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Pagosa Springs SDA

God’s Plan for Society

Skip Dodson

01 Conceived in Liberty

Let's take a moment before we begin this morning, this short series, to call upon the Lord in prayer.

Father in heaven, we give you honor and praise and glory today as Les read a few moments ago in Psalm 113.

Father conquer in our lives cause us to be more than conquerors and Lord we pray today that you would open our hearts and minds to the message that you have for us.

Things are in disarray and getting worse in our society.

Father, we desperately need to understand what is at the root of these various things that are taking place.

Help us this morning as we study your word to make sense of it all.

For we ask you this in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.

Friends, to say that we live in perplexing times would be a gross understatement.

The spirit of coercion and oppression has taken deep root here in America, something that many of us never dreamed would happen.

Whether it's the vaccine, masks, transgender activism, you name it.

There are people ready and willing to use force and coercion to propound their ideas and to force others to embrace them.

Friends, there are voices from the past who saw this day coming or at least saw its potential.

This gentleman said, You and I are increasingly told that we have to choose between left or right.

Well, I'd like to suggest that there is no such thing as left or right.

Up to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.

And regardless of their sincerity or their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Was it A, Donald Trump, B, Abraham Lincoln, C, Ronald Reagan, Or D, Barack Obama?

He said lots of things, but this wasn't 1 of them.

Well, the correct answer, well, before I go, before I give you the correct answer, I wanna just say, Dawn, you should not be faulted for choosing Lincoln since I borrowed a phrase from the Gettysburg Address for my title this morning.

But the correct answer actually is not Lincoln.

I should know that Gettysburg Address fairly well.

I had to write it out a couple of times in the fourth grade for some minor misbehavior.

In fact, it came to the place where I kept a handwritten copy ready in my social studies book for the next infraction.

Bush's face when I whipped that out and handed it to her after another minor disciplinary measure.

She was also my neighbor, which made the situation a little more difficult.

He said those words when I was a six-month-old infant, but I think they're even more applicable today than they were 57 years ago.

The conflict between liberty and tyranny is indeed age old.

The great majority of people, including Reagan himself, are unaware of its origin and true nature though.

Most People think it is a purely political conflict, but they are mistaken, friends.

Oh yes, it has political implications, but the controversy itself is inherently spiritual.

And in this short series of messages, it is my purpose to explore this question.

What would society look like if God were in direct control of it?

Or maybe we should flip it around and say, what would society look like if God were completely removed from it.

I think we're perhaps getting a partial answer to that as we look around us today.

But today's message will examine what we Adventists call the great controversy and see the principles of this conflict permeate human society.

The second part of the series will contrast 2 nations from scripture, namely ancient Egypt and ancient Israel.

In the story of the Exodus, we discover an example of a situation in which God engaged directly in the development of a nation.

So we will understand to a great extent What principles would guide his society if he were to be in complete control of it?

And of course, as we look forward to the heavenly society, what kind of society will that be?

It will be the society in which God has complete control and oversight.

We can get a window into it by looking at ancient Israel in contrast to Egypt.

And then finally in part 3, we will examine the end time implications of God's plan for society.

We will discover that liberty and oppression will come into a final, direct conflict in the last days of Earth's history, and that God will intervene to deliver his people from the satanically inspired tyranny that will be universal all over the world.

He will, God will intervene to take his people to heaven where they can enjoy the perfect society that he has created, which is conceived in liberty.

So I wanna begin this morning by the scripture reading that Les read a few moments ago.

I wanna begin where our Lord Jesus Christ himself began when he was invited to have the sermon at his home church in Nazareth so long ago.

So turn with me, if you would, to Isaiah 61, and we want to look at verses 1 through 3.

And I want you to read it like you've not read it before.

Read it as though this is the first time you're reading it.

The spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor.

He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.

How many of you agree that this is a beautiful passage?

I don't wonder why Jesus chose this to begin that sermon.

Jesus began his Nazareth message with these verses that speak of his own anointing as the Messiah, which means anointed 1.

