Evangelizing the Western Mindset - Part 10

We have been looking at a series of five interlocking circles that Clark Pinnock has laid out as just a good, convenient summary of different types of apologetic. We have looked at pragmatic, which was the first one. We've looked at a number of different positions within this by taking a look at what the crowd thought of John the Baptist.

Jesus summarized all of that statement by saying, you came out to look for a prophet, he's more than a prophet. And yet the one who is the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. So we move from what you could call a pragmatic test.

Does the Christian worldview fit with what is real? Does it make sense from where it starts to where it ends? Does it match reality as we know it? And the tests that we placed on that come up smelling like a rose. In other words, pragmatically this thing fits. Then secondly, we looked at experience.

We looked at witness. Matter of fact, the Quaker church under George Fox, to them that was the major thing. Wesley put it like this way, the spirit answers to the blood and tells me I'm born of God.

There is an experiential witness that is not to be despised. Scripture says we have that assurance. His spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.

So there is a very real sense in which that isn't a testimony, it is an evidence. And our speaking out into the world just as an individual witness is powerful. Thirdly, then we had the cosmic evidences.

And it's under these that the various studies of the world, what's sometimes called the teleological evidences, the design of the universe, the uniqueness of man. We haven't even looked at man. But if we just look at man as an intricate personality, as a work of art or as an engineering marvel, man himself is an incredible mystery.

There's just incredible evidence for design. If you consider what the foot is, here it is, it just doesn't complain. It just carries you around all the time.

But it's designed like a suspension bridge. It's arched and that flexing takes place all the time. You'll stick it in jogging shoes and thump it for thousands of miles.

You'll jump up and down on it. But just the foot alone, the way it's designed is incredible. The reason why I realized just how sophisticated just the hand and the foot are is because when we try to build robots now, and a great deal of engineering has gone into designing robots that will carry out simple tasks, it becomes an incredibly difficult matter just to make a hand, even if it's not as complex as the human hand, that will pick something up with enough strength to lift it, but not break something that is small.

I mean, the human hand can pick up something tiny like a pin and then can push something like a car. It's got all of this incredible amount of ability. You make a claw that's big enough to pick up a 40-pound weight and it goes to pick up an apple and goes... And you just begin to realize what an incredible marvel the human body is, the heart, the brain itself.

The brain is a nightmare to macroevolutionists. The eyes, how do you get eyes evolving from light-sensitive patches? You know, the eye is an incredible thing, the stereo vision. Here we have a set of cameras that work in full color.

I've forgotten how many colors they... I think 530,000 different shades of color the average eye can see. It's much, much more sensitive. I'm a photographer and the range of light that a camera has is nothing compared to the human eye.

It can observe things from almost near darkness to brilliant, brilliant light. And you've got automatic irises, automatic focus, you've got stereo vision, you've got all of these things happening all at once, the ears. The design just of man alone is worth an entire apologetic himself.

And a matter of fact, one man, is it Brand? Philip Brand and Yancey have put together Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. And there's another book, a medical doctor has done two books. I would suggest for a tremendous apologetic just on man that you buy those two books.

I've forgotten what the second one is. One's called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and it's just a study by a medical doctor on the human body. And there is an account there of what happens when you cut a finger or you get a cut on your hand and the incredible complexity of what happens in your body.

All of these things, there are chemicals that are dumped, there are alarm signals sent, there are a complete mobilization that's so sophisticated that takes place in seconds in your system. The human blood, all of these things. And the Scripture hints many, many places on the design and complexity that Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, of course, is a quote about our substance, about what we're like.

Scripture speaks thousands of years before it's discovered the life of the flesh is in the blood. There is man himself is an apologetic, not to mention nature. Bill Garfield has done three volumes of what he calls character sketches in nature and Scripture and uses the verse, ask now the birds and they will teach thee.

I really believe this. I believe when God designed the earth, He designed animals and birds and insects as object lessons. I don't think that Jesus came along and said, boy, that's a great idea, maybe I could use that as an object lesson.

I think it was designed like that. I think into the very design of God's universe, He built in pointers, testimonies, evidences that would point anybody with a half a brain cell in His direction. And those who don't have half a brain cell, He would be able to give them brain cells.

There are little books. This one is one that was very popular in New Zealand, The Seal of God and Creation in Word. Not a terrific cover on this one.

