Episode Transcript
Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, go therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Welcome to go teach all nations, bringing you Christ teachings through australian and international speakers. And here is today's presenter, Pastor Lyle Southwell.
Good afternoon, everybody. Happy Sabbath. It's great to be with you here at Waitara on this Sabbath day when we come to the siege of Jerusalem.
What's interesting about this particular passage in, well, Matthew chapter 24, this particular passage of scripture is that the siege of Jerusalem forms the foundation for the second longest sermon that we have that is recorded by Jesus Christ. And yet we never really speak about it very much. It's the entire first chapter of the great controversy.
And once again, we don't actually have a lot to say about the siege of Jerusalem. But when I see it as their foundation for Matthew 24: 25, 1st chapter of the great controversy, it tells me there are some lessons in this piece of history that we can learn and that apply to us today. And particularly that passage that we had in the scripture reading in reference to the abomination of desolation.
How does that apply today? What does that actually mean for each one of us today? And what can we learn from the siege of Jerusalem? I'm going to begin here with a few of the introductory passages. The Bible says that Jesus went out, this is Matthew 24, verse one to three, and departed from the temple. His disciples came to show him the buildings of the temple and jesus said to them, see all these things? Truly I say to you, there will not be here left 1 st standing upon another that will not be thrown down.
And his disciples then ask a number of questions. They say, tell us, when will these things happen? Or when will these things be? And what shall be the sign of your coming and the end of the world? Now, of course, in the minds of the disciples, these were, this was one and the same event. Jerusalem was one of the greatest cities in the world at that particular time.
And the fortifications, the buildings of Jerusalem, were absolutely stupendous. And in their minds, the only thing that would bring that city to an end would have to be the end of the world. What's interesting is that Jesus then goes on to answer both of their questions.
When will these things be? In other words, when will Jerusalem be destroyed? And what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the world? One of the most interesting and cryptic things that Jesus says in relationship to this. Here's this interesting passage that was our scripture reading where he says, when you therefore shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, then flee. Now, when I read that passage right there, I say, okay, there's something here that we need to understand, because clearly the siege of Jerusalem is something that took place in 70 ad, a long time ago, but clearly it's something that applies to our day because Jesus applies it to our day.
And so what does this passage actually mean? There's so many different things, so many aspects of Matthew 24 that we could spend time getting into. And so we need to understand, you know, exactly what is this passage all about and how does it apply to us today? In doing so, we're going to go back and look at the history of what was happening back then, and why was Jerusalem attacked by the Romans in the first place? And so we're going to summarise this fairly quickly. I know it's after twelve already, but there's going to be a few aspects of this sermon that I'm going to refer you to come and ask me about over lunch.
Anyway, here we go. Quick summary. Herod the great was appointed king of the Jews by the Roman Senate.
He replaced the hasmonean jewish semi autonomous kings. And so up until this particular time, the rulers of Jerusalem had been jewish, the rulers over the province of Judea. But now Herod the great comes along and he is edomite, he's been raised in the jewish culture, so he knows it very well.
He goes out, he kills all the hasmonean descendants, including his own wife, who was a descendant of the hasmonean dynasty, and her family members and her children. Very herod like, isn't it, when you read about what happened at Bethlehem at the time of the birth of Jesus. And just so that you know, there are about four different herods that are mentioned in the Bible.
So this is Herod the great who dies just after the birth of Jesus. Okay? He expelled the high priest, he appointed a new high priestly dynasty, he drove the country into poverty with massive building projects. And that's quite an achievement when you understand how effective the jewish people were at making money.
Then from there on, it continues on through the various Herods that come along and rulers of the province of Judea. Jewish religious practises were continually undermined. Images of the emperor turned up on coins.
That, of course, was blasphemy for the jewish people in each. Images of the emperor were eventually placed in each synagogue and finally in the temple itself. And this, of course, resulted in the first jewish revolt.
