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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Restoration 2024: The Message of Healing

Anthony Baca

Atheist to Theist Part 1

Is me mostly sharing my personal experience of healing through God's word.

And that's the bulk of it, because when we're talking about the theme and talking about what's the most important thing, to me that is the most important thing, is finding healing through God's word.

But in order to do that, there has to be foundations that have to be built upon.

We're gonna build upon that in our first presentation.

But before we do, I'm gonna bow my head for a word of prayer.

If you would like to join me, please bow your heads and pray with me.

And if you'd like to just sit there, please go ahead and just sit there.

I'm just glad everyone that is here is here tonight, amen?

So for those that would like to, let's bow our heads in prayer.

Father, thank you for the privilege for us to come, to study, to think, to contemplate.

And I pray that we would all learn something tonight, that we would all receive a blessing tonight, and that we would be able to go home with these thoughts in mind, and that we'd have a deeper experience with you.

I pray that they would be acceptable in your sight.

So in order to go on this journey of my personal experience.

Sometimes I can't hear myself and it throws me off if I can't hear myself through this.

All right, so in order to go through this experience or through this journey together, we have to go back to the beginning.

Now this is a picture of me, I won't tell you what year because I will not age myself, but this is a picture, so it's bound to slip, I throw numbers and people always come, oh, you're this, huh?

So, but this is a picture of me before I was a Christian.

At this time in my life, I didn't believe in God, in any God.

I had no desire to believe in any religion.

And in fact, I enjoyed arguing with people who did believe in religious ideology.

Now, I did go to church a little bit when I was younger, but due to some dramatic experiences that took place, as a child I chose, I didn't want to believe in a God.

That the world was too twisted, too evil, too wrong for there to be this God of love.

And as a young person, that was kind of where I fell.

And I went through most of junior high and high school with this mindset.

Now, obviously we're here at a Bible seminar and I'm here, so something changed, right?

And part of this journey that we're gonna go through is I want to walk you through that change.

I want to walk you through what led me to finally give myself fully over to Jesus.

Why I decided to even give the Bible a chance and to find healing in his word.

So in order to do that, we're gonna start with our first presentation tonight, entitled Atheist to Theist Part 1.

From a non-believer to someone who believes, but it's part 1.

Because you gotta come back tomorrow morning for part 2, amen?

So you already know that's gonna happen but multiple times this week.

It's only because I can't fit it all into 1 presentation.

I think at the end of the day, we want to know what is true, right?

Whether I'm taking an exam, I wanna know the right answer, amen?

I wanna know what is fact, I wanna know what is true.

And in my life growing up, I always liked to pride myself on the idea that I wanted to know the right answer.

I wanted to know what was true, what was fact.

Now for me at that time, at that picture I showed you, my truth, my fact is there was no God.

And I felt proud every time I convinced a believer there was no God.

And I thought I had come to truth, but what's funny and sad at the same time is this world is so distracting and there's so many things out there that can keep our eyes off of what's in front of us, that when we think we're looking right straight ahead, we fall into so many potholes in life.

It seemed as if often I would take 1 step forward in my understanding, and then I would take 2 steps backwards.

And eventually, through a series of circumstances, I'm not gonna go through all the details, I came to ask a question.

And the question was this, does God exist?

I'm gonna share with you tonight in this first presentation.

You see, 1 day I was at home, watching HBO.

You know, like in the Bible, when it said, when Jesus was from Nazareth, and it said what good thing can come from Nazareth?

It's like supposed to be like a really bad area.

So I'm watching HBO, and I stumbled on something good.

I stumbled onto this documentary with these scientists who shared these thoughts that I'm gonna try to summarize for you this evening that led me to seriously ask the question, is there really a God?

To begin, we have to deal with this word right here, faith.

This was my most disliked word when I was younger.

Because inevitably, every argument I had with the believer ended with this word.

It was like the ace up the sleeve that someone could always pull out.

When they would say, well, at the end, you just have to have, yeah.

And as a non-believer, I didn't like that, because I felt like that just like, butchered the intellectual conversation.

Because I had all these arguments, and when they couldn't answer it, they would simply say, well, you just have to have faith.