This is an ancient copy I've had a long time. And this man's design in apologetics basically goes to patterns in the universe and then patterns in Scripture. And he ties in the design of the universe with the design of the Bible and puts the two together and says whoever chose by design, which up till a century ago when Darwinian thought began to really grab hold, the design argument, argument by design was a major teaching.

It was in every university. The wonders of God and His creation pointed to a designer. The idea of design equals designer.

And then it was replaced by time plus chance plus matter equals design. And some have pointed out that this plus, that's called fairy story. We have a world around us that testifies.

Man himself is a testimony. Not even looking at his moral yearnings and desire for love. Where does love come from? Where does truth come from? Beauty, all these pragmatic things we looked at.

But those evidences there are well worth good solid look at. And I encourage you to study design. A lot of engineers get saved because of that.

Not just finding how incredibly complex man is. The reproduction, that's a nightmare for evolution. How that developed.

The birth of a human baby is an incredible miracle. Any nurses, a lot of nurses get saved watching that. They go, how did that? We want to look now historical again.

We touched on this. We looked at the scriptures and a couple of areas that were brought up. One special one in the book, Youth of Flame, I did four ways of studying the Bible.

And they're just basic hermeneutics. They're just basic ways you approach scripture. One's called inductive and one's called the topical and called the deep look, the wide look.

And there is one which I want to bring out today and I mentioned in our last session or after it. And that is the harmony of the gospels. Now, this area of the four different accounts of Jesus' life given in the gospels has been a rock for people in two different ways.

Some young people when they first see these different accounts. Matter of fact, the guy who started this thing lost his faith in Bible college being taught the harmonies of scripture. He was given all of these various accounts and the guy who taught him said, well, we just can't reconcile these.

They're just sort of problems. And so he went too with Christianity and later on he came back to God and this thing bothered him. So one day he thought, well, what I'll do is I'll make a scrapbook.

I'll get New Testament, I'll cut it up in bits. Preachers do that all the time. And he thought, he got sick.

He had TB and he had a long time of bed rest. And he thought it'd be interesting just to actually chop up the actual accounts of the thing. And he found that just by cutting the pieces out and dropping off the spare bits, he could actually put together an account given in three separate gospels, each one which was unique and distinctive and has its own style and flavor and texture.

That they actually fitted together without any loss of anything at all. He didn't have to throw anything away. He didn't have to add anything and it made perfect sense and it totally harmonized and it blew his mind.

And then he realized that he had really come on something that nobody had done before. And as a consequence, this book was finished about two or three days before his death. It's called The Life of Christ in Stereo.

A foreword by Dr. Earl Radmacher. And this is a far out book. It basically takes the four gospels and simply interweaves them.

As a consequence of this, some problems which have been held up before as real difficulties and find this hard to reconcile, have just fallen so neatly into place that instead of it being a problem, it has become a tremendous apologetic. Because we're actually dealing with four totally different people. Matthew was Jewish.

Mark was Roman. Luke was Greek. John was spacey.

We're dealing with something that is so different from everything else. So what I want to do for you, I can't obviously go through this whole thing, but what he has done to make it easy, he has taken, this of course is taken from the Greek text. You can do it in the King James or New American Standard or whatever.

That's fine. But it's the Greek texts that ultimately this harmony is best seen in it. And here is the point.

You're aware, of course, that there are four gospels. There are Matthew, and of course you're all, Mark, and Luke, and then John. And the first three, these ones here, we call the synoptic gospels.

And most harmonies of the Bible, the diatestaron and some of these early ones, all they do is they put columns. You might have one in the back of your Bible. I've got one in the back of my Bible, sort of the harmony of the gospels.

And it puts a list of the scriptures and where there seems to be parallel passage. And very, very often when you compare these things, it's hard to figure out what happened. But the power of this thing is this, and I mentioned it briefly at the end of our last session.

If I came in to, if this was a courtroom and I did something, I did a series of events, and then I asked everybody to watch very carefully, I did these series of events, and then asked you to write down now what you could remember I did, we would not have everybody in this room write down exactly the same thing. Some would remember some things, some would remember other things. Many of you would have the same things, things that stuck in your mind, things that were particularly important or particularly significant or stuck out, everybody would have.

But if we put all of those accounts together then and carefully compared each one with each one, providing you didn't make mistakes in what you saw, we would be able to assemble, hopefully, the entire thing of what happened. And it is that which is used in courts of law as a fundamental evidence that what is being said is the truth and not simply a story that is being passed out among the witnesses to share as a lie. And when we come to the Scriptures, we find them written like that.

