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We've been going through Revelation
10, 1 through 11. You can follow in your own Bibles
or from the majority text on page 21. I saw a mighty angel descending
out of heaven, clothed with a cloud and the rainbow on his head.
His face was like the sun and his feet like pillars of fire.
And he had a little book open in his hand. He placed his right
foot on the sea and his left on the land. And he cried out
with a loud voice, just like a lion roars. And when he cried
out, the seven thunders uttered their voices. Now, when the seven
thunders spoke, I was about to write, but I heard a voice out
of heaven saying, seal up the things that the seven thunders
said. And you write after these things. And the angel whom I saw standing
on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to the heaven
and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created the heaven
and the things in it, and the earth and the things in it, and
the sea and the things in it, that there would be no further
delay. But in the days of the blast of the seventh angel when
he is about to trumpet, the mystery of God that he declared to his
slaves the prophets would be finished. Now the voice that
I heard out of heaven was speaking to me again and saying, Go, take
the little book that is open in the hand of the angel who
is standing on the sea and on the land. So I went to the angel
and said to him, Give me the little book. And he says to me,
Take and eat it up. It will make your stomach bitter,
but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey. So I took
the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it up, and it was
as sweet as honey in my mouth. But when I had eaten it, my stomach
was made bitter. And he said to me, you must prophesy
again over many peoples, even over ethnic nations and languages
and kings. Amen. Father, we thank you for
this, your word. And I pray that as we dig into
it, that you would be honored, you would be glorified in the
continued worship of our hearts. We bless you in Jesus name. Amen.
You may be seated. Well, this is our third week
in Chapter 10, looking at the way in which the Scriptures came
from God to us. And two weeks ago we saw what
the identity of the angel was and what the identity of the
little book was. Then last week, we started looking
at the divine characteristics that accompanied the Word of
God. This angelic messenger is clothed
with the symbols of Christ because he is bearing the very Word of
Christ. Those symbols showcase the fact
that wherever God's Word travels, Whether it's from father to son,
from son to the angel, from the angel to John, from John to us,
wherever it is, it is always accompanied by the divine attributes
of God himself. And the first six verses of this
chapter have so lifted the spirits and the faith of many people
in the power of God's word. And that's good because we live
in discouraging times. when you see the Word of God
being so horribly abused. For example, you see socialists
and feminists, and you see even some homosexuals who twist the
Word of God for their own agendas. You see politicians who waive
the Bible trying to get evangelical votes. You see voters who will
misuse the Bible to try to get you to vote for their particular
candidate. This past week, read a post on
Facebook by a PCA elder. who was using the life of David
to try to prove that everybody should vote for Hillary Clinton.
And he said, well, yes, she's pro-abortion, but David was a
murderer too. Nobody's perfect, and I'm convinced
that there would be fewer abortions under Hillary, he said. Now,
I won't get into the ridiculous reasons that he was giving for
why he thought there would be fewer abortions under Hillary,
but just pointing out, there is such a twisting of scripture
in our day of age. You may have noticed that the
hat makers are both now using the scriptures to justify homosexual
marriage as being good in God's sight. And with the avalanche
of attacks on the Bible, it could be very, very discouraging. I've
had Christians tell me they don't know how to respond. They don't
feel intellectually up to the challenge of defending the scripture. They can't answer every objection. But we saw last week that the
Bible has a power of its own. You just unleash it by faith.
Or as Revelation words it, you put it upon your lips. I love
the way that Charles Spurgeon worded it. He said, the word
of God is like a lion. You don't need to defend the
lion. All you need to do is let the lion loose and the lion will
defend itself. And there are thousands of stories
of the Bible doing exactly that. You read conversion stories and
you see how God instantaneously turned people's lives upside
down through a scripture that ordinary people have given. In
one case, that a child had given. George Whitefield has tens of
thousands of examples of this in his life. One time There was
an atheist that wanted to find out what was going on that so
many people were attracted to George Whitfield So he came to
investigate and he climbed up into a tree to watch this vast
crowd. He was just stunned by how far
Whitfield's voice was able to project so he was just analyzing
what's going on here, but the the Preaching was kind of irritating
him and annoying him. So he put his fingers into his
ears so he could just objectively watch what was happening Well,
there was a fly kept buzzing around landing on his nose and
he kept wrinkling his nose blowing on it finally he pulled his finger
out of his ear slapped at the fly and at that very moment George
Whitfield shouted out, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
And he said that scripture struck him like a train. And as Whitfield
continued to talk about how people willfully are blaspheming against
the Holy Spirit and resisting him and in danger of hellfire,
he said he was soundly converted by that one scripture. For me,
it was Hebrews chapter 12, verse 8. For one Ethiopian that we
knew, it was the reading of a genealogy of nothing but names. How on
the earth do you get converted by reading a genealogy? Well,
he did. I mean, that genealogy was absolutely profound in the
way it broke through. He was thunderstruck by it because
God had prepared him to be converted with that verse. For a friend
of mine at Covenant College, it was reading the scriptures
that were in Gary North's book, Introduction to Biblical Economics. He had been utterly resistant
to God's word, but seeing the scriptures addressing his discipline
broke down all resistance, and he bowed his neck under the feet
of King Jesus. The famous Lady Huntington, It
was a noble woman who had helped George Whitfield a great deal.
She was once asked how she got saved, and she said that she
had been saved by one letter in the Bible. And when a person
asked, well, what do you mean by that? She said, in God's word,
1 Corinthians 1 verse 26, it says, not many noble are called,
That M saved my soul, for had he said, not any noble, I must
have been damned. So God blessed the little letter
M before any other for the salvation of my soul. She knew that God,
generally speaking, worked with the poor. And it was that word
that gave her comfort and hope to put her faith in Christ. Let
me assure you, Even atheists, smart atheists, have been soundly
converted by people just conversing and sharing a scripture with
them. In one case, it was a child quoting a Bible verse to them. And this is what we were saying
last week. God's Word is powerful. It's
living. It is accompanied by all of God's
attributes. And it's why it's such a shame
that so few Christians bring the Word of God into the public
arena. Your testimony cannot transform people's lives. Your
testimony cannot tear down strongholds and the high things that have
exalted themselves against the knowledge of God in our culture.
