Will Christians Have to Fight the Antichrist's Army?

Search the Scriptures Daily Program #0603a:

Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon.   I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in.   Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will resume their exploration of the gospel of John, and, why did the people greet Jesus as the Messiah?   In Religion in the News, “Getting Paid to Pray” we’ll take a look at that story and examine the question:   Is there a contradiction in the Book of Romans?   We hope you can stay with us.   Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers many teaching materials including books, tracts, audio and video tapes and copies of our weekly broadcast on tape or compact disc.   You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter which we offer free of charge.   We’ll let you know how to order later in the program.

Now, this week’s Cover Article.   We continue with our series of discussions based on Dave Hunt’s book from Harvest House with Installment #78 of In Defense of the Faith , and along with Dave Hunt, here is T. A. McMahon:

Thanks, Gary .   You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to him.   Now Dave, before we get to our first question, I want to discuss something—well, maybe some would consider it philosophical, but I don’t, I think it’s just basic truth kind of stuff and it has to do with questions that men have pondered throughout history.   And, this is the beginning of the year.   I don’t know if I’m in this mood of pondering or whatever, but I had some discussions with some people over the holidays and it sort of brought me back to this.   Specifically, what is the purpose or point of life—I’m not going to mess up the French word raison d‘être okay? But what is our reason for being?   Now again, college professors have pondered these things and no one seems to be able to come to a conclusion about it, but I think God’s Word lays it out pretty simply, doesn’t it?

Dave:

Well, you’re starting out philosophically, you obviously have two choices.   We’re either here by chance or by design and we can’t go into that, but there is absolutely no doubt that we are here by design.   And, of course, one of the greatest evidences, which we didn’t have a few years ago and Darwin never even imagined it, is DNA.   So we have written a smallest, tiniest, microscopic, single cell has chemical machinery beyond our comprehension and that is all written in the DNA.   Coded in fact in language that has to be decoded by protein molecules, certain protein molecules and there are thousands of kinds of them.   And, we’re talking about information, we’re talking about a language and even Einstein acknowledged that matter cannot produce information.   In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think in philosophy they call this Einstein’s, what is it? Chasm?   That’s not the exact word, the Einsteinium Gap, or something like that, because you cannot bridge this chasm from matter to understanding to information.   And it couldn’t happen by chance.   I mean, when you have information, when you have language, it’s saying something in words with grammatical rules and so forth, it has to have an intelligent source.   It comes from an intelligence and it certainly isn’t human intelligence.   Human intelligence is struggling to somehow come to grips with some feeble understanding of what this is, okay? Beyond our comprehension, beyond our computers at the moment, we are trying to learn.   So, we know God created us; there is absolutely no doubt about it, no one can possibly be an atheist.   You couldn’t come to that conclusion honestly.   There is no way you can do it.   You’ve got to be stubborn, rebellious, determined, not to acknowledge that God created us, okay?   So now, we’ve done away with chance, we’re here by design.

Tom:

Which means a point, a purpose?

Dave:

That’s right.   There must be some reason why God created us.   I talk to Him about that all the time, Lord, why did you even create us pitiful creatures because man has done nothing but rebel.   Now we could launch off onto Calvinism here, which, if you give me just a brief moment, the Calvinist says that everything works according to God’s will, that he wanted sin to enter into the world, that he causes every thought, word and deed, even the most wicked thoughts and actions of all mankind because they cannot allow anything to obstruct God’s will.   In other words, everything has to go exactly as God wants it go.   Well then, you would have to say that God wants the world the way it has been and the way it is.   But God says he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.   It can’t possibly be God’s will that men should sin because sin is contrary to God’s will and we have God pleading with Israel, for example, O, do not this abominable thing that I hate!   Well then, you’re telling us that what God hates is really His will?   Jesus talked about people rebelling against the will of God; they don’t do the will of God and so forth.   He wants us to do the will of his Father which is in heaven and He had us pray, “Thy kingdom come, they will be done in earth as it is in heaven.”   Well then, it must not be done right now and there will be a future day when it will be done.   So why all of this sin and evil and so forth?   The Calvinist, in fact amazingly says if God wanted to he could keep everybody from sinning.   But then, people will be in—well, it’s a horrible thought—in a lake of fire, in torment forever and forever because God wanted them there—this is according to His good pleasure and his plan.   I do not believe that that is God’s plan and the atheist would argue with you on that—we’ve mentioned that before.   The atheist would say look, why all this suffering in the world?   If God can’t stop it, He’s too weak to be God; and if he could and doesn’t, He’s a monster, you couldn’t possibly trust Him.   Now, even to say that indicates we have a standard written in our conscience and that standard was put there by God.   And even an atheist knows something about being kind, compassionate, being a Good Samaritan.   So then again, you have two choices.   Either God has predetermined the world as it is—

