GYC 2009: unASHAMED

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Clifford Goldstein:  Unashamed to be an Adventist

Clifford Goldstein

Called by Name

Father, I thank you for the opportunity to be here.

I consider it a privilege and I just pray that your spiritual guide and what I say, in the name of Jesus I pray, amen.

You know, I was raised in a Jewish home, but...

Of course, that 1 simple thing I'd forget.

Even though I was raised in a Jewish home, Goldstein, it was really a very secular home and my folks were pretty much very secular, didn't believe in God and we really never talked about it much.

And I was very much raised post-modern, maybe not even knowing the term, and I was basically raised with the idea that there is no absolute truth.

You could have your truth and that was your truth.

And it didn't matter if You looked at them logically and they contradicted each other because there was no sort of Archimedean point.

There was no point that you could stand above and ultimately judge.

And this was the way I was raised, this is the way I was educated, and this is what I strongly, strongly believed.

Now, I don't know what it was from the time I was young, I always had an interest in philosophy and I had an interest in some of these questions and I used to do a fair amount of reading of philosophy and I'll never forget I was about 20 years old, 21 years old and I was sitting in a pizza parlor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

And I was eating a pizza, drinking, let's just say, a non-adventist beverage, and I was reading a philosopher.

And if I can't think of anybody who I think has got it all wrong now, I'd say it was Spinoza.

But I read this guy and he said something that changed my life.

I'm reading him and I'm sitting there and he said, in order to live the most perfect life upon the earth, you need to find out the reason why you're here and live your life accordingly.

Well, for some reason, well now I know the reason, but back then, but anyway, those words went in my mind like a prefrontal lobe lobotomy.

It just took like a shiv and it went right in.

And suddenly all that subjectivism, all that relativism, all that stuff that I had been raised on, in an instant, just got wiped out.

Because it was like, here, I was sitting there at the table.

There was this pizza sitting on the table in front of me.

Now, you could have had 1, 000 different people.

They could have each 1 had their own explanation for how the pizza got there.

Some might have thought the god Marduk created the pizza.

Some might have thought aliens came and dropped it in a flying saucer.

Some could have believed that it evolved out of the ground.

You could have had a thousand different people with a thousand different views, views that they would die for or kill for.

They could have started religions over their belief on how the pizza got there, and maybe every last 1 of those views were wrong.

But it didn't change the fact that there was a pizza on the table.

And somewhere out there in the universe, somewhere out there, there had to be an explanation for the origin and purpose of the pizza.

And that explanation of whatever it was, wherever it was, that was the truth about the pizza.

And at that moment, I mean, I can't still, I never forget, I was 21 years old, I'll never forget, at that moment, it just suddenly hit me.

I stepped back from the pizza, and I just looked around, and I thought, oh, here I am.

And in this, and that moment it hit me, just as there had to be a truth about the pizza, somewhere out there, there had to be the truth, the truth that explained the existence of the world, the existence of the universe, that just explained everything.

And whatever that was, that was the truth with a capital T.

And I can't tell you what an earth-shattering...

Anybody would have looked and just would have seen some kids sitting there.

You know, they had what was an earth-shattering moment for me.

And you could have thought, oh, what's the big deal?

You know, Mickey Mouse could have told you that.

But had you not been raised the way I was raised, you couldn't understand what a life-changing moment that was for me.

And I'll never forget, it was 19, oh it was the mid-1970s.

I was, I said I was 21 years old and I'll never forget it was at night and I was walking through the streets of Gainesville, Florida.

And I'm walking through the streets, and I'm realizing that truth had to exist.

And I'll never forget, I just felt this burning.

This was almost painful because I thought, if it were possible, because the fact that I realized that truth had to exist didn't automatically mean you couldn't deductively pull from that, that I would ever know what that truth was.

I mean, 1 didn't automatically flow into the other.

But at that moment, I suddenly realized that's because I knew truth had to exist.

I thought to myself, if it were humanly possible, if it were humanly possible, because it was almost, I can't describe it, it just felt like, I just felt like I had, I thought, if it were humanly possible for me to know what this truth was, I thought to myself, 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 mean, I can still remember, it was almost painful, this burning inside me.