But God's Word can. It can. And by the way, people
wonder, you know, well, how come God's Word is not, when I bring
it, it's not having any impact on people? Well, God has promised.
that his word never returns to him void. And we need to realize
that for some it's a savor of life unto life, for others it's
a savor of death unto death. Sometimes God hardens, and if
it's his will to harden, that person will be hardened. If it
is God's will for them to repent, that person will repent, but
his word never returns to him void. The only question we need
to ask is, are we willing to bring the scriptures into the
public sphere of life? So last week we looked at many
attributes of God that are also the attributes of the Word of
God. And today I want to focus on the powerful imagery in verses
8 through 11. It is imagery of God's verbal
revelation being incarnated, so to speak, into human language
and experience. And I'm going to give an entire
sermon just on that imagery because this is probably the most powerful
image that you could get to deal with all of the heresies that
are out there on the Word of God. Some of you are not as analytical
as others. Some of you are very picture-oriented.
Well, here is probably the most powerful picture, and if you
can keep this in your memory, I think it'll help you to not
be sucked in by or negatively influenced by the heresies that
are out there. Now, one of the questions that people sometimes
have is how can the entire Bible be the word of God when it is
so obvious that it was written by men and that Each of those
authors has their own unique vocabulary, grammatical idiosyncrasies,
expressions, and emotions. That confuses many people. How
can the Bible be both God's word and the word of a prophet? How
can one New Testament verse say, David said, and yet another author,
or sometimes in the same book, in the book of Acts, it'll say,
of the same verse, God said. Which is it? David said or God
said? How can it be both? How can the
entire Bible be the word of God when Paul can say, We do not
know what we should pray for as we ought. Romans 8 26. Or
the psalmist can ask God, why have you forgotten me? Why do
I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? Psalm
42 verse nine. People say, that doesn't sound
very much like God speaking. That sounds like a mournful human
speaking. And those are all very good questions,
but I think they are perfectly, perfectly answered by our passage
in Revelation chapter 10. Now in terms of how the very
words could exist in this little book before John ate the book
and even knew about them, I think it's helpful to remember that
God decreed everything about John before the world was made.
And he made John and formed him and prepared him and providentially
governed his language acquisition and his experiences. And he knew
how to use it. So God gives every word. Yet
every word passes through John, so to speak, and then comes out
of John. Okay. It is John's words. They're obviously John's words.
There's a human dimension to scripture. Hundreds of times,
the Bible says Moses spoke, Samuel spoke, David spoke, et cetera.
So there's a human dimension, and yet 3,808 times the Bible
says that every portion of the scripture is the very word of
God. How can that be? How can it have
such human characteristics and still be God's word? And the
best analogy that theologians have come up with is the incarnation
of Jesus. Just as God the Son took to himself
a human nature in order to become the God-man, God's revelation
took to itself human characteristics, you can think of it taking on
a human nature, so to speak, in order to become scripture.
And I've given a chart in your outlines that helps you to see
the parallels. Virtually every heresy concerning
the doctrine of Jesus has a corresponding error in the middle column concerning
the nature of scripture. And the right-hand column then
gives the portions of chapter 10 and Ezekiel 2 through 3 that
correct that error. And so this morning, what we're
going to do is we're going to be working our way through that chart and
hopefully exhaust most of what this passage has to say. This
is not going to be as easy as last week's sermon. You're going
to have to put your thinking caps on, but I think you're going
to find it to be very, very helpful for you. Lot of doctrinal confusion
out there in the evangelical church, and there's a lot of
bad fruit that has resulted. And unfortunately, this topic
rarely, if ever, is taught in the pulpits. Now, so that you
can have as clear, crystal clear an understanding of the background
as possible, I really do want you to turn with me to Ezekiel
Chapter 2 and 3. This is one of those times where
I think it'd be great if everybody could just follow along and see
these words in your own Bibles. I'm going to be reading most
of chapters 2 and 3. Everybody in the commentaries
agrees that the imagery that's in John where you've got this
mighty angel who's giving a little book to John, John eats it, it
tastes sweet, it's bitter in his stomach, he prophesies the
contents of that book. Everybody agrees that is referring
to the same image in Ezekiel chapters 2 through 3. So it's critical we have both
passages in mind when we go through these points. Okay, Ezekiel 2,
let's begin reading at verse 1. And he said to me, son of
man, stand on your feet and I will speak to you. Then the spirit
entered me when he spoke to me and set me on my feet and I heard
him who spoke to me. Now Ezekiel had already been
indwelt by the Holy Spirit as a believer, so this entering
of the Holy Spirit into Ezekiel has nothing to do with becoming
a Christian. The Holy Spirit invades Ezekiel
in this passage in order to turn him into a prophet. Okay, so
the Holy Spirit gives a special gift that enables Ezekiel to
infallibly receive revelation and to infallibly communicate
it. The spirit within Ezekiel will
receive the revelation from God the Son, and then the spirit
within Ezekiel will give that revelation from God the Son to
the people who are out there. And the rest of these two chapters
will show how. Verse three. And he said to me,
son of man, I am sending you to the children of Israel, to
a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me. They and
their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day,
for they are impudent and stubborn children. I am sending you to
them, and you shall say to them, thus says the Lord God." I want
you to notice that he wants Ezekiel to speak for him. to give God's
words, and I want you to notice that God's words come to people
even when they are unbelievers. The heretic Karl Barth claims
that the Bible only becomes the word of God when we, by faith,
receive an experience of Jesus in those scriptures, in those
Bible words. His idea of the Word of God being
found in the Bible means that the Bible becomes the Word of
God only to those who experience it by faith. Okay, it's a very
subjective view of the Word of God, and it is a heresy. This
passage indicates, no, it's the Word of God whether you're a
believer or an unbeliever. He's going to be speaking to
unbelievers here, and everyone who heard it is hearing what?
God's Word. And notice that his prophecies
are not just, I think God is saying, it's not a subjective
experience, they're dogmatic. Thus says the Lord God. Verse
five. As for them, whether they hear
or whether they refuse, for they are a rebellious house, yet they
will know that a prophet has been among them. And you, son
of man, do not be afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words.
