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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Called to Victory

Well, if I'm ever in London, in downtown London, how many of you have been there?

It's 1 of those my wife gets to say, well, I've been there many a time.

But when my wife takes me to London, there's 1 place that I would like to go that fascinates me quite a bit and that dates back to the time of World War II.

That was also the time of Winston Churchill.

There's a place there, some of you may have been there as well, Churchill's underground war rooms.

Okay, well this is a place that I would like to go.

This is where Churchill and his team plotted the strategy to defeat Hitler and his forces during World War II.

And oftentimes it's in times of war that we think or when we look and think back in times of war we think of the challenging conditions on the front line and probably the most challenging conditions were often on the front line but that wasn't the only place where people were struggling and having a hard time as they were back at home and trying to black out the curtains and trying to avoid the air raids and so on and so forth.

And London was certainly right there in the thick of it, much different than United States across the pond, you understand.

And so they set up this place for Churchill for as the Prime Minister and for his advisors and his team to be underground in London, much of the time with air raids and different things, this is where they would go.

And if you can study there, the picture a little bit, you can see all of these phones lined up and different, you know, there's a map there on the back wall as they tried to make calculations of what to do next.

And so much of his advisors would actually live there all the time.

Now, Churchill didn't like to sleep there.

He had a place that he could and it's been told that he slept there about 3 different occasions.

So I don't know what was happening on those evenings that caused him to stay there but much of the time he liked to make his way out and sleep someplace else.

Maybe there was some fear that people would find out where the war room was because it was not able to withstand a direct hit from a bomb.

And so maybe he thought, just in case, I'm going to slip out to another secret spot.

But now you can tour this place and you just kind of get this feeling of if you're claustrophobic in any sense, that the hallways are narrow, the ceiling is low, the rooms are small, the air is stale, there's not 1 window, there's not fresh air circulating through.

And I imagine just because of the era, there's a smell of metal and all of these types of things and this is what is known as the war room.

The other thing that is interesting is that during that time, there was a, In fact, there was a book written about this time by Simon Singh called The Code Book.

In that book, he describes the code breakers in England's Bletchley Park during the war.

1 of the many challenges was that the Nazis had a secret code or way of communicating.

They would call it the German Enigma Machine that is pictured there in the left.

And in both of these pictures, you probably can find soldiers of the German army using this Enigma Machine.

Well, it's kind of like when you were in grade school and you'd play spy in your neighborhood and you had a secret code and they had the key to the secret code and you would write it out and unless they knew which letters represented which, except this is much more sophisticated.

It's a little bit mind-blowing for that time, honestly.

So there are 3 kind of big curved things at the front or at the top of this.

Those could be changed to any number of combinations.

And then, down here at the bottom, there were plugs where you could make it even more customizable to where on any given day of the war, the Germans had set up, these are the codes that we will use for our code machine.

So On a certain day, they would turn those dials to HQT, whatever it said, and then they might plug or unplug these bottom things, and then it would be set to either encrypt or be able to figure out the encryption of the code for that day, whatever it might be.

And so the way it would be used, once you got that put in there, it was kind of a two-man job.

1 person would type the letters, if it's going to be attack, you hit A.

But then another, You can kind of see these other keys above.

They're not really keys, but they're buttons that would light up.

So you would hit A for attack, and maybe a P would light up.

And then you'd hit T on the keyboard, if you will, not a keyboard, typewriter, whatever.

You hit T, and another letter would light up, and they would write that down until they got all the way through their message.

And then on the other end, on that day, they would know, okay, and they'd set their dials to interpret it.

And sure enough, it says, attack at midnight.

And supposedly this was so sophisticated that without this little box, without knowing the day and how to spin everything, the only way to crack the code or to crack the code would be 1 in 150 million million million as far as combinations.

So the question during World War II was, could it be broken?

Because if we know what the enemy is going to do before they do it, there's a huge advantage.

Well, they carefully selected this mathematical team of geniuses and brought them together to see if in fact they could break the German code of this box, the Enigma.

1 design flaw that they found was that the letter that they would type was never the 1 that came out, if that makes sense.

So if you type A for attack, it would never say A.

That and some other things and some other things that they were able to scramble, and they're eventually starting to put some things together, some hints, if you will, but it was this man in your bottom right of your screen, Alan Turing, that decided to make an elaborate, complex machine that would try and try and try and try and try and try to decipher the Nazi codes.

How that machine, that mechanical machine, literally worked, I'll leave that to you and Google this afternoon.

It was doubted whether or not it could be done.

At times he doubted whether or not it could be done.

This is a picture of the machine that was developed to break this Enigma code.

It was later dubbed the Turing, after his last name, the Turing bomb.

And upon cracking the code, these scholars at Bletchley Park were able to read Enigma communications throughout most of the war.

Friends, Revelation is a book that is a code breaker, if you will.

The Bible's last book of Revelation reveals and unmasks the plans of Satan and also gives us the plans of God.

If you know what the enemy is going to do before he does it, friends, it's a game changer.

The best news of all, this Code book, the book of Revelation, the last book in your Bible and my Bible, it outlines the simple yet profound truth that in times that we are living in that we know are unprecedented, filled with virus and pandemic, global shutdown, peaceful protest in the midst of all kinds of things.

Of course, we have not so peaceful protests.

We have debates that are more like yelling matches.

And despite of everything that's going on, Revelation's code breaker tells us a simple and profound truth that Jesus wins and Satan loses.

The heart of this battle is outlined in Revelation chapter 12 and in that chapter we see 4 episodes, if you will, 4 vignettes, 4 snapshots of the great controversy beginning with the battle in heaven to the closing battle on earth.

I want to look at those 4 little snapshots in Revelation chapter 12.

I doubt any of this will be news to you, but hopefully it will get us thinking about the times in which we're living a little bit Differently because if you're like me the news is not a pick-me-up Is it for you?

But we need to remember what the code breaker, what the book of Revelation reveals to us.

And so, beginning there, let's read there in Revelation chapter 12, is where we'll be this morning.

And beginning in verse 9, let's read those, sorry, verse 7 to verse 9, let's begin in verse 7.

Michael and his angels fought with the dragon and the dragon and his angels fought but they did not prevail Nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer.

So the great dragon was cast out, the serpent of old called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world.

He was cast to the earth and his angels were cast out with him." Heaven?

Michael and his angels fought, the dragon and his angels fought.

Was this a physical battle or simply a mental war game?

But notice carefully that every angel in heaven had to make a choice.

We don't have a third group where they were able to be neutral.

Every angel had to make the all-important choice regarding whose side they would be on.

Friends, in Earth's final conflict, there is no neutrality.

I have a letter written to a college student dating back to the 60s, and the story is gonna surprise you.

This college student was a Christian, but a communist evangelist, there is such a thing.

Communist evangelist came to the university in this country, United States of America, and it was in the late 60s that this Christian who was engaged to a wonderful Christian college woman, but he started reading the philosophers and writings of Marx and Engel and others, and he was just enamored and enchanted by the thoughts of world communism.

And so when this Christian young man was exposed not only to these writings, but to this communist evangelist.

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Called to Victory

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