Tom:

Or tries to uphold His sovereignty, according to some.

Dave:

Right, yeah, but you know, if God can’t control, if God can’t be sovereign where men have free will, then that’s a limited sovereignty, isn’t it?   But we have two choices, either God wants it this way and every rape, and murder, and crime, and war is just fulfilling God’s will, this what he wanted, this is the way he planned it.

Tom:

Again, upholding His sovereignty in their view.

Dave:

I don’t see how anyone can believe that.   Or, man is a rebel; to be a rebel man must have the power of choice.   He can actually defy God; he can say, No, I’m not going to go your way.   And the Bible is all about God pleading with men to repent and to turn to Him.

Tom:

Now Dave, doesn’t that undermine His sovereignty?

Dave:

Absolutely not.   For example, they will quote Ephesians:1:11In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will:, God works all things according to his will, but that isn’t what it says.   He works all things after the counsel of His will.   And in the counsel of His will, quite clearly, he gave man the power of choice.   Why would he give him the power of choice?   So that we could love Him.   What glory is it to God if He has people in heaven, who are there simply because He has caused them to praise Him, caused them to love Him?   You can’t make someone love you and you can’t make someone accept the gift.   So, God has created man with the power of choice.   A man and a woman stand before witnesses and the minister says will you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, and so forth.   And he says, I do, I will, and then she must respond in that way.   I think one of the most beautiful stories, well, there are many in the Bible.   You remember, Abraham’s servant, who went to get a wife for Isaac and you come to that point where the relatives, her family, say will you go with this man?   She says, I will.   I mean, that’s beautiful!   Love is beautiful, but it must come from the heart.   So all through the Old Testament you have free will offerings.   When they built the tabernacle, if you bring an offering, you know, whether it’s purple or scarlet or whether it’s some fine linen or gold or whatever, you must bring it willingly from your heart.   The offerings must be from your heart.   In the New Testament, Well, here is water, the Ethiopian says to Philip, what would hinder me from being baptized?   If you believe with all your heart!   Romans:10:9That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved., “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart…”   Daniel it says, “purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king’s meat.”   Proverbs says “…keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life…”   I would take that to mean what a man really is comes from the power of choice.  

Tom:

Now Dave, I don’t want to get too far away—I keep going back to the question.   So, why did God create us, what’s our purpose, what’s our reason for being?

Dave:

He created us because he loves us.   Now he didn’t need us.   Some people would say, well, he needed creatures to love.   No, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit love one another.   Father, Son and Holy Spirit are complete in themselves, one God, three persons, did not need us.

Tom:

Or else God couldn’t refer to himself as the I AM, the self-existent one.

Dave:

God IS love.   So, within the three personages of the Godhead they love one another; there is love, a perfect love, completeness.   Well, I think that He wanted to bestow His love upon other creatures.

Tom:

Dave, now I’m going to nail you down on this.

Dave:

All right.