I want you to notice the humanness of Ezekiel. Do not be afraid
of them nor be afraid of their words We're gonna be seeing that
there is a human dimension to his prophecies all the way through
these two chapters. He goes on Though briars and
thorns are with you and you dwell among scorpions do not be afraid
of their words or dismayed by their looks Though they are rebellious
house. You shall speak my words to them
notice that Ezekiel speaks but he speaks God's words not man's
He says, you shall speak my words to them. And notice that this
revelation is actual words. It's propositional truth. What
often goes for prophecy is kind of fuzzy feelings, but these
two chapters show concrete propositions. Going on in verse 7. You shall
speak my words to them, whether they hear or whether they refuse,
for they are rebellious. But you, son of man, hear what
I say to you. Do not be rebellious like that
rebellious house. Open your mouth and eat what
I give you. I want you to notice that he
is not a robot, okay? God commands Ezekiel not to rebel,
not to refuse to speak. Obviously, a prophet can sometimes
run from his prophetic office. That's what Jonah did, right?
He did not want to prophesy, but God always has his way with
a prophet. Jeremiah testifies to the fact
he had been persecuted so much because of his prophecies that
he was not going to prophesy anymore, but he said it was like
a fire burning within him. He couldn't contain it. It had
to come out. And here is the testimony that he gives. Then
I said, I will not make mention of him nor speak any more in
his name. But his word was in my heart
like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I was weary of holding
it back. I could not." Okay? So you can
see that man's will is involved even though man's will does not
originate the words of the prophecy. That's a key point. Okay, you
see the Spirit moving him to prophesy God's word. So back
to Ezekiel 2 verse 9. Now when I looked, there was
a hand stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was
in it. Then he spread it before me,
and there was writing on the inside and on the outside, and
written on it were lamentations and mourning and woe." So notice
that the words were already written on the scroll of this book. This
angel hands Ezekiel not a blank scroll, but a written one. That's
key. The words precede Ezekiel having
them. This is so key to understand.
Because of this background, commentators believe that the same must be
true of John's scroll, and there's actually several indicators in
Revelation chapter 10, there were words on that scroll. Okay,
continuing in chapter 3. of Ezekiel. Moreover, he said
to me, son of man, eat what you find. Eat the scroll and go speak
to the house of Israel." So just as in the book of Revelation,
Ezekiel must first eat the words before he can speak the words
prophetically. But even the eating of the scroll
is God's work, not man's. The prophetic Holy Spirit within
Ezekiel must infallibly receive the little book and internalize
it within Ezekiel. Notice verse two. So I opened
my mouth, so there is man's will that is involved, and he caused
me to eat that scroll. So there is God's will that makes
Ezekiel receive it with his will. Notice it says, God caused him
to eat the scroll. Even the receiving of the word
is not by man's will, though man's will is not bypassed. Now
we're going to be making applications of all of these verses later. Verse 3. And he said to me, son
of man, feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll
that I give you. So I ate and it was in my mouth
like honey and sweetness. Then he said to me, son of man,
go to the house of Israel and speak with my words to them."
Notice that the very words that Ezekiel would later prophesy
are already written on the scroll from heaven. Though the words
will be mediated through Ezekiel, word for word what God has said
from heaven is what Ezekiel will say on earth. He prophesies what
God had caused him to internalize and God caused him to internalize
what had already been written word for word. And this is quite
contrary to one theory of inspiration, which has the spirit originating
the words in the mind of the prophet. That's not the way prophecy
works. But that's the way many people
see it. Originating words in the prophet's mind. This is quite
clear. The words precede the prophet, even knowing about the
words. Verses 5 and following even put
this down to the level of the kind of language that Ezekiel
is going to use. For you are not sent to a people
of unfamiliar speech and of hard language, but to the house of
Israel." So he's not going to be writing in a different language.
He'll be reading, speaking, and writing in Hebrew, the language
he's familiar with, just like John. Is going to be writing
in greek language that he's familiar with verse six Not to many people
of unfamiliar speech and of hard language whose words you cannot
understand surely had I sent you to them They would have listened
to you, but the house of israel will not listen to you because
they will not listen to me For all the house of israel are impudent
and hard-hearted Behold, I have made your face strong against
their faces and your forehead strong against their foreheads.
Like adamant stone, harder than flint, I have made your forehead.
Do not be afraid of them, nor be dismayed by their looks, though
they are a rebellious house. Then in verse 10, God reiterates
that the words on the book that Ezekiel ate are the same words
that Ezekiel will prophesy. Moreover, he said to me, son
of man, receive into your heart all my words that I speak to
you and hear with your ears. And go, get to the captives,
to the children of your people, speak to them and tell them,
thus says the Lord God, whether they hear or whether they refuse. Now I'll skip over verses 16
through 21. They are important. They speak
of Ezekiel's humanness, his emotions, his will that's involved in prophesying,
though it does not originate prophecy. But if you skip down
to verse 22, It says, then the hand of the Lord was upon me
there, and he said to me, arise, go out into the plain, and there
I shall talk with you. So I arose, went out into the
plain, and behold, the glory of the Lord stood there like
the glory which I saw by the river Chebar, and I fell on my
face. Then the Spirit entered me and set me on my feet and
spoke with me and said to me, go, shut yourself inside your
house, and you, O son of man, surely they will put ropes on
you and bind you with them so that you cannot go out among
them. I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth,
so that you shall be mute and not be one to rebuke them, for
they are a rebellious house. But when I speak with you, I
will open your mouth, and you shall say to them, thus says
the Lord God, he who hears, let him hear, and he who refuses,
let him refuse, for they are a rebellious house. Now though
it's Ezekiel speaking, He will not be speaking on his own initiative.
God will shut his mouth and he will not be able to speak even
if he wants to speak. But God will open his mouth and
he will speak. And it's always, thus saith the
Lord. Now, there's so much more in Ezekiel 2 through 3 that we
could go through that describes this amazing inscripturation
process. But I think I've given you enough
so you can see this is clearly the background to John chapter
10. They're talking about the same
kind of inscripturation process. Both passages interpret each
other. And that's what I've done for you on your chart. So let's
go through that chart. We're going to look at the historical
errors on the left-hand side, compare it to the errors on Christ's
nature, and then in the middle column, the errors on Scripture,
and then the right-hand column are the passages from Ezekiel
and Revelation 10. The first error mentioned was
made by both the Apollinarians and the Nestorians who so separated
the divine and the human natures of Jesus that they treated Jesus
as being two persons. But the Orthodox position is
that Jesus is not a human person and a divine person. He was a
divine person who took to himself a human nature. He did not take to himself a
human person. He took to himself a human nature. So he's fully God, fully man,
but still one person. This person existed before the
incarnation and was eternal. Yet in the incarnation, this
perfect person took to himself human characteristics. Now you
can see how that is perfectly parallel to what we've just read
in Ezekiel two through three of how we get the scriptures.