Well, all I know is about 3 years later, and I've gone into getting into all sorts of different things, you know, gains, and I went through my Marxist phase, and I went through this and that, and of all the different ways I could have gone, About 3 years later, I ended up becoming a seventh-day Adventist.

Now, that's remarkable for a lot of reasons, because, first of all, growing up in my life, well, first of all, I only knew 1 seventh-day Adventist my whole life.

I only knew 1 Adventist, and we used to smoke pot together.

I probably won't have time, but you know, it takes, you gotta go about 30 years later to get a happy ending for that, but that story does have a happy ending.

But plus 2, in my life, there were 2 kinds of people I used to hate.

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

I mean, I was so carnivorous, I was so into eating meat that, you know, I'd meet vegetarians, it was all I could do to keep myself from spitting in their veggies.

But anyway, now my animosity though towards Christianity was a little deeper seeded though.

Because even though I wasn't raised a religious Jew, I was raised a Jew.

For most Jews, secular Jews, that's their religion, the Holocaust.

And I was just so bitter over all the persecution done to the Jews in the name of Christ.

You go through the centuries of crusaders rolled into Jerusalem, dragged all the Jews, put them in a synagogue, burned the synagogue to the ground where the Jews are inside alive, why these Christians sang hymns to Jesus, you know, and the Holocaust happened in all these Christian countries, people that went to church, you know, and then with all this, and I was so hostile against Christianity.

There used to be this hellfire and brimstone preacher named Jed Smock.

And my kids heard me tell this story for years.

And then 1 day, I got on YouTube and showed him Jed Smock and the kids, students harassing him.

But anyway, this preacher used to come out on the campus and he'd stand out there with a Bible in his hand and he'd just start preaching hellfire and brimstone.

Well, I would, used to get in the center of the circle.

I mean, I could have gotten arrested for what I did to this guy.

And I mean, he used to, if he damned my soul to hell once, he damned my soul to hell a thousand times.

He used to put his hands on me and speak in tongues, try to cast demons out of me.

And I'd start drooling and writhing on the ground.

Eventually my friends nicknamed me Heckle.

Because I said, what are you doing out there harassing that guy?

The Fifth and Final Kingdom

Again, Father, I thank you for the privilege to be here, and I pray that some good will come out of this and faith will be affirmed.

How many of you here heard my conversion story?

All right, I'm just going to very quickly, I want to make a point here.

For those of you that didn't, I had a very, and those of you who heard it, You'll notice there was nothing logical, rational, really intellectual about my conversion story.

It was totally personal, totally subjective, totally experiential.

You know, it's somewhat, makes me think of somewhat, Though I don't like to compare myself to the Apostle Paul in any way, shape, or form, think about Saul of Tarsus.

What did Saul of Tarsus' study get him to do?

Then Saul's going along, going along, and kaboom!

He has this, I don't want to use the word irrational.

I like the word trans-rational experience.

He's kind of pulled out of the world, his worldview, given a revelation of Jesus, supernaturally, and popped back in, okay?

And that is exactly, for those of you who heard my conversion story.

It was purely on an experience that I got converted.

Anyway, The next day, after I burned that novel, after I had that experience, I went back to the health food store where the guy had given me the great controversy.

And I told him what happened, you know, and I said I wanted to study the Bible.

And they said, what do you want to study?

And I said, I want to study Bible prophecy.

And we did a Bible study on Daniel 2, My first Bible study.

And we went through the sequence of the kingdoms.

Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, the breakup of Rome.

And I'll never forget when we came to The feet and the toes, you know, of iron and clay.

And the text said, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men, but they shall not cleave 1 to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

I never forget, you know, this all symbolic of modern Europe.

I never forget, I sat there and I burst into tears and I said, it's all true.

I mean, here in my hands, here in my hands was powerful evidence, not just for the existence of God, but for his foreknowledge and his sovereignty.

Here on the page before me was logical, rational, objective.

Great, was logical, rational, objective, public evidence for belief.

See, with Daniel 2, my experience of the night before was now underpinned by a platform.

A platform that means as solid, as rational, as faith-affirming now as it was almost 30 years ago.