I mean, each one of these guys, even in the languages written, the Greek of Mark and the Greek of Luke and the Greek of John are different. There's different flavors, there's different colors. They're not, and they're not at all like each other.

In the early days, people used to think that probably Matthew borrowed great chunks from Mark to make his account and that kind of thing. But what the harmony does, what this Gospels and Stereo shows, is that there's no necessity for one borrowing from the other at all. That what we've got here is actually four different men telling a story, and I know I'm flying in the face of a great deal of law criticism saying this, but the life of Christ in Stereo shows there is no necessity of one borrowing from the other, that we actually have four people telling this story.

And when this, I call it interweave analysis. It's like the threads on the curtain thing I mentioned to you. Three different, we'll say four different colors all woven together to form one story.

Now, the simplest way we can do this is we'll do it just in English, but we'll label these one, two, three, and four. I'll just ask you if you could look up this passage, and I've got it here in this thing, I'll have to look it up myself. It's in Matthew 22, 34 to 40.

I remember reading this when it first came out, when the guy, it wasn't even a finished work yet. I was still in Bible college and it blew my mind. It excited me so much.

I began to use it in my Bible studies for that time on, and I've used it now, I guess, close on 16 years. And it has been a constant source of excitement to me. It is a neat apologetic.

And that was the principle I told you. You can go so far and get skeptical. You can read dumbly and not understand any of the problems.

Then you can hit problems and get skeptical. And or you can plow on through those and say, this is God's word. He's got something to say, I'm gonna keep going.

And even on pragmatic basis, I think we talked about this. Just on a purely pragmatic basis, if I had a choice between thinking like this, this book is mostly God's word, was probably got a lot of errors in it. Do you see that? Or this book is God's word.

It is free from error in the original autographs. And if there is a problem or a discrepancy somewhere, I'm gonna keep plowing and I'm gonna keep asking until I find out what that thing is. On purely pragmatic grounds, I'd go with the second one.

Do you know why? Because that second one is a greater motivator of inquiry than the first one. Now on the first one, you just go, hey, it's probably one of those mistakes and you never look at it again. And you can miss such incredible blessings in at least four areas that I've even seen, quite hot licks Bible answer books.

I think their answer is stupid. I don't think it's true at all. They come up with some weird, obscure little, well, it's probably this thing.

And a simple principle like this, harmonizes this thing on much deeper levels. I'll give you this first just in the gospels and then we'll go to a major thing that I've seen even Bible translators change words in, which I don't think are necessary at all. Okay, we'll call these then Matthew, Mark, Luke.

And here's the scriptures, Matthew 22. And you'll have to have three fingers at least for this. 34 to 40.

40 to 40. And then Mark 12. We'll only use two in here.

I'll just show you the, I was trying to find a passage that had three or four, but then I thought you'd go crazy. 28 to 34, all right. Now, when I say one, read Matthew.

When I say two, read Mark. You know, three is gonna be. So just, we'll go for two.

This is the first and great commandment, okay? Start in Matthew. The principle here has been take the major passage and if I wanted to visually do it like this, show you it'd be like this. Say we have a passage where we'll read this passage first in Matthew, then in Mark.

Okay, so we'll see it as two distinct passages written by two different people. And one is Jewish, one is Roman. Each had their own styles.

We analyzed Mark, for instance. It's a very short gospel. It's very, Mark is a pragmatist.

He's a realist. He's very, very full of energy and power. Everything happens straightway in Mark's gospel.

Boats arrive at the thing straightway. He's very impressed with crowds and with numbers. It's a huge multitude.

Multitudes is one of Mark's favorite words. He is a, if you want to give a gospel to somebody who's in a hurry and don't want to mess around, give them Mark's gospel. And it shows Christ as a servant and it shows him as a man of great power, which is two things not usually put together in our world.

Matthew's gospel, on the other hand, is eminently Jewish. It is a revelatory gospel. It has many quotes like that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet.

It's got a Jewish flavor in it. Luke's gospel, again, is different. Matthew's gospel shows Jesus as the Messiah, the promised king, the one who is the anointed one, who is going to come to deliver Israel.

Even the genealogies of these two are different. For instance, Matthew's gospel is a forward-looking one. It is a prophetic genealogy.

It looks forwards into the future. Mark doesn't even have a genealogy. Servant is not known by his pedigree, but by his service.