Very, very parallel. God's revelation preceded Ezekiel. God incarnated that revelation
in a human vessel to communicate his will to us. This eternal
word is incarnated in what? In human language, human grammar,
and historical context, yet without in any way giving up its divine
nature. Man's will did not originate
any portion of scripture, only God's will did. And that can
be seen in the fact that the words were already written on
the little book before John wrote them down in his book. And I've
given you some scriptures in the right-hand column that show
this process in both passages. Word came from heaven, was incarnated
in John's mouth and pen and language. And this is yet another reason
why the scriptures can minister to us so profoundly. Now the
divine side, we can understand that. We looked at that last
week. They minister to us because it's God's very power working
in our lives. But the human side shows that
God knows how to identify with our exhaustion and our tears
and our hurts. The Psalms contain every emotion
known to man, and because they are authorized for us to pray,
they can powerfully minister to us in the midst of our doubts,
and our fears, and our feelings of despair. I think we'd have
a hard time relating to the Bible if God had not put this human
dimension to the Bible. In the process, those Psalms
release our emotions, resolve them by fixing our faith on God. So far from being a weak point,
as the critics really say it is, the human dimension of the
Bible is a foundational truth for which we cherish it the more.
Speaking on the Psalms, John Calvin wrote, I have been accustomed
to call this book, I think it not inappropriately, an anatomy
of all the parts of the soul, for there is not an emotion of
which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented
as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit is
here drawn to the life, all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts,
hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions
with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated. And as you
continue reading his introduction to the Psalms, You begin realizing
that Calvin states that God has entered into our lives most fully
and identified with all of our needs. So can you see why the
human dimension really, really is important? I'm going to dig
into this first point a little bit more because it is important. I want to first of all look at
some other scriptures that show that 100% of the Bible is divine
in origin. Even the words were there before
the prophet thought of them. If you would turn with me please
to 1 Thessalonians. 1 Thessalonians chapter two verse
13. When you come to the Bible, you
are coming to God and you need to reverence the Bible the way
you would reverence God before his throne. So take a look at
1 Thessalonians two verse 13. For this reason, we also thank
God without ceasing, because when you received the word of
God, which you heard from us, you welcomed it, not as the word
of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively
works in you who believe." Notice that Paul denies that this prophecy
is the word of men, though it Though it has a human nature,
after all, it came through Paul, it's spoken by Paul, its origin
is divine. He said, you welcomed it, not
as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God,
which also effectively works in you who believe. So the divinity
of the word precedes Paul speaking it. So I think you can see it's
appropriate to speak of the Bible as the Word of God in human form. It's kind of like an incarnation.
Okay, turn next a page over to 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 8. Paul's already given some commands
to this church, and they're not liking it. They don't like these
commands too well. But he says this. Therefore,
he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who also
has given us His Holy Spirit." People might have been tempted
to say, yeah, I just disagree with Paul. I'm going to follow
after somebody else's advice. But they couldn't do that because
this is God's Word. Yes, Paul said it, but read verse
8 again. Therefore he rejects this, does
not reject man, but God, who has also given us his Holy Spirit.
Now this is the logical implication of the previous verse. Even though
Paul is the vehicle through which these words were written, even
though they contain human characteristics, emotions, grammar, color, they
still represent God's will, not man. To reject any portion of
the Bible is to reject God. Now, I've had people arguing
with the scripture, thinking they were arguing with me. I
remember one time I was just quoting a passage on predestination
from the Bible, and the guy says, oh, I don't believe that. I don't
believe in predestination. I said, well, I'm not interpreting
the Bible here. I was just quoting it word for
word. And I opened up the Bible and showed him, see, right here,
it's Paul saying about predestination. And he's looking at that and
he says, well, I still don't believe it. So there was a heart, a rebellion
against that doctrine. I had one noted church leader
here in Omaha tell me that Paul was wrong in his teaching on
male headship, that the chauvinism of Paul's day had colored his
thinking. As you can imagine, we got into
a big debate over that one. But he tried to illustrate by
saying that Paul had a vision of the Macedonian call, and in
that vision Paul thought that a man called him to come to Macedonia. But when Paul got there, he realized,
oh, I was mistaken. It was a woman who called me,
Lydia. Lydia called me. And so he claimed that Paul's
chauvinism kept him from receiving the vision correctly and kept
him from communicating to us that vision correctly in the
scripture. That is blasphemy, absolute blasphemy. To reject those scriptures because
they are Paul is to contradict 1 Thessalonians 2 verse 13 and
1 Thessalonians 4 verse 8. OK, turn next. This is the third
one. If you have these three scriptures,
you've got about all the ammo you need to deal with every heresy
out there. So 2 Peter chapter 1 and verses 19 through 21. This is a verse that describes
how every portion of the scriptures came into being. And so we have
the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as
a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and
the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first, that
no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation. That's
actually a wrong translation. If you look in the margin, it
says is of any private origin. It did not originate from a person. Verse 21, for prophecy never
came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke, so it's
not just scripture, they even spoke as they were moved by the
Holy Spirit. So these three scriptures teach
exactly the same thing that is visually presented before us
in Revelation chapter 10. So if you take a look at your
charts, the second heresy listed in your chart is thinking that
some of the Bible is divine. and some of it is human. And
some people might scratch their heads and say, now wait a second,
I thought you were just funny saying that some of the Bible
is divine, some of it's human. Just like Jesus is the God-man,
this Bible is divine and human. But this is where we've got to
make fine distinctions, and they're very important. This heresy teaches
that you can trust the divine portions of the Bible, and you
can't trust the human portions of the Bible. You see what's
going on there? He's saying there is actual portions
of the Bible that are divine and other portions that are not
divine. That's wrong. The truth says that the whole
Bible, every jot and tittle of it is divine revelation incarnated
in human language and experience. Fuller Theological Seminary has
unfortunately been teaching this heresy for decades. They call
it limited inerrancy. But remember that 2 Peter 121
says that prophecy never came by the will of man. Never, ever,
ever. Though it is men who give it,
and therefore it has human characteristics, it is divine in origin just as
Jesus was divine in origin. And just as Jesus' human will
was in perfect unity with the divine will, the prophets' wills
were totally moved by the divine will when they wrote the scripture. So the third column of the second
row, I list several scriptures that show that exactly the same
words that went into John and into Ezekiel came out of John
and Ezekiel. The origin was not in man. Look
at the third comparison on the chart. One of the heresies out
there is known as peccability, the theoretical possibility that
Jesus could have sinned. Peccability comes from the the
Latin word, peceris, which means to sin. Now they don't say that
Jesus did sin, they just said there was a theoretical possibility
that he could have. I remember talking to an evangelical
one time who believed that the angels were probably on pins
and needles wondering whether Jesus would blow it and our redemption
would be completely washed out and we would lose it. That is
heresy. That is absolutely false. The
scripture is quite clear that it is impossible for Christ to
have sinned. Because of the incarnation, and
he's divine, and it says it is impossible for God to sin, it
would be impossible for Jesus to have sinned, even theoretically. So the true faith holds to impeccability,
impossibility of sinning. Well, let's compare that to the
doctrine of Scripture. In the same way, though men wrote
the Bible, the Spirit's inspiration kept the Scriptures totally without
error. After all, the Holy Spirit entered
into Ezekiel in order to receive the little book infallibly and
to prophesy it infallibly. And we spent some time last week
looking at the symbols in the first six verses of Revelation
chapter 10 to show that the angel is clothed in the attributes
of Christ. Why? Because he's bringing the word of Christ.
