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Chester Van Clark, III

Living the Word

Chester Clark

If Need Be

It's good to be here, even on a Sunday morning.

This is still the day that the Lord has made, amen?

I had other Responsibilities already, but it's it's been a good weekend, especially since my sister Amy's been here visiting me this weekend.

So I'm just glad that we can spend these last few minutes and studying God's Word together.

Amen and You know, I was thinking about this final meeting.

It's sort of you get the faithful and true you know he that endures to the end of the same shall be saved right.

And so you get those who are maybe really serious or at least have the schedule flexibility to be here.

But I'm just glad that we can spend this time together.

There's not much more important than taking a few minutes the last hour perhaps and thinking particularly about what we're going to do with what we've learned this weekend.

You know, as a church, as Christian young people, as Adventist young people, we have a lot of knowledge.

We have a lot of information we place in our mind right.

But sometimes we don't translate all that into changes in our lives.

And that's really what's most important as we leave here this weekend.

We're different people from the time we've spent studying his word together.

You know, I was thinking about the importance of making this kind of a decision.

And I was remembering the story of Dwight Moody.

You've probably heard of the evangelist Dwight Moody, right?

Right here in Chicago he was pastoring a church.

And he was used by God many times to make powerful appeals and to ask people to make decisions.

In fact it was his habit, his practice to every time he preached make an appeal and ask people to make a decision to follow God and to give their lives to Him.

And 1 night, he tells a story about 1 night he was preaching a prayer meeting, a midweek service in his church, and he decided, you know, I always make an appeal.

Tonight I'll just give them a break, you know, I'll send them home without making this specific appeal.

And so he concluded with a prayer song, I'm not sure exactly how, but he sent his church members home and went home himself, went to bed with his family.

And in the middle of the night there was a knock at his door.

He awoken, he was awakened with a start and he ran to the door to see who was pounding on the door and when he opened the door nobody was there.

But the street was full of people that were running and screaming and he looked down the street and just a few blocks away was a wall of fire coming towards him.

And Pastor Moody had enough time to grab his kids, his wife, with the clothes they had on their backs, they left the house and joined the crowd running from the flames.

That night, one-third of the city of Chicago burned to the ground.

Hundreds of people died, and many of them were Pastor Moody's own church members.

And he said, I will never forgive myself for not making an appeal.

I didn't realize that was the last opportunity that some of my church members would have.

We're living in serious times, aren't we?

I remember I was in Romania and my students and I were preaching evangelistic series and I was...

Where they fill out a card and the 3 general options usually are something like this.

I've never given my life to Jesus before but I would like to do so now, accept him as my Savior from sin." You can check that box if you would so desire.

And then the second option is something like, I once knew Jesus as my Savior, but I've wandered away, and I want to return to him.

I want to rededicate my life to him and the third option is something like you know I've I am a Christian Jesus is my Savior, but today I want to Reconcentrate and rededicate my life more completely to him and so the call was made that night and decisions were made the cards were collected And the next night 2 of my students were setting up for the meetings, and they asked where's the lady that always sits right there she's usually here early where she and 1 of the church members said you know of didn't you hear and they said no what what were we supposed to hear and they said well last night she went home from the meeting and she went to bed as normal, but she never woke up.

They went looking for those cards And they looked through the cards and they'll tell they found her card and there they found Her name and they wanted to see which of those boxes she had checked And they found that she had checked the box that said I've never accepted Jesus as my Savior from sin, but I'd like to do so now You think they were happy?

Amen God is good Today is the day of salvation.

Amen And so it's I I'm just glad that we can come together for these few minutes and consider again the Word of God, and especially consider the decision we're going to make as we leave here today.

Father in Heaven, our hearts have been warmed this weekend as we've heard from your Word.

Lord, we want to be a generation of youth for Christ.

We want to be the Davids, the Stephens, the Pauls, the Esters of our generation.

We want to be all that you would have us to be as your young people.

So today, Father, I just want to pray that in our final minutes here together that you would send your Spirit.

Lord, there's nothing that human lips and human words can do, but as we open your Word, we pray that the Spirit might touch our hearts, that He might speak to us, that We might hear His voice and recognize it and follow it.

Turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Peter 1 and verse 9.

1 Peter 1 and verse 9, I believe this is the, been the theme this weekend, right?

1 Peter 1 verse 9, we're going to look at a little bit of an overview of a couple of themes in 1 Peter 1 and we're gonna focus on 1 of them for a few minutes this morning so this is the passage that we're going to be taking our thought from.

First Peter chapter 1 and verse 9 says, Receiving the end of your faith, even the what?

The outcome, the goal, the objective of our faith, what this verse is saying is the salvation of our souls.

Now we know there's more involved in faith than just us being saved, right?

In fact, if we look at the entire chapter, we see a bigger picture.

We see that Jesus is definitely a central part of 1 Peter 1 verse 9, right?

1 Peter 1, notice with me, the person who is the anchor of our faith.

Verse 18, for as much as you know that you are not redeemed with corruptible things, the silver and gold from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of who?

Of Jesus Christ as of lamb without blemish and without spot.

And notice in verse 21, who by him do believe in God that raised him up from the dead and gave him glory, that your faith and hope may be in God." Right?

So Jesus is the center of our faith and Jesus is the center of 1 Peter chapter 1.

I want to make that very clear first of all.

Jesus is the center of our faith and He's the center of 1 Peter 1.

We find also in the next few verses though, we find a reasonable, rational, concrete reason to have this kind of faith.

Beginning in verse 23, being born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible by what?

You see the Bible is central to our faith.

Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.

And so here Peter is saying being born again by the Word of God.

That's the modality by which we are converted and we are saved.

And notice he continues, he says the Word of God lives and abides forever.

For all flesh is as grass and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.

The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.

But the word of the Lord endureth forever." Amen?

And so we have a firm foundation for our faith.

But this morning I want to look particularly at a verse early in chapter 1 which talks about the testing or the proving, the trying of our faith.

Look with me back in 1 Peter 1, and we're going to be looking at verses 5-7.

He's talking about Those who have been begotten to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ It says who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation Ready to be revealed in the last time.

The Inevitabilitiy of the Word

It's a special Sabbath to be here in God's house, amen?

And it's a special Sabbath for me also because my parents are here And I'm glad that they can join us today as we worship God and as we study His Word.

As was mentioned earlier, we're beginning a series on the Word of God.

And we're going to be looking in this series first of all at a number of facts regarding the history of God's Word.

Probably most of you know that the Bible has its share of critics, right?

There are those who would like to find fault or perhaps find reasons to disbelieve the Word of God.

And we're wanting to look in this series at some of those criticisms, particularly over the last 100 to 150 years, which have been lodged against the scriptures and how many of them have already been answered.

Probably most of you are aware that the Bible is 1 of the most widely read books in all the world, but compared to the number of books that are printed, it's probably 1 of the least read bestsellers.

The Bible's been translated into more than 1, 700 languages.

And so in that sense, it's 1 of the most widely translated books, probably the most widely translated books.

It's very difficult to put a handle on how many Bibles are actually produced or bought each year.

But in the United States alone, in some years, up to 50 million copies of the Bible are printed.

When you talk about bestsellers, it's usually 100, 000.

Some depends on which list, 10, 000, which category.

But the Bible, up to 50 million copies a year are printed and distributed.

Now the Bible is written, we know it's a collection of books, not just 1 book as we Christians today would view it.

It was a collection of books written by 40 writers and they wrote 66 different books.

In fact, it was written over a period of time spanning more than 1, 600 years.

And if you have your, your bulletin insert, I, I see some of you are following along and writing down some of these facts The first 5 books of the Bible are called the Torah or the Pentateuch.

That's Torah, which is spelled t-o-r-a-h the Torah we believe was written by Moses And although we're going to talk some about some of the criticisms by the scholars that would say otherwise, we at Seventh-day Adventists believe the Bible, the first 5 books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, was written in fact by Moses.

And Moses had a very interesting life story.

As you know, he was born as a slave child.

He was dedicated to God, much like Camilo was dedicated to God today.

He was dedicated to be raised as a God-fearing child.

