COMMITTED to train men and women
to have minds for the Lord Jesus,
hearts for the truth, and
hands that are skilled to the task.

Sermons on Luke (Page 2)

WHAT IF?

Stuart Briscoe in his book titled: “Vital Truths to Shape Your Life”
“Freedom creates options. Political freedom allows me to vote for the politician whose platform most closely reflects my political opinions – or not to vote at all. Religious freedom allows me to worship at the church, synagogue, mosque, or temple that I believe teaches the truth. Or I am free not to believe anything. Economic freedom allows me to live where I wish, drive what I prefer, travel where I want, wear what I like, associate with whom I choose. BUT ALL THESE OPTIONS REQUIRE ME TO CHOOSE. “
Ian Thomas comments on this text: “Those who would have you reject the Virgin Birth of Christ, would have you believe that He was the illegitimate child of a woman who was both unfaithful and a liar! Others would have you believe that a matter of such gravity is of no particular consequence! Remember that every lie is a lie about the truth – and every lie comes from the same source, the big Lie, who is the father of lies.”
Ian Thomas: “By the Word of God, through the Holy Spirit, acting on the obedience of Faith. That is how the miracle took place, and Christ was born in Bethlehem. …By His incarnation the Lord Jesus Christ had established a precedent in procedure for spiritual regeneration.

BE A HONEY BADGER

Gad Saad wrote the book titled: “The Parasitic Mind” subtitled: “How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense”
“Many people living in the West tell me they want to defend our liberty but cannot do so publicly because they could suffer professional or social consequences. Therein lies the problem. Did the young, Allied soldiers landing on the shores of Normandy in World War II ask for a guarantee of their safety before charging German machine guns and mortars?”
Their selfless heroism granted me the freedom to type what you are currently reading. Millions of individuals have sacrificed their lives so that your children and mine could live in free societies. And yet, most people today are unwilling to speak their minds lest they be unfriended by an acquaintance on Facebook. Cowardice should be added to the list of seven deadly sins.
THERE IS NO WAY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE GRAND BATTLE OF IDEAS FOR THE SOUL OF THE WEST WITHOUT FACING ANY THREATS.”
Paul Joseph Watson wrote on article published under www.summit.news
“Senior U.S. Army Official Says There Will Never Be a Return to “Normal” Post-COVID”
“During a speech at the U.S. Army’s annual conference, Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said that measure implemented across the country will remain in place across the defense industry to protect against the shutdown of production facilities.
He also suggested that the restrictions should remain in place for the general public.
“I would say we don’t back off of the COVID-19 standards because it will also reduce the impact of flu and other illnesses,” he added. “We think continuing to apply these same techniques would be further beneficial to the people and to the Army overall.”
Here is what he put up on Twitter:
“A vaccine on its own will not end the COVID-19 pandemic. We will still need to continue:
• Surveillance
• Testing, isolating & caring for cases
• Tracing & quarantining contacts
• Engaging communities
• Encouraging individuals to be careful.
Author Joseph Massey commented: “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, nor am I a COVID denier, but people like this make it difficult not to believe that lockdowns are more about social engineering than they are about stopping the virus. A vaccine is not a ‘COMPLEMENT” to being isolated and muzzled like an animal”.
How did the Nazi Government in Germany get away with all this? They called it “Enabling Act of 1933, which formally granted the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wanted under the guise of remedying the distress of the people.”
Do you know that on November 18, 2020, the German parliament passed a law, the so-called ‘INFECTION PROTECTION ACT’ formally granting the government the authority to issue whatever edicts it wants under the guise of protecting the public health.
“Carl Teichrib “Game of Gods”: From politics to transhumanism to the interfaith movement, western culture is quickly turning away from a Biblical Worldview AND EMBRACING A False Gospel of ONENESS.”