He swears, he raises his right hand to heaven, he swears by
the living God. that what prophets say is absolutely
true. The mystery they reveal is absolutely
true. By the way, this is another reason
why I absolutely insist that the prophets in the New Testament
were identical to the prophets in the Old Testament. Identical
to them. In Matthew chapter, in the Old
Testament, a false prophet could be discovered if even one of
his prophecies was false, and you see the same in the New Testament.
Matthew 7, this is a key verse to write down, Matthew 7, 15
through 20, Jesus warned his disciples to watch out for false
prophets who would come in their day, and the way to test them
was by their fruits. If there was even one bad prophecy,
they were to be treated as a false prophet and rejected. Okay, so
Jesus is talking about New Testament prophets. This is an important
passage. I don't know any modern charismatic who claims to be
a prophet that has had 100% accuracy in his prophecies, not one. They
don't even claim to be that way. The prophets, so-called prophets
down in Kansas City, according to their statistics, they've
got 60 plus percent accuracy rate on some of their predictions.
Much different than Nostradamus. That is not prophecy. Okay, and
by the way, do not misapply This passage to Christians Christians
have good fruits and bad fruits. They are always growing that
is not true of prophets not true of prophets some charismatics
have said that this passage is testing individual prophecies
and but not the prophet himself. They say that if individual prophecies
don't come true, then yes, you can reject those prophecies,
but read it yourself and you will see that it is the prophet
who is the tree and the prophecy is the fruit. If there's even
one bad fruit, then the tree must be judged as bad. In other
words, it's not being a genuine prophet. In fact, let's just
go ahead and turn to it. Matthew chapter seven. We might
as well read it. Matthew 7, 15 through 20, I want
you to notice who is being tested in verse 15. Beware of false
prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are
ravenous wolves. You will know them. Who will
you know? It's not Christians in general. He's referring to those prophets.
You will know them. You will know those prophets.
How? By their fruits. Do men gather
grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every
good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A
good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good
fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and
thrown into the fire. So there's judgment. Therefore
by their fruits you will know them. A good prophetic tree cannot
bear any bad fruit. Why? Because we've already read
in 2 Peter 1 verse 21 that prophecy never came by the will of man. Never. Prophecy is always inerrant. This is why the angel in Revelation
swears by the God who lives forever and ever, who sustains all things,
that the mystery that all the prophets have spoken about is
true. It will come to pass. But the passage also says that
false prophets never have good fruit. In other words, they never
have spirit-given prophecies. It's either or. If there is a
failed prophecy, the prophet is to be rejected, since even
the prophecies that might seem to be right are not from the
Holy Spirit anyway. You don't accept the accurate
predictions of Nostradamus as being spirit-given and then just
reject the ones that didn't come true. No, since his failed prophecies
reveal Nostradamus to be a false prophet, you reject even the
so-called accurate predictions as being false prophecies because
even the false ones are bad fruits. A bad tree cannot produce good
fruits. They're all bad fruits. You don't trust the accurate
prophecies and say, oh wow, we need to follow him because he's
had such a good record. And we're going to see next week
that all prophecy and all prophets ended in 70 AD. So the second
heresy is that Christ's human will could operate independently
of his divine will. The corresponding heresy on scripture
is to say that a prophet's human will could act independently
of and even against the divine will when prophesying and therefore
could be theoretically wrong. That is absolutely impossible.
Look at the next heresy on the chart. There were people who
so separated the human and the divine natures that they turned
Jesus into a schizophrenic. sometimes being human, other
times being divine. And this is similar to the previous
heresy, but it is a little bit different. It has to do with
how the two natures relate to each other. Let me read from
the Council of Chalcedon, their beautiful description of how
the two natures of Jesus relate to each other. I don't expect
you to understand every nuance of what I'm reading here. There's
entire books been written on it, okay, but I want you to at
least be introduced to it. In the middle of the creed it
says, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to
be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly,
inseparably, the distinction of natures being by no means
taken away by the union. but rather the property of each
nature being preserved, and concurring in one person and one subsistence,
not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same
Son and only begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Wow, what a mouthful I mean as I said There's entire volumes
that have been written trying to give the scriptures of the
background to to their debates there But here's the part that
I want to apply right now Orthodoxy says that what one nature experienced
can be attributed to the person and I'm going to illustrate Even
though God does not have blood, Jesus as a person is God, and
Jesus as a person shed his blood as to his humanity, but since
anything experienced by one nature can be spoken of as being true
of the person, Acts 20 verse 28 speaks of God purchasing the
church with his own blood. Very interesting language there.
