The Spiritual War & the Power of Truth - Lea-Anne Smith (Sermon Audio) Go Teach All Nations

SPEAKER 1 Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing 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's teachings through Australian and international speakers. And hear us today. Today's presenter, Lea-Anne Smith. SPEAKER 2 Thank you, Father, that we're here and we just ask now that you help us to focus our minds on what it is you would have us to know this morning. In your name, Amen. Amen. A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Toowoomba to visit my mother and she's actually in the process of downsizing. And we went out to the shed and she was going through some boxes and pulling out things and I was taking this trip down memory lane like you wouldn't believe. And out of one of these boxes came a basket. And out of that basket there were two little rings. I've got a picture of them here. Here we go, two little rings. So that's one of them right there, and a little piece of rock and the pen's just there to show you how big they are. But I've got this here anyway, so it took me back to quite a way. It holds meaning for me. I don't know what it is, I really don't know what it is, but it holds meaning for me because I remember how we came to have these. When I was a child, we went to Papua New guinea to live. My family were missionary families. And when we arrived in Papua New guinea, so this was 1970, so it was 25 years after World War II, and for all intents and purposes, Papua New guinea looked like the war had just finished yesterday. People had just walked away and they'd left the relics everywhere of war, they were on the side of the road, they were all over the place. Some of it was live, live ammunition. But, you know, some of the best finds were buried in the bush. And one Sunday, a number of families from the mission compound got together and we went four wheel driving into the bush. And then we got out and walked and we walked into a part of the bush where we went down into a cave and we write. Yep, okay. Went down into a cave. And there were rooms and corridors everywhere in this cave. Now, to give some context to this, I'll just put this one up here. Basically, the Japanese invaded Papua New guinea and they took over Rabaul because it has such a fabulous harbour. But towards the end of the war, the Allies were bombing them into oblivion. And so the Japanese went underground and they built about 300 kilometres of tunnels under Rabaul. And they had something like 13 hospitals underground. And as a child, I remember walking into this place that was a hospital. The sheets were still on the beds. It was unbelievable, Unbelievable. And we went into this room and there was this mound of rings. No idea what they were, this mound, massive mound of rings. And my mum picked up two of them and three weeks ago, my sister and I split them between us. So we've got one each. And if anyone's got any idea what they are, I don't know if they have military equipment or for uniforms, I don't know. But, you know, it's now my reminder in connection to one of the greatest conflicts this world has ever seen, which was World War II. And these past few years, I guess we've had to wonder whether we might see another one. In fact, in the last week, so much has happened in the last few years. We've seen the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, we've seen Hamas invade Israel and Israel's response to that, we've seen Israel and Syria having conflict. And in the last little while, we saw Israel start a war with Iran. And while I was literally writing this sermon, we saw the US bomb Iran. And it's hard not to ask the question, what comes next? What comes next? And you know, there was a time when the disciples asked that question of Christ and it went like this. They were on the Mount of Olives and Jesus had told them that the temple was going to be destroyed. And the disciples came to him and they said to him, tell us, when will these things be and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age? And before Jesus answered the question, he said this. Take heed that no one deceives you. And I think that's a pretty big clue that right at the end of time when things start to unravel, that deception would be a major issue. And the rest of the chapter talks about physical wars which we're experiencing, one of the signs of the end that we're seeing right now, but it also talks about a spiritual war. And that's what I want to talk to you about this morning. You know, growing up in Papua New guinea, it wasn't just the physical relics of war that I saw, it was very much a spiritual war as well. And I well remember things like, you know, times when the demons were not happy and there'd be stones literally flying up out of the ground and landing on the roofs of the girls dorm, and we had a House girl who lived with us, and there were times the demons tried to strangle her in the middle of the night. I remember going to a local show and seeing a shaman walk through fire and kick the coals out of the fire with his bare feet. And I felt the heat from that fire as a small child. And I grew up with this sense that the supernatural is very, very real and that there's a very real war between good and evil. And, you know, I guess that's partly why when I bumped into supernaturalism in my early 20s, which I did when I started hanging around my Pentecostal friends, it was important for me to understand where that power came from. Either it was from God, in which case we should all seek it, or if it wasn't from God, then it was something that maybe we shouldn't have anything to do with. And I spent much of my life trying to sort that out. And I talked about that story last night. And I think for those of you who are not here, it will actually go up on Facebook at some point. YouTube. YouTube. There we go. But this morning, I want to trace the