This sermon delves into the concept of the Trinity, emphasizing the distinct personalities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the Godhead. It explores the eternal nature of God and the unique roles each person of the Trinity plays. The discussion moves from theological terms to the practical implications of the Trinity in our lives, highlighting the importance of understanding God's triune nature and the unity within the Godhead.

The biblical idea that the Father is God and the Son is likewise God and the Holy Spirit is likewise God and that the Father is not the Son, you do it like that, and the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit's not the Father, they're not just other names and God stuffers. There are three distinct personalities in the Godhead, but we could say this, now the word Trinity doesn't appear in Scripture, it's a theological term, not a biblical term, but the word Godhead does. And if you go through Scriptures, there's a whole stack of them in nature and character of God, you put them together, the Father is clearly shown to be God, the Son is clearly shown to be God, not a God, but the God and the Holy Spirit likewise. Now how that how that works, I don't know, we've had all kinds of cracks at it, we do know that God is eternal, He is uncreated and He has, we just put that word, that's probably the best word to use to describe the otherness of God, He has no beginning, no beginning, no end, He's unmade, uncreated, everything else we see has a beginning, everything else we see has a start, but He didn't, so it's impossible therefore for the devil to be God, because He had a beginning, therefore He's finite, a being without a limit in either direction, and that's the word in French, l'eternel is the description of God, it's a good, it's a good word. Now I don't really know how the actual, we're dealing with a multiple dimension being, okay, an infinite being, and you can't actually get behind this and explain what that is, we don't know what it is, but we know it's different from everything else, but what we can say is this, the Bible does not teach that one plus one plus one equals one, that's terrible math and even worse theology, but this is alright, what's this one? Nothing, you can't take one out without losing them all, you can't say I'll have the Father but not the Son, I'll have the Son but not the Spirit, there is a, and we call this, because this is the unity of, okay, we call this tri-unity, not three separate gods, not one, and right at the very first in Genesis 1.1, we have a magnificent seven Hebrew words, I know a little Hebrew, his name is Bob Weiner, started a ministry called Maranatha Ministry, I also know some Greek, because I went to watch my big fat Greek wedding a number of times, brought my Windex with me to clean the board, but those seven Hebrew words in the beginning, God, see, in the beginning God, just starts like that, He, in the beginning, He's there already, and then the word God is an interesting word, because the word that is used there is a plural unity, it's like saying, if I gave you a bunch, have we got a bunch of grapes there? Can you give me those for a second? This is called living illustration, you can actually eat them too, these are, see, if I said I want a bunch of grapes and I bought you this, you'd be somewhat disappointed, okay, this is a compound unity, a bunch, that's the word that's used for God, it's hidden in there, but it's there, he said, that's a bunch of grapes, that's the word used for God, not the word for grape, the a bunch, see that? So we don't know what that is, and you might like to pass those around, this is part of the blessing of the last one. That pattern, where's your, up here, this pattern here, is seen, a simple, perhaps one of the simplest illustrations, not explanations, illustrations, would be H2O. We think water is very simple, it's actually not, it's probably one of the most incredibly complex, simple looking things there is in the universe. Without that, life as we know, would not exist. Only a few compounds that can store high order data, if you're going to have something, for instance, that stores a bunch of data, you need to be able to make a very large molecule, you can't store something on a small molecule, so we know silicon does that, as we make our chips for computers and stuff like that, but actually, we could look at it like this, water is H2O, and there's another one here, we could say steam, I better go through one other one, we could say steam is also H2O, and also ice is H2O. They're not the same, if you ever tried to ice, it's really difficult. So these are distinct, but they are the same substance in essence. So that's the idea, the biblical idea of Trinity, it's an illustration, but not an explanation, and whether we took any kind of concept we have today, like for instance, time. Time, we know that past is a measure of time, and then present is a measure of time, and future is also a measure of time. We call those things time, so the unity of it is they're all time, but if I take one of these out, what happens to the equation? You can't, you know, like this is present, whoops, it just became past, this is future, whoops, it's not, these all, but if I take that out, then we lose everything. That's only illustration, but you could take almost anything, the family, which we're going to look at in detail in a minute, has three parts. It has a father, a mother, and a child. It's sort of a minimum family. That basic family is one of the most attacked, threatened, embattled pictures in the whole of the Western world, and every single one of these is under attack. Take one out, you lose the lot, understand? Not talking about friendship, we're talking about a family, and you see legislatively today attacks are being made to remove one of these, and the fight to maintain this as a family is actually rooted in a biblical idea. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall join with his wife, and they too shall be one flesh. So you've got the man who leaves his father and his mother, same with the wife, they form a new unit. Leave is the legal, see that? Cleave is the, well you could say leave is like, you have to start again, you've got to leave behind whatever things you learned, you begin again, and the official joining of those to the cleave is usually solemnized by marriage, and in some places both solemnized by marriage and also by the state. And then the one flesh, leave, cleave, and one flesh is a marriage. And the one flesh is sexual, physical, so then we have a marriage, it's also a trinity, and so on. Now keep that picture in mind when you start looking at these things. But going back to this study Bible, we were supposed to do this thing, so what I got, I brought one to show you, I'm going to pass it around. This original study Bible was supposed to come out in 2001 for the new millennium. It was a groundbreaking thing because its purpose was to have 2,000 years of Christian history, which we've never had a Bible as far as I know. We've got Bibles that have blocks of history, we've got American history Bibles, we've got archaeological Bibles that have ancient history, we've got some Bibles that deal with particular parts, but to put the whole thing, it's a serious amount of stuff. Now if, Jim, if you want to get me my, that big thing, you know, the big thing that unfolds, the history chart, you know, it's right on the end of the, you know, the library there. I just want to show you what task it is visually, so you can get an idea of just how insane it is to try and do a study Bible on history, okay? Yeah, it's crazy. I think, have you got it? Joel, got to call all the troops. This is a test to see how much you're actually using this library. It's a big, huge thing. You found it. Okay, here it is. Jim, I need you, or somebody. I mean, you can, or should, Brie, the beautiful Brie will now help us. This is one man's, I'll say life work, okay? I don't even know how I'm going to unfold this thing, but he, let's start on, maybe go that end, Brieza. Maybe, yeah, hang on to there. You take this end and go as far as, as far as you can. What you're looking at here is just a tiny fragment of history. Still going. Keep going that way. Pull it around. No, it's not big enough. It's not big enough. Okay, keep going. Pull it all the way back to where Jim is. Keep coming. You see how silly this is to try and put this into a book? Okay, this is an outline, all right? And we're only going up to, you can see the time there. No, no, no, no. Most of the major things have come in in the last 100 years, okay? We're not into quantum physics, nothing there. But you give me an idea. Isn't this crazy? How do you put God's, and here's the wild thing, God has dealt with each one of these places, each one of them. When we say eternal, we have no clue what that means. The same God who dealt with those Persians and the Babylonians and the Egyptians way back there, is the same God who's dealing with our own versions of Babylon and Egypt in our day. Therefore, when he talks about those things in the past, it's not dead stuff. It is the way he deals with a civilization then, based on his nature and character, is the same way he will deal with a similar civilization in our day. Okay, thank you. All right. So I love showing people this because it really is mind-blowing. And this is one guy's work, you can imagine. So what we tried to do is something, a dumb version of this, just for biblical times, you know, not all of those biblical times. So I'm going to take you right back to very early times and show you something here that threatens this. But the point is that that little thing which is, I suppose, is I'm sitting on here. In six months time, the deadline was given, went something like this. What could be done, the only way I could figure out a resolution, what could be done in say six months? Because they thought it'd take about three, four months to print and bind and stuff. So to get it out by that time, what could be done in six months? I said, I don't know. But we will use networks of relationships and friendships. And the cool thing is, over the years, if you make friends, I always think of that lady when the prophet came, it was an embarrassing thing for the prophet who's called down the judgment of God on the whole nation, and there's no water, to be sent by God after every day God delivers him steak sandwiches and the brook is running, then God calls him so he doesn't fall in love with the brook and the birds and forget the God who bought them. The brook dries up, just like it dry up for you. You love this wonderful teacher and later on you think, ah shoot, you know, I wasted a bit of time on that one. You've got to look through the brook and the birds to the one who brought