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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Clifford Goldstein

Called By Name

I grew up in a secular Jewish home, very secular.

And I guess the essence, like, for how we would celebrate the Jewish holidays, You could boil it down to, they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.

And I was raised very secular and very much, on 1 level it was very modernistic, you know, science is the final word on everything, you know, everything science says it, that's it.

But on the other hand it was very much postmodern, very relativistic in a moral sense.

There were no absolute truths, there was no 1 Archimedean point where you could sit and look at everything, you know, you have your truth and that's your truth.

You could have your truth and that's your truth.

And it didn't matter if they were polar opposites because that was just your truth and your context and your culture, that was yours.

So there was no overarching point to look down and to judge whether it was true or not.

And this was pretty much how I was raised, this was how I was educated, and it was how I passionately believed.

Now at the same time, I was always somewhat of a seeker, just wondered about things.

And I always had an interest in philosophy.

And I'll never forget, I was 20 years old.

I was sitting in a pizza parlor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.

And I'm sitting there, I'm eating a pizza, drinking a non-adventist beverage, and I'm reading a philosopher.

And it's funny because when I read the man today, I can't think of a thing the man says that he gets right.

I think the guy, Spinoza, if you know the name Spinoza, I can't think of 1 thing the man said, for the most part, that I don't think is sheer idiocy.

But he said something, I was reading a book about him, and they said something that changed my life, right there in the pizza parlor.

The context was something to the effect of in order to find out, in order to live the best possible life, You needed to find out the reason why you were here and then live your life accordingly.

Okay, well, for what some reason, those words went into my mind like a prefrontal lobe lobotomy that just went in and just zoomed in that instant.

All that relativism, all that postmodernism, all that just in a split second, it got wiped out.

Because I thought, look, here was the pizza sitting on the table in front of me.

Now, you could have had A thousand different people with a thousand different views on how the pizza got there.

Maybe they thought the god Marduk created the pizza.

Maybe they thought aliens dropped it from a flying saucer.

I mean, they could have started religions based on their view of the pizza, how the pizza got there.

You could, you know, they could have been willing to kill or to die, whatever it was, but the fact was there was the pizza on the table.

You could have had a thousand different people, 10000 different people, and maybe every last 1 of them was wrong.

Maybe nobody knew how the pizza got there.

Maybe it was conceivable that nobody could ever know.

The issue was, to me at that moment, there was a pizza.

Somewhere out there, something had to explain the origin of the pizza.

How it got there, why it got there, what the purpose was, if there was a purpose.

I mean, putting aside the fact that maybe nobody could ever know, I wasn't talking epistemology here, that's a total separate thing.

Something had to explain the pizza and that would have been the truth about the pizza.

And in that moment, I'm telling you, I was 20 years old and it just suddenly hit me.

There's a world, there's a universe, there's something out there just as the pizza was there.

And just as something had to explain the pizza.

And whatever that was, that was the truth about the pizza at that moment at 20 years old.

At that moment, it hit me right there in the pizza parlor.

And whatever that was, whatever that, that was the truth that, so it was only, wow, truth existed.

And if anybody would have looked, they wouldn't have noticed that I walked out of that pizza parlor.

I can still remember walking through the streets of Gainesville, Florida.

I don't want to use the word sacred, that's the wrong word because I wasn't thinking God.

But suddenly when it hit me, that truth, I mean, I don't know how I could possibly be wrong about this.

Okay, whatever it was, an illusion, fine, let it be an illusion.

I suddenly realized I can't be wrong about this.

I could be wrong about what I think it is.

But it suddenly hit me that truth had to exist.

And I remember I felt it so strong, I felt the pain.

I felt the pain in my chest thinking, if it were humanly possible, because again, my realization that truth had to exist, it no way deductively followed that I or anyone could know it.

One's epistemology, 1 is how we know things, another ontology, the nature of being.

The fact that I suddenly realized it had to exist was totally separate from Whether I or anyone could know but I remember thinking to myself and I felt it.

I felt this pain I remember thinking to myself if it were humanly possible.

I Thought if it were humanly possible to know this truth what explained the universe?

Why the famous question somebody wants to ask, why is there something instead of nothing?

I remember thinking to myself, if it were humanly possible, I thought I wanted to know it.

I didn't care where it led me, what it cost me, what I had to suffer, what I had to give up.

I thought if I could know it, I wanted to know it no matter what.

I was 20 years old and all I know is about 4 years later of all the different paths I could have gone on.

I know I went through my Marxist phase for a while, and this phase, and the gurus would come to town, and I'd hang with the gurus.

And I've got to just got me we'd be in bars and I'd be everyone be drinking and I'd be wondering you think there's a God or whatever and they said give Cliff another drink and so on.

But it was like of all the different ways I could have gone, of all the different paths that I could have gone on, all I know is I wound up a Seventh-day Adventist.

Now it's remarkable for a number of reasons because I only knew 1 Seventh-day Adventist growing up.

In fact, about a month ago, somebody from the GC was in a church that, This has a happy ending.

The guy came back to the Lord, but about a month or 2 ago, a friend of mine was in a church, and they said, you work at the GC?

And they said, yeah, you know Cliff Goldstein?

They said, yeah, well, I used to be his dope dealer.

And the other reason that made it remarkable for me to become an Avenist was there were 2 kinds of people in my life I used to hate.

I used to hate Christians, and I'm serious, I used to hate vegetarians.

I was so carnivorous, I was so into eating meat, that when I would meet vegetarians, I would mock them, I would, you know, everything I could do to keep from spitting on their veggies.

You know, it was, but my, my animosity, though, towards Christianity was a lot deeper seeded than my animosity towards vegetarians, because even though I wasn't raised in a practicing home, for secular Jews, their religion is the Holocaust.

I mean, I could have named you every Nazi death camp.

I couldn't have told you the 10 Commandments.

I mean, they really mess you up with this.

They messed the whole generation, the post-Holocaust.

And I grew up very, but just about Christianity in general.

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Called By Name

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