spiritual war through the pages of Scripture. And I think the best thing you can do if you want to understand the origins of something, is to actually go to its beginnings. And that's what we did last night. When we looked at early Adventism, we looked at early Pentecostalism. So this is the question we're asking this morning. How did that spiritual war between good and evil actually get started? And what is ground zero in the spiritual war? And I don't know if you've ever heard the story before, but if you haven't, the answer is quite surprising, because it didn't actually start here on Earth. It actually started in heaven. And I'm going to take us to a passage in Revelation. You can look along in your Bible, if you've got your Bible here. If not, it's on PowerPoint for you. And this is what it says. Revelation 12, 7, 9. And war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was the place found for them in heaven any longer. So. So the great dragon was cast out. That serpent of old called the devil. And Satan, who deceives the whole world, he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast with him. You know, heaven's the perfect place, but it's actually the place where the war began. And then it spread to Earth. And what was the war about? Well, our Next scripture this morning is going to share that with us. It gives us a few clues, and it's found in Isaiah 14:12, 14. And this is what it says. It says, how you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning, how you are cut down to the ground. You who weakened the nations, for you have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit on the mount of the congregation on the farther side of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the most high. So what's the phrase? What's the sentiment that it happens over and over and over again? I will ascend. I will be like. I will be on high. I will sit on the throne. It's I, I, I, going to ascend. And how does it start? It starts with, you are fallen. You are fallen. You know, in his quest to reach as high as he possibly could, Satan actually fell. He falls from heaven to earth. He's reached for something that's not his. You know, like that child that gets the step ladder out to get that cookie jar that's up there in the kitchen, and they. They've reached for that forbidden cookie jar and they fall off the ladder, you know, because only the creator of the universe deserves the worship of the created. And so an angel called Lucifer, he falls. He becomes the devil, he becomes the dragon. And his encounter with Jesus in the wilderness gives us another clue. He tries to tempt Jesus three times, and the very last time is where he lays out what he really wants. And it's found in Matthew 4, 8 and 9, and it says this. And again, the devil took him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory. And he said to him, all these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me. What did Lucifer want? He wanted worship. He wanted the worship of people, he wanted the worship of angels, and he wanted the worship of Christ himself. How audacious. God had ordained him. Sorry, God had created him, but he wanted God to worship him. You know, in this beginning story, we get a glimpse of what the cosmic conflict is all about. Who is worthy of worship? And this is the question that Satan has infected the world with. Is God worthy of worship or is he not? Satan was actually pitching himself as being the one worthy of worship. And there is a sense in which the entire conflict that this world is now embroiled in is about worship. The entire universe worshiped God and Satan decided he wanted to be like God. He wanted to be the recipient of worship. And now a lot of the deception in the war is about Satan trying to steal the worship of people. I want you to think about the very first story in the Bible that speaks deeply of human conflict. And it's the story of Cain and Abel, and it's a story about worship. Abel worships God in the way that God asks Abel to worship him. And Cain wants to do his own thing, and so he does. And God rewards Abel's efforts at worship, but he doesn't reward Cain's. And Cain is so jealous that he kills his brother. The first death on earth is over this matter of worship. We have the story of Abraham, which I won't take the time to trace all the way through now. But he's basically called out of his country where they worship idols, and he's called to a new land where he's just a wanderer, he's just a pilgrim, but wherever he goes, he builds an altar and he worships God. And that was God's way of preserving him from the worship of his countrymen. And then we come to Israel, you know, Abraham's descendants who ended up as slaves in Egypt, and they can't worship. And finally, God is calling them out of Egypt. He wants them to come out to the wilderness and worship him. And they come. And then the first major test comes, and they want to return to the idols of Egypt. So when Moses went up the mountain to speak with God, remember that story? After he gave the Ten Commandments, they start to worry because Moses, their leader, doesn't seem to be coming back. And so they beg Aaron to make an idol, and he did. And here's the story. It's in Exodus 32. 