That's like the, it's like if Uno had an automatically win card and you just played that.

We're trying to have a conversation here and you pull this word out on me.

And so, and why did I have such a hard time with this?

Because what they were in essence saying is you have to have faith.

And what they were saying is, you have to believe the Bible because the Bible tells you to believe the Bible.

Do you see the problem with that thinking?

Like you have to believe the book that tells you you have to believe the book, and you get trapped in this circle of believing the thing that you believe, but your evidence for believing it is the thing tells you to believe it.

And you get trapped in this intellectual circle where you don't really know why you even believe it anymore except for the fact it says to believe it, whether right or wrong.

Because you can get trapped in that circle on the right thing, can't you?

You can, and that's lucky you if you do, but you can get trapped in that circle also on the wrong thing.

So this was my least favorite word, mostly because I misunderstood it.

Atheist to Theist Part 2

Father in heaven, thank you so much for the privilege that we have to come to study your word, to think on these things today.

And we pray that you would give us a blessing, Lord, as we seek to understand and to experience your word and your truth, in Jesus' name, amen.

So this is our second meeting in our Restoration series.

Last night we talked about Atheist to Theism, part 1.

Now it was more my personal testimony, part of my journey, on how I came to begin this process of seeking after God and trying to get to know Him for the first time.

And as someone who was not open to religion or to any aspect of religion whatsoever, The fact that God reached me through the sciences is how he kind of first intrigued me.

We talked about a few different principles based on a documentary that I stumbled onto on accident that began my whole journey of looking for God.

We talked about the law of biogenesis, the idea of biological information and DNA and the design of it.

We talked about the law of first cause, that something caused us to be here that must transcend both space and time.

But it was done in such a way that it's perfectly designed for us to actually live and inhabit this planet.

And then we talked about the idea of the moral conscience and all of these things were strong indicators that it's more logical and more rational to believe that We're here by design, we're here by intention, not by accident.

And I shared how that was not enough to convince me to become a Christian or to believe in any God for that matter, because there are other religions out there that I was obviously aware of at the time, But it was enough to get me to a point for the first time that I could say I respected someone for what they did believe about God.

Because prior to that, I'd never heard anyone give a tangible, cohesive, logical reason for why they believed in God until that day.

And we summarized it with a quotation from another ex-atheist who said that he realized that if he was to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, that he would have to believe that nothing produces everything, that non-life produces life, that randomness produces fine-tuning, that chaos produces information, and unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produced reason.

That if he were an atheist, he would have to stick with his Darwinian ideas, he was gonna have to accept all those facts based on the things that he learned.

And he concluded by saying, Based on this, I was forced to conclude that Darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that I was not willing to make.

And I shared how in my personal experience, I came to this point where there was more evidence leaning toward the idea that we're here because someone wanted us to be here and not here by accident.

That if I was gonna be true to what I would tell people, because I would tell people and they would try to convince me, I would always say, if you can convince me, I'd become a Christian.

But now here I was facing some evidence for the first time in my life, like real tangible evidence that was pushing the other way and I had a choice to make.

Am I willing to follow this evidence where it might go or do I wanna just stay where I'm at and say no?

In essence, if there was a God, would I actually want to find out?

And that was a very real question I had to answer.

And that began my journey, which brings us to our presentation today.

And what I wanna talk about is why the Bible?

Now, just because we're here by design doesn't automatically mean that the God of the Bible is the 1 who designed.

As an atheist learning to believe these things, I said, well, there's Christians, there's Buddhists, there's Hindus, there's lots of people out there who believe in different gods.

And I promise I will not go through that whole process with you today.

But that was a process I had to go through and to think through all the different possibilities that might be over the course.

And in that time, God linked me up with someone who, it was perfect, it was providence, amen?

So what are some of the reasons I trust the Bible today?

To name just a few, to list a few, you can look at the scientific reliability of the scriptures.

You can look at the textual reliability of the Bible.

The fact that we know that we have the textual evidence and know that what they wrote is what we have today.

We have at least the based on textual critical thinking, enough evidence to know that we can trust what we have is what we were supposed to have.

We have the historical reliability of the Bible with proof of archaeology.

