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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Ken Kelln

What Are You Afraid Of?

Lord, how good it is to be together here in your house, to look into your word, to see what you have for us today.

And I pray your Holy Spirit to sink these truths into our minds and bless us with the presence of your holy angels to prompt us to your ways fully, completely, wholly committed to Jesus we pray in his name.

Here is a phrase in verse 6 that we don't find in the other synoptic Gospels.

Here's Jesus on the mountain with Peter, James, and John.

And Elijah and Moses come down and talk to Jesus, and Peter gets all his tail tied in a knot, you might say, and says something that is inappropriate.

And then a cloud covers the mountaintop and what do the disciples hear?

Here in verse 5, a voice from out of the clouds said, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

When the disciples heard this, they fell face down on the ground and were terrified.

Now Mark and Luke don't say anything about them being terrified, but Matthew mentions this.

If you heard the voice of God speaking to you today from out of the ceiling here or someplace, would you be frightened?

Well, how about when the Israelites were out in front of Mount Sinai and the voice of God, actually it was Jesus, the voice of God spoke down from the top of that mountain and just the force of his voice caused the earth to shake.

They said, Moses, you talk to us, don't have God talk to us, that's too frightening.

My question to us today is, what are you afraid of?

1 Peter 5.8 says, the devil's going around like a roaring lion.

Well, the Lord is protecting hand is over us.

You see political unrest and war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, even at our Mexican border down here, people are being killed.

Lots of political turmoil and controversy over that issue.

We have social upheavals, gangs and drug dealers almost at our doors right here.

You know, you don't have to walk very far to find that.

Just 3 weeks ago today, we had a concert over at the Orange Show Pavilion.

4, 000 people each paid $35 to go to that punk rock concert and afterwards 1, 500 of them got upset enough and stirred up enough so that they went out and did $500, 000 worth of damage to the community right around the Orange Show.

That's 6 miles from here I think, isn't it?

How about things that are happening to you personally?

Just 14 months ago I was admitted to the hospital here next door for a coronary artery bypass graft.

That's frightening, especially when you know all the things that can go wrong.

You've seen the complications, you know what bad things can happen, and it's probably best not to think about that when you're the patient, you know.

And if it wasn't that I was able to place my life in the hands of the Lord, maybe I would have been terribly frightened.

And think about that when you're dealing with patients.

Everybody who enters a hospital, in fact if he's not frankly delusional, is frightened.

Remember that when you're dealing with them.

How about perhaps more frightening is the prospect of Jesus coming and I'm not ready.

Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and in your name perform many miracles and then I will declare to them I never knew you depart from me you who practice lawlessness now statements like that, that's rather unsettling for a Christian, isn't it?

Jesus says there's, even if you were performing miracles in his name, that's no guarantee that you're going to be saved.

There are lots of things to be frightened about.

If you're looking for them, they're not hard to find.

The Jews were frightened in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and afterwards.

The things that frightened them the very most was national apostasy, corruption of the Jewish society.

When the remnant of Judah returned from Babylon, their leaders had learned their lesson.

It was very clear, either follow the true God and His ways and enjoy independence as a nation and spiritual and financial prosperity, or else ignore the true God, forget about Sabbath-keeping, follow the ways of the pagans and enjoy their orgies and celebration of their worship of pagan gods and the result would be political and social and financial ruin.

The choice was clear, follow God and prosper, or rebel against God and suffer.

You see, that's the obvious thing that we do as humans.

If things are going wrong, we make a law to fix it.

And they found out they made up a whole code book of rules to govern every phase of one's life.

Wise religious leaders saw that in order to meet every possible situation, they needed lots of rules.

Every generation of rabbis added to the rules.

It was a work in progress, not really completed until 2 centuries after Jesus came to this world.

In Jesus' day, those rules were called the tradition of the elders.

And the commentary on these rules we call the Gemara.

You put those 2 documents together and it's called the Talmud.

You've probably heard of the Jewish Talmud.

The Talmud was created to protect the Jewish nation from pagan idolatry and the resultant curses of God.

Now, have you read Deuteronomy chapter 28, verses 16 to 68?

All those curses that God pronounced upon Israel if they would not follow His ways.

And in the first 15 verses of Deuteronomy 28 are the blessings that God said He would put upon them in every possible imaginable way if they would follow His ways.

Now, these were real blessings and God was serious about this and the Jews wanted these blessings.

So they made the rules because they knew that God was serious about the curses as well as the blessings and if you read Jewish history you can see that God was serious about what he said God keeps his word you can count on it but is that frightening It was frightening to the Pharisees in Jesus' day, and the persecution of those so-called heretics that the new Christian believers were called by the Jewish leadership was serious.

James, the son of Zebedee, was executed by King Herod at the instigation of the Jews.

Peter was to be next, except the angel let him out of jail.

You can read about that in Acts 7 and 12.

And the priests sent Saul of Tarsus to imprison believers of Christ.

He was breathing threats and murder against these disciples of the Lord.

These Pharisees believed God's promises of blessings and curses and they would stop at nothing, not even murder, to keep the Jewish religion pure and free of heresy that would contaminate the nation and bring down God's judgments upon them." Now clearly the zeal of the Pharisees was misplaced.

You can see Matthew chapters 15 and 22 and Mark chapter 7 for details of Jesus' view of these rules and their natural consequences.

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What Are You Afraid Of?

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