And so if we think about the first jewish revolt begins in 66 ad. And when I thought about this and I came to this subject, the thought that went through my mind was this. It was like, why did the Jews revolt? What did they think they could possibly achieve against the might of the roman empire? I mean, it's a little bit like New Zealand taking on the United States, right? God bless the Kiwis.
But I mean, the reality is that America would probably go, yeah, well, we take that on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. You know, that's kind of how it is, isn't it? And you look at the province of Judea, it's a micro nation. It's not even a nation, it's a province, but it is tiny when you look at it in the empire.
And so when I first started to study this, I'm thinking, okay, why did the Jews think that they could do anything? Okay? So to be able to go to war, there are a number of things that you need. And here we find them. You need money, you need motivation, you need men.
And it's really good if you have mountains. And when we go through the list here, we find that the jewish people in the first century, and nothing much has changed since then, have a unique superpower, right? They have a unique. You know, every different nation has their own superpower.
And when it comes to the Jews, their superpower was making money. And Jerusalem was fabulously wealthy. In fact, just the temple in Jerusalem, by itself, just the temple was running the second biggest economy in the entire empire, outside the city of Rome.
And when you've got money, that buys you a lot. It buys you fortifications, it buys you weapons. It can buy you mercenaries.
You can do a lot if you have money. And the jewish people had a lot of money. Did they have motivation? Well, they certainly had a lot of motivation.
Did they have men? Well, they were distinctly lacking in men. But in starting a revolt, they're in the far east of the empire. And there's a lot of other nations in their part of the world that didn't like the Romans.
So there was the possibility of other nations rising in revolt as well. And if they could start a snowball effect, they could accomplish a lot. And finally, the Jews had mountains.
They're very good mountains. We're going to talk about the mountains that they had, and particularly the mountain on which Jerusalem was built. Because one of the things that I underestimated was just how powerful a fortress the city of Jerusalem was in the ancient world.
Here you've got a city that is surrounded by deep ravines and gullies, valleys, waddies, whatever you want to call them, which when you go and see them today, are spectacular enough on their own. But you have to consider that, you know, 4000 years have filled them up a lot. Some of them have actually disappeared.
They've filled up so much over the centuries with all kinds of rubble. And you remember that when Herod the great came to power, he built massive fortifications. Let's think about the fortifications of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem on top of a mountaintop. David had chosen it. King David had chosen it because it was the best defended location anywhere in the nation.
He had recognised that it's strategic. Of course, David was a major strategist. He recognised its strategic position and that's why he chose it.
Okay, within the fortress you had layers of defence. So you had fortresses within the fortress. The first fortress that you had within the fortress was what was called the citadel, had three massive towers, the Mariame, the Hippicus and the Fasael.
So once you got inside the city walls, then you are faced with this fortress. It was over on the western side of the city, on the other side of the city. Then you had the castle of Antonia.
This is rising up about ten metres above the temple itself. And this was where the roman garrison stayed when they were in the city. So you had this particular fortress that was also inside the city.
But the greatest fortress that you had in the city of Jerusalem was the temple complex. And this was fairly typical in ancient cities. Typically the temple was placed in a location, whatever God it was that they served, that would give the best defence on the highest point of the city.
And this was massively fortified. In fact, if you read from Josephus, Josephus says this, the walls were scarcely surpassed. This is, the walls of Jerusalem were scarcely surpassed, if at all, in the ancient world.
That's what Josephus says about the city of Jerusalem. He goes on, these were for largeness, beauty and strength beyond all that were in the habitable earth. That's a rather big claim to make, wouldn't you say? But Josephus was a jew, so he's being patriotic, right? Just as the disciples were in verse one.
They're like, you know, they're in Jerusalem and they're like, let's do some tourism while we're here. Let's go on a tour through the magnificent buildings. Come on, Jesus, and see this magnificent capital that we have.
What did the Romans have to say about it? Well, Pliny the elder said that Jerusalem was by far the most famous of the cities of the east. And so you're comparing it with cities like Carthage or Constantinople. I mean, Constantinople had walls that withheld every siege for an 1100 year period.