Luke's genealogy goes in the exact opposite direction. It shows Christ as a man. It shows him... So it traces his genealogy in a historical sense instead of a prophetic sense.

And then John's gospel shows his genealogy in the other direction, that he is not only man and the promised, not only related to Adam, but he is also in the promised line of the Messiah, the king, and then he is also God's son. And that's neat to look at the genealogies in this, when they harmonize together. Okay, now let's read first Matthew 22.

I'll just read it in King Jimmy. It's good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me. I'll just read it in the standard version here.

Now, when the Pharisees had heard that he put the Sadducees to silence, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, says, tempting him and saying, master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Now that's an account.

It is coherent, it makes sense, it's not stilted. All the words are there necessary to put that account together. Now we go to Mark, Mark 12, and we come to a parallel account of this.

In verse 28, and one of the scribes came and having heard them reasoning together and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, the first of all the commandments is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment.

And the second, like this, you shall love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. And then it goes on, well said, master, et cetera.

Now watch what happens. And remember, we're taking this from Greek, but it's fair enough in your English versions. It's no, all we do here then, in taking these two passages, here's Matthew's account, here's Mark, a little bit shorter in some place, a little bit longer in other places.

What we do is whenever there is a match of two exact same words, we drop one of them and leave the other one in. But we leave nothing else out. We put in everything that is, that is, you know, like there's one up here and nothing down here, we put it in.

But we keep it in the order in which it arrives. And that's the only, it is no big, heavy, exegetical principle. Whenever there's a doubling, you drop one of the things and you leave everything else in and you don't mess with the order, you don't try and change it.

Greek order, of course. You stay in that and away you go. Okay, here's the way it goes.

So I'll read it to you from this and I want you to flip backwards and forwards. One, we're in Matthew now. But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together and one of them, who was a lawyer, two of the scribes having, see, this guy's a heavy duty.

He's not your ordinary lawyer. He's also a scribe. Which means he wrote out this thing, remember, and memorized it.

So this guy really knows the law. He's not just a guy who interprets, he's also one who wrote it. Having heard these disputations and perceiving that he had answered them well, came up and one, asked him a test question, saying, teacher, which commandment in the law is the great one? Two, which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, the first of all the commandments is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, that's a quote, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

One, this is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it. Two, namely this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

One, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Two, there is no greater commandment than these. Now isn't that incredible? Now let me just read it to you without the one and the two, okay? And you tell me what this sounds like.

But the Pharisees, when they heard he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together, and one of them, who was a lawyer of the scribes, having heard these disputations and perceiving that he had answered them well, came up and asked him a test question, saying, teacher, which commandment of the law is the great one? Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, the first of all the commandments is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it, namely this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. There is no greater commandment than these. Now that is a gospel in stereo.

It is a four-dimensional thing, and some other passages tie all four together like this. Now the thing, this would be fun for you to get into, but I'll leave this here afterwards and have a look. What I did originally, in the original version, I underlined all the sections in different colors.

Whenever there was a blue, I put blue for John and red for Matthew, and I went through that thing. And it's wild to read the thing. But here's the question.

If you just picked this up, you would recognize it as the gospel. You would not be quite sure what chapter it came from. And we got a Greek translation here, so there's little shades of difference.

But the original here has not a jot or a tittle that's been dropped. Nothing has been dropped out to make something harmonized. It's all been in.

Here are some very interesting conclusions from this. First of all, the ministry of Jesus was not simply three years. It was closer to four.

These are the consequences of this discovery. Jesus' ministry actually lasted closer to four years, not three. There are passages near the end of Jesus' life where it seems like he did everything, he did four million things in three seconds.

And in the ordinary parallel things, people try and jam something he did there into the same place, but they don't belong there. They're properly spaced out. The other thing, and this is a wild one, is that Peter did not just deny Jesus three times.

He denied him six times. He did two sets of three denials. In one, the cock had not crowed.

In the second lot, he denied him three times after that. And so Peter's denial looks much worse. It is not just a few inadvertent blunders.

It is an entire string of denials. And in each case, the prophecy Jesus gave, he said, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times. And then he said, when we put the two together, we see Peter denying three times, the cock crows, and then denying him another three times.

And it must have really smashed Peter to bits when at the end of those string of six, and it is so appropriate that it should be six denials. You know what six as a number represents in the Hebrew mind? Six, six, six. The, that right at the end of that string of six denials, six is a man under sin number, is basically what it means.