4. And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and he made a molded calf. And they said, this is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt. And so they worshipped a golden calf. Now, last night we looked at this diagram, and this is. It's a big word, spirituality. But it's not really. Just remember, when I use the word spirituality, it simply means how you connect to God. And there's different ways of connecting to God. That's what we looked at last night. And so these are the two ways that we talked about last night. You can connect to God through his Word and through using faith to actually connect to Him. You know, he's there whether you feel he's close or not. And then we looked at this other way that's been persistent right through history, and it's connecting God through experience. And those experiences make you feel close to God. So those things might be signs, they might be feelings, they might be mystical things, they might be miraculous things. Signs, signs, wonders. And they make you feel close to God. And we look last night at why that's a trap. Remember that passage that we looked at in Matthew 7, 21:23, if you weren't here, you can look it up later. But basically, God was saying, listen, there's a type of spirituality out here where you can think you're close to God, you can feel close to him. But when I come back, what does he say? I never. I never knew you. I never knew you. So the type of spirituality that we get caught up in really, really matters. So I want you to note something important in verses five and six. And it says this. So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. That's the calf, the golden calf. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings and bought peace offerings. That was part of the sacrificial system for the sanctuary. So even though they were worshipping an idol, what did they call it? A festival to the Lord. Now what they did here was they merged the religion of God with the religion of Egypt. Now we learned a word for that last night. What was that word? Haha. Yes, I can hear it. I meet with success. If people remember syncretism. That's right. Syncretism's taking two different religious systems and mixing them together. And when one of those religious systems belongs to God and the other one doesn't belong to God, then what happens is that truth becomes obscured. It's no longer clear. And God warned his people, don't mix the worship of myself, God, with anything else. In fact, the very first two commandments actually speak to this. Do not have any gods before me. Yep. And the second one, do not make for yourself any graven image, depending on what translation of the Bible you use. Why? Why not? Well, that would be syncretism. That would be syncretism. And syncretism dishonours God. It obscures the truth. It steals something away. It steals worship away from God. Because ultimately what happens is we end up worshipping something else. And this went right back to the war in heaven. You know, Satan was trying to steal the worship that was due to God. And so God gave his people warning. He knew that they would be assailed by this creature, this evil angel now. So he said, stay away from other gods. It'll rip the relationship that you and I have apart if you worship something else. Well, we've talked about this type of spirituality that's very much based on experience and we've talked about syncretism, but they're actually related. Because what happens is if God's word is not at the center of your spirituality, and if experience, if emotions, if feelings, if signs and wonders, mysticism become the center of your spirituality, if that what becomes important, you will tend to follow that wherever it goes. And as you follow it, syncretism is what happens. You end up mixing other religious systems in. And there's no clearer example of that than what happened in the time of Constantine in the early Christian church. So that Emperor Constantine, just a bit after AD 300, decided that he needed to unite the different factions in, in Rome. And some of those factions were Christian and some were secular. And so he feigned a conversion to Christianity. And then he actually took elements of the pagan Roman religion and he mixed it with the Christianity as we, as we know it from the Book of Acts. And so it gave rise to a new religious system. And one of the first things that happened was that he made a Sunday law. He took the pagan day of worship, which was the worship of the sun on the first day of the week, and he made it a Christian day of worship so that everybody, that the empire could be united, didn't matter whether you were a pagan or a Christian, you would be worshipping on the same day of the week. And what do we call it when pagan religion is mixed with God's religion? Syncretism. Yeah. And this actually started the demise of Christianity. By the time we get to the middle of the ages, Christianity is hopelessly mired by pagan religion. Every type, idol worship, the whole thing, it was incredibly experiential. So there were grand cathedrals glittering with gold, incense, ornate priestly garments, shrines and idols, worship of Mary and the saints. It was highly experiential. The chanting, the grand organs, the liturgy that wasn't even spoken in the, in the language of the people hearing it because you didn't need to. It wasn't about your head. It was about the experience. It wasn't meant to be a reasoned faith. This was a spiritual experience designed to make the worshipper feel close to God. And the more truth was lost, the more the Holy Spirit departed. And, you know, as the Holy Spirit departed, the buildings got grander and grander. I want you to think about that in light of today. Because sometimes I wonder if this same thing is operating, that as the Holy Spirit departs, worship becomes grander and grander. And rather than the buildings being ornate, worship itself becomes ornate. You know, I want you to look at this model again. You know, after. After the corruption of the church that started with Constantine in the early 70s, centuries after Christ returned to heaven, the type of spirituality shifted to this experiential type in the red circle where people, things happen to make you feel close to God. And then what happened is we had something called the Protestant Reformation, and that actually returned spirituality to the other one. And I want to tell you a little bit about that. You know, last year I had the opportunity of going on a Reformation tour, and we toured the Vatican in Rome. And the Vatican just took hours