Participants:
Series Code: ICJ
Program Code: ICJ190009B
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00:01 So the text in Isaiah gives us a great insight as to
00:04 what went on in heaven and why we are in this 00:07 terrible mess that we're all in because of the awfulness of sin. 00:12 Let's continue in Isaiah 14:12-14. 00:17 It says, "O Lucifer, son of the morning. 00:18 How are you cut down to the ground, 00:21 that weakened the nations!" 00:22 God never meant for the nations to be weakened. 00:24 He never meant for death and sorrow, disease, 00:27 and all these things that we see everywhere, war and horrors. 00:32 "For you have said in your heart..." 00:34 Now that's interesting. 00:35 That's a very important point. 00:37 You see, God takes a risk when He makes 00:40 a human being or a free moral agent. 00:43 As I mentioned the other day, I used that little illustration 00:46 about your children being robots, would you 00:49 choose for them to be robots? 00:50 No. Because when they say, "I love you," 00:52 you don't want to be listening to a computer. 00:55 No, you want your child to say that because 00:58 he really loves you. 01:01 So God takes a risk. 01:03 And He took a risk with Lucifer and all the angels. 01:05 He took a risk with all of us. 01:07 We have the power of choice, we can choose. 01:11 One person called this, the temptation from within. 01:14 Because you have the power to choose, 01:17 you can choose evil. 01:19 And Lucifer was not made a devil. 01:22 He was made a perfect, powerful, wonderful, 01:25 glorious being. 01:27 But because of his internal choices 01:29 and because yielding to that internal temptation, 01:32 he made a devil out of himself. 01:36 He destroyed himself. 01:38 That's why those sad words, "How are you fallen from heaven, 01:41 O Lucifer, son of the morning. 01:43 How are you cut down to the ground." 01:46 Because he said in his heart, the text says, 01:49 "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God." 01:52 Above the angels of God. 01:53 In other words, he wanted God's place. 01:58 Now a lot of people are not going to like me for this, 01:59 and that's okay, I love you just the same, 02:04 I know our world is filled with competition. 02:07 But heaven is not going to be filled with competition. 02:10 Heaven is going to be filled with cooperation. 02:14 It was the devil and his evil angels that invented 02:18 this competition. 02:19 You know, the board rooms of America and around the world, 02:22 they get, "What can we do to knock this one down 02:24 so we can put ourselves up?" 02:26 I know we live in that world. 02:29 But I'm looking forward to a heaven 02:31 where nobody is coveting anyone else, 02:39 no one wants to compete. 02:41 But Satan began to covet God's throne. 02:44 But he's a created being. 02:46 God is not created. 02:48 God always has been, always will be. 02:50 Satan couldn't say that. 02:51 He had a beginning. God has no beginning. 02:54 And God is love to His very core. 02:57 I'm glad that God never changes. 03:00 Because His love will never change. 03:02 His unselfish love. 03:04 So he says, "I will also sit on the mount of the congregation 03:07 on the sides of the north." 03:09 "I will be like," he says, "the Most High." 03:15 He wanted competition. 03:17 And so he went about it very cunningly 03:20 to get as many of the angels as he could get on his side. 03:23 And he had a very appealing line. 03:26 And I want to get down to what that line is. 03:28 You cannot run the universe without law. 03:33 Now I mentioned some of this before, 03:34 but I'm going to keep coming back to this theme. 03:36 Because I think our world doesn't understand it. 03:39 People think freedom is the ability to overthrow law. 03:42 Well yes, there are sometimes oppressive laws that man made. 03:45 But we're not talking about man's laws here. 03:47 We're talking about God's laws. 03:50 God created the universe. 03:52 And when I get to that subject on evolution, 03:54 I think I mentioned that earlier, 03:55 we're going to talk more about this. 03:57 But God runs the universe with finely tuned laws. 04:03 That's the way He makes it work. 04:05 That's the way life is possible. 