Jesus walks out, having just been before the judge, he walks out on the balcony, he looks down, Peter's in the middle of his worst swearing match. Jesus looks down, Peter looks up, and broken hearted, it just busts him right up. Now, I want to give you another one of these, and this one is not in the Gospels, it is in the book of Acts, to show you the same principle operating.

And this one has to do with the conversion of the Apostle Paul. Could you find for me please, because I haven't looked at it, you know. Find for me the account, there are three different accounts of the Apostle Paul's conversion.

We'll write them up on the board, we won't call them one, two, and three or anything, we'll just have a look at it. I'll take a little time on this because it's a fun thing, and we haven't had time to get into deeply any of these others, so. First account, where's the first account? Acts 9, okay, that's the actual record of it, and then later on he gives his testimony, at least twice.

Where are the other two accounts? Acts 22, and one more, and 26. All right, these are the three passages. Let me read it now from the original account, and we'll keep this in mind.

See, the power of this apologetic is that that which looks like a difficulty turns out actually to be one of the strongest evidences for a mind supervising this thing. What I read to you is clear, precise, filled with details, and yet you gotta understand, no one of these guys wrote this. Each one said their own thing and their own color, their own language, their own particular modes and forms.

Each one made sense within what they said, so if you just picked that one gospel, it would be it. It would still tell you the facts. But when you step back out of it, you see sometimes up to four people, and when you get a very key thing happening at the same, a very critical thing, all four chime in on that same thing, and all speak about it at the same time, but you're seeing a mosaic that couldn't have been put together without an incredible amount of research just on one.

And the guy took, I've forgotten, 26 years to do the harmony of this thing. And you can imagine how people can write and figure out, you take this bit, I'll take this bit. You talk about Q and Matthew borrowing from Mark.

This thing blows that to cheese. It just says, everybody said what they said, and on a multi-level thing, somebody supervised it. And it's not even a big deal, it's just there.

Stop at base one if you like and get skeptical, but if you push on, you'll get some real excitement in your life. Now let's look at Acts 9. I'll read this first in the account of Saul's persecution, of his conversion. Saul, yet breathing threatenings and slaughter out against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and desired of them letters to Damascus, to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound into Jerusalem.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus. And I want to write down now some of these facts. Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven.

So he's on his way to Damascus, a light shines from heaven. And he fell to the earth and he heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads.

And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what do you want me to do? And the Lord said, go to the city and it shall be told what you must do. And the man which journeyed with him stood speechless hearing a voice, but seeing no man. Saul arose from the earth where his eyes were open.

He saw no man, but they led him by hand, brought him into Damascus. Now we go to Acts 22, and we've got the essential elements of what happened in Paul's life, the record of it. Go now to Acts 22, and here he's giving his testimony.

Came to pass, as mine made my journey, was coming nigh unto Damascus. There's your place identification. About noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light.

And I fell to the ground and I heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And I answered, who are you, Lord? He said, I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting. And here is where the New American Standard or New International Version, I forget which one, maybe both, makes a change. In language, it's quite permissible.

It's not, and it is actually a different word, but I don't think it's necessary. I know the reason why they did it, but it's not necessary. And here's the way it goes.

They that were with me saw indeed the light and were afraid, but they heard not the voice of him that spoke to me. Okay? Now look at our board. They saw the light, but they did not hear the voice.

Now Paul's thing says, heard a voice, but seeing nobody. So at that point, what is your, read your versions out. Tell me what you got.

Verse nine, who's got a New American Standard? Got it done? See the change of the word? See the word? Understand. That is a permissible translation. That same word could be translated understand, but it is not necessary.

The reason why they translated understand is because they thought this was a discrepancy. See? Here he said, I heard, and up there it said he didn't hear. And that hearing is an understanding hearing, but you can keep it as they didn't hear because it doesn't belong there.

Let's just follow the order of the thing. Verse nine, they that were with me. Here we are, we're up to, who are you Lord? And we're up to, I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you're persecuting.

And then at this point, verse nine comes. They that were with me, this is where we put it in. Not here, this is something else, something different.

And I'll show you why it's different in a minute. They that were with me saw indeed the light and they were afraid, but they did not hear. Translated understand it if you like.

They didn't hear the voice of him that spoke. And I said, what shall I do, Lord? See? He said, arise, go to Damascus. And when I could not see for the glory of the light, I came to Damascus.

And then so on. In chapter 26, there's the same kind of thing. The light from heaven, a voice speaking to me.

We added a little thing in verse 14 that throws some extra light on this, which gets much more exciting. I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why are you picking on me? Now, if we just simply stick these two together, do a harmony thing, do an interweave thing and not try and fool around with hearing and understanding, then what we get is a beautiful revelation. It goes like this.

Let's just act it out. You know, I'm Saul riding along on my donkey. Light comes out of the, ah, I fall off my donkey.

I hear a voice speaking to me in Hebrew. Why Hebrew? Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Now, what is going on here? Who are you, Lord? He thinks, oh, oh, this is the boss. But what does he mean persecuting him? I'm zealous for him.

I'm killing Christians for Christ. I mean, this, you know, I'm serving you. What do you mean? Who are you, Lord? Embarrassment, embarrassment.

I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting. The knife goes and it turns around a number of times. It is hard for you to kick against the bricks.

Ah! Now, what is going on with these other dudes? I'll tell you what's going on. A light. And all they see is Saul going like this.

Who are you, Lord? Why? Because this is false conversion. It is personal. It is intimate.

It is God and Saul. That's it. Nobody else.

They don't need to know this. Whether they understand it or not, I don't care. They don't even have to hear it.

Who are you, Lord? I am Jesus, still. And the men saw the light, but they heard not the voice of him that spoke to me. And then he says, and this is obedience, and the change actually takes place.

Lord, what do you want me to do? See? Arise, go to Damascus. Now, he's blind. What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? Arise and go to Damascus.

And everybody goes, oh, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. Damascus? Who was that voice? But I'll tell you what, they went to Damascus. You bet they went to Damascus.

Standing there for seconds with a light shining all around you, and what you hear is, arise, go to Damascus. You don't go any place but Damascus. Damascus.

So, what I want you to do, this is a principle. It's not just a one-shot thing. I believe the Gospels and the Scriptures indeed are written like that.

And once you see it, it's not just, see, without bringing that principle in, harmonies look like somebody's trying to stick two things together that don't fit. When you see the whole thing is written like that, it is not a strange principle. Somebody asked about how many demoniacs.

There were two demoniacs. One of them was healed yesterday. Somebody said, how many demonics? There were two of them.

One of them was the one that was healed. And as a consequence of that, Thai ministry opened up in an area. So, come and have a look at this afterwards.

Remember, it's called the Gospels, or the Life of Christ in Stereo, by Johnson M. Chaney, and the Ford by Earl Radmarket. Now, I want to touch, in the few minutes we've got left, we haven't got too many minutes, just on a couple of prophecies, other than I mentioned to you one of the great unique things about the scripture is its span of time and prophecy, how it unashamedly deals with prophecy. For this, here is a little book I've thoroughly enjoyed.

It's called Countdown, A Time to Choose by G.B. Hardy. It was originally done by Moody Press in Chicago. I'm hoping that one day it will be reprinted.

This is a good little witness book. We need some more books like this to give to people that just basically minister, that preach. This is an apologetics book done to give away to unsafe people.

A lot of apologetics books are basically written for Christians, and they're more, what could I call it, they're more scholarship-orientated things. They're sort of like dictionaries. But you can't really give a dictionary to an unsafe person.

You want something that challenges them a bit, and keeps saying, if this is true, how about you, Jack? You know, that kind of thing. That's why C.S. Lewis' stuff was so effective, because we broadcast talks here in England to ordinary people and he took some of these heavy-duty things that belonged mostly in the realm of scholarship and brought them down to where ordinary people could understand that famous Jesus was a liar, or a legend, or a lunatic, or the Lord of Glory is that kind of, you know, simplified apologetic. So he does stuff here on, a little on evolution, he does stuff.

In chapter two, he talks about, there's no definition of religion acceptable to everybody, but for our simple purpose, let us define religion as a truth that'll point the way to most cherished freedom of all freedoms, freedom from death, or conversely, eternal life. And then if we stick to our very simple definition of religion, we're not interested in it, confused by doctrine, dogma, ritual, tradition, or convention, there are two essential requirements. Has anybody cheated death and proved it? One, two, is it available for me? Here is the complete record, Confucius' tomb occupied, Buddha's tomb occupied, Mohammed's tomb occupied, Jesus' tomb empty.

Argue as you will, there's no point in following a loser. Imagine, basically. Whether you convince Jesus' tomb is empty or not, he's the only one who makes this claim, hence it is common sense to start any investigation at this point, this is his claim.