There are some spectacular cities in the east and Pliny the elder comes along and says, no, Jerusalem actually tops them all. Another statement right here. The western wall of the Temple Mount rose up from the bottom of the valley to the height of 84ft, where it was on a level with the area.
And above this, and as a continuance of it, the wall of Solomon's cloister rose to the height, to the height of about 50ft. So that this section of the wall would originally present to view a stupendous mass of masonry, scarcely to be surpassed by any mural masonry in the world. And so if we compare the walls of Jerusalem, Carthage.
The walls of Carthage were about 13 metres high. They withstood a three year siege and defeated the Romans. The great Wall of China, the towers at their highest point, about 14 metres.
The Ishtar gate of Babylon goes up to 15 metres high. The towers of Constantinople, 18 metres. And the western wall of Jerusalem was 32 metres high.
It had stones in it that weighed 300 tonnes each, impervious to any kind of battering ram, impervious to any kind of siege engine that could be brought to bear against it. Jerusalem was an incredible fortress. And you look at the other fortifications that Herod the great built throughout Judea during his reign.
He was somebody who was fascinated with fortifications. And so what we find is that, you know, the Jews have a fortification like nowhere else in the world. And unlike being a little bit like New Zealand taking on the United States, it's a lot more like Japan taking on the United States.
You know, Japan was that was that asian nation that nobody was taking seriously, because the great powers were all in the west. And, yeah, they'd been fighting in China for years and Korea and so forth, but no one took them seriously until they. They took on the United States.
And when they took on the United States, they never lost a battle for the first six months. In fact, the very first battle that the imperial japanese army lost was fighting australian militiamen on the Kokoda trail. Gotta be patriotic about being australian sometimes.
Do we? The revolt begins. My slides. They got converted to PowerPoint, so they messed up a little bit.
Okay. Cestus Gallus, he threw 30,000 veteran troops at Jerusalem. He was defeated in nine days.
The walls of Jerusalem just shrugged them off. He lost a 6th of his troops. He had to retreat.
And so then what we find is that Titus spends the next four years getting together an army that can take on Jerusalem. You remember that when Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonians. When the Babylonians took Jerusalem, this was the army.
The babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar II was the army that had just defeated the Assyrians, who had ruled the world for hundreds of years. And it took Nebuchadnezzar's professional army 30 months to take Jerusalem and had nothing like the fortifications that the Romans were up against. This was an incredibly powerful city.
In fact, when Titus came to, I was going to say in relationship to this particular battle here, you know, the Jews, they got a lot of confidence from it, but it was a little bit like. It reminds me of what Yamamoto, the Japanese, said after the attack on Pearl Harbour. He wrote in his diary, I said, I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
And in a war of attrition, you could never defeat the might of the roman empire. Yeah, you could win some battles, but you're never going to defeat them. Titus, when he got there four years later, it took him a little bit longer than the Americans to spool up the industrial capacity to build an army powerful enough to take on Jerusalem.
But he said this. He said Titus commanded that the temple and the fortresses be preserved and not burned, because he believed that unless they were preserved, no one would ever believe how powerful a city the roman armies had conquered. We don't really think about Jerusalem that way, do we? We see Jerusalem as, oh, yeah, that's the city of peace.
That's the city where Jesus was. And Jesus, you know, the prince of peace, was right there. Well, by this stage, over the centuries, about 5 million combatants have been killed defending the city of Jerusalem.
It was never really a city of peace. And so we ask ourselves the question, okay, when Jesus says this and Jesus talks about the abomination of desolation, we're going to talk about the abomination of desolation in three contexts this morning. Thank you so much for the glass of water.
My throat is a bit scratchy. I think it's just the way it's going to be today. We're gonna look at the abomination of desolation in three stages, and the first one is here at the destruction of Jerusalem.
Jesus says this, when you see the abomination of desolation, stand in the holy place, do what? Flee. When Titus took the city of Jerusalem, if you want to hear about how, ask me over lunch. When he took the city of Jerusalem, the very last place to fall was the temple where the holy place was.
