Please stay with us and at the end of the program we’ll let you know where to send your questions for Dave and Tom to respond to in a future Contending for the Faith.  You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call.  Now our final segment.       UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES We resume our excursion through the Book of Acts.  Here again are Dave and Tom:  This, our Understanding the Scriptures segment, we are in the Book of Acts, we are in chapter 3.  Dave, I believe we left off last week with verse 24:  “Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days.  Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed.  Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.”       Dave: These verses follow—we need to just go back and remind ourselves and our listeners, go back to Verse 22:  “For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you—” and so forth.  So, this is what it is talking about, the prophets, not only Moses but from Samuel on have foretold of the time when the Messiah who would come, and Peter is saying, The Messiah has come, His name is Jesus, He’s the Son of God, He died for our sins.  You crucified Him, you rejected the Lord of life and glory.  We have seen that in chapter 2, and you asked for yourselves a murderer Barabas, in His place.  But the prophets have foretold these days and Moses said, You don’t believe Him, you will be destroyed, it’s that simple.  So, this One has come, Christ has taught, I mean, the Sermon on the Mount, the fantastic teachings of Christ to Nicodemus, to the woman at the well, and on the last day, the great day of the feast He stands and cries:  Anyone thirst, let him come unto Me and let him drink, John 7:37 [2], and so forth.  He’s offered Himself as the bread of life, the water of life, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.  And those days the prophets have foretold, You are the children of the prophets, that is, you Jews are related physically.  These are all Hebrew prophets, there are no Gentiles back there, there are no Greek philosophers and so forth, these are all your own prophets, Hebrew prophets, and God has sent Jesus to you.  And everywhere that Paul went, he went first into the synagogue and he says, I’m not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, it’s the power of God unto everyone that believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.  So, Peter is just saying, Look, guys, here’s your chance—Christ came, you crucified Him, now we are giving you the chance with the gospel, and if you reject Him, you are in big trouble, well, eternal trouble.  So, it says verse 26:  “Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.”       Tom: Dave, I want to go on, because on the one hand what Peter is preaching here, it had some consequences, some wonderful consequences and some that many people would say, Well, that’s not good.  Acts chapter 4, verse 1:  “And as they spake unto the people, the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees came upon them, Being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection room the dead” which the Sadducees didn’t believe.       Dave: Let me stop there for a minute.  They are really grieved about the resurrection from the dead because that’s what people are following, and Christ, remember, He didn’t say, Look, guys, after you have stolen my body, sneaked it past the Roman soldiers who are guarding the tomb and hidden it in Peter’s basement, or wherever you know, I want you to then, pretend that I rose from the dead.  And of course, you couldn’t pull that off in Jerusalem.  Nobody would believe that because they would know the facts, so I want you to go as far as you can, get down to the tip of South Africa, get way up in Siberia, you know, begin to tell them that I rose from the dead.  No, Jesus says:  You begin at Jerusalem, in the heart of the gospel.  What we believe, what we preach, what the apostles preached is, the resurrection from the dead, okay.  And these Pharisees, they knew the grave was empty, they knew they had had Roman soldiers there guarding it, and they knew what the Roman soldiers told them—Wow! here comes an angel, rolls the stone away and they didn’t see Jesus, He had left that tomb.  As soon as daylight begins to break, His time is up.  But the Pharisees knew the truth and they had bribed the soldiers to say that the disciples came and stole His body while we slept.  Tom, you just think about it, they had to be asleep or the disciples couldn’t have tiptoed past them and stole the body.  Roman soldiers who are there to guard that tomb to prevent that very thing from happening are not going to let it happen with their eyes open.  But if they are asleep how do they know who it was that stole the body and how did it happen?  There is no way you can get around it.       Tom: Right.  The consequences for Peter, verse 3:  “And they laid hands on them, and put them in hold unto the next day:  for it was now eventide.” So, they threw them in jail.       Dave: Tom, these guys are just selfish, they are self-centered.  You go back to John 11 [3], and they very clearly say:  If we let this man keep doing these miracles and people believe in him, the Romans will take away our position.  They are protecting themselves, protecting themselves in this life, which is very brief, at the expense of eternity.  They are going to be lost eternally, they made the wrong choice, they have rejected the truth, they are preaching a lie and they don’t want the disciples to expose them.  It’s a tragedy, Tom, and you quoted it earlier in our program the first segment;  Those who refuse to receive the love of the truth will be given a strong delusion to believe the lie.  