I used to love reading the different arguments against the Bible.

It would be like, well, this person never existed, and it seems like a big deal.

And then they would do an archaeological dig and find their name written somewhere.

And this is like a constant theme through history, that archeology and exploration continue to unearth things that indicated that these historical events did in fact actually occur, and these people did in fact live.

You can look at the internal consistency of the Bible, written by many authors over a long span of time, and yet they do not contradict 1 another.

You can look at the prophetic word of the Bible and how it predicted things before they happen, and they happen how it was predicted.

And then you can look at the personal testimonies of those who have chosen to follow the Bible.

All of these reasons are different subjects that I explored myself because I needed to know, is the Bible something I can trust?

And I found that the Bible was in fact trustworthy.

And I wanna share with you a piece of that today, just a piece, I promise.

I want to just focus on what I believe was the most powerful evidence for the Bible?

What was it that got me to, in Mentone, California, we live right by a Greenspot farm.

I don't know if anyone knows where Greenspot Christmas tree farm is.

And I still remember sitting in my backyard, looking at the starry sky, and for the first time acknowledging there was a God.

What was it that brought me to that point?

That's what I wanna share with you today.

That's what I wanna look at you with today.

The idea that the Bible has these prophetic passages.

Prophecy is simply a prediction of a future event before it happens.

It's saying X will happen before it happens and then it happens exactly how it was said it was going to happen.

That's what I mean when I'm using the word prophecy today.

And as I looked at different religious texts that exist, I saw many failed predictions of the past, like tons of failed predictions that exist.

But I noticed that the Bible has been accurate for the past 3, 500 plus years in its predictions and his prophetic passages.

In fact, out of the, what they, someone has calculated out of the 800 prophetic verses that are within the Bible, 90% have already been fulfilled.

Only approximately 10% remain unfulfilled, but those 10% refer to events of the end of earth's history.

So clearly those can't be fulfilled yet if we're still here.

But the majority of the prophetic passages in the Bible have been fulfilled and therefore we can go and examine those prophecies and then look at history at those events and see, did the Bible actually accurately predict these things before they happen?

1 scholar said a few years back that over the last 30 to 40 years, more scholarship has been devoted to this idea of studying the prophetic passages in the Bible than in the past 300 years combined.

There's an interest in what the Bible says is happening at the end of time.

There's an interest in what the Bible says in its prophetic passages.

I think we could all agree that we kind of live in some strange and unusual times, don't we?

I think we can all kind of see that on the horizon.

And I remember there was such a spike just a few years ago during the initial outbreak of that COVID pandemic that seems so long ago.

But I still remember so many people had questions, So many people wanted to know.

I walked into the local shopping center Walmart where I was at to grab some supplies before they all disappeared.

And I noticed something though in the book section, all the Bibles were gone.

Like, when I saw that, I said, we gotta plant a church out here.

Because there's an interest, something happened in the world, and the interest was there.

And this is a growing interest that seems to be building.

Now there are 2 books in the Bible that are these like, kind of these primary prophetic books.

The first 1 is the book of Daniel found in the Old Testament and the other 1 is the book of Revelation found in the New Testament.

These are the sisters of Bible prophecy, as it were.

Now, when we hear about the book of Revelation, especially if you're new here today and joining us with the restoration series and you haven't heard these things before.

When you hear the book of Revelation, some people think that that is a scary book or you think it's a book shrouded in mystery.

I remember, I kind of liked the book of Revelation when I was younger, because when I had to go to church for a few years, and I mean, the idea of dragons on moons chasing people just was kind of cool to a young boy.

So I was like, oh, this is kind of a cool book.

You know, you can make some good movies off this book.

The Cosmic Conflict

We talked about the big question, does God exist?

And that's a big question to grapple with.

I was an atheist most, a good majority of my life.

And I didn't really believe in anything beyond the natural.

And so that first night when I shared those principles, those concepts in science and physics and philosophy, that led me to challenge my thinking on the subject and to ask myself the honest question.

If I look at the evidence that is out there, the evidence that like on the subjects we talked about Friday night, is it more logical and rational to believe in intelligent design or an accident?

