Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 16, 2020 | Stand Strong - How To Know Who To Believe?

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February 16, 2020 | Stand Strong - How To Know Who To Believe? · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Mammalady, would you get up here?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Chris is the executive director of Haiti Lifeline, whose Thrive event this Thursday is sold out.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, but you've got something for us.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, some of a lot of the folks can't go there, but we've got good news.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this last Christmas, part of our Christmas project, as you know, was that we raised money for OASIS, which is sort of the what do we do with the orphanage kids when they get too old to be in the orphanage?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the year before, you're gonna tell us a little bit about the cool way, and didn't you just get back from two weeks ago?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Two weeks ago.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: So how some of how you've been using some of the money that that we gave to to you a couple of years, uh Christmas program, Christmas Project.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: 2018.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Bingo, go for it.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'll put a picture up here.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's up.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's up.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can see this is a picture of an old church in Haiti.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh looks like a barn to me.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it you can see it's there's gaps, there's holes in the roofs.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a structure that is on its last legs.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the community that this church serves has been praying for a new church for decades.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And with the money that TDC provided through the 2018 Christmas project, we had a team of men that finished construction on this church the last week of January.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jim, if you show the there's the new church.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so nice inside that that they're gonna make them meet outside and stay away from it, right?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's too fancy inside.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, too now too nice.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: But and then that was one church at the end of January.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: The next picture?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: We have even better now.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think it looks like finished off a second church, and you can see what the people had been worshiping in, that white tarp structure.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the pastor at this church is 91 years old.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: He has been praying for decades for a new structure, what he called a temple.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see the temple under construction behind him, and here's uh here's the new church for that community.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh what I just want you to know is a thank you from these communities in Haiti.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And also, you guys are the answer to prayer.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: These men and women of this community have been praying for the resources to build a new church, and TBC was the answer to that prayer.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much for that.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: One last thing.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's a third church because there was enough raised in 2018.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're building a third church.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna try to finish it off at the end of April.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody is interested in being on a team to go and put a roof on the structure that the Haitians have already built, contact me.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's Chris with a ch at haitilifeline.org.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Send me an email if you're interested, and we can talk some more about it.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks again.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Chris.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're visiting today, uh we're in a series from January until Easter.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: The theme of the series is Stand Strong.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: The book that we're doing the series in is Jeremiah.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing a Jeremiah challenge in which uh I'm urging all of you, every all the people from all over the world, to read the book of Jeremiah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and Lamentations, those five chapters.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, by April 12th, Easter Sunday, and I'm writing devotionals this coming week to read chapters 25, 26, 27, and 28.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be preaching on the last two of those chapters this morning.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's this week, and uh uh so you will already have read like about a half of it almost, you know, if you'll just stay awake.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: So each week we're doing four devotionals, I'm doing four devotionals, you're going through four devotionals, I hope, on those four chapters.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I really appreciate those of you that email me and say, wow, loved the devotional today, or even who are saying, I did a devotional today and back in chapter two, and I appreciated it.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, so anyway, that's great.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got an interesting message, in my in my view, today for you, and it's sort of uh it's from uh Jeremiah, how to know who to believe, right?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I need to tell you that you're so privileged because this message is not just for me, it's from the guy who was driving the shuttle last night at 11 o'clock, who was 40 minutes late picking me up.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So um, anyway, I was at the airport and I'm outside, and and and for some reason there was a glitch, and so I was waiting there for 40 minutes and I was shivering, and he could tell I was about to die.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so anyway, we start chatting as I get in, and he says, So, do you have anything to get back to?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I told him I had to preach in about nine hours, and I still had an hour and a half drive.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, he says, What are you gonna preach on tomorrow morning?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, what, that's a strange question for most people to ask.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he's an older man and so forth.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, I was a preacher off and on, you know, uh part-time preacher in inner city, Kansas City, uh, for a number of years.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: I still fill in sometimes.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I said it's on the book of Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, he said.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Yeah.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So what are you preaching on?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I tell him Jeremiah 27, 20.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I start start describing it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so for the 10 minutes of our trip, I didn't say another word because he told me, he told me what I need to tell you this morning.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: So this is, you know, actually, I think I only have one line from him.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um, but anyway, he was pretty excited, and I only had to tip him like a buck or two.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: So um, but it was really, it was really fun.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is a message you're getting both me and him.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: I never found out his name.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that was all extra.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the good question.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how do you know who to believe?