04:08 Satan came up with another idea. 04:11 He says, "I don't believe that." 04:12 In other words, he didn't trust God. 04:15 He says, "No, I can get along. 04:17 I can live without obeying Your laws, God. 04:20 You know, we angels, we're pretty intelligent. 04:24 We can add and subtract, we know what's going on. 04:27 Why should we always have to be subject to Your laws?" 04:31 Now here comes the punch. 04:34 "No, we should be free. Free." 04:40 In other words, "In the name of freedom, 04:43 we want not to obey Your laws." 04:46 But those laws are essential to life. 04:50 Satan, nor the evil angels, are going to survive this. 04:54 They're all going to die. 04:56 Just like the whole human race is dying. 04:59 They're dying because they're ignoring the good, gracious, 05:04 essential laws of God. 05:07 So when God made the Ten Commandments, 05:09 He didn't sit up there and say, "Well, I kind of like this one. 05:11 Well, I kind of like..." No, no. 05:12 They're all essential. 05:14 You can't do away with any of them. 05:17 If you break any of them, you're going to undermine life itself. 05:22 And by the way, there's no freedom, 05:25 there's no freedom in being dead. 05:29 Have you ever gone to a graveyard 05:31 and look at all the people that are buried there 05:34 and say, "Oh, don't these people have lots of freedom?" 05:36 No, they don't have any freedom. 05:39 Most of the people that went there 05:41 would rather not have gone there. 05:44 And most of us are trying to stay out of there 05:47 because we like freedom. 05:51 But death doesn't bring freedom. 05:54 And sin brings death. 05:58 Now I want to say this clearly, 06:01 because people have a hard time getting it. 06:04 You can't play around with sin, 06:07 the transgression of God's law, breaking His law. 06:11 Just like you can't, if you had the power to start 06:14 shoving the planets around, you'd destroy 06:16 life on earth very quickly. 06:18 Shove the moon around, you destroy life. 06:21 You can't play around with that kind of thing. 06:23 Because breaking the law of God is fatal. 06:29 It's always lethal. 06:32 It will always destroy. 06:36 And Satan believed his own lie. 06:40 And he sold it to a lot of the angels, 06:43 that somehow they could have freedom, 06:47 they could be free by breaking God's law 06:51 and not being subject to His wisdom and His love. 06:55 God never does anything unless He does it in unselfish love. 07:01 So this is why Satan hates the woman, the church. 07:06 This woman, by the way. 07:08 This one that's dressed with the lights of the universe. 07:13 She's in harmony with the universe. 07:15 The rest of the universe. 07:17 Because Satan and his evil angels were kicked out of heaven 07:20 and he's making a huge problem down here for all of us. 07:24 But the Bible is very clear why he's angry. 07:27 And listen to it. Here it is in Revelation 12:17. 07:33 "And the dragon was enraged with the woman, 07:36 and he went to make war..." 07:39 There it is, just like he did in heaven. 07:42 "...went to make war with the rest of her offspring..." 07:46 In other words, we're talking about time. 07:49 This is not just a moment in time. 07:51 This is all of Christian history. 07:52 And this rest of her offspring, or remnant 07:55 as it's sometimes called, are those in the end of time, 07:59 in the time of the end, when the mark of the beast 08:02 and all of these great temptations are starting 08:06 to take their toll on humanity. 08:10 Here, this woman keeps the commandments of God 08:15 and has the testimony of Jesus. 08:17 There it is. 08:18 That's why he hates God's church. 08:20 He hates God's true church 08:23 because it keeps the commandments of God. 08:25 He hates every Christian who keeps the commandments of God. 08:29 He hates every Christian that has the testimony of Jesus. 08:34 By the way, the ark of the covenant was often called, 08:37 the ark of the testimony. 08:39 The Ten Commandments were often called, the testimony. 