And see, that's what I want to look at, because, you know, experiences...

You know, any religion that says the most important commandment is to love God with all your heart and all your soul, it's got to be experiential.

I mean, this is nothing if there isn't an experience there.

Okay, but you know, but experience is as important as they are.

That's why it's important to have an ongoing experience with the God, an ongoing relationship with the Lord.

But you know, sometimes we don't always feel so spiritual.

Sometimes our, you know, experience isn't so great.

Sometimes we don't feel that close to God.

But see, the bottom line is, but no matter how I feel or the experiences I might have, Daniel 2 is always there, never changing, with the solid and logical objective reasons for faith, you know, in other words, it's objective logical reasons for faith when you might not feel so full of faith.

And I want to take a little look at Daniel 2, at some elements of Daniel 2, in some ways that you might have not thought about it before.

Because even to this day, after 30 years, that chapter remains a pillar for me in helping me, you know, show that I've got logical, rational reasons for what I believe.

Now, if you really read the story, the narrative of Daniel 2 itself, you know, it's not exactly brimming with rationality, okay.

Now, this king has a dream and he can't remember the dream and he tells the wise men to tell him the dream, and if they don't tell him the dream, he's gonna kill them all, and so the Jewish boys go home and they pray, and God tells them what it is, and they go back to the king, and they tell him the story, they tell him what the dream, Daniel tells him, and he interprets it, and they kind of all live happily ever after.

I mean that's sort of hardly the logic of geometry.

However, logic and reason exude from the prophecy itself.

How could a man, 5, 600 years before Christ, unfold the history of the world up through, you know, all through those centuries, up through today, were he not divinely inspired?

Without supernatural intervention, how could he have gone through the ages, through millennia, depicting these things as powerfully and as actively, you know, as he did.

Daniel, about 600 years before Christ, lays down the history of the world.

Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, the division of Rome, you know, divided into the nations of modern Europe today.

I mean, we're talking about 5, 600 years before Christ.

You know, we're not talking about either some flighty phenomenon, you know, I mean Joseph Smith had his magic goggles, you know, which enabled him to translate the Book of Mormon, you know, or not talk about some young girls claiming to have had visions from the Virgin Mary, you know, and so on.

We're talking, think about this, we're talking about something as firm as public and unchanging as world history itself.

Think about it, as human beings living in this world, if God wanted to give us a solid, firm, unmovable, rational platform.

What firmer, broader, larger, more immutable platform for faith could he give us than the history of the world itself?

We're talking about world history itself.

I mean, God could blow up the world tomorrow.

There'll have always been a Babylon, always been a Medo-Persia, always been a Greece, always been a Rome, had been the breakup of the nations of modern Europe.

What I'm saying is, here we are as humans, limited to this planet.

What firmer, solid, unmovable foundation could he have given us than the history of the world itself and locked it in the past, which is immutable itself?

Now, it's so powerful, it's so strong, that folks want, have been trying for centuries, for centuries people have been trying to get around it, because they can see the power and the logic there and the evidence that is for the God of the Bible.

You know, I mean, if you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in the supernatural, if you don't want to believe in the God of the Bible, then you're gonna have to do something about Daniel 2, okay?

Because it's very powerful, logical evidence for not just the existence of God, but for the existence of the God of the Bible and for his sovereignty and his foreknowledge.

And so people for a long time have been trying to do just that.

And 1 of the most entrenched Beliefs that I can pretty much guarantee, I can guarantee you could pick up almost any Bible commentary in the world today.

Any Bible commentary written in the past 50, 80 years.

And they will give you basically what they call the Maccabean hypothesis.

And the Maccabean hypothesis claims that the book wasn't written when it says it was written, but was written many centuries later.

It was written after the events themselves.

I'm telling you, this is the vast, vast majority view.

Almost every commentary you will find on the book of Daniel teaches that we as Seventh-day Adventists, We are not totally alone, but we're almost 1 of the few clinging to this.

And even among with all the other nonsense in the church, we even got some of this nonsense even in it as well.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Father again, we just come to you now in the name of Jesus, and I just ask for your presence, and ask for your spirit to guide us in this final session of today.