GO TELL THAT FOX

King Herod was the tetrarch of Galilee meaning “ruler of a fourth,” for the kingdom was divided) He was King of Judea and he ruled the territory with Roman approval. While Judea as an independent kingdom it was under heavy Roman influence and HEROD came to power WITH ROMAN SUPPORT. It was in Herod’s territory where Jesus was ministering. We all know about Herod the Great, the one who was in power when Jesus was born and who slaughtered the innocent children after the Magi told him about the Christ child, but this is his son, Herod Antipas. What do we know about him? Well, when Jesus calls him “that fox,” he is not just saying that he is as sly as a fox but Jesus is actually insulting him, for a fox is an unclean animal in the Israelite holiness codes. Herod the Great (Herod Antipas’ father) was by descent an EDOMITE, whose ancestors had converted to Judaism. Herod was raised a Jew.
C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”
“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”
As John Whitehead wrote:
“Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier – a surveillance matrix – the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction. Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery.
The government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in a guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without knowledge of consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
“There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: YOU.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your SINGULAR HUMANNESS.”
“Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself – mind, body, and soul – in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.”
These COVID-19 vaccines, which rely on messenger RNA technology that influences everything from viruses to memory, are merely the tipping point.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively unchartered, frontier; mental, emotional, of the human race.”
If you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in on the heels of the governments, rollout of this COVID-19 vaccine.”
The term “SINGULARITY” – that is, computers simulating human life itself – was coined years ago by mathematical geniuses Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann.
“The ever accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
The plan is to develop a computer network that will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of human beings by 2029. And this goal is to have computers that will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on earth.”
John von Neumann
Science and Technology Journalist Marcelo Gleiser published an article under the title :”The Transhuman Future; BE More Than You Can Be”
“How is it that we define a human? Is it our body? Our genome? Our behaviors? Our self-awareness? Our compassion? Our minds? All of these and then something more? What now may be obvious to most people about being human will become less so as we become progressively more integrated with technology both inside and outside our bodies.”
“The future? Transhumanism will only grow. Technological devices will be implanted in our heads and bodies, our used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities. Why see only in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Let’s go ultraviolet! Infrared! Let’s extend our hearing range, our memory capacity, our immune defenses, our life span, our brainpower.” Marcelo Gleiser
Ray Kurzweil is the brainchild behind what Google is doing. This is what he sees:
“Google will know all the answer to your question before you have asked it. It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.
Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book titled:
“SINGULARITY IS NEAR: When Humans transcend Biology”
“Artificial circuits replicating themselves at a molecular level will merge with the biological circuits that constitute our nervous systems, giving rise to an ENHANCED HUMAN SUPER INTELLIGENCE. Once this starts happening, what we now call the Internet will in effect become telepathic, giving these enhanced humans instantaneous access to all available knowledge and information as they fashion their brave new world. You see how explosive this gets? And its just the beginning.
Once the process gets underway, the evolving superintelligence keeps expanding until it permeates the entire planet and, still accelerating, eventually the universe.
That movement should one day facilitate rapid travel beyond our own galaxy, taking the process literally everywhere.”

THE GLORY OF GOD

we have four texts taken out of the Word of God, all dealing with God’s Glory, and yet they all seem to say something different.
• Is God’s Glory the shining clouds
• Is it something the clouds point to
• Is it God’s honor or reputation connected with what we eat or drink
• Is it some standard to which you and I did not live up to
What is it?
What is the Glory of God?
כָּבוֹד kavod (Hebrew)
Literal meaning of this word is HEAVINESS, WEIGHT
In English we use the word heavy also as a metaphor.
• My heart is heavy when I heard your story
• This is a heavy message
We use this metaphor to describe that this message was intense and difficult to absorb or understand. And
• Literal: heaviness, weight
• Metaphorical: importance, reputation, honor
• Physical manifestation of one’s importance
• A Personal KAVOD = wealth & possessions
Why is this all important to understand? Because what the Biblical writer wants you to know is that KAVOD describes the reality of the physical weight, the wealth, the possessions, the importance, the reputation, the honor of people on this earth and then go OUTSIDE OF THOSE MANMADE ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND LOOK UP TO HEAVEN at night, look at the towering mountains, the beauty and splendor of God’s creation. It’s all real, things you can see and experience, we see and experience. The entire creation IS A REFLECTION OF GOD’S GLORY.
The entire realty of God’s Creation is God’s KAVOD.

THE GOD OF ORDER – Part II

Dr. Michael Heiser:
“A biblical writer would use “Elohim” to label any entity that is not embodied by nature and is a member of the spiritual realm. This “otherworldliness” is an attribute all residents of the spiritual world possess. Every member of the spiritual world can be thought of as “Elohim” since the term tells us where an entity belongs in terms of its nature.
The spiritual realm has rank and hierarchy; Yahweh is the Most High.”
“The New Testament marks the rebirth of a struggle thousands of years in the making. The people of God have been isolated and under foreign rule. The divine presence of the days of Moses, David, Solomon, and the prophets is nothing but memory. When angels visit Mary and Zechariah to announce the impending births of Jesus and John, centuries of divine silence are broken. Thirty years later Judea will explode. The unseen spiritual conflict is even more volatile.” Dr. Michael Heiser “The Unseen Realm”

THE GOD of ORDER

The church of today is bending under the weight of its own rationalism.
Today’s church tradition forces us to believe that God’s heavenly hosts is another term for angels.
The term that describes the NATURE of the heavenly host
The nature describes what the members of the heavenly host are or are like
The term that describes the STATUS of the heavenly host
The status describes the hierarchical rank of the members of the heavenly host with respect to God and each other
The term that describes the FUNCTION of the heavenly host.
The function describes what the members of the heavenly host do.
Francis Schaeffer in his book “True Spirituality” is talking about this very subject:
“The Mount of Transfiguration makes is very, very plain that the supernatural world is not a long way off. One does not have to take a spaceship and fly for two generations, producing the second generation in flight, in order to reach the supernatural world……
This is the emphasis of Scripture, that the supernatural world is not far-off, but very, very close indeed.
Speaking of Christ on the Emmaus road, Luke wrote: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31)
It would in fact be better to translate: “He ceased to be seen of them.” Luke does not say that Christ was no longer there. In this particular place they simply did not see him any longer.”
Dr. Michael Heiser:
“A biblical writer would use “Elohim” to label any entity that is not embodied by nature and is a member of the spiritual realm. This “otherworldliness” is an attribute all residents of the spiritual world possess. Every member of the spiritual world can be thought of as “Elohim” since the term tells us where an entity belongs in terms of its nature. The spiritual realm has rank and hierarchy; Yahweh is the Most High.”