08:42 And Jesus here is also fulfilling 08:46 those Ten Commandments. 08:48 I'll talk about that in just a few moments, a little later. 08:50 But Jesus is really the Ten Commandments in living life. 08:57 They have the testimony of Jesus. 08:59 Yes, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. 09:02 It's the Spirit through the prophets, 09:04 the Holy Spirit through the prophets 09:06 that teaches us what God's law is all about 09:10 and why it's good for us. 09:13 As you know, the psalmist would tell us how wonderful... 09:16 In fact, the longest psalm in the whole Bible, 09:18 the whole longest chapter in the Bible is a psalm all about 09:23 the law of God and why it brings life, 09:26 and why this testimony of God's character 09:30 is so important to all of us. 09:33 So how did we get into this mess? 09:36 Well, you know the story of the fall and the temptation. 09:40 And that's exactly what Satan went after Eve. 09:43 When she was standing there in front of that tree, 09:46 he says to her, 09:48 "Has God said you can't eat of the trees of the garden?" 09:51 "Oh no," she says. 09:52 "No, we can eat of all the trees of the garden except this one. 09:56 But the day we eat of that, we'll die." 09:59 And Satan cunningly says, "You won't die." 10:03 Contradicted God. 10:06 And then he says to her, "God knows..." 10:11 He cast doubt on God's love. 10:14 He cast doubt on God's goodness, on God's truth. 10:18 "God knows that in the day that you eat of it, 10:22 you'll be like Him." 10:26 That's what Satan wanted. 10:27 He wanted God's immortality. He wanted to be God. 10:32 And so he used the same temptation now to Eve. 10:36 He uses it externally. 10:39 And you know the story. 10:42 That's why we're all here. 10:44 She stands now in front of Adam, her hands filled with the fruit, 10:48 the forbidden fruit. 10:49 Adam is faced with a terrible decision. 10:52 Satan is now using Eve as his emissary. 10:55 You've got to be careful who you associate with. 10:58 You want to make sure that Satan doesn't use your friends 11:02 to influence you in the wrong way. 11:04 Even those you love. 11:06 And there is Eve, standing with the forbidden fruit, 11:10 in all of her beauty, in all of her loveliness. 11:12 Adam loves her. 11:14 But Adam has to make a choice. 11:16 Is he going to trust the God of heaven 11:21 who gave him Eve, or is he going to trust himself? 11:28 Who is he going to love the most, 11:30 the Giver or the gift? 11:36 Now we can understand a little better why Jesus said, 11:40 "If you love father or mother more than Me, 11:42 if you love husband or wife more than Me, 11:44 if you love children more than Me, 11:45 you're not worthy of Me." 11:47 It's not because Jesus was trying to be mean or arbitrary. 11:51 It's because He's the source of love. 11:54 The greatest security that anybody has, 11:58 that children have, or a husband has, or a wife has, 12:01 is if their parents or their spouse loves the Lord 12:05 more than they love them. 12:09 That gives them great security 12:12 for God's goodness in their life. 12:15 This war in heaven, this great controversy, 12:20 is about selfishness versus unselfish love. 12:26 That's why we had to have a Savior. 12:28 The Savior who is so full of unselfish love. 12:31 He came here, and He's the only one who has ever done it, 12:34 but He lived a life of unselfish love. 12:39 I mean, don't you think you can trust Him? 12:42 Don't you think you should trust your life to Him? 12:45 Why would you just want to practice a few of the pleasures 12:48 of unselfish love only to lose life eternal? 12:52 Not to speak of the challenges here. 12:55 I want to appeal to you. 12:56 That war is raging in every human being's heart. 12:59 Are you going to be selfish or unselfish? 13:02 With the power of the Lord Jesus, you can become 13:06 an unselfish person. 13:08 A person that moves from selfishness to unselfishness. 13:12 That war can be won in your heart. 13:15 It can be won in your heart because the Savior, 13:17 if He comes into your heart by faith, He wins. 13:22 He turns you into a being of unselfish love. |
Revised 2019-07-31