It's tough because my voice is going and I don't know what the problem is.

I want to start out with these verses, famous verses in 1 Corinthians 15, 12-19.

And it's basically Paul is talking about the resurrection.

And basically in those verses he's saying that if Christ is not raised from the dead, then our faith is in vain, and we of all people are most miserable.

In other words, in these verses, He's really emphatic about the importance of the resurrection of Jesus.

He's saying everything else is in vain, our faith is in vain, and there's no ambivalence here.

There's none of this, you know, ah, you know, he hasn't caught the spirit of our age where it's, you know, well you believe what you want or whatever.

Either Christ was raised from the dead or He wasn't.

If He wasn't, our faith is a lie, we're living a lie, everything is in vain.

And it's interesting too, that Paul is talking about this, Paul is talking about this with this big emphasis on the resurrection.

Even with the death of Jesus, Paul is adamant about the importance of the resurrection.

It's almost like as if Christ's death and as adamant as he is about Christ's death without the resurrection, Christ's death is meaningless.

So it seems very clear that when I read my Bible that the resurrection of Jesus is crucial to the Christian faith.

In a sense, the cross without the resurrection.

Paul's saying in first Corinthians, is useless.

So in other words, if he wasn't resurrected from the dead, everything is in vain.

And see, you know, it's not that big of a deal, and when so, it happens to be you.

I mean, for the Romans to crucify somebody, Romans to crucify a Jew, was, you know, no big deal back then.

As I said, it was a big deal if you happen to be the 1 being crucified, but you know, in the span of things, but it's the resurrection of the dead from Jesus that makes all the difference in the world, and as no matter how much emphasis Paul has on the gospel and Christ's death and justification by faith and salvation by faith alone, those verses in Corinthians, if the dead aren't resurrected, If Jesus wasn't resurrected, we aren't resurrected, and our faith is matia, I believe is the Greek word.

Sit there and say Christ's death ultimately is meaningless for us, if there wasn't the resurrection of the dead.

So I guess the question is what evidence do we really have though for the resurrection of Jesus?

As I say, you know, it's 1 thing for the, believe the Romans crucify a Jew.

I mean, you know, they crucified lots of Jews.

But for someone to be resurrected from the dead, and I think of course you say the first answer is, well, we believe it because it's in the scriptures.

Okay, well for a lot of people that's just not good enough.

And so do we have any historical evidence?

What is the evidence that we have to buttress our faith?

Because you know the Bible says that just shall live by faith.

And I believe that faith could be, it's not a blind faith.

I have to live by faith in a lot of things.

You'd be surprised as to how many things you really have to take on faith, how little we know.

And my Christian faith, my Christian belief is no exception, but it's not a blind faith.

I have some very, very good reasons for believing in the things that I believe in.

If they were foolproof, then I wouldn't need faith.

But I told you, if you heard earlier, you need faith.

2 plus 2 equals 4 is built on certain assumptions that ultimately you cannot prove.

This was a work of a great mathematician in the 20th century named Kurt Gödel.

He completely kicked out the entire foundations of mathematics which people once believed was the absolute certain truth.

So if you're gonna kick out the foundations of math, you know, it's, if you gotta take math on faith and, you know, things about God, you know, or could, You know, it's not such a big stretch.

But anyway, I want to talk about some of the reasons for the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence for the resurrection because I never really thought about it until I got into it.

Then I thought, wow, wow, that's powerful.

And I want to begin with a story from C.S.

I mean, screw tape letters are the closest thing I've ever seen to inspiration outside of real inspiration.

He told a story about from his agnostic days.

He was teaching at Cambridge, classics, and he was in the room with a bunch of the teachers, other classics professors, and they're probably sitting around between classes, you know, having a smoke and drinking some coffee and chatting.

And 1 of the professors says to him, he says to him something to the effect of, well see us old chap.

You know there really is an incredible amount of historical evidence to back up the resurrection of Jesus Christ 3 days after his death.

He said, you know, there's a lot of evidence.

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Clifford Goldstein: Unashamed to be an Adventist

The Fifth and Final Kingdom

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