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Blue Mountain Academy

Eric Walsh

03 The Last Party: Judgment Must Come

All right, so we're going to go into our third message and get right into it.

And we are continuing in for Power Weekend, the theme, Strong in Babylon, Lessons from the Book of Daniel.

It really should have been Lessons from the Life of Daniel maybe, but we're going to transition now.

I'm going to read our scripture for this message, 1 Corinthians 6, 18 through 20.

1 Corinthians 6, 18 through 20 reads, flee fornication.

Every sin that a man does is without the body.

But he that commits fornication sins against his own body.

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and you are not your own?

Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God's.

A message for divine service today, the last party.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your word and go further into the book of Daniel.

I ask now once again, Lord, that you just make me a nail on the wall.

A rusty nail, Lord, but Lord, hammer that nail in with your Holy Spirit.

And then Lord upon that nail I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Now Lord we need an extra outpouring of your Holy Spirit.

All right, we're going to jump now to Daniel chapter 5, 1 of my favorite Bible stories.

Daniel 5, we're going to start at verse 1.

Daniel 5 and verse 1 says this, Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords and drank wine before the thousand.

Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem that the king and his princes, his wives and his concubines might drink therein.

Belshazzar is the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar.

He did a coup d'etat actually to get rid of the king that came before him.

But he was a lazy king, did not take his office seriously and instead even while the kingdom was under threat, Nebuchadnezzar's grandson here, Belshazzar, chose instead to party and to have a good time.

In verse 3, it says, then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple out of the house of God which was at Jerusalem and the king and his princes his wives and his concubines drank in them And they drank wine and praised the gods of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

This was the party of all parties, a thousand of his lords, just like in the last story.

All of the dignitaries show up and there's a big party happening.

They break out the alcohol and when Belshazzar tastes it, he says, Ah, this is good wine, this is a big party.

Go and get the vessels that we took out of the temple in Jerusalem.

This was the ultimate level of disrespect to the God of the Hebrews and he knew what he was doing.

He had heard the stories and he called for the vessels.

I think as if it was for him to say that if we could conquer the God of those people and their peoples, We can be safe no matter what threat is around us.

Speaking of this party, this is what the spirit of prophecy says.

With reason dethroned through shameless intoxication and with lower impulses and passions now in the ascendancy, the king himself took the lead in the riotous orgy.

Ellen White tells us that in fact this was not just a normal party, this was sexual sin at the highest level.

The reason this was so despicable in the sight of God is that it was so debaucherous, so debased.

And to bring out the vessels of God into this situation was a statement that they were really disrespecting God most directly.

I want to submit, especially to the young people, that you must be careful where you spend your time and in whose presence you spend your time and how you view yourself.

You have no place at Belshazzar's party in these last days.

You ought not be filled with the wine of the world.

You have been called to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And this is what we see in our society today.

I told you guys we'd talk about this a little bit today, but this is literally the culture of today.

Many of you have been following the story.

I know you guys may not be following as much, but the rapper, music mogul, billionaire, Sean P.

Diddy Combs has been sitting in prison or in a jail in Brooklyn for the past few weeks because the parties that he throws are so debased that they're actually trying to bring, and it's all alleged still, criminal charges against this mogul.

And you can see him here on the right in the second row.

Here he is, and this is where the world has gone.

What the devil wants to do is to tell you that you can live any way you want without consequence.

And the other side of this that I want to bring up to you guys is that just as Belshazzar engaged in this partying environment and this riotous living as a form of worship to his pagan gods, I want to submit to you young people that today when you step outside of God's design for sex and intimacy, you also worship the gods of this world.

That starts sometimes, time in the nightclub.

This is 1 of the nightclubs in Las Vegas, 1 of the top 10 nightclubs in the world, I don't even remember the name of it.

But you can see the atmosphere, the people, what the devil does.

He actually designs the atmosphere of these nightclubs.

The reason you ought not ever even step foot in 1 is that the dimming of the lights, the pounding of the music, the streaming, flashing lights, all of it is designed to put you into a state of almost hypnotism.

The music, the alcohol, the sexual innuendos, the way that people dress are all designed to lower your inhibitions so that in the banquet hall of modern day Belshazzar, you will behave in a way you would never behave outside of that place.

I wanna tell you today that you, like I said before, are like those vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem.

Because what Satan is after is the opportunity to hijack your mind.

You see, God designed us, the Bible says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

God designed us so that there's a system in your brain, and we talked about serotonin last night.

I'll talk about dopamine a little bit now.

It is the neurotransmitter in the brain that causes you to feel euphoria.

It is why when someone does cocaine, they feel high.

I didn't say this about marijuana last night.

Marijuana doesn't work on the pre-synaptic neuron.

What that means is it affects the actual receptors that receive dopamine.

And because it manipulates those receptors, marijuana is a gateway drug.

It makes you much higher when you try any other drug.

And that's why most of the people now that marijuana is legalized, many of them who start using marijuana also add cigarettes because nicotine releases so much dopamine.

So we're watching this manipulation of the mind.

The devil wants to hijack, and you can see these neurotransmitters kind of mixed together just as we talked about yesterday.

But what the devil wants to do if he can do it is to take your mind and you can see where serotonin and dopamine overlap that this is where appetite, sex and aggression are actually controlled in your mind.

If the devil can manipulate these 2 things, he can literally change your character.

He can develop in you habits, and habits become character.

And that can make you either qualified or disqualified for heaven, because what Christ is coming back for, according to Ephesians 5, Christ is coming back for a church that is without spot or blemish or wrinkle.

He wants to create upon you the kind of character that does not look like the character of Christ.

And so he works to hijack the dopaminergic system.

And everything we see in our society is designed to give you instant, automatic pleasure and reward so that you're constantly looking for this dopaminergic reward.

That's why the cell phone is so dangerous.

The smartphone is dangerous because even just the alert that you get When you get a new iMessage, or whatever message they have on the Android phone, when you get the message, a little bit of dopamine is released when you're just notified you got the message.

As you scroll through the social media and scroll, you notice it scrolls you up and it never ends.

And what we're realizing now is that this constant release of dopamine because you can stream Netflix on demand, because you can eat on demand, everything is automatic, everything happens so fast, is actually changing the way the modern brain is wired.

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03 The Last Party: Judgment Must Come

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