and hours to walk through. There was so much gold and so much ornate decoration that my senses were actually. I was on overload by the time I got through. And here, here is just some of the pictures. The ceilings were so ornate and grand. And it was just corridor after corridor after corridor with this most fantastic, beautiful, beautiful artwork. Incredibly ornate. No expense spared. And, you know, after. After we finished walking through the Vatican, we actually went next door. This picture is actually from St. Peter's Basilicon, but here it is here. Here it is here. And, you know, the money to build this was actually raised by selling something called indulgences. Now, what's an indulgence? It was actually permission for you to sin. You could go and sin and you would know that you would be forgiven, and you paid money for that, and you'd get your little piece of paper. That was an indulgence. And so that's how the money was raised to actually build this. And, you know, Martin Luther, he got particularly antsy about this. He rose up and said, it's by faith alone that we're saved. No, we don't sell money, but we don't have to buy things with money for this. And he spoke out about what he saw as wickedness and exploitation and immorality that he saw in the church. And he particularly took issue with this system of indulgences. Well, I found Luther in the cathedral as I was wandering around. And that's not him in the statue, in the tall statue. That's actually Ignatius Loyola. Loyola. He was a Jesuit priest. But can you see that there's a person underneath him? That's Luther. That's Luther. So he's standing on the neck of Luther because that's what they thought of him for standing up and trying to reform the church. I was just delighted to find that statue and I knew it was there somewhere. So a few days later I visited the Waldensian valleys. Now the Waldensian people were people who preserved the Bible through this terrible period. And they hid in these mountains because the medieval church persecuted them. The soldiers would leave that place of Rome where we just saw those pictures and they would travel up several hours, quite a few hours it would have been in those times before buses, and come up here into the Waldsendian valleys and mountains and they would hunt these Waldensian people down to kill them. They lived in simple huts, they ran schools and one of their self appointed tasks, well actually they were called by God was to copy scripture and to faithfully preserve it. And they would sew little pieces of scripture into their garments and they would go from town to town as merchants and when they found a receptive heart, they would give the scriptures to that person and then disappear in the crowd and go back to their homes in the mountains. Incredible mountains. You can see why they went there, these Italian elves. Amazing place. And you know, they were hunted for hundreds of years. And let me tell you a little story. I met this gentleman, lovely young man in Italy and when he found out I was from Australia, he came and he wanted to talk to me and he said, he told me his story. He said, you know, I grew up in the foot of the Waldensian valleys here and I didn't know anything about religion, I was a secular person. He said, I went on a trip trying to find myself and I ended up in Australia. And he was traveling across Australia and Covid broke out. He said I was scared witless. I was absolutely so scared. And he said, I ran into some bunch of Adventists and they, they told me about my heritage and I became an Adventist. He was convinced of the truth and he's gone back to the Waldensian valleys to be a missionary. Amen. Beautiful young man, beautiful young man. I was just so blessed to meet him. You know, men like Martin Luther and these other reformers, they champion this type of spirituality where you think, where you reason, where you make a decision based on the word of God under the illumination of the Holy Spirit. And then that's what gives you joy, that's what gives you everything that makes you human. It was when spirituality reached its lowest point that God did intervene and raise up men like Luther and began the process of restoring reason and truth to Christianity. The Adventist church stands proudly in this tradition. You know, I think if there's any church that's Protestant, it's Adventist, because we take a stand against that practice of syncretism. You may not have heard the word before last night, but we take a stand against it. And that is why we worship on the seventh day, because that is the biblical Sabbath. And so I'm proud to come from the great lineage of the Protestant Reformation. But, you know, in a good part of Christianity over the past 150 years, spirituality has returned to this experiential model. I talked last night about how in the last hundred years, Christianity's undergone more change than at any other time in history. Now, I want to make it clear to you, you can be any brand of Christian, you can be an Adventist and be operating out of this experiential circle. You can be a Pentecostal and be operating out of that biblical centric model, okay? It's just that some systems, it's easier for you to drift into one than the other, okay? So don't sit here thinking, I'm an Adventist. I'm all good. Because I've talked to plenty of Adventists, and some of them have said to me later, you know what, Leanne? I was operating out of that model, and I realized I've got to get back to the word of God. And so we all. This is not so much about religious systems. This is about where we're each sitting personally with this. Last night we also looked at all the submovements that have come out of Pentecostalism. And I'm not going to go through all of these. Now, if you want to understand a little bit more about these, I did talk a bit more about that last night, and I'm going to talk about the fourth wave, which is what