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you know what to believe?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: How do you know why you believe what you do?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, listen, just be frank with you, that I think that one of the best things for you to do, one of the best things I think a church that God wants his people to do and a church to do, is that we should allow our most deeply held religious, moral, and political beliefs to be challenged, to be critiqued, and to be tested by views that disagree with us.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Just something, I mean, you would think, by the way, that this would be really common today.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: We live in a digital age where you can find out, every one of us has 7,000 TV stations that are beamed into our home.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so you get CNN as well as Fox and all kinds of different views and opinions about stuff.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we have computers, and you can Google anything you want.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the interesting thing is that surveys and polls are showing that we're going in the opposite direction.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: That is that we do not, we have a kind of confirmation bias in which in which we do not talk, listen, read, anything that disagrees with us.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is just uh this is just what all the polls are showing.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, let me give you an example.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: A couple months ago, uh, there was a justice that was nominated for the Supreme Court.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: His name was Brett Kavanaugh.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And as he was going through the process, all of a sudden a woman named Ford came forward to announce that a couple of decades before he'd sexually abused her.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so NPR and PBS and so forth started doing a poll the next three days, and they interviewed Americans about what they thought.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And to their astonishment, they found that an abnormally number, a high number of Americans had already formed a firm opinion over whether Brett Kavanaugh, who categorically denied the charges, whether he was right or whether the woman was right.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And to their fascination, they found that 92% of Republicans believed that Brett Kavanaugh was right, and almost 90% of Democrats believed that Ford was right.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Which goes to show that we have a kind of confirmation bias that we tend to prefer to uh to reinforce the beliefs that we already have rather than allow them to be critiqued or questioned.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's also true religiously.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Studies show that Christians usually only dialogue, read, communicate on Facebook, whatever, with other Christians or people who believe similarly, similarly, so whereas atheists and agnostics only read, only dialogue, books, Facebook, and so forth of people who agree with them.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, we rarely put our beliefs to the test.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was entertaining.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: I did not expect this yesterday, at exactly this time.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was in the San Francisco airport, and I'm addicted to uh airport bookstores when I'm in them.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: I like all bookstores, but airport bookstores are nice because they're small, and you can pretty much go through the whole bookstore in a in an hour or whatever.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: And San Francisco bookstore, this is the most significant one there at the airport, and I go into it a lot, and it's and it has two major displays: recent fiction books, novels, and recent nonfiction.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the fiction is very, very, very different.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you can get anything you want, but the nonfiction in the San Francisco airport is astonishingly one-sided.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've never seen that so much as yesterday.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going through, and you know, a number of books on Trump.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're looking for a book that holds an opinion different than the one view that they have there, then you're gonna need to come back to go to Barnes and Noble if you're gonna look for a book called Like The Case for Trump.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Or there are a number of books on impeachment, even though it's already over.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And those books on impeachment, as I picked them up, universally said the same thing.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing with global warming, and the same thing with immigration, and the same thing with the moral issues about gender and marriage and so forth.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just got a little bit funny after a while.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I was about I was just so disgusted with the fact that they wouldn't even allow one book that disagreed with the prevailing politically correct opinion in California there in the bookstore.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was leaving, I saw this book title, How to Change Your Mind.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I go, whoa, this would be good because changing mind implies, you know, even if they say you need to believe what we believe, at least they'll acknowledge that there is another opinion.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I opened it up, read the first chapter, and you know what it's about.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's about we all need to be taking more LSD and psychedelic drugs because that changes our minds in a positive way.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought this really is San Francisco.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I find the same thing, confirmation bias happening.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I love it when people come up and they question or disagree with something I've said, whether it has to do with uh the sovereignty of God or once saved, always saved, or the age of the earth or end times or the future of Israel or whatever else, because I will say something that will challenge or will disagree with somebody's deeply held religious or moral or political beliefs.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: It just happens.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll come up and they'll challenge me and so forth, and oftentimes, sometimes I try to meet with them during the week because it's a lot of fun.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the frustrating thing that happens at least 80, 90 percent of the time.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that is I'm able to talk with this person about what they believe really well, and I'm able to quote their books because I have them in their library, I'm able to quote their positions, but when we start moving to what C.S.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis says or something else, they've never read it, they're unaware of it completely because they've never opened their mind to anything competing, and they really don't even want to talk about that.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'll hand them a book.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why don't you try reading chapter three out of mere Christianity?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Here it is.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I have very little hope that they will because we all tend to be somewhat close-minded.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have a confirmation bias, and that's all an introduction to the fact that sometimes we do get open-minded, and sometimes we have two opinions right in front of us, and both of them seem winsome.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is, how do we know who to believe?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: How do we know which of these two things to believe?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: As the guy in the shuttle said to me last night, how do you know whether to believe CNN or Fox?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: I told you I'd use one of his lines.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the best passage I've ever seen in the Bible on this question.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: It gives us four, it's gonna give us four things to do to help us know who to believe in difficult situations.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is the New Living translation, wonderful translation of the Bible, Jeremiah 27, 1, and it's a fascinating story because my sermon last week is about the potter and the clay.