of the people then so we can get an understanding. We cannot read the Bible with our thinking and expect to interpret it. You have to interpret it according to the light of the age where they live, okay? And how you've been raised, your religious ideas, what you were taught in school, movies that you have seen on TV and in the new movie theaters, your ideas. And we ran upon that so greatly just here a while back. I mean, we were studying the book of Exodus on Sunday morning and So it says, those two tablets that the Ten Commandments were written on, when Moses broke them. So I interjected just one thing. I said, how much of the law was on those two commandments, two stones? Well, here Cecil B. DeLeo has Moses up there breaking two tablets of stone, big old heavy-duty tablets of stone, you know. Well, the Bible doesn't tell us they were two tablets of stone. It said they were tablets. They could have been like slate. I mean, everything, the whole law written on them. Exactly the whole thing. But because of the movie we have in the idea is two tablets sewn, they're great big and they're shaped like, you know, like this. Here they are, boy. And the Ten Commandments are written on them. That's what we have in our minds, huh? Isn't it? Really? It had affected me. You know why I asked them and why I interjected that? Because I had it in my head. Because I saw the Ten Commandments sewn. the movie, you know, the movie several times. So we have that prejudice already when we look at the book, huh? Your ideas of death. You know, I've dealt with people like this. Oh, my grandma died and came back to life. You know, where are you going to find that in the Bible? The Bible says when you're dead, you're dead. You didn't come back. But people think about these experiences, people written about them and everything in the world. They get these kind of ideas, but it doesn't come from the word of God. You know, but we get these things that are what I feel. You know, I had a vision. I spoke in tongues. I was blessed in the spirit. I was this, I was that. So it's got to be real. Then you've got to take the Bible and try to teach them the right way. You know, you've got to now, you've got to show them that you've got a big job to do. The best people, the easiest people to teach are those people that have had no religious background at all. that never picked up the Bible before in their life, that have no kind of religious ideas or superstitions. Superstition will kill you. I mean to tell you, it will absolutely kill you. And two of the groups, well, we have three, white people aren't too superstitious, most of them are. But Indians and Mexicans and black people are the most superstitious people you have ever seen. They aren't, really. My family Indians, you know, and they had some of the wildest superstitions that you have ever seen. And old wives tales and things, you know. It was crazy, you know, the superstitions. And I know the Mexican people have the same thing, probably the same stories, but in a different way, you know. So how do they account for how the body experiences things? Are they delirious? They're delirious and then of course people that want to try to prove Christianity jump in there with some stupid idea that they're going to prove it by that. Why, you can prove it by the word, not by some other silly... The problem is with most people is they won't accept this as stuff of God. It won't contradict this, but you find out most of their expense is contradicting the word of God. Well, that's why, you know, I don't go along with that stuff. It's because it contradicts the word of God. The Bible is our revealed Truth from God. We have to trust it, regardless of what we feel or anything else. Why? This is what I believe. So what? God doesn't care what you believe. He didn't care the least what you believe. My grandmother, I've told this a thousand times, my grandmother had a woman come and speak to me that believed she's never going to die. And anybody she baptized, she baptized them in her bath, that wasn't going to die. And she got me in an argument with this woman, and I told her, you know, the Bible, God appointed man, I'm the one, the man who wants to die, and so I replaced that with scripture. And the curse of Adam was still on all the Adamic race. Salvation didn't have anything to do with eternal life in the body, and so on and so forth. Well, she died two weeks later. And then my grandmother said, well, I couldn't understand why she died. I said, well, Grandma, The Bible teaches that every man's gonna die. Yeah, but God, doesn't he care what she believed, how much faith she had? I said, no. I don't even care about anything about how that woman believed, besides what he taught in his words. You know what? I still can't convince her. She thinks that I hurt her faith and made her doctor. You know. That's real. That's the whole family. She told me later on, you know, she said several of the family think that when you argue whether that's tied with the Bible, that you've stunted her faith, that you've hurt her faith, And that she died because of that. She'd been sick all the time. She had heart trouble. She just had heart attacks. She had heart attacks and pills. She was hiding her medicine and taking it and telling everybody else she wasn't taking pills. After she died, she had aspirin, heart pills, and everything else. Swearing them down. Telling her disciples, don't you take even an aspirin. That's a lack of faith, you know. You know, more demanding of them. Don't you do this. Don't you take any pills. Get off your diet, you know. the insulin shots, everything else, whatever, you know, whatever kind of problem they had, she demanded that they leave it, you know, and trust God for healing. All the time she wasn't doing that. And