I don’t know how the Pharisees could talk themselves into believing the lie that they are teaching but they are determined to squelch this.  Look, if the Romans could have put the body on display to prove that Jesus was still dead, they would have done it because this is an uproar.  I mean, you remember a little later in Acts we read:  We, who have turned the world upside down are come here too, you know, the Romans would have stopped this, they could have squelched this Christian revolution that is upsetting the empire.  If the Rabbis could have put Jesus’ body on display, they would have done it, that would be the end.  You’d have to scold them or beat them, you wouldn’t have to say a word to anybody, just put the body of Jesus on display, because the gospel that they are preaching is not only that Christ died for our sins, but that He rose again.  They couldn’t—where’s the body?  It didn’t just vanish, I mean, let’s torture these disciples to finally tell us where the body was put.  In fact, all of the disciples went to their grave as martyrs testifying that this is true.  Now, you can’t get someone to die for what he knows is  lie, okay.  So, we have powerful proof of the resurrection.       Tom: And Dave, that’s one of the points here.  You have Peter, what’s he going to get out of this?  Well, he’s going to end up in jail.  But what’s he really going to get out of it?  Verse 4:  “Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand.”  Wow, is that worth going to jail for?       Dave: Well, if it’s really true and if these five thousand are going to end up in heaven—but if Jesus is a fraud and the whole thing is a fraud here, why would Peter die—I mean, he’s going to die, they are going to kill him, they are going to beat him—why would he persist in this lie?  If anybody knows, Peter knows, Peter knows the truth, the Apostles know the truth, you can’t escape it.  This is why Simon Greenleaf, you remember, pro-founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Law, this is why he came to believe in the resurrection, because he examined the evidence and he wrote a book to his fellow lawyers—guys, here’s the evidence—You claim that you want to face evidence and come to a just conclusion based upon it, here it is—you cannot deny Jesus is who He claimed to be, He died for our sins, was buried and rose again the third day.       Dave and Tom will resume their discussion on the topic of salvation next week, we hope you can join us.  This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call, and now, to tell you more about our ministry, here is TBC Executive Director Tom McMahon:  The name, The Berean Call, is taken from the Book of Acts Chapter 17, Verses 10 and 11, where we find the apostle Paul entering the synagogue in the Greek City of Berea after he had just come from Thessalonica. To these Bereans he preached that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah sent from God.  They were commended for being noble, or fair-minded, not only for their willingness to hear what Paul had to say about the matter, but more specifically, because they searched the scriptures daily to find out whether or not what the apostle was saying was found in God’s Word.  That’s what we hope to encourage through this ministry.  Our mission is to alert believers in Christ to unbiblical teachings and practices impacting the church.  We want to exhort believers to give greater heed to biblical discernment and truth regarding what they are accepting as spiritual.  We hope to supply those who profess to be biblical Christians with information and materials that will encourage the love of God’s truth.  Hopefully, we can help mobilize believers in Christ to action in obedience to the scriptural command to earnest contend for the faith found in Jude 3 [4].  And finally, our prayer is that we can be used of God to stimulate Christians to look to the Bible alone as their rule of faith, authority and practice in living lives pleasing to our Lord and Savior.       Gary: If you are a serious student of God’s Word, we offer a wide variety of items that you will find helpful, from books and tracts to audio and video tapes, CD-ROM, our internet website and much more.  For a complete list of materials, or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, write to us at PO Box 7019. Bend, Oregon 97708, call us at our toll free order number 877-882-4253, that’s 877-88Bible, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org [4].  If you would like a copy of this broadcast, ask for Program #1305, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station.  Get a pen or pencil ready, we’ll repeat our contact information in just a moment.       Next week, we will continue our series of programs entitled:  Selections from Beyond Seduction, and, Does having faith give you power?  In Religion in the News, Creationism on Trial Again, we’ll take a look at that story and address the question:  Christmas in China?  We hope you can tune in.  If you have questions or comments about this program we urge you to contact our offices.  Search the Scriptures Daily Radio Ministry is made possible by God’s grace, your prayers and your financial support.  I’m Gary Carmichael and for Dave, Tom, and everyone here at The Berean Call, I would like to thank you for joining us and invite you to tune in again next week.  In the meantime, if you desire to know God’s truth, search the scriptures daily.  For more information about The Berean Call, write to us at PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708, call us toll free at our order number 877-882-4253, that’s 877-88Bible, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org [4].  Join us again next week for Search the Scriptures Daily, featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon.