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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Kenneth Avila

Ready to Give a Defense

Father in heaven, thank you for all of your many blessings.

And Father, today I just want to pray that you will be with me, and that you will lead me, and that you will hide me behind you, and that this message will reach the hearts of people out there.

You might not think so, but when I was in engineering school my senior year, we had a lot of circuits that we had to design, and I'd gotten used to the point where I'd have to spend hours before lab wiring up my circuits, and sometimes even after lab, because I couldn't finish the circuit or I couldn't demonstrate it to my professor, prove that it worked.

Sometimes even after lab, I'd have to stay late and work on my circuit.

But with this particular circuit, I had spent so much time on it that I had to take a picture of it.

And this is back in the day when we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have the cameras on the cell phones like what we have today.

So, you know, I pulled out my camera and, you know, took a picture and sent the film in to get it developed and came back and I still have it with me today.

And, But I was working on this particular circuit, and after I got it all done, I had it all wired up, and I had troubleshooted everything.

And with us engineering students, when we finally get done with our circuits, we have this moment of silent euphoria.

We were just so excited, oh, it's done, I can finally show this thing to the professor.

And I was like checking my inputs, changing the waveforms, looking at my outputs, and measuring everything on my circuit, and everything was looking beautiful.

And in comes in, he was a mechanical engineering student, and we had a common friend.

So he came into the lab, and I was just finishing everything up on my circuit, everything was looking really good.

He came into the lab and he was asking me for his friend.

I said, I don't know where he's at, but man, I just got done with my circuit.

And I said, yeah, see, look, I can change my waveform here and the output comes out just right.

Look at these signals coming over here and the signals are coming out just perfect over here and he was like he was listening very intently and he he looked at me and then he looked down at my circuit and then he looked back at me and he goes dude nothing's moving just walked away and you know sometimes that's how it is with people in our lives.

We show them the scriptures, we talk to them about Christianity, about our life experience, and they look at 1 thing and they say, dude, nothing's moving, it ain't working.

So, I wanted to bring up this quote over here from Ellen White.

It was actually a couple of weeks ago in our Tuesday night Bible study.

By the way, I'm going to pull a little Carlos Moretta here because he's always like plugging Chubb Club all the time.

But I want to plug the Bible studies, the weekly Bible studies that we have over here.

If you guys like Advent Hope, you really should come to the weekly Bible study.

It's like a little miniature Advent Hope and you get to meet some of the people that come over here that you only see weekly you get to meet some of them.

I go to the 1 regularly on Tuesday night and but we have others all week long so yeah come come and join us there.

So the quote here by Ellen White, we just read this a couple of weeks in our Bible study, so we've been going through the steps to Christ.

And so here in the chapter on doubt, Ellen White says, God never asks us to believe without giving sufficient evidence upon which to base our faith.

His existence, his character, the truthfulness of his words are all established by testimony that appeals to our reason.

Yet God has never removed the possibility of doubt.

Our faith must rest upon evidence, not demonstration.

Those who wish to doubt will have opportunity, while those who really desire to know the truth will find plenty of evidence upon which to rest their faith.

And like my mechanical engineering friend, I could show him everything, but yet he could focus in on 1 some particular point on my circuit and say, hey, nothing's working.

And that's how it is with people that we run into our lives.

They will focus in on some little particular issue and not accept the truth that you're giving to them.

Since we're going to be spending lots of time with the Bible here today, we're going to go ahead and start first with the Bible and just kind of scratch the surfaces of the Bible.

So how can we know that the Bible is credible, reliable, and pertinent to our lives today?

And I just want to hit on just a few points over here.

So first of all, the Bible, it doesn't really sugarcoat anything about it.

It's very, very unique in terms of the spiritual writing that talks honestly about things that happened to people a long time ago.

A long time ago, if you had the skills to write, you probably were employed by a very powerful person or a king, and they wanted you to write positive things about them, right?

We always like to have people write good things about us, and that's what they wanted the writers to do, but the writers of the Bible, they didn't sugarcoat anything.

All the mistakes of people, all their evil plots, their evil desires, their wrongdoing are there just as well as all the good parts.

So I take hope in that, or I take credence in that, because here the Bible is being honest with itself, right?

Another point is that it's diverse over time.

So it was written over a long period of time.

There's actually a number of little diversity points here.

It was written by more than 40 different people.

These people, they all came from different backgrounds.

We have Moses, who was a political leader, Joshua, a general, Solomon King, Amos the Shepherd, all these people from all these different backgrounds, all these people, different people, many of them did not know each other and written over a long period of time.

And I believe that this shows us that, but yet the Bible is, points to Jesus continually.

It points, it has a consistent thought, it has a consistent message.

And that is amazing for a book that's with all this diversity brought up to it.

Oh yeah, different subject matters, all of you as well, too, and vetted.

This book has been able, People have studied it for hundreds of years and it's been studied by critics who are looking to find a mistake in the Bible.

But yet today, hundreds of years later, they can't really point anything against us in the Bible.

They can't point to some fault that's in the Bible.

We can also look at non-biblical sources for Jesus.

So these are sources that are not found in the Bible.

We find that also he was a teacher, that the followers believed that he performed healings and other miracles, that he was rejected by the Jewish leaderships.

The followers believed that he resurrected after dying by crucifixion.

And that by 64 AD that there was multitudes of Christians in Rome.

But all this evidence we get from non-biblical sources over here.

Let's start turning into something that is more focused in on the topic for right now.

So I'm not talking about prophecies here where a couple gets together and somebody says, oh, I'm gonna prophesy that you guys are gonna have kids.

I mean, that's not the kind of prophecies that we're talking about here.

We're talking, in the case of Jesus, we're talking about prophecies that are hundreds of years before Jesus came about.

And not only that, they were prophecy that was specific about many events inside of his life over here.

And so if you could open up your Bible, let's turn to Micah 5 verse 2.

So the first prophecy I want to bring up is that he was born in Bethlehem.

And let me pull out my Bible here as well too.

And by the way, this list right here will be real convenient if you want to write it down.

So if you don't have these verses that talk about prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament and then the corresponding fulfillment in the New Testament, yeah, you should jot these down.

But here, Micah 5, verse 2, it says here, But you, Bethlehem, Ephraim, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the 1 to be ruler in Israel, whose going forth are of old, from everlasting.

And then we find the fulfillment of this in Matthew 2.6.

And actually here we're going to start off with verse 5.

But This is taken from the story of the wise man that came from the east.

So here the wise man came from the east at Jesus' birth.

So they said to him, speaking of the wise men talking to King Herod, in Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet, but you, Bethlehem in the land of Judea, are not the least amongst the rulers of Judah, for out of you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.

Another prophecy is that a messenger will precede him.

So Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament.

And here Malachi is saying, "'Behold, I send my messenger.

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