And so that's a rather strange statement for Jesus to make, wouldn't you say? Why say, when you see it in the holy place, then get out? Because by the time the Romans were in the holy place, there was no escaping for anyone. The Jews had defended their city with such tenacity that the Romans ended up basically killing everyone inside the city. There was no surrender, and so no quarter was given.
And so what's Jesus talking about here? Well, what's interesting is that the holy place in the temple, which we normally assume when we read the passage, isn't the only holy place that there was in Jerusalem. When Nehemiah was ruling Jerusalem, he had a problem with Sabbath keeping. And so he introduced some laws to bring the Sabbath back into how it was supposed to be kept properly within the city of Jerusalem.
And so there was a bunch of traders, particularly Phoenicians, lebanese people who used to trade in Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And the Sabbath day was a great day for trading. They did a lot of business on that particular day, and they weren't happy about losing their business.
And so Nehemiah comes along is like, well, on the Sabbath day, we're going to close the city gates. To close the city gates. And so the Phoenicians, they all set up their booths out the side of the city.
And so they're trading up and down over the walls outside the city on the Sabbath day. And so Nehemiah is like, okay, that's not good. What we're going to do now is we're going to create a two mile exclusion zone around the city of Jerusalem, where no trade is allowed to take place on the Sabbath day and call it the holy place.
So what happened? The jewish revolt begins. The roman armies under Gallus surround the city of Jerusalem. They are now standing where? In the holy place.
What gods are they worshipping in the holy place? Pagan gods. Dies Solus, the greatest of the roman gods. His holy day is which day? Sunday.
Sunday. Sunday. Is now standing in the place of the Sabbath.
All of the Christians recognise the sign because the abomination of desolation is standing in the holy place. And as soon as Gallus is defeated, nine days later, all the christians left. This was the headquarters of the christian church up until this particular point.
The first great christian council was held in Jerusalem. They all left. There was none left.
And when Jerusalem fell four years later to Titus, there wasn't a single solitary Christian who died in that conflict because they followed the prophecy of Jesus. So that's the first instance we have of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. But it's not the only one, because Jesus goes on and he says, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.
So if we're going to understand some things about that, we need to go back and look at what Daniel the prophet has to say. Right? And I'm just looking at time right here and thinking, how quickly can I get through this? All right, let's go, let's go. Let's do this as fast as we can.
All right, what have we got here? Daniel chapter eight is where you're going to find this. Why is my clicker not working? Oh, here we go. Oops.
Daniel 813. I heard one satan speaking to another saint, said unto that certain saint which spoke, how long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice and the transgression? This is the abomination of desolation to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden underfoot. Here's where we get our first clue.
And by the way, we're going to enter into some controversial area here. There are those in the adventist church. There are two views in the adventist church in relationship to this passage, and there are those that are wrong, and there are those that are right.
And I am one of the ones who is right. Barand is one of the ones who is wrong. No, I have no idea what Barron's view on this is.
I'm just joking. Okay, so it works like this. There's two ways of getting to the same place, all right? They both end up with exactly the same conclusion.
We all clear on that? And Ellen White says very clearly, don't argue over it. So after I preach on it over lunch, don't come and argue with me over it. Honestly, I don't care which view you take, because the conclusion is the same.
It makes no difference. But I gotta teach one, so we'll pick one and go for it. How's about that? All right, we have the transgression of desolation here.
The abomination of desolation is called the transgression of desolation. That's important because transgression is involved. And to have transgression, you have to have truth first.
You have to have a truth that you can, then transgress. Isn't that so? All right, that's going to become important as we work our way through. Of course.
Daniel chapter eight mirrors the previous chapters before it. You have the ram who becomes great, which symbolises media and Persia. You have the goat that becomes very great, which symbolises Greece.
Then you have the little horn, which becomes exceedingly great, which symbolises Rome. Of course, we have it laid out for us here. Repeat and enlarge.
And then we come down to verse eleven and we have these really cryptic verses that we often avoid when we are doing. In fact, when I'm doing an evangelistic campaign, I just skip these ones. So get ready to go deep.