Now here's the question that Jesus' hearers should have asked and that we must not fail to ask.

What was the Messiah, what was Jesus anointed to do?

I believe we have the answer in this very passage, which is why he chose it.

By what person of the Godhead was he anointed?

It's right, he is right there in Isaiah 61.1.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, he says.

Well, I find it interesting that the Spirit of the Lord is also associated with a concept that's near and dear to our hearts here in America.

Because it says, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3, verse 17, that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

02 Divine Nation Building

Let's take a moment before we begin this morning to pray and ask for special guidance and blessing as we open God's Word together.

This is part 2 of the short series that we're doing, God's Plan for Society.

And in this message this morning, I pray that God will show us some things that perhaps you haven't thought about as you read the Old Testament.

And the other goal that I pray that will happen this morning, that will take place, is that you will lose all confidence in man and his ability, and even in your own.

So let's take a moment to pray together before we begin.

Father in heaven, we are grateful for your wisdom.

We are grateful for the history that we have in scripture.

We're thankful for the opportunity to learn from the past, to learn from what you have done and what we have failed to do.

Father, we're thankful for Jesus Christ, the sin-pardoning Savior, the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world.

He truly is our only hope on a personal level and as a body, as a church.

Father, bless us as we listen to your words today.

So over the past couple of weeks, all eyes in the American media and among world leaders have been on what nation?

That's right, and the withdrawal of our military there.

Our hearts especially go out this morning to those that have lost loved ones as a result of the terrorist attack this week.

What began for us as an effort to avenge the terrorist attacks of 20 years ago, devolved into an exercise in nation-building, it seems.

I don't think it was totally inappropriate to try to prevent terrorism to develop from developing in the region, but we got into trying to reshape the nation of Afghanistan.

We tried to make a nation with very different values and customs into a liberal Western democracy.

If the images and the reports of the past few days tell us anything, it is that those efforts have failed.

I think Americans have forgotten 2 things about America.

For 1, I think we've forgotten the context in which America became a nation.

This nation grew up near the close of the years of papal persecution and domination of the nations of Western Europe, and our founders were anxious to set up a society in which such atrocities would never be repeated.

The historical context means a lot to the development of the United States, and of course Afghanistan does not have this national heritage.

But second and more importantly, I think we have forgotten that this nation is a nation called out in Bible prophecy.

In other words, God called this nation out and set it up as a refuge, at least initially, as a refuge for the oppressed, those that were being persecuted by the Church of Rome.

In other words, We are what we are because God ordained it to be so.

And if we remember these 2 things, we might understand why the liberties we enjoy here in this system of government that has served us so well for so long has not been so easy to replicate around the world.

It is not a mere commodity that can be exported.

This is what we refer to as American exceptionalism.

And the reality is that freedom is not some sort of inevitable destiny for earthly societies, is it?

No, instead it is the exception, not the rule.

The fact is that society tends not towards liberty and freedom, but towards tyranny and oppression.

History demonstrates that with abundant evidence.

So having said that, I would like to remind you again why I am giving this series of messages.

Perhaps some of you think that I am seeking to make some sort of political statement.

On the contrary, what I am seeking to do by pointing out these things in Scripture is to strip away all confidence in what can be accomplished in any earthly society by any set of politicians, Democrat or Republican.

Of course, many of us are deeply concerned by what is happening in our country and in our world.

There is no question that our God-given rights and liberties are being trampled underfoot.

Things are going to get worse, much worse.

And there is nothing that any political party or politician can do to heal the division in our nation, or to make the American experiment ultimately succeed.

The painful truth is that it will ultimately fail.

And we dare not set our hopes on the American experiment as it is a blessing to be raised here born and raised here in the United States how many want to say amen to that praise God we could have been born anywhere in the world thank God we were born here but our hope is not on America.

Our only hope is in the soon return of Jesus Christ.

Even Jesus, when he comes, will not engage in nation building.

Rather, He will utterly destroy the nations of the world, symbolized by the stone striking the feet of the image in Daniel 2.