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: This one's about a yoke, a yoke, a wooden yoke that God tells Jeremiah to wear.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: This message came to Jeremiah from the Lord early in the reign of Zedekiah, son of Josiah, king of Judah.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Zedekiah is happens to be the last king.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're now in the last 10 years of the land of Judah.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Before they get crushed, C-R-U-S-H-E-D, crushed, including the temple, the walls, and everything burned in 586 BC.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And this is Zedekiah is, he he he runs the show.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's not much of a king, he's really a doofus.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's only 24 years old as this story develops.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Not that age is a problem, but he just shows that he's he's he's out of his element.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So this is uh 594 BC when this is happening, and he has been put on the throne by Nebuchadnezzar himself, right?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Nebuchadnezzar has conquered Jerusalem twice, but left the wall standing, and so forth.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: He's come and conquered it.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: What he likes to do when he conquers the country is he comes, he conquers it, he leaves it there, he imposes a lot of taxes on them.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: He he skims off the crime de la crime of society, the royals, the doctors, the scientists, you know, the best people, and he takes them back to Babylon to help him in his home church, or in his home country, sorry, but and he leaves the other people there and he imposes taxes.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he did that in 605.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: He took Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and some other people.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then Jerusalem, as is typical, uh, cheated on their contract and they rebelled against him.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: So he came back three years before this in 597, and he conquered them again, and this time he skimmed off Ezekiel the prophet, took him back, and some other cool people.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you got mainly blue-collar people, and he stuck Zedekiah on the throne.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Zedekiah promised that he'd pay the taxes and he'll be, and he wouldn't rebel.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the situation, and this is what the Lord said to me: make a yoke and fasten it onto your necks with leather straps.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a this is what, and I'm sure it was just a single yoke, not a double one, which should have, over the months that he had to wear this, you know, would have given him a permanent crick in his neck.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: So he's wearing this thing, okay, because God's point's gonna be that everybody needs to stay under the yoke of Babylon and not rebel, okay?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be God's very controversial, unpatriotic, treasonous command, right?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so God says, I want you to wear this yoke.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, put it on with leather straps so that it doesn't budge, and I want you to wear it whenever you go outside the house.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now I want you to send messages to the kings of five little countries, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: All of them significant countries, especially Tyre, number one seaport in the world at that time.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they have all, they've all sent their ambassadors to Jerusalem, send messages to the kings through their ambassadors who've come to see King Zedekiah in Jerusalem.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why have they come to see King Zedekiah in Jerusalem?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because all of them signed that contract with Nebuchadnezzar three years before, and they all want to get out of it.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So they call a summit conference, they're gonna quietly say, let's form a coalition, let's stop paying the taxes.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: We've heard that Nebuchadnezzar is having a tough time.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nebuchadnezzar is in Babylon, which is today Iraq.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now, guess how up to date this sounds?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: We've heard that Iraq, Babylon, is having to put down a civil war in Syria.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, that's happening at this point.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he has internal problems.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Plus, he lives nearly a thousand miles away.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: If he gets mad at us, it'll take him mounting his whole army up, taking three to four months to get back here.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So why don't we form a coalition, stop paying the taxes, and if he comes against us, you know, he'll be like a lion with five hyenas around.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: He won't know which one of us to attack.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: He'll be afraid the others will chomp on his tail.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that they've gotten together to try to foment a rebellion, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: A revolution.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And God says, I want you to wear a yoke, okay?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: I want you to send this message to them.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is what the Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel, says.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: First song we sang today, God of Angel Armies.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Same, that's where it comes from.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: With my great strength and powerful arm, this is God speaking.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: With my great strength and powerful arm, I what?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Made the earth.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm the creator and all its people and every animal.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: God's really interested in animals, by the way, in this passage.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Quite interesting.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I can give these things of mine to anyone I choose.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Since I'm the creator of all of the nations and the kingdoms of the earth, I'm sovereign over them.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: I can give them away to anyone I want.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he's gonna say, and I've decided to give you five away to Babylon for a while, and I can do it, because you guys are like chewing gum in my pocket.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can pull out, you know, one of you and I can hand you to anybody I want to, because I'm God.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I created you, I'm the boss, I'm sovereign.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: God really is sovereign.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's sovereign over the United States of America.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: He owns, you know, you know, he owns uh, you know, the coronavirus country of China, you know, he doesn't need to give them away, they're about to collapse.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm sorry.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: So he owns Russia, he owns the continent of Africa, he can do with them whatever he wants.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: He also controls the leaders of those countries, world rulers, right?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now I will give your countries to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, God says.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Who is my servant?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Who is your what?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is the mightiest ruler in the entire world.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And God says, Well, he's just my servant.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if you guys think Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and whatever, that you think those guys are amazing, Erdogan, so you know what?