I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold, I'm alive forevermore, Revelation 118. In the debate between, by the way, there's a book on that debate, we'll have the copies of the tapes here you can listen to, we'll probably make some copies before we leave. In the book of the Islam debate between Ahmed Didat and Josh McDowell, good to get hold of this, just for your reference, because there's a lot of Muslim people in the world, it is the fastest growing missionary movement outside of Christianity in the world.

And Ahmed Didat's challenge was that Jesus never said that he died. He was crucified, but you know, just because you put up on the cross doesn't mean to say you were dead. And he said, nowhere in all the gospels will you find Jesus ever claimed to be dead.

But he did. In Revelation 118, he said, I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. This is his promise, John 14, 19, because I live, you shall live also.

And this is what he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I say to you, he that believes in me hath everlasting life. You shall know the truth, the truth shall make you free.

If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. And I give to them eternal life, and the word of the Lord endures forever. And then he goes there to a short apologetic on the inspiration of scriptures, and then he goes into historical foreknowledge, the prophecies that God gives.

Now, I have a kind of a weird view on prophecy, and I'll give it to you now. It may be heretical or not, but I'll throw it, I'm allowed one heresy per lecture. It goes like this, that time in the hands of God is not a fixed thing, that he can actually alter and extend and stretch things.

That prophecies then given in scripture are very rarely tied with a time. They are instead tied with signs. The simple reason is that God can extend or shrink time.

That he is Lord of the time, that he operates in eternity, which I don't think is no time, but a super time, a time beyond all time, as Cliff Richard sings in one of his songs. A time which is superior and transcendental to our idea of time. In other words, just like God's space is infinitely greater than our space, so he can do things with space that we can't even imagine, and his power is greater than the power of the created universe.

Remember, light was a creation. Scripture speaks about God is light, but I don't think it's talking about he's an energy field. He created the energy systems out of which matter, raw formless matter was first formed, then organized it into an existing structure.

So even the energy, the matter energy world is a creation of God, and his energy is greater than that created energy. There's actually three levels then. There is the matter energy universe, which we are a part of.

Matter energy phenomena, we could call it. It's actually a trinity. Phenomena is what describes that matter energy matrix.

Next, and we'll call this the created material universe, though it's matter energy. And we can go one back up further, and we come to the created spiritual. There is a world of the supernatural that is transcendental to the matter energy phenomenon world that has its own space, its own time, its own characteristics, and man is simultaneously a citizen of this world and that world, because he has a spirit, and he has been made in God's image.

This is the created, we could call this the created spiritual, but there is one level higher than this, and it is the uncreated spiritual, and that is God himself. Remember the magicians, and that's capitalized, that spirit. Remember the magicians in Pharaoh's time? They thought they were working with the forces with you, you know, and they're into all this stuff, and Moses did it, and then we did it, and they think they're all tapping into some cosmic overmind or something, and then suddenly there's a creation miracle, the dust becomes lice, and it totally shocks them, and their statement is this is the finger of God.

There's something personal and scary, and it's transcending any manipulation of matter and energy on spiritual planes that we've ever heard of. This is not magic, this is personal, and it is scary. And God, I think, ran through all those things just to bust Egypt's gods one by one.

Anyway, with this in mind, that God actually works on a higher time, a transcendental time system, even to this one, I believe then that prophecy is given by science. God says, I will bring these things to pass. Classic examples is the, you know, God said you're going to be in the wilderness 400 years.

Well, he kept them in about 430, which is closer to 400 than 500 and 300, but it's not a hard and fast thing with God. You see, time, I'm always suspicious when people say, the world will end January the 3rd, 1987. I go, you know, what do you know? Science, God works.

Give me another example where he said a time, and then it never happened at all. Yes, yeah, yeah, or that, what about the universe? Classic one. 40 days, none of it will be destroyed.

The people repent, the whole lot of them repent. Jonah is the only one who wants it destroyed at the end of the repentance, and it's not destroyed until centuries later. I mean, it is destroyed, but not then.

It's the time doesn't matter to God. He can shift it around. Has it ever occurred to you, reading the scriptures, that maybe the disciples thought Jesus might return again in their lifetime? I think that, as a matter of fact, I believe the last 2,000 years has been the mercy of God.

I think that the disciples actually expected him to come back then, and it set up his millennial reign. And I think this has been an extension of the mercy of God. I think we're living in the last chapters of the book of Acts.