He was then raised or adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh, you remember, and ended up being educated in all the arts and sciences and war tactics of Egypt.

And then after his mistake of trying to free God on his own terms, we often try to help God out, don't we?

After his mistake, he ended up being exiled, self-exiled I guess, to save his life into the desert where he tended sheep.

Dwight Moody once said that the first 40 years of Moses' life he was becoming a somebody.

The second 40 years of his life Moses was becoming a nobody.

And the third 40 years of his life, Moses was demonstrating what God can do with somebody who becomes a nobody.

And I like that perspective because their tending sheep where Moses could have thought there was nothing really influential that he was doing.

We believe that he wrote at least Genesis and perhaps the book of Job as he was there in the desert just doing a very menial or servile task.

So really quickly, we don't have much time this morning, so I want to move very briefly.

When Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 by the Roman emperor, The Roman government thought that that was the end of the Jewish faith.

The center of the Jewish faith moved into Galilee, into Tiberias actually, where many of the scholars took up residence.

And this center, Tiberias, as well as there was a center in Iraq in what we call Babylonia, And there was also 1 other center in Caesarea where the Jewish scholars congregated.

And these schools, as it were, produced scholars which became known as the Masoretes.

And the Masoretes were dedicated to the task of protecting the Hebrew scriptures.

That was what we call the Old Testament, right?

These Masoretes studied and they commented upon the writings of the Old Testament.

These commentaries became known as the Mishnah and the Gomorrah combined to make the Talmud.

And these today are sacred writings in the Jewish faith, not so much in the Christian faith because these are commentaries on the Old Testament.

But the Mazarites studied the Old Testament Scriptures.

When a copy of the Scriptures became old and worn out, they thought that it was the respectful thing to do to destroy it.

And they would either burn it or they would bury it so that it would not be in a tattered shape.

And so when we come down to the 20th century as we're excavating and archaeologists are digging in the Holy Land, we're looking for ancient manuscripts.

And the latest manuscripts we could find were from about the year 8900.

That's a thousand years, nearly a thousand years after the time of Christ, 900 years after the time of Christ.

So all of the manuscripts from before the time of Christ had been destroyed as far as we know.

So, that gave a lot of room for the critics to jump in.

And they said, look, you Christians as well as the Jews, you believe a Bible that you have no record of existence of before 8900.

I mean, we had older copies of the New Testament than we had of the Old Testament.

And so they assumed even though the Masoretes were very particular about their copying, even though the Masoretes they would copy a page and they would count until they found the middle letter in the page, count forwards and backwards, and then they would count the same on the copy, and they would make sure that, well, if they had missed a letter, they'd have had to have added a letter too, right?

In order to come up with the same number.

But the critics said, look, it's impossible.

You can't have a manuscript hand copied for 900 years without having terrible errors, a lot of mistakes.

And so the critics would say that the Old Testament was not reliable.

In fact, something would take place in the 1940s which would change that argument.

I wish I could tell you about it, but we'll have to tell you about that next week as we look more at the history of the Old Testament.

And we're going to move on in our sermon this morning and look at the inevitability of the word.

The reason it's important for us to solidify in our minds that God's Word is reliable is because God's Word is the only real guide for human living that doesn't change.

It's the only way that shows us, it's the only book that shows us where we came from and where we're going.

It's the only road map for our human existence.

Oh, many other philosophies, many other theories have been tried.

There's a way that seems right unto a man, to a woman, right?

But the Bible says the ends thereof are the ways of death.

The Bible is our sure guide for human living.

There's a problem that's probably bigger today than the problems of the critics and the atheists and agnostics.

There's a problem that we as Christians have.

Sometimes we say we believe the Bible, we say we read the Bible, but we don't actually live the Bible.

Sometimes We have a denial of the word which isn't like that of the critics of the scriptures.

We just pretend we can't quite understand what it says when it speaks to us something that we don't like to hear.

So Today we're going to be looking at something called the inevitability of the word and we're going to be looking at the story not of a critic of the true faith, but as the story of a man who was in fact a verified prophet of the true faith.

This was a man who was not a bad man, much like we today living in 2010, we're church-going, Bible-believing, God-worshipping Christians, right?