the birds and the one who, always a danger of making idolatry of the creation and not really worshipping the creator. It's embarrassing for him, having had all that supernatural care and protection, to suddenly have to go hand in hand to a woman who's a widow with her child who's starving to death and ask if she had anything she could give him to eat. That's really embarrassing. It's like, who are you? Well, I'm the prophet who brought the judgment down on the entire nation and the reason why you're starving is because of me, but do you have anything to eat, you know? Yes, I was being taken care of, but now the brook is dried up. And remember she said, I've only a little bit of oil in this meal and then that's it, I'm dead. Just enough really for me. He said, well, make me a meal. Then remember what he told her. He said, go get these vessels together and go and borrow from your neighbours. What if she'd had no friends? What if she had no neighbours? What if the only thing that she had was just what she had in her house that was hers and the relationships were not there? I had a girl say to me, I just want to love God. I don't want to love people, they're horrible. So I said, nice try. But the commandment says, if you love me, keep my commandments. The commandment says you should love the Lord your God with all your soul and your neighbour as yourself. So if you don't have any neighbours, you can't keep that commandment and that means you really don't love God at all. God is nice. Of course, he's easy to love if you know him, but people are awful. So you're right. But the whole heart of it is you demonstrate that you really do love God by this. Jesus' great prayer in John 17, that the world will know that you love me and you sent me when they see the love they have between each other. Bottom line in this thing is that the kingdom of God is built on friendships. The kingdom of God is built on family ideas and that everybody has a huge hunger in their life to be part of that. I never met anybody who said, I never want to be loved. Everybody wants to be loved one way or another. Never met anyone who said, I hate all families and I just want to live on my own. At that time, they do put you on your own. They call it a psychiatric facility where you can get to feed the birds on the calendar and live in a room with rubber wallpaper. If you take that out to eternity, it's called hell. Nobody in hell has any friendships, no friendships in hell at all. It is real isolation. You get to live just with yourself and that's it. Nobody else. So in all of this, we see that this friendship is a tremendously important thing. I was able, though I didn't have vast amounts of material on hand, apart from that library, to connect with friends who have seen revivals, who've been in revivals, who, like me, have seen God do things from the scratch. So putting out the networks, I believe also God gives us technology. I don't think Facebook and YouTube and all of these were designed for the content of, you know, if you go up and look at what the average content on the satellite is, there's a trillion messengers a day up there and that's the content of most of them. Hey, what's up? That's it, you know, basically that's it. I don't think God has given all that technology for, hey, you want to catch a cup of coffee at Starbucks? You know, so Twittering and Facebooking and stuff, they're marvelous social networks because kids have no families. That's the best way they know to have an extended communication with people. I haven't got time to tweet and toot, well I have got time to toot, but for tweet and all these things, but emails alone is enough. I mean, and when a kid spends five pages of stuff, it's not just like a text thing. I think that's worth me spending hours to try and answer their questions and stuff. So anyway, this thing is not a product of Steve Hill or me or the one general editor we have. It's a lady who, from the time she was eight years old, has done inductive Bible study. She's done another 44,000 subjects and she did a study chain that nobody ever seen before, blew Steve's mind, my mind, blew Thomas Nelson's mind, a 300,000 word study on the word revive and it's cognates in scripture. Many people think there's only about 30 something verses in the Bible on revival and most of them in the Old Testament and if there is a revival in the New Testament, it is probably of evil. When you plug all of these in, you can scarcely find more than two or three pages in the Bible where that word or an equivalent, awake, awaken, you know, restore, return, doesn't appear. So in here we have an entire study chain on revival that's never been done before in history, something else. But this is not actually our work. We have made a shot of trying to collect over 2,000 years the body of Christ. If you look at church history, there's a simple way, pretty simple, it's almost oversimplified, but it's close enough. If you saw three great streams of church history, I think you'd find these. You'd find there is a scripture that says this, three that bear witness, remember this? Three that bear witness, the spirit, the water, and the blood. Now that library in there contains a cross section of what God did with all kinds of different groups and ministries. But if I had three big filing cabinets to put blocks of ministries or things that God put back, if I asked a reformer or a Puritan, how do