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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Chad Kreuzer

The History of Bible Memorization

Heavenly Father, we are seeking Your presence in a very special way this morning.

We are living in a time in earth's history where coming to a meeting like this and leaving the same person we came is no longer an option.

So Father, we're seeking your Holy Spirit.

We're seeking for the ultimate change that you alone can bring about in our lives.

I pray that Jesus would be uplifted in a very special way.

I pray that you would give me words and thoughts that are alone from you.

Anything that should be forgotten would be forgotten.

And Lord, I pray that you would lift us to a higher level of experience with you.

Not because we're deserving of it, but rather because of our desperate need.

We pray these things in the name of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

I was reading some time ago in a book about a soldier who, his name was Howard Rutledge.

He died a few years ago and Howard was an aviator.

He was flying a plane over the Gulf of Tonkin and ended up going over northern Vietnam.

And while he was flying over, his plane was struck.

And as it was struck, he realized his plane was going to go down, so he ejected.

And as he shot up and his parachute came out, he turned and looked back at the plane he had just come out of and it exploded just after he came out of it.

And after this experience he sailed down to the earth in his parachute and the trouble was he wasn't falling down into the jungle, he was falling down into an area filled with people.

And so as he landed, the people ran to him.

And this man went through a living hell, 7 years of hell, in what has come to be known as the Hanoi Hilton.

He was thrown into a prison and tortured in horrendous ways.

And I'm going to read to you kind of a long paragraph that he shares about his experience there in a book called In the Presence of Mine Enemies.

He says, it is hard to describe what solitary confinement can do to unnerve and defeat a man.

You quickly tire of standing up or sitting down, sleeping, or being awake.

There are no books, no paper or pencils, no magazines or newspapers.

The only colors you see are drab gray and dirty brown.

Months or years may go by when you don't see the sunrise or the moon, green grass or flowers.

You are locked away alone and silent in your filthy little cell, breathing stale, rotten air and trying to keep your sanity.

In prison, I discovered how important regular times of reflection can be.

Living in America, 1 becomes preoccupied with family and career.

When I was free, I seldom thought seriously about what I was doing or why I was doing it.

When days are filled by travel, conversation, books, papers, movies, television, meals, radios, billboards, and the like, We could add iPods and computers and all this.

The mind is constantly looking outward and dealing with the world outside and around.

But when suddenly all this is taken away, it is forced to deal with the world inside.

He goes on to say, Now the sights and sounds and smell of death were all around me.

My hunger for spiritual food soon outdid my hunger for a steak.

I tried desperately to recall snatches of Scripture, sermons and gospel choruses from childhood, and hymns we sang in church.

How I struggled to recall those Scriptures and hymns.

I had spent my first 18 years in a Southern Baptist Sunday school, and I was amazed at how much I could recall.

Regrettably, I had not seen the importance of memorizing verses from the Bible or learning gospel songs.

I never dreamed that I would spend almost 7 years, 5 of them in solitary confinement, in a prison in North Vietnam, or that thinking about 1 memorized verse could have made a whole day bearable.

1 portion of a verse I did remember was, Thy word have I hid in my heart.

How often I had wished I had really worked to hide God's word in my heart.

I think on this story, this young man, Howard Rutledge, went as a soldier, never thinking of the hell that he was gonna have to live through, never thinking of the trials he was gonna come upon as he was struck down, as his plane went down, and he was put in 7 years into prison, tortured in ways that are almost unspeakable.

Going through this living hell and all of this he says, you know, when we live in America and life is good, When we live in maybe Southern California life is better right things seem really good You got nice weather people have money Everybody has an iPhone or an Android or whatever right and so people are living basically good lives And he looks around and he says, I didn't think about it.

He said, I was used to looking around and constantly dealing with life on the outside, but never actually dealing with the life on the inside.

Actually dealing with what was going on in my own heart.

And he said, then he goes on to say, listen, when I was younger, I was raised in a Christian church, he says, happened for him to be the Baptist church.

And he said, I never would have thought that sometime I would be in prison for 7 years, tortured and tormented, and 5 of those years all alone in solitary confinement.

I never would have thought that would happen.

And then he ends his little discourse there by saying, I wish, I wish I would have stored up verses of scripture in my head.

Yeah, I had a few that I had memorized as a child, but how I wished I had actually taken that seriously and stored God's Word up in my heart.

Now what I find fascinating about the story is this young Baptist would have had no idea that He was going to come upon a time of trouble in His life that was intense.

He had no idea what the future held for Him.

But the reality is, That's not the case for us.

If we are the faithful generation who lives out the Word of Jesus Christ, who lives out the 3 angels' messages, actually lives by the Word of God, if we are those faithful people, we do know what the future holds.

And imagine, we're not like this young boy here who didn't know the future.

And can you imagine what it would be like knowing the future and still not preparing for it.

Not having our hearts and our lives ready for the time that comes in the future.

This young man didn't know the future, but we do know.

And we actually see the beginnings taking place.

And God is calling us to be a faithful people to His Word, living out the life and faith of Jesus Christ.

God is calling us to be victorious in our Savior.

Now, when we think back on the Bible, now God's people throughout history from the very beginning of time have taken God's word very seriously.

Now obviously there have been many who fell away, But it was a part of the Israelites' understanding of what Scripture said that they would hide God's Word in their heart.

That they would make it a part of their daily life, hiding it away in their heart.

As the Bible says in Deuteronomy 6, verse 4, it says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is 1 Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.

And the next verse goes on to say, And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart.

But then it goes on to say, and you shall teach them diligently unto your children and you should talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you stand up.

At all times you should be talking about them with your children.

You should be conversing with them within your family.

We should be talking about the Word of God instead of constantly being interested in all the popular news and all these other things.

Not like we shouldn't know what's going on in the world, but meaning sometimes we are so full of just the things of the world that we're not actually getting into the Word of God and actually conversing with our friends and with our families and interested in eternal realities, right?

Now the Israelites took it very seriously.

If you look back historically what the Israelites would do when their child was about 3 years old and as they were beginning to talk and as they were getting to the point where they would talk the father of the household would actually teach their child, the father mind you, would teach their child this verse here Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4 and 5.

The first thing you would do as the child began to talk would be to train his child to store these, the verse said, right?

I mean it says this is the most important commandment in all of scripture, right?

To love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, right?

This is the most important, and immediately says these words shall be in your heart.

And so the Hebrews took it seriously and right when their child could begin to talk, they would begin to store up this passage in the heart of their children, causing them to memorize it.

And then they would go on to memorize the entire chapter there of what we would call Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Now as they got a little bit older, these children would begin to memorize and store up more of the word of God till many of them would store up, many of the children throughout Israel would have the entire 5 books, which we call the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, they would have them totally memorized.

They would store up the Word of God in their heart.

Some of those young men who were particularly apt to memorization would then go on further into their education and they would memorize the entirety of the Old Testament.

Some of these then would then actually be given in a kind of like a university setting they would be given jobs these individuals were called tena and these people would actually what would end up having now this was later in time this was an ancient Israel but they would go on to memorize the entire Old Testament and they would be given a job, a paid position in a something like a college or a university, where the professor would say, oh brother would you please share for us in the section where Jeremiah says when he's speaking about being thrown into the pit and the mire is up to, would you quote that section for us?

And boom he would rattle it off from memory.

Because you can imagine it wasn't very easy to take a scroll and try to roll your way to find it in the scroll, right?

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The History of Bible Memorization

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