The Bible says in Numbers chapter 22, the children of Israel set forward and pitched in the plains of Moab on this side of Jordan by Jericho.

Now Balak the son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Ammonites.

And this king of Moab, he became very fearful because he saw how the Amorites had been destroyed by this nomadic people that was wandering through the desert.

And so he said, I need to find something that will give me as a king the upper hand to be able to fight off these Israelites when they come into my territory.

And so he thought of those who might have connection with the gods.

And this is a real testimony to Balaam's life previous to this time.

Because when Balak the king wanted to find someone who was in touch with the supernatural, who did he think of?

Balaam must have been known as a person who was close to God.

God must have answered Balaam's prayers previously.

The Relevance of the Word

So good to see each 1 of you here again today.

Look forward to seeing the family of God and being in His presence and studying His Word.

Last week we were talking a bit about the challenges to the accuracy of the Old Testament.

So today we're going to just pick up where we left off a bit and talk about Whether or not we can trust the Bible.

So if you have your little bolt and inserts you could pull them out at this point.

We're going to talk a little more about some of the history of the confirmation of the Old Testament today.

We noted that the Masoretes had been duplicating the Old Testament scrolls from the time of Christ or before the time of Christ actually until somewhere in the 10th century or so was the earliest of the Masoretic texts.

So from the time that the Old Testament was finished, the book of Malachi, until The earliest scroll that we had in our possession was around 1300 years.

1300 years had passed between the writing of Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament and the date of the earliest scroll that was available in the early 20th century.

What happened was the Mazarites had such respect for the Scriptures that as their scrolls, which they had been using to study and comment upon, became worn out, they would actually burn them and destroy them.

And so we just had this gap of more than a millennium between the time of the writing of the Old Testament and the earliest known scroll that existed.

They said, it's impossible for 1, 300 years to pass and there not to be terrible errors that have been introduced into the Scriptures.

In fact, in 1921, this was less than 100 years ago.

In 1921, Friedrich Delitzsch wrote and he spoke on behalf of many of the scholars in the historical critical and textual critical world when he said that the biblical text had experienced, quote, a degree of corruption beyond our wildest imagination.

The scholar said, look, if you were to see what Malachi wrote or Isaiah wrote or the other prophets wrote and you were to compare it to what we have today and what we call the Bible, there would be no comparison.

We wouldn't even be able to recognize them.

That's how different these scripts would be, these texts would be.

Now, of course, those who believe in the Bible, they countered with the argument that the Mazarites had been very careful copyists.

Remember, I mentioned briefly last week, They had counted the letters on each part of the letter in the Hebrew.

And so that when they finished a page and they would count backwards and forwards and find the middle letter and they would make sure that all of their numerical double checking, you might say.

But the scholars said this theory or this history of the Mazarites' careful copy habits was a myth.

That's what they believed this theory or this teaching was.

It was just 1 of those myths that churchgoers, that superstitious Christians or Jews had established to try to believe in this book we call the Bible.

So in 1947, 1 day, it seemed as though the critics' opinions and criticisms of the Bible Were difficult to answer unassailable The next day all of their theories were proven wrong.

In fact, it was in March of 1947 when there was a young shepherd boy by the name of Muhammad Adib.

This view of experts was overthrown not by a scholar in a laboratory somewhere but by a little boy who was out looking for some missing goats.

He was looking for these goats and these goats were, you know how goats are, they climb up on the rocks and on the mountain sides.

And he was just in the Qumran area around the Dead Sea.

And as he was looking for his goats, He threw a rock up onto a cliff up above him.

And he heard a curious sound, sort of a tinkling, smashing sound.

And this little shepherd boy, Muhammad, 12 or 13 years old, he climbed up this rock face to this cliff.

He pulled himself up where he could barely see inside the hole.

And there he saw clay jars, and broken clay jars, thanks to his rocks.

And just then, his fingers lost their grip on the rock and he fell down the mountainside.

Now he'd seen enough that he knew there was something in there that was of interest.

And so he ran all the way back to his little bedouin tent where his nomadic family lived.

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Series

Living the Word

The Stillness of the Word

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