Tom:

Give me chapter and verse, because I think in my own simple-mindedness that God is the manufacturer.   He’s given us the Manufacturer’s Handbook.   You get a handbook from Sears or whatever; it tells you right up front how you are to deal with this object that you bought how it’s to work and so on.   So, from the Scriptures what—

Dave:

Well, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”   Now I would take that to mean, He doesn’t just, after He created man and then He sees what a pitiful creature he is, then He begins to love him.   “God is the same yesterday, today and forever…” there is no changing in God.   So, from eternity past, and I can’t even think about that, that God has been here forever; that’s beyond my comprehension.   Sometimes I say, Lord, now wait a minute, if you’ve been here forever, then forever has passed before you created me, now that’s impossible.   Well, I don’t have an answer for that except that God exists outside of time.   So it’s not the passage of time, time hasn’t passed, but anyway I would take that to mean that even before He created man, He loves this being that He is going to make and he wants to bestow His love upon all mankind.   And it says He’s not willing that any should perish.   He’s long-suffering and patient.   It says that in the ages to come He will show the exceeding virtues of His grace, His love, His compassion.   All through eternity God is going to just overflow with love upon mankind and I believe that that is why He made us.   Now in order for him to—

Tom:

Let me just add on to that because that’s where my thinking along this line is.   The great commandment: we’ve to love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind, soul, strength, love our neighbor as ourselves.   Love is the heart of it.   He creates the environment of love for us and we are to love him and love others and why wouldn’t that be the great and the first commandment, because that’s I think a major point with regard to our creation.

Dave:

He made man in his image, it says.   So with the capacity to respond to His love, to love one another and to respond to His love and this has to be the reason.   He didn’t make us to torture us.   He didn’t make us because he needed us.   He made us because he wants to love us and bless us.   Tom, I don’t see too much of the quail these days; I don’t know where they would go for the winter.

Tom:

They’re over at my house, Dave.

Dave:

Are they over at your house.   But were about 40 doves sitting out there this morning just outside the kitchen window just longingly waiting, hey, where’s our seed?   I had forgotten to get it out there for the last day or two.   So I went right to the bird seed in the garage and I went out there, of course they fly off but then they come back and after while they learn that when I appear when there is nothing, after I go back in the house, what do you know?   There’s a lot of bird seed spread all over, because I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for those doves, I want to help them.   Well, before we were even created, God knows everything about us.   He loves us.   Amazing, that God would love rebels, evil creatures and we love Him because He first loved us and His love awakens a response in our hearts and God is trying to teach us to love Him, He’s trying to teach us to love one another and one day we will be in His presence forever in the likeness of Jesus Christ.   He came into this world, a perfect man, the second man, there was never a man that deserved to be called a man since Adam and He’s the last Adam, the progenitor of a new race.   He will bring us into glory in His likeness.   He indwells the believer, those who open their hearts to Christ and believe that He died for their sins on the cross, that He paid the full penalty so that we could be forgiven righteously, not just a whitewash but the penalty has been paid and He rose from the dead.   He wants to impart to us eternal life, He wants to live his life in us—we believe that, we are saved the Scripture says and we are His children adopted into His family and it says in the ages to come He’s going to show forth the riches of his grace, his mercy and his kindness to us.   So I would have to take it that that is God’s purpose, why He created us.

Tom:

Dave, I think of some other verses; Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.   I think in Romans it talks about that we are to bear fruit unto God, and all of this done, not by our own strength, not in our flesh, He enables us to do it, He empowers us to do it.   And one of the reasons I was thinking about this, here it is the beginning of the year you always tend to say, okay well maybe I blew it last year but this year I’m going to get started and you make your list of things to do and so on, but more than that, when you begin to think, who am I? And what has God done for me?   I’m talking about those who really know Him and we could go down a list of just being thankful for so many things.   But now it’s not a matter of what can I do for God, but how can I please Him?   How can my life be, even just looking at this week or this day, you know, this is the day the Lord has made.   I can take every day and make it a time in which I want to, I desire to please Him, to bear fruit unto Him.   I think that’s what it’s about.   I went to school for quite a while.   My Dad thought I was majoring in just attending school, but as I wrestled with these problems or these concerns, this philosophical ideas of what it’s about, I found it in God’s Word and it’s not all that complex, Dave, I don’t think.