a lot of these experiences, people that have really, have read the Bible and studied their experiences, do seem to correlate with the Bible. As they correlate with it. Your mind is really strong. It's a beater. I mean, you're delirious a lot of these days. Yes. Well, the Bible, when you study it, I've had a vision, so to speak, when I was under... I just hallucinated, that's all. While I was under morphine, I had 80 morphine shots, as a matter of fact, and I was coming down off of it, and I was delirious. I was just delirious, that's all. I thought I saw something that I didn't. It all correlated with the word of God, except that God doesn't give us visions anymore. He gives us the word of God. Every now and then, you ever dream about God? Huh? You ever dream about Him? I still do. I dreamed about God a while back. I dreamed that I died and gone to heaven. I did. I dreamed that I had died and gone to heaven, and I didn't feel worthy to go into heaven. And so God says, Jim, what in the world are you waiting for? Come on up here! And I was laying outside the gates, you know, and I just didn't feel worthy to walk into heaven, you know. And Laura says, come around here. Quit fooling around. Waste of good time. You know, but you really, don't you, do you really feel worthy? Huh? Do you really feel worthy of salvation? Oh, we just don't. All right. Brother Greg. Just people that have these visions, they kind of can, It's kind of dangerous too, you know, if people... Like I had this one lady, she was in TV and she had the experience that she had gone to heaven. And she says, now I know there's life after death and we're all going to go to heaven. We're all going to make it to heaven. Everyone. All of this is demonic, basically. Because you find... These people will come back and tell you that everybody's going to make it to heaven. All this, you know, everybody's going to do it. Everybody's going to do it. Everybody's going to make it. There is no hell, only heaven, and God is a great light. He's a great light, you know. That's all. You know, it's not the truth. It is anti-Bible. Now, will you believe that or will you believe this? I preached a funeral here a while back for all of her children. She had died two or three times, supposedly, and had visions of God. The bad thing about it, she's a missionary Baptist. She never stayed in the churches of the Lord long enough to understand the truth. That's the problem. She was baptized by a missionary Baptist church. Been a member of a missionary Baptist church for many, many years. But she had visions and when she was dying, they said she was having visions again. You know, she was hilarious. Well, how in the world are you going to deal with a family like that? All I did is told them, I said, you know the Bible can give you more comfort than any kind of stuff like that. The Bible can give you comfort. You know your mother was saved. She was born again. You don't have to worry about if she went to heaven or not. I wouldn't have had a vision where God was accepting her or anything. The Bible says, for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And she was saved. And you ought to have, yes, but I know my mother's in heaven because, she said, oh Jesus, when she's dying. Oh, how dumb! You know, help them. They just don't want to accept the word of God and accept what somebody's saying in a dream, you know. They're trying to convince you of that. Yeah. They didn't want the Bible. The Bible can give you truth and real assurance, but they didn't want that. They wanted to feel and see something. They wanted a God they could see and a religion they could feel, just like all mankind in their natural Adamic form always wanted. People want a religion, but they want a God that they could see and handle, you know, like a wooden thing. Why do you think that it's so easy for Catholics to go down and pray before an altar with a bunch of candles with Jesus up on a crucifix or pray to Mary that they can go out and touch her, you know, an idol? Are these Buddhists bowing down before Buddha who they see a picture of, you know, a form of? Are the Moslems, you know, bowing before Mohammed, you know, all kinds of statues and saints and everything you can think of. They go to any kind of a dead relic, you know, a bone, they'll go down and worship it and kiss it, you know, Muslims do. I was over there in the Middle East where there's millions and millions of Muslims, and you run around, every time somebody even looked like they were holy, they had a tomb there for them and had their bones in the thing, and they'd go there and they had John the Baptist's head in Damascus, Syria, in a big mosque there, and people would go in there and you could see They had brass bars around each tomb, you know, this big coffin there, gold and silver and just everything you can think of. Wasted all that money fucking around this old dead head, you know. They found how they thought. They were digging around, going to build this mosque. They were digging a hole, you know, digging the foundation for it and everything else. They were going to pour some cement there. And this was several hundred years ago. They dug down and ran into this box. And this box, finally they opened up and it had a skull in it. A head. A skull. And they said, oh! One of the guys fell back and Muhammad told me that it was John the Baptist's head that they had found. So they built a big tomb there and called it the tomb of the mosque of John the Baptist's head. So now his head is in this big coffin in there. And they go around there and they hang on, and I mean bawling, crying. You ain't never heard of such people bawling. Tears flowing all over the place. Talk about being serious. Boy, they're serious in there, hollering and screaming and going on.