you know what God's will is? What would they say? The word, the word, the water of the word, that if you want to find out what God's will is, it's in his book. Read it. Objective, propositional scripture. If I asked an Anabaptist or George Fox or John Wesley, how do you know that you really have God's will? He'd probably answer, the spirit answers to the blood and tells me I'm born of God. That if there's nothing supernaturally changed in your life and you can't hear his voice, it's probably because you're not saved yet. And he knew that having gone out as a missionary and finding to his embarrassment, when a storm hit the boat, this little, I don't know how they even crossed oceans in those boats. They're about as big as this, this kitchen, some of them, it's ridiculously small. He ran into some crazy Moravians. Those Germans who started that Guinness Book of World Records 24-7 prayer meeting for a hundred years. Why? Because they were all fragmented in their family and met together to form a community and found such division there, they needed a visitation of God to bring healing to them. And out of that revival came those who took as their motto to win for the lamb that was slain, the reward of his sufferings. Amazing, amazing group of people. They sent out actually two groups of Moravians. One were to win the last. And these are people who actually had themselves chained into, sold into slavery and chained into like Ben-Hur thing, into those rowing ships with slaves to win the slaves. Or became lepers in order to win lepers. And they went out to the pagans. The other lot went out to win the church. So if we're looking at what revival is, revival actually is getting the church saved in a way just like evangelism is getting the streets saved. Revival is bringing something that used to be vived back again. But if I asked Catholic, a Roman Catholic for instance, how would you know what is right? What would they say? Ask the Pope. That saved the church. You ask the church. Now I reckon this, we know the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin. But the scripture speaks about the life of the flesh is in the blood. This would be my take, that the blood here is a parallel in those three forms, church history, scripture, and the witness of the spirit. That would represent the life of Jesus in his church in the times when it was behaving like him. So we call these mystics. We call these reformers. We call them popes. We all have nasty names for different people. But if we wanted to find out what was true, I think the best way to do is look at all three of these, not just one of them. So when I came to try and find who we're going to put in this thing, we've got 2,000 years. Who are we going to put into this thing? These are my invisible criteria. They're not on the thing. They're just kind of hinted at. I wanted first, it is a book, a Bible on revival. So we wanted, what is a biblical picture of what revival is? What does the Bible actually say about revival? And the general editor that did the study chain has a wonderful summary. She said, if we don't really know what God's talking about when he uses the word revival and put in appropriate tests and boundaries and stuff so everything fits within what God has authorized, our danger will be an idolatry of revival, making it the goal rather than intimate relationship with Christ. Remember, revival isn't it. Otherwise, it's like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You just keep chasing wherever the rainbow is. The real goal is bringing man and woman back into the family of God and to proper relationship with God. If you were going to, for instance, tune two pianos together, the way you do not do it is take those two pianos and try to tune them to each other because you might get two pianos out of tune. The proper way is to take some standard, a tuning fork, middle C or something, ding that, tune that piano to that, take that same tuning fork, the standard, and tune it to the second piano. Even if those pianos never meet each other, they will play in tune. Given the same song, they will play in harmony. So the proper way then to bring the church together is not to try and tune us to each other. That's an impossible task. But to all tune back to him. So the closer we come to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and his work in us. And by the way, another quick side for those of you younger Christians. I'm keeping that one up there for a purpose. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit actually have different ministries. I'll just put it like this. Father, Son, and the Spirit. We can put it like this. When we look at the work of the Father, things come from the Father, and they come through the Son, and they come by the Holy Spirit. Some people go, well, you know, I don't know who to pray to now. I used to know. Just pray to God. It'll work out. But actually, your prayer would go by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. And the answer would come from the Father, through the Son. He is called the Mediator. So there are visual illustrations you could use. The Father would be like the heart, the unseen, invisible, and yet source of all of our life. The Son would be like, how do I think about this, heart. He's like the body. He's the visible embodiment of the invisible God. Yeah, He's the one, yeah, He does negotiate. He's the mediator between those