He will deliver us from the tyranny of earth and take us away from it to heaven where we will reign with Him for a thousand years.

There will not be a nation left on planet Earth after Jesus comes.

Why is it, you ask, why is it that Jesus will not rework society and sit as monarch over the nations?

He has already demonstrated that this sort of nation-building in this present sinful world will not ultimately work.

We have in Scripture the record of such an exercise in divine nation building.

The scripture reading, the book of Deuteronomy, there is a lot there that we will explore this morning.

But in the record of the history of ancient Israel, we see that even divine nation building doesn't work.

Now before I launch into the main course of the sermon, let me point out that I believe we must read the Bible in a more practical and a more discerning way than we have been used to doing in order to prepare for the last days.

Too often we make the Bible merely esoteric, a collection of beautiful stories, but we generally fail to make the application for our own lives.

This is especially the case when we read the Old Testament.

Because the Old Testament chronicles the history of a people separated from us to a great extent by time and even by customs, we often make the mistake of thinking that its message has little or nothing to teach people that live in the 21st century.

This is often the mistake that the unbelievers make.

They will look at the Bible and say, what can I possibly learn from this old book?

But friends, if we read the Old Testament with new eyesight, if we read the Old Testament through the eyes of the Holy Spirit, we will find out something that its message is equally important for us as is that of the New Testament.

It is in the Old Testament that we really learn who and what man is and why even a divine effort at nation building failed.

I say it failed not because God failed, but because the people with whom he was working failed him.

But before we get to this conclusion, let's observe a few things about God's effort at nation building.

First of all, I wanna point out that, and this is looking at our scripture reading, so I hope you'll turn there and follow along.

The founding of ancient Israel was done, First of all, with a perfect constitution.

We have our own constitution here in the United States, but Israel had its constitution, and guess who gave that constitution to them?

No set of men, but it was God himself that wrote and ordained the constitution of ancient Israel.

What founding of a nation could be more auspicious than this?

Think of this promised new nation, about to take root in the land of Canaan, conceived in the liberty of the gospel, a nation to which God was speaking through his prophets.

Surely if nation building could ever succeed, it would be successful in this case.

So let's look at our scripture reading, Deuteronomy 27, we'll begin with verse 1.

Now Moses, with the elders of Israel, commanded the people saying, keep all the commandments which I command you today.

And it shall be on the day when you cross over the Jordan to the land which the Lord your God is giving you that you shall set up for yourselves large stones and whitewash them with lime.

Why Does God Judge?

Father in heaven, we are grateful for the opportunity that you give us today to come before you to sing and to return tithes and offerings and to pray And Lord now we pray that you would open our eyes to your word Lord give us keen discernment the discernment that is needed at this hour of earth's history.

And Father, we are all, I think, sensing our need of deeper understanding of scripture and deeper levels of discernment.

Father, the issues of the last days are more subtle than we imagined.

And we ask that you would help us to understand what we should be thinking and what we should be doing.

Help us to understand what hour we live in as we look into your word this morning.

Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg opened the gate to enter his property and enjoy a nice evening with his family, his wife and children.

But the moment he opened his gate, something happened that he never would have imagined.

A bomb detonated, the blast of which was heard 16 miles away.

Steunenberg, of course, as you might imagine, was killed by the explosion.

The man who planted the bomb, who's 1 of his aliases was Harry Orchard, he was originally born Albert E.

After some initial resistance, he was, I should say, he was arrested and charged with murder.

And after some initial resistance, he confessed to Steunenberg's murder as well as others.

However, he swore that he did not act of his own accord but was hired by the Western Federation of Miners to assassinate Steunenberg as payback for his actions against the Miners Union while he had been governor.

William Haywood and 2 other high-ranking leaders in the Western Federation of Miners were subsequently arrested and tried.

Haywood's trial in 1907 was 1 of the first to gain national media attention.

Of course, that term has been applied to other trials since that time, some even in the same century.