This morning. This afternoon, I should say. This afternoon.
Yep. Okay. He magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away and the place of the sanctuary was cast down.
You see, the question that we need to ask is this. The Bible talks in Daniel eight and verse 13. Let me just flip there very quickly.
It talks about Daniel chapter eight and verse 13. How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice and the transgression of desolation? We need to know what is the relationship between these two. Magnified himself even to the prince of the host.
By him, the daily sacrifice was taken away and the place of the sanctuary was cast down. A couple of things I want you to notice here straight away. This is King James version.
In King James version, one of the advantages that you have is a very word for word kind of translation as much as possible. But when a word is added in, it's italicised. That's helpful.
And we've got a couple of italicised words right here. 99.9% of the time, you find that the italicised word is absolutely appropriate to be there.
But you don't have to leave it there. It's optional because it's not in the original. Why don't you notice the word daily? The daily.
Because the word sacrifice is not in the original, is it? It's italicised. It's been placed in there. So therefore we're going to do some English.
The word daily, in this context is an adjective because it is describing a noun. Okay? So an adjective describes a noun. The noun is the sacrifice.
The word daily is. Is an adjective that describes a noun. We all following so far.
Okay, get ready to go deep and hold on. I'm going to use an illustration. And when I was looking for an illustration, I'm a bit of a car guy, so we're going to use cars.
Okay, let me illustrate this real quick. Let's take the sacrifice out. Let's replace it with some cars.
We'll put some cars in here. By him, the red forward was taken away. So the word red is an adjective, right.
It's describing the forward. However, the word Ford's not actually there because it's in italics, isn't it? If you take the word Ford out, the red was taken away and it changes from being an adjective to a noun. Now, we have a brand of cars that is called ared, right? That's an odd name for a car.
But hey, I always used to think that the great walls are the thing they were building between America and China until they. America and Mexico until they built cars in China called great Walls. There you go.
Okay, so the red. So now the word red. So we go back to our passage.
Here's our passage. If we take the word sacrifice out, the word daily now becomes a noun. It becomes a thing of its own.
We all following so far? Good. All right, let me just see where we're up to over here. Bear with me.
Then I heard how long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice and the transgression of desolation. Here's our words that are italicised. If we take the word sacrifice out, the daily becomes a noun.
And now what you have is two kinds of desolation. You have the daily and you have the transgression of desolation. We all follow so far.
So you've got two kinds of desolation. Now. You have the daily and you have the transgression.
Of what? Of desolation. Okay, so if we look at that in a little bit of historical context, we could simply ask ourselves, okay, daily continuance, continual of desolation. Has there been a continual desolation on our planet since Satan was here, since we accepted him to be here? Absolutely.
All of the pagan religions are a form of a worship of Satan. They have always been here. They will always be here.
Right the way through. Right. Some of you are thinking, where's Laura going with this? Okay, if you want to go with the high priestly ministry, God bless, I'm happy with that as well.
You'll end up in the same place. It's no big deal. But anyway, you have a continual desecration.
But then you have this new one that turns up which involves transgression. In other words, it begins with truth and then it transgresses that truth. Christianity comes along.
But did Christianity remain pure? No, absolutely not. Christianity became impure and we find that taking place down through the dark ages. Well, how did that happen? The Bible gives us the answer.
And to find the answer for it, going to look at a couple of hebrew words here. They are Mikdash means a sanctuary. It can mean God's sanctuary, it can mean anyone's sanctuary.
It can mean Baal's sanctuary. Quodesh, on the other hand, only ever means God's sanctuary. And then we have this really interesting word, rum, which means to absorb, lift up, and exalt.
So let's go back to Daniel, chapter eight and verse eleven, where it says, yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host. By him, the daily, or paganism was taken away. How was it taken away? It was absorbed and exalted.
Rum. And the place of Mikdash, paganism, sanctuary, was cast down. If you ever noticed that in the area of the world where Christianity existed, how it dominated the world and it completely wiped out paganism.