we're living through right now. I'm going to talk about that this afternoon. But the first wave I talked about last night. But I personally, as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was impacted more by the things that were happening in the second and third waves. I was impacted by things like inner healing, that worship renewal, when it first started off. And I'm not saying that worship renewal has been totally a bad thing at all. I wouldn't want to say that. There are certain aspects of it that maybe aren't so great. But the thing I want to talk a little bit about now is spiritual warfare, because it's something we don't talk about much in Adventism. And I think sometimes we can get a little bit confused about it because many people think that spiritual warfare is actually very. It's the same as the great controversy. And so they're similar in this, that they both believe that there's good and evil, but actually they operate from very different fundamental differences. And one of the core differences relates to how the war is actually won. So modern spiritual warfare puts a lot of emphasis on strategies and weapons of the war and how you achieve power in the war. And so you see things like. In modern spiritual warfare, you see things like anointing buildings and objects and binding Satan. You see these practices of decreeing and declaring and defeating curses, deliverance ministries and discovering intergenerational sin and something also like prayer walking. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to go walking and pray, not at all. But if you believe you've actually got to be on site for your prayers to work, which is where a lot of prayer walking happens these days, then you know, that's something that the Bible wouldn't teach. So let's talk about some of these things. You know, there's nothing magical about anointing buildings and objects. Placing a little bit of oil on something does not banish the devil, neither does telling him that he's bound from certain places. And I hear people pray sometimes, you know, satan, we bind you. We declare you cannot enter this building or this place. I hear people declare that depression is banished, or anxiety or the demon of this or the demon of that. But this is not how Scripture admonishes us to deal with these things. And what is being suggested here is that there's actually power in the words. So this is one of the tenets of modern spiritual warfare is that there is power in words and you can use words as a form of spiritual warfare. And so decreeing and declaring, defeating curses, examples of that. So something else. Well, actually move to the next slide. Here we go. The power of using words. We've just covered that. The other one is taking back territory from Satan. So we go back to that list. A number of those things are actually involved with physical territory. Prayer walking in this context is about taking back physical territory. Anointing buildings and objects is about physical territory. Now, how did this actually come about? I want to talk a few minutes just about the rise of spiritual warfare and basically it happened in the second wave. So remember we talked last night about the rise of glossolalia and speaking in tongues. There came a point some years later where our Pentecostal friends began to realise that perhaps speaking in tongues was not what they thought it was because they thought it was the infilling of the Holy Spirit. And basically you were going to act in a pure way from here on out. But they found out you can speak in tongues and you can still be involved in some pretty unholy stuff. And so they realized this formula did not work. Being a Christian, plus speaking in tongues did not give you holy living. And so they came to some conclusions. And what I'm sharing with you, I'm sharing with you from Pentecostal historians. I'm not making this up. This is their own analysis. Okay? So they came to the conclusion that Christians can be spirit filled and still not be victorious. Something must be blocking victory, and that something must be demons. And that's actually what gave rise to the spiritual warfare movement, which started roughly in the second wave. It had always been there, but now it got sort of got really organized. I also want to talk a little bit about this idea that Christians who have the Holy Spirit in them can also suffer with demon possession. And I've talked to Adventists who are confused about this. But let me tell you where this idea comes from. It comes from something called Platonic dualism. So remember Plato, he said that, you know, the soul lives forever, the body dies. They're actually separate from each other. And that's where the modern idea that the soul goes to heaven actually came from. But what does the Bible say about what happens when you die? The dead know? No, nothing. Yeah, yeah. So basically this idea of Platonic dualism was taken and it became something they called the tripartite. So you had a soul, a spirit and a body. And the thing is, in this modern spiritual warfare, demons could inhabit some of this, but not others. So you could have the Holy Spirit with you in your spirit, but you could have a demon in your body. And so this practice of deliverance, delivering Christians from demons actually arose and it became quite a big thing. And it still is. And you can trace it through many, many books that have been were written. Probably the most seminal one was Pigs in the Parlor. It is actually speaking to, you know, demons actually inhabiting the Christian body. How do we know that that can't happen? Well, there's many texts, but here's one that's one of my favorites. First, John 4. 