His divine nature didn't have blood, But the divine person
did because it was inseparably united to the human nature. So
even though what can be said of the divine nature cannot be
said of the human nature or vice versa, what can be said about
each nature can be said about the person. Now here's where
evangelicals, modern evangelicals, get really freaked out. And they
get freaked out because they don't know their doctrine. Unlike
the Protestant reformers, a lot of evangelicals do not affirm
the ancient creeds. Here's what they get freaked
out about. The phrase right before what I just quoted says this. Born of the Virgin Mary, the
mother of God, that is, according to the manhood. Doesn't say she
was the mother of God, period. It says she was the mother of
God as to Christ's manhood. Now the Greek word is actually
Theotokos, and it's more literally translated as God-bearer. I prefer
that translation to Mother of God. Roman Catholics prefer Mother
of God translation, and technically it's a possible translation,
and it is absolutely true if you nuance the meaning carefully,
okay? If you nuance it carefully. But
because of the meriality that is rife in the Romanist and the
Eastern Orthodox churches, and we abominate that, That itself
is heresy. We Protestants prefer the translation
God-bearer. Now here's the point. Jesus didn't
become God later in his life. To think that he did is rank
heresy. It's not Protestantism. Jesus
was God even while in his mother's womb. This is so important to
understand. He was God while his body was
being suckled by his mother, Mary. To say otherwise is to
heretically divide between the natures of Jesus. Protestants
at the Reformation had no problem whatsoever affirming the Ottokos,
and neither should we. They had no problem affirming
that the person of Jesus was born, grew up, hungered, thirsted,
died as to his manhood. And the Confession is very careful
to put that in there, as to his manhood. Even though his divinity
could not hunger, thirst, or die, he as a person experienced
that. That's all that the Chalcedonian
Council affirmed. They're not worshiping Mary.
That didn't come until much, much later. Now, if you want
a name for this true doctrine, the Protestant Reformers called
it Communicatio Idiomatum. Communicatio Idiomatum, which
is a Latin for communication of properties. It means that
what can be affirmed of either nature can be affirmed of the
person of Jesus. Is Jesus omnipresent? You might
say, I don't know, is that a trick question? Of course he's omnipresent
because he's God, right? Is Jesus local while he was here
on earth? Is he local now at the right
hand? Of course, because he's man. His body can only be in
one place at a time, but as a person, he is local, he is omnipresent. Because he is both God and man,
it's appropriate to say that Jesus hungered, grew tired, did
not know the time of his second coming. But since Jesus was also
God, it's just as appropriate to say, as Paul does, that Jesus
upholds all things by the word of his power, and in him are
hidden all the riches of God's knowledge. He knows everything. I know this is probably making
your head want to explode because it's complicated stuff. We like
to simplify things to make them understandable to our children.
But let me tell you something, if you simplify the doctrine
of Christ too much, you become a heretic. Simplification sometimes
is dangerous. And many modern, uneducated evangelicals
really hold to a heretical view of the nature of Christ. Well,
enough on the complicated doctrine of communicatio idiomatum. How do we apply this to scripture?
Well, it's perfectly appropriate to say of any passage of the
Pentateuch, Moses said, or God said. Because the whole thing
is came through Moses, but God said it as well. God and Moses
are like those two natures, and Jesus affirmed to the Bible as
a whole, God said, the author said. And the Bible does this
over and over again. For example, the very same words
that are quoted and said to be the Spirit's words, the Holy
Spirit's words in Hebrews 3 verse 7, are again quoted later on
and said to be David's words in Hebrews 4 verse 7, one chapter
later. What David said by inspiration,
the Spirit said. This means that we really should
not, Bible producers drive me crazy when they give red letter
editions. See all these red letters on
there? And people treat the red letters as if those have a higher
authority. They come from Christ. No, the
whole Bible comes from Christ. The whole Bible needs to be treated
with equal authority. OK, next line of the chart. keeps
us from going to the opposite extreme. Though we cannot separate
the natures, our creeds say that they are inseparable, right? We cannot separate them. We can
distinguish between them. And if we don't distinguish between
them, we get ourselves into trouble. For some heretics, the human
nature of Jesus was so absorbed into the divine that there wasn't
any human any longer. Now the Lutherans aren't as bad
as the Eutychians, but Calvin and the others were right that
the Lutherans were treading dangerously close to the Eutychian heresy.
Think about it. To be able to munch on Jesus'
body in every Lutheran church all the way around the world
at the same time, Jesus' body would have to be omnipresent.
Now, if his body is omnipresent, by definition it's not a human
body. And if he doesn't have a human body, then he cannot
be fully our mediator, and our salvation comes into jeopardy.
Now, we Reformed people have been gracious to the Lutherans,
and we say, you know, we accept you in the flock, and we love
you and everything, but we really get nervous about that, because
it's dangerously close to Eutychianism. We think that they have held
it in in ignorance. On another heresy, Christ is
neither divine nor human, but a hybrid, something in between.
Well, that's false. Now, let's apply that to scripture.
Though every word of this book is God's word, we can distinguish
the human characteristics of the language. And for that matter,
you can distinguish between the human grammars and vocabulary
and the personalities of each of the authors of each book of
the Bible. It's actually, here's an entire
grammar book written just for Revelation. It's really remarkable.
And it was looking at the grammar, the unique vocabulary, and the
other language pointers that have convinced me beyond any
shadow of a doubt. And I've looked at Luke, Acts,
and Hebrews. And there's been books written
on this as well. It's convinced me beyond any shadow of a doubt
that Luke was the author of the book of Hebrews. It's not an
unknown author. It's Luke. Had to be part of
the Pauline group. But I think it's clearly, clearly
Luke. Now all of those kinds of things
are human characteristics, and we misinterpret the Bible if
we ignore those. So when John, in obedience to
the command in verse 11 of Revelation 10, prophesies the contents of
this book, when he writes it down on paper, we see that it
contains John's emotions, John's amazement, exclamations, joy,
sadness, grammar, vocabulary, et cetera. We'll skip on. The next row emphasizes another
heresy that has been rather common. I've got a book by Fuller on
my shelf that says Jesus made a mistake when he said that the
mustard seed was the smallest seed. You look in context, he's
not saying that the mustard seed was the smallest seed. He said
of the gardens that he was looking at, that he was pointing at.
But in any case, Fuller says that he's overlooking Christ's
human frailties and he's submitting to Christ's divine authority.
