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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Clifford Goldstein Weekend

Clifford Goldstein

Called by Name

The Pre-Advent Judgment

Existence of God

I think my whole life, I don't, I don't, I almost remember We never talked about God.

And I think the few times we ever did, it was, did he exist or not?

And we pretty much came to the conclusion that he didn't.

The way my immediate family, or the way my whatever, the immediate and grandparents, the way we kept the holidays was like this.

They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat.

Okay, and that was the essence of my religious training.

And because I was, they sent me to get a bar mitzvah.

I was there for 10 minutes, asked to go to the bathroom, ran out, ran down the street, sat underneath a bridge, and smoked some cigarettes I stole out of my dad's car.

And that was the beginning and end of my religious education.

Now growing up secular, I also grew up very postmodern.

You have your truth and that's your truth.

And it didn't matter if logically and rationally they contradicted each other because truth was purely on the horizontal level.

There was no God's eye view of, you know, objective reality and that's how I believed passionately.

Well, it was The middle of the 1970s, I was 75, I was at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and I was sitting in a pizza parlor, and I'm eating a pizza, and I'm drinking, say, a non-adventist beverage, and I'm reading this philosopher, And right there in the pizza parlor, instantly that whole relativistic worldview shattered, just shattered.

And the essence of what it read was, it just, well here, let me explain it this way.

Here was the pizza sitting on the table in front of me.

Now you could have had 1, 000 different people with 1, 000 different views on how the pizza got there.

Aliens dropped it from a flying saucer it Evolved out of the ground you could have had 1000 different people with 1000 different views And they could have been so passionate about those views they would have died or killed defending those views.

And maybe every single 1 of those views was wrong.

The fact still remained was here was this reality, this pizza.

It was here and somewhere out there, something had to have explained it.

And that was, you know, why it got there, how it got there, the purpose, whatever.

Something had to explain the ground, the earth.

And I just moved out to the entire cosmos.

I mean there's something out there, there's a reality out there no matter how filtered it is.

And I realized just as Something had to have explained the pizza.

Something had to have explained all of creation.

And whatever that explanation was, that was the truth with a capital T.

So it suddenly hit me that truth had to exist.

Now you might think, well, Mickey Mouse could have told you that.

But again, you have to understand how I was raised, how I was educated.

I mean, I walked out of that pizza parlor just shaken, like, wow, truth has to exist.

Now, my realization that truth had to exist was a total, it was almost like a total separate metaphysics from the question of whether or not I could know it.

Something's here, something out to explain it.

Okay, that I defy anybody to show me how I could be wrong.

But whether I or anyone could know it, that was a total separate issue.

And I walked out of that peach bar, I probably never could know it, but, and this is the part that's so weird.

I'm maybe 21 years old, I can remember this moment so clearly.

I was walking down the streets of Gainesville, Florida, and this realization, that truth, and I remember thinking to myself, and I don't want to use the word sacred because I was totally secular, but I remember thinking, and I felt it so strongly, I literally, I felt a pain in my chest.

I remember thinking if it were possible, because again I realized it might not be possible, but I thought if I could know this truth, what explains the entire cosmos?

And it was only about 6 months ago that I realized it was a doctrine of creation.

That's what I was dealing with back then.

It took me almost 50 years to put that together as well.

But I thought if I could know this truth, because again, I realized I probably couldn't.

I thought if I could know it, I wanted to know it, I didn't care where it led me, what it cost me, what I had to suffer, whatever it was, I thought if I could know it, I wanted to know it.

And boom, All I know is 3 years later of all the ways I could have gone I Ended up becoming a Seventh-day Adventist Now that's remarkable because I'm not I grew up.

I knew 1 Seventh-day Adventist growing up, and he was my dope dealer.

I used to buy drugs, and we would get stoned, and he would witness to me about his religion.

I thought maybe there's some kind of white Rastafarians or something because they're into smoking.

He came back to the Lord, lived not far from the GC, and we 1 day, like 25 years later, had lunch in the GC cafeteria with this guy.

And also, in my life, there were 2 kinds of people I used to hate, And I'm serious, I used to hate Christians.

And I'm not kidding, I used to hate vegetarians.

I was so carnivorous, I was so into eating meat that when I would meet vegetarians, I'd mock them and I'd tease them and all the rest and so on and now my animosity towards Christianity was much deeper though because even though I wasn't relate raised religious For secular Jews.

I could have told you every Nazi concentration camp and how many Jews were murdered there.

I couldn't tell you what book of the Bible the 10 commandments were in.

And all this stuff happened in quote, Christian lands by people raised in the church, probably half those guards were gone to church, whatever, religious, and all that happened.

And at the University of Florida at Gainesville There was this hellfire and brimstone preacher Who used to come to the campus?

His name was Jed smock And he'd come to the campus and he'd be preaching Hellfire in Brimstone and there'd be a crowd of students in a circle around him and Some would mock him or whatever, but I was never content To stand in with the crowd I get in the center of the circle.

I got in that guy, I cursed him, I cursed his mother, I cursed his Bible.

I mean, he swore there was no hope for me.

He swore, and he was a charismatic, and he'd put his hands on me and speak in tongues to cast demons out of me, and I'd, I would writhe, and my friends eventually nicknamed me Heckle, And it was so funny, about 10 years ago, a guy wrote me an email.

I forgot your first name, but I remembered you as Heckle or whatever.

But anyway, I harangued this guy for the couple of years I was there.

And then I graduated the University of Florida in like 75, 70, yeah, 76, no, 76, 77, no, yes.

I went there and I graduated in 77 and at this stage of my life, I had 1 goal and 1 goal alone.

And I had started a novel my senior year at college.

And I got writers and editors in my family.

I had an uncle who was nominated for the National Book Award.

I mean, It was just in my blood on my mother's side.

And I had started this novel, and before long it consumed me.

I mean, in many ways, the book controlled my life more than I controlled the life of the characters in it.

And I spent my last year working on the novel and just got my degree to get it out of the way.

And as I look back, I learned more from my creative writing classes than I thought at the time.

And it's funny, even now, every now and then, I teach some writing seminars, and I find myself channeling some of my teachers from the University of Florida.

But anyway, I graduated there, and I go back home to Miami Beach.

And I go back home and I'm gonna work on my novel, and then I finally decided I had a little bit of money left over.

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Series

Clifford Goldstein Weekend

Called by Name

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Called by Name

1h 6m

The Pre-Advent Judgment

52m

Existence of God

48m

Sound Doctrine