You know, if we look at our world today, we have Hinduism, we have Buddhism, we have many of the other religions from around the world, but we don't find major people worshipping Saturn, do we? Or any of the other roman gods that existed, or any of the scandinavian gods or whatever existed where Christianity existed. Within 500 years, those religions vanished, gone, ceased to exist. How did they disappear? Well, they were absorbed into Christianity.
In fact, it reads like this. If you put that in there, it says, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him, paganism was absorbed and exalted, and the place of paganism, sanctuary, was cast down. Paganism ceased to exist.
But did it really? The simple reality is if you take away everything from Roman Catholicism that originated with paganism, you have nothing left. It's a simple reality. It was absorbed and it was exalted.
There's one more interesting verse right here that helps us to understand this a little bit better. He said unto me, for under 2300 days, then the sanctuary would be cleansed. What date does that point us forward to? 1844.
Yep. All right. And how many verses in the Bible do we have pointing to 1844? How many verses can you.
Can you use in the Bible to prove 1844? Yeah, one verse. Most Adventists would say one verse. Right, now, watch this.
Let's go to. Okay, so there's our two longest time prophecies that you've got anywhere in the Bible. You've got the 2300 and your shorter one, the 1260.
The 2300. We've got that in one place in the Bible pointing to 1844. The 1260 you've got in seven different places.
It's interesting is this verse and a host. An army was given him against the daily, against paganism by reason of transgression. It cast down the truth to the ground.
It practised and prospered. So we look back historically and we say, okay, when was an army ever given to the papacy to fight against paganism? Well, that happened in the year 508. And then we have this prophecy here, Daniel twelve.
So from the time that the daily shall be taken away and the abomination of desolation set up, there will be 1290 days. Blessed is he that waits and comes to the 1335 days. We never talk about these dates, do we? Ah, but look where they fit in.
If you go to 508, when an army was given to the catholic church to fight against paganism, your 1290 now links to your 1260, your 1335 now links to 1844, you've got all four of your major time prophecies that are interconnected together. They are triangulated in such a powerful way you can never separate them and you can never misinterpret them. Becomes rather powerful argument in favour of 1844, doesn't it? Okay, so I'm skipping through rather quickly right here.
I hope you weren't expecting to come to Waitara church and get milk on the Sabbath day. We're getting into some meat here today, but time is escaping us, so we need to continue on and we need to talk about what does this actually, how does this apply to our day? We have a scene how the abomination of desolation applied to the siege of Jerusalem. We have seen how it applies to the dark ages and the rule of Catholicism during the dark ages.
But how does it apply to our day? Because the Bible says, when you see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, then do what? Flee. Does the Bible indicate here that there is a time when we will have to flee? Yes, it does, because Jesus is answering the question, what is the sign of your coming in the end of the world? Right. So there are three different aspects right here and we need to know, okay, if such a time is coming, when is that going to be? Somebody asked me the other day, they said, how soon do you think it could be the time to flee? And I said, I have no idea.
But, you know, a few years ago, I learned something. I learned it can happen really, really fast. Because a few years ago, if you'd have been having Christmas dinner with your family and you had said to your family, you know, within two months, you won't be able to leave your driveway without showing the right excuse for leaving your driveway, what would your family have said here in Australia? What would your family have said they would have laughed you to scorn.
They would have said, you're the wildest conspiracy theorist ever. But within two months is exactly what we had right here in Australia. Right? Can things change fast? Absolutely.
You get the right circumstances, you get the right environment, our world can turn on a dime, and we've seen it. I often wondered how these things could happen. But now I wonder, just a little bit less, what's the Bible talking about right here when you see the abomination of desolation stand in the holy place? What did the Christians see at the siege of Jerusalem? They saw the pagan gods being worshipped in the place of the Sabbath.
They saw Sunday being kept in the place where the Sabbath was to be kept. Sunday replacing the Sabbath by law, you know, not by lots of people doing it, but by law. What's the Bible indicating to us right here? The Bible is indicating, as it does in revelation, chapter 13, that there will be a time, some time in the future, and forgive me if I'm just skipping to the end right now, but there will be a time sometime in the future where Sunday will replace the Sabbath.