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: They're my servants too.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm sovereign and I'm the boss.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I put everything, even the wild animals, under his control.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that I'm not going to turn Nebuchadnezzar into a wild animal himself when he gets so proud that I'm going to drive him insane.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you've read the book of Daniel, you know what I'm talking about.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: But God is saying, I'm God, and all the nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until his time is up.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: In the previous chapter, I haven't preached on it.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you've done devotions, you know Jeremiah gave the word from the Lord the exile would last 70 years.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: And 70 years after this, Persia will invade, Cyrus will invade Babylon and will overturn and conquer it.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: 70 years.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what God's predicting here as well.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to let him, his son, and his grandson rule, then his time will be up, and then many nations and great kings will conquer and rule over Babylon.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, this is amazing.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: The omniscient God knows exactly what's going to happen.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, here's the point: you, that is, you five kings, must submit to Babylon's king and serve him.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Put your neck under Babylon's yoke.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: I will punish any nation that refuses to be his slave, says the Lord.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'll send war, famine, and disease on that nation until Babylon has conquered it.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now I know we take Jeremiah's side, but would you imagine for a minute that somebody stood up and said something like that on television or the radio today about America that you should submit and go into bondage to whoever?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: China?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Russia?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what God's saying.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Don't listen to your false prophets, fortune tellers, interpreters of dreams, mediums, and sorcerers who say the king of Babylon will not conquer you.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: They're all liars.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: This was the first of ten times in these two chapters.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: God calls false prophets liars.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And their lies will lead to you being driven out of your land because you're going to believe them.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're so stupid, you're not going to follow them.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to believe them, and it's going to cause him to come back and conquer you again and take all of you into exile.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I will drive you out and I'll send you far away to die.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: So God is saying something really radical through Jeremiah here.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he doubles down on it when he says, But the people of any nation that submits to the king of Babylon will be allowed to stay in their own country to farm the land as usual, Ayahweh have spoken.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hold it, Lord, just a second.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: You're telling us that you want us to give up freedom for bondage.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: I thought you brought us out of Egypt, out of bondage into freedom.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that we were supposed to live as free people.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that you motivated our ancestors in 1776 to rebel against Great Britain.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is this your policy instead?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: You want everybody to go into bondage?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this really does go against what we firmly believe and how we live, in fact, how I think we should live.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: We are descendants of the Minutemen, we are descendants of the people who rebelled against Great Britain, and God has blessed this country and Himself, and we live by New Hampshire's motto, live free or die.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if God were here, I know he'd say, Jim, would you just shut up for a moment?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: You are confusing things terribly.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: You are talking politics about freedom and slavery, but this has nothing to do with politics.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: It has everything to do with spiritual sin, discipline, and restoration.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because 800 years ago, And ever since I told the nation of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy and sins that if they worshiped Baal, if they neglected me, if they walked independently, if they oppressed the poor, if they exercised injustice among each other, if they killed their own children and so forth, I have been promising them for centuries that I was going to send them into captivity.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I said, you got eternal security, I'll bring you back to the land.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: I will finally bless you.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you have an eternal stake.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your mine, but I'm gonna send you into temporary slavery and bondage.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's discipline, that's punishment.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: I have just been patient, not willing that any should perish.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: I have just been long-suffering and so forth.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: So this has nothing to do with politics.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't try to confuse your people by, you know, it has nothing to do with the Revolutionary War, but it does have everything to do with parenting.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, don't suddenly jump from sin to hugs or disobedience to hugs without going through that middle thing that you've always promised, which is discipline and correction and instruction, right?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And people want that in their countries as well.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: They want to be able to do whatever they want.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm telling you, I'm I'm going to bring them back and give them hugs, but there is a judgment period in between, and that's what I'm saying they need to submit to.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I repeated the same thing, Jeremiah says, when the summit conference got out, and Zedekiah and his five buds finished their little coalition of non-aligned countries and signed their little treaty that they were going to stop paying taxes, which they did, and they all got in trouble for it, and they all paid.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: I repeated the same thing, same message to young King Zedekiah of Judah, who was a total doofus.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just put that on the line there, okay?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: He just was, okay?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I said to him, if you want to live, submit to the yoke of the king of Babylon and his people.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Why insist on dying, you and your people?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why choose war, famine, and disease, which the Lord's gonna bring against every nation that refuses to submit to Babylon's king?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Did Zed listen?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, Zed didn't listen because he was a doofus, and so seven years later, you know, having rebelled, Nebuchadnezzar does bring his army and he takes him into captivity, and he burns the whole city, and he burns the temple, and he takes Zedekiah into captivity, and he says, The last thing you have run, you know, you promised that you would be, that you would honor our contract, and you have defied me.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: You got other people involved in it, so the last thing you're gonna see is your children die in front of your eyes.