4. You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them because of the one who is in you. And who's he greater than? He's greater than the one that's in the world. They're not both in you. One of them is in you, and one of them is in the world. And when I think about modern spiritual warfare, it's really based on two lies. The two lies that were told in the Garden of Eden. You shall be like gods. And how does that actually come through? It comes out in this thought that your words are as powerful as God's words. And if we trace this back to its history, something called the New Thought movement in the late 1800s, which then morphed into the Word of Faith movement and today's prosperity Gospel. Words are very powerful because you are like God. And just as God had powerful words, you have powerful words. It's this lie that you are like God. And the other one is, you shall never die. Because in this theology of spiritual warfare, the body and the soul spirit are separate, and the Holy Spirit can be in one while the demon is in the other. Isn't that amazing where this comes from? Yeah, you know, genuine spiritual warfare, you can't go better than Ephesians 6. And the very first one is the Belt of Truth, the thing we've been talking about this morning. And the last one is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. So all of those beautiful things in the spiritual war bookended by truth and the Word of God, the concept of truth itself, which is under attack. All right. Modern spiritual warfare today revolves not around truth, but around territory. Because if you come to the place where you look at every church denomination and you say the Spirit is. Is with everyone and the Spirit causes signs and wonders in every church, then obviously, truth is not important. And if truth's not important, then the war must be about something else. So it's actually about taking back territory. And this afternoon, I'm going to explain how that's playing out in America right now, and you'll be quite amazed. So to finish up, I want to tell you a little bit of a story. It also happened in the Second World War. Happened about the time the Japanese were starting to build those underground hospitals in Papua New guinea, where the war had been raging for three years with no end in sight. And the British decided that they would launch an assault on Europe. And they looked at it, and they didn't quite know which way to go. So if you can see that there, you can see Sicily, okay, above the word Malta, and you can see Greece over here. So to really take a major assault on Europe and really hit the heartland of Nazi Germany, they knew they had to go through the Mediterranean. And so they were wondering what to do. And the obvious one was that they'd go through Sicily, but they also knew that that would look obvious to the enemy as well, the other way was to go through Greece, but that was problematic. And they'd be launching from Egypt to get to Greece directly under it. And so they came up with a strategy to convince the Germans that they would actually be striking through Greece while they actually struck through. So, and how did they do it? Well, what they did was they, the highly secret intelligence unit in charge of deception. Can you believe they actually had. These just happened on the cosmic level. They happened in the human level as well. Unit in charge of deception, they set about devising a strategy that would completely deceive the Germans. And so they come up with this idea. They would need a dead body, and they would create for that dead body a fictitious identity as a military general, and that would float him off the coast of Spain, which then they hoped maybe a Spanish fisherman would pick up this body and take it. And this body would have some papers outlining what this fictitious attack was going to do, and it would hopefully convince the Germans that the attack would be through Greece. The hope was that the papers would fall into the hands of Hitler himself. And they gave the name of this operation, Operation Mincemeat. And what followed was billed as probably the largest, greatest deception to occur in World War II. They did find a body. It was a homeless tramp, a poor man who'd actually, sadly, taken his own life by eating rat poison. And they put him in cold storage for three months while they created, constructed this web of lies around him and they gave him this new identity as a British army general. And for those who were creating this ruse, there were some very practical problems that they had to overcome. Like how would they actually get this body, this fake general, to the coast of Spain and position him in a way that the currents would actually drift him in far enough to be picked up by a local fisherman. And what would happen if no fishermen were there? And what would happen if, at the post mortem, the person during the post mortem determined that he'd not died in an air crash, he'd actually died from poisoning, or if the coroner came to the conclusion that he'd been dead for several months rather than for several days. And how do you create identity papers with photographs of a dead person? They did some really interesting stuff. How could they be certain the seawater wouldn't dissolve the ink on these letters and make them illegible? And how would they? The most important question was how would they know that the Germans had fallen for this ploy? Because that would determine what strategy they actually used to invade Europe through the Mediterranean. So Many ifs. And it was truly an audacious plan. By the time Major William Martin was ready for his mission, he'd undergone a complete transformation in the circumstances of his life. He had parents whose letters were in his pockets. He had a girlfriend whose picture he carried in his wallet. He had had a London stopover just days before this aircraft accident that was happening. He had a receipt. He had receipts for that, and he had receipts for a diamond engagement ring. He was an amphibious warfare expert on loan to another division, hence his need to travel across the Atlantic. And he's being trusted with important