But Haywood's trial nonetheless was the first or perhaps 1 of the first at least to gain this kind of attention.

His legal team included Clarence Darrow of Chicago who would later figure prominently in a couple of other big media trials, including 1 in which he defended a science teacher by the name of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.

Some of you have heard of that famous Scopes trial, also called the Monkey Trial.

It was definitely some monkey shines happening in that trial, for sure.

Newspapers across the country gave daily reports on the progress of the Haywood trial.

In the end, Darrow's wily strategy and 11-hour closing argument was enough to convince the jury to acquit even the likes of Big Bill Haywood.

As fascinating as these media trials are, an even bigger trial is underway right now, friends, and the ironic thing is that None of the networks are covering it.

You won't read much about it on Facebook or Instagram.

If you ask the average person on the street about it, chances are you will get nothing more than a blank stare.

I'm talking, of course, about the heavenly judgment that is in progress right now as we live, breathe, and speak.

The defense attorney for the accused has never lost a case.

Every unfallen being in the universe is intensely focused on this courtroom.

It is the talk of the town, so to speak, at least in other places everywhere else except here on earth where it matters the most.

You and I are or will be on the witness stand.

We learn about this in our scripture reading which Wayne read a few moments ago.

Thank you Wayne for reading it so well and clearly, but let's take 1 more look at it.

Now, we will not stay here as is our custom.

Usually we'll be looking at some other passages today, but I do want to start off with this 1.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

I'll let that thought sink in for a moment.

All, in fact, Paul is writing this to those that believe, which is quite interesting, because you go to many churches today and you will hear nothing about the judgment of believers.

And yet Paul writes very clearly and plainly here about it.

We, he says, must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each 1 may receive the things done in the body according to what he has done, whether good or what?

Now, friends, if you knew you were going to stand trial in an earthly court, let me ask you this question.

Would you hire an attorney or would you think yourself capable to go in and stand as your own legal counsel.

I think most of us would hire an attorney, wouldn't we?

But how many today are preparing for the most auspicious but eternally important judgment scene in human history?

Most are completely unaware of their impending day in court.

A few others have only a vague idea of the heavenly judgment and its significance.

To gain a thorough understanding of these things would take us significant time, more time than we have here this morning.

I pray that you will take the time with God to understand these things more fully.

But for our purposes here on this Sabbath morning, I want to examine only 1 significant question relating to the heavenly judgment, and that is Why does God judge?

And to answer the question why let me suggest 2 reasons from scripture.

Reason number 1, God judges because it is his nature and his character to judge.

Now that might strike you as a little bit odd because so often we hear from Christian pulpits these days that judging is something that is negative.

Judging is something that is un-Christlike.

After all, didn't Jesus say, judge not lest you be judged?

And they hone in on, people hone in on that 1 text and without really understanding what Jesus meant by that, of course we should not pronounce condemnation upon others.

We are not the judge." But does that mean that judgment is a negative thing?

God judges because it is His nature to judge.

I want to prove that to you just by looking at Genesis chapter 1.

So please turn there, it should be easy to find.

It's right at the beginning of the Bible.

Genesis chapter 1, I want to read a few verses of this And I'm gonna select them, I'll tell you which ones to follow me on, but we're gonna see a very distinct pattern here.

Series

God’s Plan for Society

01 Conceived in Liberty

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

God’s Plan for Society

Why Does God Judge?

48m

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

1. Tree Without a Fence: Religious Liberty in Bible Times

55m

Freedom in Christ

40m

Religious Liberty 2023

Truly Free

37m

We Believe

We Believe - Who is God? Part 1

52m

InVerse 1st Quarter 2024: Jesus & Liberty

13 Ultimate Liberation

29m

Prophecies of Hope

21 America in Prophecy

1h 4m

Deliver Me

Deliver Me From Evil Expectations

1h

But Deliver Us from Evil Expectations

41m

God’s Great Objective

57m

Liberty Unshaken

59m

Daniel Vis Weekend

01 The Final Warning Revelation 18:1

46m

Sound Doctrine