And that led me to that the idea that it was more rational to believe in a designer than an accident.

And then this morning, we talked about, so which designer, who's the designer?

Who's the 1, if this is true and things are designed, who is this, what we would call God, that did it all?

And that was what we talked about this morning.

And I gave what I think is the strongest evidence in favor of the Bible, that the Bible can in fact be trusted, that it can be set apart from all other religious books that do exist in the world.

And we looked at Bible prophecy out of, there were 6 subjects, but we only had time for 1, and we talked about Bible prophecy and how in Isaiah 46, 9 and 10, God says that he declares the end from the beginning.

In other words, he predicts the future so when it does happen, when it comes to pass, you might believe.

In other words, the God of the Bible, as he is portrayed in scripture, cares enough about humanity to lay evidence down for them so that they can find God.

And that's what we looked at this morning.

And I talked about Daniel chapter 2 and how I studied Daniel chapter 2 with a dear friend who was able to come out this morning.

He gave me my first Daniel 2 Bible study, and I'm sitting here looking at him as I'm now sharing Daniel 2.

I felt like he should come up and do it instead of me, but it was great.

And so we talked about how God predicted the rise and fall of these empires, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome.

And now the Bible called these nations by name before they came to power and then predicted not only that they would fall, but what would be the kingdom that would take their place after their fall.

And then we saw after Rome, the fourth empire described in Daniel chapter 2, the Bible then predicted that the Roman empire would not be conquered from without, but it would divide from within.

That's huge because anyone could, in theory, guess kingdoms rise and fall.

You can almost say that vaguely and be pretty accurate, most likely, especially at that time in Earth's history.

It said, after you will be the Medo-Persian Empire.

You can get into the details of those prophecies.

Not only would the Grecian Empire be the kingdom, but it would have a prominent king who once he comes to power would cease, he would break into 4, and this is an exact history of what happened to the Grecian Empire.

But not only that, to then know that the fourth kingdom would not be conquered by another kingdom, but would just fall apart from within.

And we talked about how the main argument against the idea of prophecy is that the events must have been written after the events.

In fact, 1 atheist scholar actually said, the description is so precise, it must have been written after the events have occurred.

And that was the prevailing thought and argument until about the, I think, 1970s, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

And we now know that the Book of Daniel most definitely predates into the BC era, a time period in which it was written.

So we know that these prophecies predate their kingdoms.

That the idea that they were written after the fact can no longer be the case because of the evidence that we have found in this archeological discovery.

And if you can ask people who know me, I don't change my mind easily.

When I am set in my way, ever since I was a kid, I was that stubborn kid.

If I'm set in my ways, that is the way it is.

And so for me to have a worldview change took radical evidence.

And I believe I found that evidence in Daniel.

We then stall that if everything God had predicted happened exactly by name and by detail, how he said it would happen, hundreds if not for some of the events, more than a thousand years before the event actually occurred, then we could have confidence in the Bible that the other things that the Bible actually says can be trusted.

My great desire was not to ever live by blind faith.

And before when I was an atheist, I believe I was following the evidence, where it led.

But on my journey, as I continued to dig, the evidence went a different direction.

And I had to make a choice, and I made that choice.

But again, I want to encourage you to look into that evidence for yourself, to dig deep.

Series

Restoration 2024: The Message of Healing

Giving Glory to Him

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

The Three Angels' Message for the Millennial Generation

2. Fear God and Give Glory

1h 23m

Being Adventist

The Debilitating Drudgery of Adventist Doctrine

53m

Plenary

The One Thing Jesus Can’t Give You

55m

Whose Side Are You On?

1h

The Cross & The Great Controversy

Redemption and Conflict

35m

GYC 2012 Seminar: Conversion - My Own, Around Me and On the Go

Sensitive Seekers

58m

ASI 2011 Seminar: Evangelism

Finishing Strong by Remembering the Past

1h 11m

Reuben and the Birthright

25m

How to Grow Spiritually

Light in the Darkness

53m

Prepare to Meet thy God

4- The Plan of Salvation

1h 47m

The True Medical Missionary

56m

Balaam, Balak and the Nicolaitans

46m

Sound Doctrine