papers. They found someone with a similar facial shape to do the identity papers, which were replacements for lost cars. And then one of the special operatives spent weeks rubbing the letters, sorry, the card on his clothing to make it look worn. The letters from his girlfriend were repeatedly opened and closed to make them look like they were very well read. And finally he was ready to go. They loaded him into a canister and filled it with dried ice and loaded into a British submarine and released it just off the coast of Spain. And there was a fisherman out fishing on April 30 that day on the coast of Spain, and he saw this unusual water object in the water, and he went over and he hauled his body onto his boat and he took it to shore along with the briefcase, which had been padlocked to his belt. So it wasn't long before the German agents learned that there was a briefcase, the existence of this briefcase, and they began to put pressure on the Spanish to share the contents. And the Germans knowing that, the British, knowing that the Germans had cracked one of their communication codes, used that cracked code to send messages to the Spanish telling them, hey, we've got to get that briefcase back. It's very, very important. And the Germans listening in, became even more determined that they had to get this briefcase to find out what was in it. Well, it did the rounds and it was finally sent back to London. And once it was back, intelligence agents started to determine, working to determine if the letters had been opened. How did they know? They'd actually had the forethought to plant an eyelash in one of the letters. And when they opened the letters, the eyelash was gone. So they knew that they'd been read. But who read them? Was it the Spanish? Was it the Germans? Well, just a few days later, they got their answers. They intercepted. They'd cracked one of the German codes and they intercepted a message that warned that the British assault was going to be through Greece, just as the fake letters had said, well, that fake information found its way to Hitler's desk. And because he believed it, he sent an additional 90,000 troops to Greece rather than Sicily. And six weeks later, the British launched their offensive through Sicily and easily won it. And even as it was playing out, Hitler was still convinced that the real attack was going to be on Greece. So he largely ignored what was happening in Sicily and continued to build up his reserves in Greece. And some military analysts believe that this was the deciding event that determined the outcome of World War II. You know, this is. He was buried in Spain, and there's his gravestone. Lindwa Michael served as Major William Martin on his gravestone. The Allies were successful because they managed to convince the enemy that the war was really happening someplace else. Some. Yeah. And that, my friends, is exactly the same playbook that the enemy uses today. In the enemy's playbook, the war is not on truth, but we, you know, how important is truth? Truth is the very vehicle that carries forward the gospel. That's how important it is. That's how important it is. A successful battle strategy, convincing the enemy that the battle is really someplace else. But the one I want to take you to is this second Thessalonians 2:10. They perish because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved. That's how important truth is. And my plea to you today, friends, is this. Love the truth. We had that beautiful prayer about protection this morning. Truth is what protects us. It's at the center of that genuine spirituality that we're talking about this weekend. But to love the truth, we have to know the truth. We have to know the truth. That's where the war is today. The evil one would have you believe that the truth is not important, but it is started in heaven with the worship matter of worship. Lucifer determined to steal the worship of the angels and of humans and even of Christ himself. And this is the deception that is still playing out today. Eighty years ago, that Second World War was won in considerable part because the Allies managed to convince the enemy that the war was really somewhere else. And I say Seventh Day Adventists, this is our moment to shine. Because we know, we have always known of the primacy of truth. And this is what we are called for as remnant people. We are called to share truth. And no time in history is that more important as we hurdle towards the Second Coming. And I'm going to talk more about that this afternoon. As prophecy is being fulfilled on a daily basis, I ask myself, will this church rise and ask what God has called it? To do. Because it's called to proclaim the truth. And why? Because it's the truth that sets us free. It's the truth that sets the world free. And that is what we're called to do. Let's bow our heads and have prayer. Dear Father, We've talked about some really heavy stuff this morning. And I realise that I don't know, you know, where people have come from here today, but I realise that some of these concepts may have been new. And I just ask, Father, that you help us to take away from today what it is that you want us to take away. I know that you are coming back soon and that truth is at the centre of this war because it's truth that protects us as we get closer to the end. So, Father, fill us with your Holy Spirit. Keep us faithful to you. Help us to always remember to lean on you when things are not looking so good. Help us not to rely on our feelings. Help us not to go looking for feelings that tell us that you are close, but to believe on the basis of your word that you are there. Keep us faithful until the day we see you. In your name, Amen. SPEAKER 1 This message was made available by the Waitara Seventh Day Adventist Church. For more resources like this, visit waitarachurch.org.au this program has been brought to you by 3 ABN Australia Radio.