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: So he's killed his children in front of his eyes, then gouged out his eyes and later killed him.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean it's brutal, it was bloody, but you can't say he wasn't warned repeatedly.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then Zedekiah says, and this is appropriate to us asking the question, who do we believe?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Don't listen to the false prophets who keep telling you the king of Babylon will not conquer you.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're liars.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is what the Lord says.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sent these prophets.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're telling you lies in my name.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: You'll all die, you and these prophets too.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: So here's a problem that we have.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, not only do we have sort of closed minds, do we have confirmation bias, do we not check out, do we not allow critiques of what we deeply believe morally, religiously, and politically, but we are easily fooled by good liars.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a television show that's coming back in June, ABC's gonna start it again, called To Tell the Truth.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Any of you see this show back 150 years ago?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the way this show works, for those of you that are younger than 80, is that um so they bring in, so they bring in somebody who has an interesting career, okay, jumps out of airplanes upside down or whatever.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's call him John Wayne or something.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: They bring in a guy, okay.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: If it was John Wayne, it wouldn't have worked very well.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you got to pick somebody that nobody knows, and they bring in two impostors, basically, and they tell the imposters, please lie, and you need to be effective liars if you want to take away money today.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: You need to convince the panel that you are this person, okay?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: So they introduce and they say, Person A, person B, person C here.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: They say, uh, introduce yourself.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: And each one introduces himself.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I am John Wayne, I am John Wayne, I am John Wayne.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And just go with me on that one.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's a terrible illustration.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know what am I going to do?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm John Wayne.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so they say, okay, please sit down.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so then the panel begins asking questions, and they ask them questions, and two of them lie through their teeth, and one of them, you know, tells the truth.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then these people have to hold up a card saying, which one do you think is the real John Wayne?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they hold up a card, and generally the reason the show works well is at least three of them are wrong.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's just really cool, okay?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: And and the show's coming back.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, but my point is that we are easily, and the reason the show works is we are easily manipulated and fooled by good liars.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And our problem is this that we think that everybody on TV is like us.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: We think that everybody in the public arena who speaks about politics, morality, or religion, we think that nobody would lie, because we're not liars, and so nobody would intentionally deceive, right?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're not right about that.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and wow, I just happened to come across an illustration of that here really recently this last week.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm looking at, you know, CNN puts on Bill Nye the science guy, and now they have to bleep him out constantly because of all the profanity he's using.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: But Bill Nye the science guy, some of you remember him from the 90s.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was sort of, we brought him into our rooms and he and he educated our children because he was a science guy, introduced them to science.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes, unfortunately, he would introduce them to secular thought and anti-Christian thought and so forth.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because he made radical fun.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: He mocked anybody who didn't believe in evolution, anybody who believed there was a God who had actually created.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then he started moving into sexual mores and anybody who believed in life as versus abortion, or anybody who, you know, and so forth.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's and it's kept getting that way.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Nye the science guy, however, was really good at what he did, and he was constantly on the networks, and the networks liked him because, I mean, he agreed with everything they believed in, and then all of a sudden in 2017, two and a half years ago, an expose came out and said, Oh, by the way, Bill Nye's not a science guy, he never took any science courses in college other than a physics course, and so forth.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: So he's misrepresented himself all this year.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: And Bill Nye, you know, and then it showed his background.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: He did major in mechanical engineering and briefly worked for Boeing, I think down here in Wichita, real briefly, but then left to become a stand-up comedian.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: That didn't work really well, but he had one shtick that people liked, and that was Bill Nye, the science guy, and then he found out that some people believed it, and so he took that, and that's how he's become a mega millionaire, and he's been on networks ever since, talking about science, as though he's ever had even one astronomy course.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking, wow, I looked at the list of courses he took in college.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I had a lot more math and science courses than he did, and you do not want me teaching your children science, I guarantee you.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: But so I mean, but people are really easily fooled, and even though there was an expose in 2017 about this very anti-Christian, anti-creation, anti-God person, now he's being brought back on and still called Bill Nye the Science Guy.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: So just an alert that we tend to be lied to because we think everybody's just like us, and we get fooled by good liars, and that's what's happening here.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: People are easily fooled.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the best liar of them all was a guy named Hananiah.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: One day in the late summer of that same year, fourth year of Zedekiah, Hananiah, prophet from Gibeon up north, just a little two miles away from where Jeremiah grew up, addressed me, Jeremiah, publicly in the temple while all the priests and people listened.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, everybody, it's been months now, he's been wearing this yoke around.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, sorry.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Ouch! Sorry, you know, Jeremiah is well known.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's already weird.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: This has made him weirder.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: So Hananiah goes, I know what I'm gonna do.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he confronts him in the front of everybody in the temple.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now I think Hananiah is a cool guy.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, he's got a cooler name than Jeremiah.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: His name means God of the Lord is gracious.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure he was married because Jeremiah was the only single weirdo in the whole land.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody got married in those days.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah had been told to stay single.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah is just, he's the weeping prophet, he's not normal.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody is cooler than Jeremiah, and that's, I think, a significant point.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Hananiah said, this is what the Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel, says.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Did you notice he uses the exact same words as Jeremiah has been using?