By law, religious liberty will cease to exist. We don't actually have religious liberty in Australia, you know, that right doesn't actually. We have no legal foundation for religious liberty whatsoever at all.
None. And so it could happen remarkably easily in Australia. And so the big question then is what's the issue with the Sabbath that so much of Christianity today is telling us? It's all about the principle.
The principle of the Sabbath is a good thing. The principle of the Sabbath is worshipping God. More specifically, the principle of the Sabbath, if you want to get really specific about it, is worshipping God once a week, right? Isn't that what's most important? So why do we make an issue as 7th day adventists over worshipping God once a week on a specific day? Aren't we just all caught up with the letter of the law? You know, shouldn't we go to the principle of the law rather than the letter of law? Let me challenge you guys this morning.
We're going to face these arguments in the future. This is going to be the reality of what we're dealing with. You know, the Bible is all about worshipping God, knowing God, having a relationship with God.
We can do that. We can have regular times for worshipping God. Why be specific over, you know, why be hung up over the letter of the law? You know, it's many things about the letter of the law.
If you look at the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law never does away with the letter of the law. The spirit of the law never undermines or diminishes the letter of the law.
The spirit of the law always exalts the letter of the law. The letter of the law says, rest one day a week. The spirit of the law says, worship one day a week.
Isn't that so? The letter of the law says, thou shalt not kill. The spirit of the law says, thou shalt not hate. Is the spirit of the law doing away with the letter of the law? No, it's exalting and building on.
The letter of the law doesn't do away with it, doesn't change it, doesn't negate it. You see, the spirit of the law is where we find our connection with God. It's the letter of the law, which sounds like a dirty word that reveals our loyalty.
It shows where our heart is. Isn't that so? Because when you do what God asks you to do purely because you love him and for no other reason, it's what shows you where your heart is. I have this picture of this farm here on the screen.
It's an illustration. We'll cover it real quick. A man buys some property, it's all.
Bush draws up some plans, gives them to his son, gives him the money. I'm going to be in the other side of the world for a few years. Here.
Go ahead and do it. Here's the money, here's the property. This is your job for the next few years.
Build everything that's on the plans. The son does everything according to the plans. He puts the fences in where the fences are supposed to be, puts the house in where the house is supposed to be, puts the sheds in the orchard.
Everything goes where it is supposed to be, exactly like the plans. But this was back in the olden days where you had to dig a well, right? And the well was over near the shed, and they're like, you know what? That'd be better over near the house because, you know, people wanting to get water and so forth for the house and to put it over near the house. The father comes back a few years later and everything is as exactly as the plans had said, and he's super excited about it.
He's looking at all this stuff that his son's done, everything just as the plans, and he noticed the well. It's like, why did you move the well? And the son says, well, it made more sense for me for the well to be over there. So I put it over there.
The father said to the son, you have not obeyed me in anything. And he hadn't. Because you think about the precedent that the son set.
The precedent that he set was, if it is more convenient, I will change it. So the only reason the fences in the house and the shed and the orchard are in the right place was because it made sense to the son. He didn't obey.
He didn't obey at all. His heart was not in what his father had said. And it's exactly the same with the Sabbath.
One day is like any other day. The sun goes up, the sun goes down. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't.
There's no difference in a day. That's not what it's about. The Sabbath is about our heart.
It's about our loyalty to God. Do we love God enough to do what he says? Because he says so. That's true love right there.
That's true devotion. And that, my friends, is why the Sabbath is such a critical issue as we get nearer the end of time. May God bless you all.
Let's bow our heads. Father in heaven, we thank you so much that you are coming back soon. We thank you for the gift of the Sabbath and what it means to us.
And we thank you that we have the privilege of showing our love, our devotion, our loyalty to you by worshipping you on this Sabbath day. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.
This message was made available by the Waitara Seventh-day Adventist Church. For more resources like this, visit waitarachurch.org.au.This programme has been brought to you by 3ABN Australia Radio.