Nonsense. You can't do both at the same
time. I've got another book by a so-called evangelical that
claims that Jesus was accommodating himself to the superstitions
of the time when he spoke of demons. He doesn't believe that
demons exist. He thinks what is described as
demonic is really psychological problems, but he still claims
that the bulk of what Christ has said is something that he
submits to. He just discards the human frailty
problems. I have another book that says
that Jesus believed in a young earth. Because that was all that
Jesus had ever heard. But now that science has supposedly
proved that the earth is billions of years old, we need to take
the kernel of Christ's statement and leave the husk behind. What
all of these heresies have in common is a belief that you can
resist some statements in the Bible and only be resisting man,
not God. See the problem there? But Ezekiel
2 through 3 is quite clear that resistance to any of Ezekiel's
words is resistance to God. We saw that Paul said the same
thing in 1 Thessalonians. Resistance to what Paul was writing
was not resistance to man, but to God. If we lose the infallibility
of the scriptures, we lose the infallibility of Christ, period.
Both were incarnations. Now in the next row, I give another
comparison. that of the docetist heresy. Just as the docetic heretics
denied that Jesus was human, they said, you know, he looked
like a human, but that was an illusion. There have been some
who claim that the writers of scripture were merely typewriters,
so to speak, taking a direct dictation from God that they
were not at all involved creatively in the crafting of the books
of the Bible. This is actually the Muslim view of how they got
their scriptures. That's not how the scriptures
came to us. You might think that they did because the words were
already written in the little book before Ezekiel or John ate
it, and before they prophesied its contents. Doesn't that make
them little typewriters? No. When the angel says, you
must prophesy again, in verse 11, he's recognizing that John's
will is involved. He's not a robot. He's addressing
his will. When Ezekiel is told he must prophesy, not be fearful,
it indicates that Ezekiel is very human. And you may remember
that I've already said that God decreed everything about these
prophets before the foundation of the world, prepared their
language, their emotions, everything else about them to perfectly
communicate to us in just the way that God wanted them to communicate. So Ezekiel's little books had
the words that Ezekiel was ordained to write. This has been the Orthodox
teaching of both Christ and the Scriptures for the last 2,000
years. On the other hand, and this is
the next row, just as Nestorians made the mistake of saying that
Jesus was merely a God-bearing man rather than the God-man,
heretics today say that the Scriptures only contain the Word of God
or become the Word of God in our experience. but that the
Bible isn't the Word of God in every jot and tittle. This is
the error of Karl Barth that I mentioned earlier. He believed
that the Bible becomes the Word of God when we have an encounter
with Christ in it. In other words, when we have
an experience with Christ. But for the most part, people
who read the Bible, it's just reading a human document. For
him, faith alone can make it become the Word of God. So he
believed we can find God's word within the Bible if Jesus meets
us, but that the Bible itself was human. And we've got Barthians
all around us in Omaha, and you need to be aware of it. They
sound evangelical, but they are not. Barthianism is heresy, and
the scriptures we've already covered refute that. The little
book was the word of God when it was in the father's mind.
It was the Word of God when it was in Christ's mind. It was
the Word of God when it was communicated, carried from Christ to John by
that angel. It was the Word of God when the
Holy Spirit received it into Ezekiel. It still was the Word
of God when it was spoken out and written down by Ezekiel.
At every point, it is objectively, not subjectively, objectively
the Word of God. Now, the next heresy is Apollinarianism. This heresy denied that Jesus
had a human spirit. They said that the Logos, the
divine spirit, took the place of the human spirit, so they
said Jesus had a human body. They don't deny that, but not
a human soul. Well, the church called that
a heresy because a body is not enough to make Jesus a man, fully
a man. It also makes no sense or should
I say nonsense, of the various passages that speak of Jesus'
spirit being crushed, sorrowing, being overwhelmed. It makes no
sense of Jesus saying that there were some things that he did
not know. Logos, he knows all things. As God, he always knew
all things. He was always omnipresent. At
the very time that Mary was holding Jesus in her arms, Jesus was
upholding Mary in his arms. Why? Because he has always upheld
all things, Hebrews says, by the word of his power. All things. So when Jesus was
here on earth, he could have done any miracle by his divine
power, but he chose not to do so. As a model man, he restricted
his power as divine son, subjected himself to the spirit, and did
all of his miracles by the power of the spirit, just as men would
do. Okay, so the church rightly rejected
a Paul an area of Paul an arianism though. Jesus was one person
He was a spirit as God the Son he had a human spirit, but it
was in perfect unity With his divine spirits one person, but
two spirits two wills in perfect unity Okay applying that to scripture
We make the same error If we do not recognize, for example,
that Paul, by inspiration, records that he does not know whether
he's going to be coming to Rome right away. He's sharing what
he's thinking. That's in Scripture. In 1 Corinthians
419, Paul says, if the Lord wills, I will come to you shortly. Though
God's Spirit moved Paul to write down everything he wrote, God
moved Paul to write in a way that showed his human character
and emotions and limitations, but kept him from error. And
when you look at the other interaction that the Apostle John had with
this mighty angel in the book of Revelation, you see a human
spirit that is interacting. And I praise God that the Psalms
have this human element because it allows us to express through
the Psalms all of our emotions of sadness and feelings of betrayal
and frustration and loneliness. Those aren't divine characteristics,
yet they are God's words. And because God's Word was incarnated
in real human, soulish emotion, it makes us realize that God
really does care about what we go through. I've got to finish this because
there's just not enough here to make another sermon out of. Okay, it is both. Okay, so we
saw the emphasis was on the divine characteristics in the first
six verses. Second half of the book, emphasis is on those divine
characteristics being incarnated in real human characteristics. And it's both of those that give
it such sweetness to us. The angel promised that when
John ate this revelation, it would be sweet in his mouth,
but become bitterness in his stomach. And that is a perfect
image of the nature of redemptive judgments. Judgments bring salvation
to God's elect, condemnation to the non-elect, but prophets
rejoiced at God's purpose of redemption, but wept at the hardness
of heart of those who rejected it. Even Jesus wept over Jerusalem's
rejection of the prophetic word. Now I want to take a look at
the sweetness of God's word first. He said that it tasted as sweet
as honey, and that's an allusion to at least three passages in
the Old Testament. We've already read Ezekiel 3
verse 3, but Psalm 119, 103 says, how sweet are your words to my
taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. Psalm 19 verse 10 says
much the same. Now that is so foreign to the
unregenerate mind. They don't understand how we
can savor God's word so much. They find God's word distasteful.