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Don't believe someone just because they use spiritual language.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do not believe a pastor, a preacher, a priest, someone on Christian TV just because they use good Christian words.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Just because they use words that you love about God.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: He uses the exact same words, the Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is what he says.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: I will, the opposite of Jeremiah, I'll remove the yoke of the king of Babylon from your necks.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: People are going, who do we believe?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Who do we believe?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Within two years, well, Jeremiah said it's going to be 70.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Within two years, God says, I will bring back all the temple treasures, King Demeka Nazar carried off to Babylon.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'll bring back all the other captives too that were taken to Babylon.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll surely break the yoke the king of Babylon's put on your necks.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: I, the Lord, have spoken.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody cheers.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody cheers.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is such a positive message.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is such an encouraging message.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: We could go, a guy in our church writes to me, in chapter 28, Hananiah is a false prophet.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: But how do we know which prophet to listen to?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: History tells us, hindsight's 2020, so history tells us which one was correct, but at the moment of the prophecy, what do we need to look for?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's answered in the next verse or two.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just say, speaking about Hananiah, I think we have a social bias.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: We tend to choose the most attractive messenger.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Hananiah was the most attractive messenger.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: He was.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'll never forget being part of a famous debate, most famous Christian debate in the 70s.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was in 1971.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was held on Wheaton College campus as a Wheaton College student.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: We heard about it, TV was gonna pick it up and so forth.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: The huge debate in the 1970s in American churches in Christendom was how uh inerrant is the Bible?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: That is how without error is the Bible?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is the Bible inerrant completely in all of its details?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or can we just rely on it when it comes to salvation and theology, but it could get a lot of stuff wrong, or some stuff wrong at least.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that was huge.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: People were, you know, it's just fanatical.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so the debate was going to be held, the national debate, on Wheaton's campus.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so some of us lined up and waited for hours to get into this room of only would see 300 people.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I was there, and on one side of the debate was going to be the famous Jay Barton Payne, the premier Old Testament professor at Trinity Evangelical Vinity School, which I had no idea then I would go to to get a doctorate 30 years later.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Jay Barton Payne, Old Testament prof, looked just like, I don't know, my grandfather.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he looked like he had a stake right down the middle of his back and that he had indigestion and then he didn't like you.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he wore a suit and he was really stiff.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And when he walked out on stage, we all went, wow, he's really smart.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he sat down and he didn't have really good eye contact.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: But we'd heard about him, he'd written a number of books, and he was representing the view the Bible was completely without any errors at all, it was completely true in every detail.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if Mark says, as he does, that Jesus healed somebody going into Jericho, and Luke says that he healed so that same person going out of Jericho, he'd say there's an easy explanation for that.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: They both are true.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, whereas the other guy would say, No, no, there's a mistake there.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: The other guy was named Daniel Fuller.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: He was the president of Fuller Seminary from California, so he had a tan, and he walked in.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: He was years younger, and he walked in smooth.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because he was a smooth guy, and he didn't wear a tie, and he had one of those jackets that were in style at that moment that had those leather.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: You ever seen leather patches on elbows?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: We were going, oh my goodness, I want to be like him.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, and he had also written books, not very many, but anyway.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, so he sits down and he crosses his legs and he has good eye contact.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And immediately, I gotta say, me and my buds, you know, we're going, uh, I think I like him a lot better.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So they begin talking, and the debate goes that way.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Payne's giving all these, you know, points one, two, and three, giving these arguments.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: He's explaining everything that comes up, you know.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mentally, we're fine with it, and it seems convincing.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then the other guy would crack jokes and he was friendly and so forth.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: He was much more attractive.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so when they had the vote at the end, who's won the debate?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can imagine that two-thirds of us voted for the guy on the left, for Fuller, for Bible is in yeah, I mean, that's we we sang that tune uh of uh the Bible is, you know, is pretty much you know accurate in the details, but it really doesn't matter.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: We went back to the dorm.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of playing cards that night, which was our really spiritual thing to do every night, is that we decided we talked about that.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really interesting how we conceded the more we talked.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Jay Barton Payne had the best of the actual arguments, but Fuller, we wanted to believe him because he was so much more attractive.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and you find that there's a sort of a social bias, and you'd have to admit, I think you need to admit, I think I'd have to admit, I tend to believe the person that I like better upon appearance.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: I used to have a really good friend, she passed away recently, actually, uh no, I better not say that.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, knew her really well, lived here in our town, went to our church, and so forth.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: And she made her decisions about what she believed politically based upon the single TV station she watched.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: She would always, she chose a TV station, but she chose that television station based upon the attractiveness of the male, the young man, who was the news and commentator guy.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, so about 15 years ago, she was sort of secretly in love with Sean Hannity.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: He was the best thing she had ever seen.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: So she became a fervent right-wing conservative for those four or five years.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was really funny, it was very entertaining, and she was just blasting the other side and so forth.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: But he grew a little bit older, and there was the guy that came on one of the other channels, CNN, who was better looking.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: So her channel of choice then became CNN.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: And within days, hours, I feel like, all of her beliefs changed.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: She suddenly became this leftist progressive who, you know, and so forth.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just laugh.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: I never tried to change your mind, but I mean it was really funny, and and it was it's it's another evidence that we tend to choose the most attractive messenger.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are the rules that we should use in choosing who to believe?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, notice here Jeremiah responded to Hananiah as they stood in front of all the priests and people, and he said, Look at this.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Amen.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: May your prophecies come true.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: I hope the Lord does everything you say.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Some people say, Oh, it must be sarcastic.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't believe that.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's real.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Most scholars think it's real.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: What he's saying is, I really hope you're right.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: I love Israel.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want them to suffer for seven years.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: I hope it's just this tiny little, you know, pat on the hand.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: I hope God is like, you know, this compassionate grandfather or something that just, you know, I hope it's soft punishment.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: I hope he does bring back from Babylon the treasure of this temple and all the captives.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: But um got to tell you, I don't think it's gonna happen.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: Listen now to the solemn words I speak to you in the presence of all these people.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: The ancient prophets who preceded you and me spoke against many nations, always warning of war, disaster, and disease.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, there have been seven prophets, he's saying.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: There have been Hosea, Joel, Amos, Isaiah, uh, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, prophets who've already prophesied, and we know they prophesied truth, and he says, every one of them prophesied doom and disaster on Israel for their sins.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're gonna predict peace, word is shalom, and everything's gonna be hunky-dory, I'm sorry, the burden of proof is on you.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: You must show you are right.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: Only when his predictions come true, like those other guys have come true, can we know that he's really from the Lord?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the first of the four lessons I'm gonna give you in the next five minutes.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, select the message that sounds most like the word you know is true.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: Check the word of God.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Check other words that you know are true.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: Check what you're hearing against the words that you know are true.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, lean away from the easy politically correct popular message, which is of course Hananiah's message of peace and prosperity, the message of I'm okay, you're okay, don't worry, be happy.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lean away from the message that's politically correct that everybody wants, because of course Jeremiah has nothing to gain with his negative message other than persecution.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the temptation, of course, is always to be a positivist.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's clear, and here he says, you know, that message of shalom just isn't a message that God's been passing out.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if that's gonna be true, we're gonna have to wait and find that proof.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because the don't worry, be happy message sounds good and everybody wants it.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: But we need to lean away from that easy, politically correct, popular message.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, kids, you know, in school, there's a cool kid, and they head, when they head one direction down the hall, you'll find you will never go wrong by standing against the crowd, by heading the other way.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it may not be popular, but if everyone else that's cool is believing one thing, then question whether or not it's true, because that may just be because it's the politically correct option.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I babysit my grandkids, and I'm a little embarrassed that I have a daughter-in-law in this room right now and a grandson who are going to hear my admission, that I tend to be a little bit like the God that Hananiah wanted.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to be like this uncle who wrote in his tweet, I'm babysitting my two-year-old nephew today, and when I told him he couldn't eat ice cream for breakfast, he told me, you're not my best friend anymore.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we compromised, and now he's on his second bowl of ice cream, and I've gained the title Best Friend in the Whole Wide World.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, wow, that sounds like me.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is terrible.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: But this is what people want God to be like.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: They want to jump straight from the disobedience and sin, straight to the hugs without the discipline.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right?
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why he says, that's not the way God works.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then Hananiah went even further, and this will give us point number three.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Hananiah took the yoke off Jeremiah's neck and broke it in pieces, right?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Violence.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, This is what the Lord says, just as this yoke has been broken, within two years I'll break the yoke of oppression from all nations, now subject to Babylon.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: What did Jeremiah do?