And God's allowed to do, is that all right for him? I mean, being sovereign God, is he allowed to do stuff like that? Is he allowed to extend things? Okay, give you a couple of these prophecies. Therefore, signs are the ones. Here's one key one with this we'll have to quit because time's going.

The prophecy concerning the city of Tyre is most intriguing. Prior to the event, by 260 years, this is in Ezekiel 26. We're not talking about a little futuristic look here of maybe 10 or a decade or so down.

It's hard enough for us to predict two decades what's going to happen. We're talking here, Ezekiel 26, of something that took place 260 years in the future. God, through Ezekiel, foretold the destruction of Tyre.

In detail, he said, the city would not only be destroyed, it would be leveled flat. And here's the weirdest bit of it. The stones and the timbers would be cast into the sea.

Now, who would ever destroy a city to such a level that they actually scrape the city flat and put all the bits in it? That's really destroying a city. Not only that, but the prophecy said that it would never be rebuilt. That site, major city, is Well Springs.

It's a fabulous place. It would never be rebuilt. It would become the place of spreading of net for fishermen.

And that's it. Now, what happened is that, and this is what actually happened, and the coast has changed now. The people on that city were sailors.

They were sea merchants, kind of pirate-type people. So they were attacked. They were challenged by Alexander the Great.

You give up, you surrender to me or not? And they said, phooey on you, Jack. And they all got in their boats and went over this island. And when Alexander tried to get them by sea, they blew them out of the water.

They were the best sailors around. Alexander didn't have a hope of a snowball in hell of getting them from there. So what he did was very simple.

He was no dumb cookie, was Alexander. He took the city of Tyre. He burned it to the ground.

He took all of the timber and the stones of the city and he plowed it into the sea. And he built a causeway on dry land and he marched over the sea and killed everybody on the island. He never messed with Alexander the Great.

And to this day, that's what it looks like. Not an island anymore. 260 years into the future, God described the destruction of a city and to this day, the historical site of Tyre has never been rebuilt.

They'd build another Tyre somewhere else, but not here. You know, it's a good place for fishing. A lot of people still spread their nets there.

To this day, millennia later. Now that is the kind of detail. We'll give you, how many, we got three minutes? Think, oh, two.

Ah-ha-ha! Let me just give you, I told you the 300 prophecies. I'll give you 10 of Jesus. The historically chronicled life of Christ that is estimated fulfilled over 300 Old Testament prophecies.

Critics say he deliberately arranged to fulfill these prophecies and they are correct, absolutely. Here are what he managed to arrange. He arranged it to be born in Bethlehem, Micah 5, 2, Matthew 2, 1, and 5. He arranged that Isaiah record precise details of his life on earth, chapters 7, 9, and 53, 700 years before he was born.

He had the writer of Psalm 22 describe his method of execution many centuries before the Romans introduced death by crucifixion to that area. Psalm 22, 16, Zechariah 13, 6, and John 19, 18. Four, he persuaded two thieves to be crucified with him, one on either side, and to be subsequently buried in a tomb reserved for the rich.

Isaiah 53, 9 to 12, Matthew 27, 38, 57 to 60. Five, he arranged that Judas would betray him for exactly 30 pieces of silver, Zechariah 11, 12, Matthew 26, 15. Six, he persuaded the chief priest to use his betrayal money to buy a specific plot of ground, Zechariah 11, 13, Matthew 27, 7. Seven, he also persuaded Roman soldiers just to fulfill prophecy, to thrust a spear into his side, divide his garments in four, and cast lots for his robe.

Psalm 22, 18, Zechariah 12, 10, John 19, 37, Matthew 27, 35, John 19, 23. Eight, he arranged that in his death agony they give him a drink of vinegar, Psalm 69, 21, Matthew 27, 34. Nine, he convinced the soldiers, as prophesied, they did not break his legs as they did with everybody else, as the custom.

Psalm 34, 20, John 19, 36, then 10, the classic arrangement of all, he arranged that on the third day after his death he would come to life again, convince over 500 witnesses he had truly risen from the dead. So completely did he convince many of these that with no hope for material gain and at the cost of their lives they set about to convince others. That's 10 of the 290 others.

Matthew 26, 56 says, but all these were done that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Now, those things are playgrounds. You could teach for a year and have a lot of fun on these things, but these are some of the historical evidences surrounding that whole third era.

Let's take a break.