They've been deluded into thinking the Bible is legalistic, barbaric,
outdated. It's to be rejected. But Christians
savor every word of scripture. They treasure it. They agree
with it. They love it. It's a delight of our soul. And
even though the sweetness was being experienced by a prophet,
most commentators make an application to all preachers and all believers.
Scripture indicates that the moment a human heart is genuinely
born again, it has an instant appetite for the Bible. As 1
Peter 1.22 words it, as newborn babes desire the pure milk of
the word that you may grow thereby. There is something wrong with
a baby that doesn't have any appetite, right? And if we say
to God, how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey
to my mouth, we're saying something's right with my soul. Thank you,
Lord, that you have given me this new appetite. It has grieved
me to see so many evangelicals becoming embarrassed by the Bible.
The hat makers of the most recent casualties calling homosexual
marriage holy and honorable before God. And when evangelicals have
to change the Bible to make it palatable, I question whether
they are even regenerate. I really do doubt people are
regenerate when they do stuff like that. Pagans can study the
Bible on one level and admire it on a literary level, but they
cannot find it sweet to eat. They cannot live by it. 1 Corinthians
2.14 says, but the natural man does not receive the things of
the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he
know them because they are spiritually discerned. If any portion of
the scripture is foolishness to you, it's unattractive to
you, it's a sign that you're not regenerate. or at least you're
not sanctified by God's Spirit. Romans 8, 7 says, So in one sense,
having a taste for God's words and evidence of regeneration But certainly this prophet found
God's word to be pleasing to his palate. But what happens
the moment you start preaching the scriptures? You get persecution.
You get pushback. You get resistance, right? So
the same Bible verses that you love and that minister to your
soul end up bringing grief to you because you're ending up
weeping over those who don't get it and who hate it and who
resist it. And most commentators relate
the bitterness to either the persecution and backlash that
comes to the prophet, or more likely to his inner, because
his stomach was bitter, right? I think it's his inner weeping
over their hardness of heart. Douglas Kelly says, no matter
how sweet and wonderful the gospel is in your heart, there will
be people around you who do not accept it and who may even hate
you for where you stand. Beal says, the non-repentant
response to his message in the church and the world is a bitter
or mournful thing for John to contemplate, as it was for the
Old Testament prophets and Jesus. This is why Jeremiah, even though
he affirms how sweet the word of God was to him, he says, it's
bringing me pain as well. Yeah, in Jeremiah 15, 16, he
says, when your words came, I ate them. They were my joy and my
heart's delight. And he's excited to share it
with other people. He gets this pushback and he
says, oh, the hurt of the daughter of my people and my hurt, I am
mourning. Astonishment has taken hold of
me. So you can see why commentaries
apply this to the preacher today. Though he loves God's Word and
delights in it, there is a pain in his work when he continually
sees believers ruining their lives by rebelling against it. I can tell that Rodney and Gary
are good pastors because they not only love the Word of God,
but because it brings them pain. I see the pain in them when I
see people rejecting God's Word. It pains them. It brings me pain
when I see people blinded to the Word, and I see the negative
fruits that are going to come to them. There is a sweet and
sour aspect to the ministry, and no one should enter the ministry
without being prepared for such pain and bitterness in his heart.
Leon Morris said, the wickedness of man grieved God at his heart,
Genesis 6 verse 6, and the true preacher of God's word enters
to some degree into this suffering. So commentators like Matthew
Henry say that when preachers avoid certain sections of the
word of God because they know they're going to get persecuted
from it or it's going to bring bitterness, they're trying to
avoid the bitterness. He says, they are not true preachers.
They are hirelings. And so you need to pray for us
as pastors that we would not only delight, but we would be
willing to take the bitterness in our stomach knowing that this
word is going to be resisted. And brothers and sisters, please,
we do take it personally when you react negatively against
God's word. It does bring us pain. It really
does. And I think you need to be aware
of that. Yet in verse 11, John is commissioned to bring this
message of redemptive judgment to all. Yes, even to those who
reject it. And he said to me, you must prophesy
again over many peoples, even over ethnic nations and languages
and kings. Too many people don't bring the
word of God to the public sphere because Pagans don't believe
in the word of God. Why would I bring it to them?
They don't even accept the Bible as the authority. Well, that's
a ridiculous argument. Just imagine that a murderer is coming after
your wife with a knife, and you pull out a .357 Magnum and say,
drop that knife or I will shoot you. And the burglar says to
you, ha, I don't believe in guns. Are you going to sadly reholster
it and say, oh, that's too bad. I wish he believed in guns. No,
you're going to pull the trigger and make him a believer, right?
And in the same way, we need to unleash the Word of God. We
need to have it on our lips. Deuteronomy 6 says 24-7 the Word
of God needs to be on our lips. We're in the mess today because
Christians use carnal weapons to deal with the strongholds
of our nation. God calls us to use His weapons,
which are mighty in God for tearing down strongholds. So it's my
prayer that Revelation chapter 10 will cause us to have such
faith in God's word that we will put it on our foreheads, that
means our thinking. We'll put it on our hands, that means all
our work. We're gonna put it on our doorposts
of our house. We're going to talk about it,
whether we sit, whether we walk by the way, no matter what we
are doing. And may God bless and prosper
us as we do so, amen. Father, we thank you for your
word. We treasure your word, we love your word. And we ask
you to forgive us for those times when we question that. We know
that our flesh sometimes does rise up, but I pray that we would
be like Jeremiah, and like Ezekiel, and like John, willing to find
the sweetness of your word in our mouth, and willing to proclaim
it even though we know it's gonna bring us weeping and tears as
people reject it. Help us to value your word whether
it hardens people, or whether it brings them to repentance,
whether it tears down strongholds, or whether you choose not to
tear them down at this particular juncture of time. But help us,
Father, to be faithful stewards of the scriptures that you have
so richly entrusted to us. We love you, we bless you, and
we want to continue to worship you faithfully and to serve you
faithfully. In Jesus' name, amen.
The Divine Character of Revelation, Part 2
Series Revelation
| Sermon ID | 12418831365 |
| Duration | 1:10:37 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Revelation 10 |
| Language | English |
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