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah slug him in the chops.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is remarkable.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Look what Jeremiah did with that.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah left the temple area.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's better just to walk away.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Which of these two was more humble?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly not Hananiah, but people say, but I want to believe the person who's more passionate.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: Look how passionate Hananiah is.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, Hitler was the most passionate guy in World War II as well.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Much better to look at the person who's the most humble.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Lean toward the more humble messenger.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: Staying humble yourself.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think A.W.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Tozer was exactly right that there's a close relation between humility and the perception of truth.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Find the person who's the most humble and remain humble yourself, not dogmatic, not mean.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: When you see a situation on a college campus where there's one group of students who are getting physical or violent or preventing somebody from speaking on that campus, that should be a hint to you that you know what?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: That view that they're trying to prevent, the more humble view that's submitting to not being able to speak at graduation, let's say.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: That view is the view I should lean toward.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Finally, the Lord gave this message to Jeremiah.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Go and tell Hananiah, this is what the Lord says.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: You've broken a wooden yoke, but you've replaced it with a yoke of iron.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know whether Jeremiah made another one of iron this time, but God's saying that now, now Israel's yoked with iron to Babylon.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Lord of heaven's armies, the God of Israel, says, I have put a yoke of iron on the necks of all these nations, forcing them into slavery under King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have put everything under his control.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah the prophet said to Hananiah, Listen, Hananiah, the Lord's not sent you.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: The people believe your lies.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, this is what the Lord says you must die.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Your life will end this very year because you have rebelled against the Lord.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Two months.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: He's been prophesying, two years, we're all coming home.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Two months later, the prophet Hananiah died.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: You would think that Zedekiah and the others would go, Oh, uh, yeah, we shouldn't believe what.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hananiah said?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Nah.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Confirmation bias, they stuck with it until they fell and were destroyed.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: Choose the messenger whose past words have come true.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Choose the messenger whose words have been proven in the past.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, really quickly, just to summarize, if you're trying to decide who to believe, and I would just stop and say, listen, I would challenge you to know what you believe.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: I would challenge you to know why you believe.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: I would challenge you to know who you believe.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: It may take work, like the girl who came up to me afterwards, but how do you do that?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've, you know, I'm taking 19 hours, I work 20 hours a week in college and everything, and you're telling me I need to read other books on the other side.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, so yeah, it can be really difficult to expose yourself to the other side so that you can hear those things.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: But but there are some guidelines and some rules.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, go with the truth that you know already.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Words that what's closest to the words that you know are true.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lean away from the politically correct, popular, and easy opinion.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Lean toward the humble view, the humble opinion, and especially take a look at the view that has always come true, at the prophet whose words have come true in the past.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: One more quick story.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1210, and I want us to sing a song.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: This will be really quick.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is about a guy named Whipple, Major Whipple, fought for the South in the Civil War, rode a horse, had cavalry, and led his troops into battle against the North.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: And at one point, in a major battle, he got his arm shot so badly that, well, he got captured.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: And his life was saved by the Union by the North in the prisoner of war camp when they amputated his arm.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: But he stayed in the civil in that POW camp for months.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Major Whipple did.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: And during that time, being utterly and totally bored as he made his way through his pack, he found in the bottom a New Testament that his godly mother had stuck in there.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: But he had always resisted it, being an open-minded and a skeptical guy and not believing in it, and so forth.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: And because he was so bored, he read through the entire New Testament and sat in his bunk and read the entire New Testament again and so forth.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, the rest of the story that I didn't tell the other services is having read it a number of times, one day, uh an orderly, a medic, came in and said, Would you please pray with this guy who's about to die?
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Pray.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm I'm I can't pray, I'm not a Christian or anything.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: He said, What?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: I see you all the time reading your Bible on your bunk.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Please, none of us know what to do.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not a good man, I can't pray with him.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he drug him in there.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so Major Whipple, with his one arm, knelt down by the bunk of this dying man, and he didn't know what to do.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden he bowed his head in front of that man.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: He confessed his own sin.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: He trusted Christ as his savior, just weeping and so forth, and then was able to pray for that man.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow that moment and those multiple readings of the New Testament made him have no doubt about Christianity or about what he believed or about his faith because he'd seen both sides and been on both sides.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so when he was finally released, he became a good friend of the evangelist known as D.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: L.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Moody, and he began traveling with him.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: And as he traveled with him, he finally wrote a song that was published, a song about conviction and knowing what you believe.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was called I Know Whom I Have Believed.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him against that day, a song about knowing the assurance of salvation.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I would challenge you to know what you believe, to know whom you believe, to know why you believe, and know it with humility.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, we thank you for the assurance that you give us that we can know, and that you are willing to have the truth be placed into the marketplace of ideas, knowing that the truth is about you and your son Jesus Christ and salvation will always rise like cream to the top.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: We thank you for the assurance that your son Jesus Christ gives us and how firm a foundation we find for our faith in your word, your word about Christ, in whose name we pray.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.