Dave:

That God would love us first of all is beyond comprehension, but then that He would find some use for us and He would be pleased to give us little jobs.   We prayed before we began this program and we acknowledged what a privilege it is to be able to talk to other people, to have a radio program, to have a ministry.   It’s a great responsibility but it’s a great privilege.   I think of one of the verses we need to remind the staff again, Tom, I’d like this to be our verse for The Berean Call.   Remember, Paul said: “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints is this grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ and make all men see what is the fellowship of this mystery.”   For Tom, this mystery has been hidden in ages past but now it’s revealed in Christ.   This is God’s plan; this is God’s purpose; it’s all in Jesus Christ and without Him and without His death upon the Cross, His payment for our sins, there could be nothing really but judgment for mankind.   It would have been a horrible failure for God to make man.   And you remember back in Genesis chapter six, God looked down and he saw the wickedness in man’s heart, it was just evil.   And it says it repented God that he had made man.   I don’t understand that—God doesn’t repent, He knew exactly what was going to happen but I think it’s telling us how bad things were on this earth and God is saying it just doesn’t make sense even to create these creatures.   I’ve given them the power of choice and what have they done with it? They have rebelled.   And you read Isaiah chapter one, and God is lamenting and he says, “I have brought forth children and they have rebelled against me.   The ox knows his owner, the ass his master’s crib, my people don’t know— wicked, foolish people…”   So, that hardly tells me that that’s the way that God wanted them to be, but He did give us the power of choice and those who respond to Him, it’s going to be fantastic in eternity.   Now Tom, some people then raise the question:   Well, wait a minute!   If man has a genuine power of choice and he could say yes or no but he said yes to believe in Jesus, then how do you know that in eternity he’s not going to decide to say no again?   Well, the Scripture says that He has made us new creatures, we’re a new creation created in Christ Jesus unto good works which he has before ordained that we should walk in them.   We will be in His presence, we will be like Jesus.   We’ll not be in these sinful bodies anymore with the lusts and so forth, but we will be in new bodies resurrected, glorified bodies, in His presence.   Jesus, the Bible says, will bear forever the marks of Calvary .   The throne of God is now called the throne of God and of the Lamb.   And the gratitude—we will never get over what he did for us.

Tom:

Dave:

Just to interject there—the woman at the home of Simon the Pharisee, washing Jesus’ feet with her tears, drying His feet with her hair, Jesus said, she loves much because she was forgiven much.   That’s a motivation that will carry us into eternity—wow!

Dave:

Right.   There will be no temptation, no Satan, nothing that would turn us away and it will be so wonderful, so beautiful in God’s presence, and we would never, ever have any reason to desire anything else.

Tom:

You mentioned we have this great privilege, on the radio to be used of the Lord and it’s an awesome responsibility and a privilege.   But I think, you know, I have two ministries; I’m involved with The Berean Call but I have a personal ministry.   I have a ministry when I am in the line at the grocery store and I don’t extol one over the other because I am hoping to be used of the Lord in each and every situation.   So our encouragement to believers out there, you have a ministry, you can have a taste of heaven, these things that we are talking about in eternity you can have a taste of them right now if you are willing.   And, I think about the verse in John, was it 5:40 ? “You were not willing to come to me.”

Dave:

“You search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life and these are they that testify of me but you will not come to me that you might have life.”

Tom:

Yeah, that’s for a believer, to be used of Him.

Dave:

Absolutely.   Tom, is there time for one verse for the New Year?

Tom:

Sure.

Dave:

Maybe its two verses and I never remember where these are exactly.   I think its Titus chapter two verses 7-8.   “In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works:   in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity, Sound speech that cannot be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.”   I pray that all the time, that’s my Jabez prayer:   Lord, help me to be more articulate, to be clearer so that what I say, nobody, atheist or anybody can argue, they can’t dispute it, it is so clear, this is from you, Lord, help me!   Maybe some of the rest of you might want to pray that as well as for our personal witness.