things. So you shouldn't see the heart. You do, you're pretty gone at that part. But the life of the thing, even within our own bodies, we have structures. We have bones. We have flesh. We have blood. Those are the three trinities that the Scripture talks of describing us. But the best way I could illustrate who the Holy Spirit's work is like, would be like the hand. He's the one that enacts things. He carries things out. If I use the word bubble gum, it's a theological word, bubble gum. To say that word, I have to, this is what the word bubble gum looks like in my brain. See that? It's in there, see that? In order to put it out into the world, I have to frame it. The thought has to be framed. And then it looks like this, you know, still not a word. You must not only have the thought, the idea, the invisible, you must have the physical framing, and then the breath behind it, and all of those. Now, if you take any one of those away, if you take the breath away, you go, if you take the frame away, you go, and if you take the thought away, they all have to be there at one deal. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. And that's why I think creation reads it not on our language, but what the actual intent of the frame of the thing is. Anyway, just as a little visual there, when people first get saved, they get all excited about the work of the Holy Spirit, because He shows supernatural stuff. He shows stuff that can't be explained by backgrounds, by culture, by education, by training, by, you know, what kind of DNA you have. He does stuff that is not explicable humanly. That's what conversion is. It's a miracle, straight miracle. When you first get saved and you start seeing the work of the Holy Spirit to do stuff, it excites young Christians. They go, whoa, I saw God do all these things. And often, that's why people get saved often in meetings where there is some supernatural stuff going on. It's not explicable by any bussing program or because the Singing Andrew sisters came to our revival. Then after a while I go, you know, we need to get some wisdom here, because we're running around saying stupid things and stuff, and we think it's God, but it really isn't. So then they start thinking about the Son, you know, like the mind. He's called the Word, remember? In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And then I reckon your whole life doesn't start flowering until you start knowing more about the Father. So we're always coming by through to. When a person is first a Christian, you'll see high things on this. Then they'll get more like, well, we need to be wise to, you know, seek wisdom, seek it. It's the name of a person. Christ is his name. But this is where the boundaries of the soul go down, and you begin to see the way God sees. He is a Father. And it's quite wonderful. He's called the Father of all, especially those that believe, which doesn't mean that everybody's saved, only they don't know it. He is the rightful Father of the human race. He is our real Father. When the prodigal son is coming back, he's not coming to somebody who took pity on a loser and just decided to adopt him. He's coming home to his real home, to his rightful Father. So the whole heart of this is, in terms of looking at the whole sweep of revival, we take notice when this happens. We take notice when the Holy Spirit shows up. If nothing supernatural has ever happened in your life, you're not saved at all. Understand? It doesn't mean that if you're an occult person, then you automatically are. But if nothing happened that can't be normally explained by psychology or education or information, nothing has ever happened in your life that is miraculous, you probably need to get saved. It's quite simple. And that doesn't mean you have to have all the gifts of the Spirit and everything. It just means that there's no miracle in your life. It hasn't happened. When Wesley watched those Germans, they all invited him to come up on board and they were going to have a little worship service on the deck. There's this huge perfect storm almost, comes out of nowhere, freaks him out 40 ways from Friday. But they didn't care at all. They just calmly sang on. The mast broke of the ship. It just broke. And Wesley's terrified. They're all going to die. And these idiots are just going, hallelujah. They're just singing away to that. And finally the storm abates. They're able to repair the, you remember the ship guys, repair the mast and they go on sailing. And Wesley said to them, were you not afraid? And they go, no brother, our hearts are headed with Christ and God. Is this not so with you? Now understand who this guy is, who John Wesley is. He is a guy that gets up four in the morning to do his devotions. The top preacher of his day. His father was a preacher. He was chosen to be the guy who does, I don't know what you'd call it, the baccalaureate address every year for the kids who are graduating from Bible school. The best there is in his thing. And he says, were not you women and children afraid? Our women and children are not afraid to die. And this is what he writes in his journal later. I went out to convert the heathen, but oh who will convert me? And he says, I discovered the one thing I least suspected that I went out to convert others to God was myself never converted to God. And it was that John Wesley that changed England. The previous one would have just, his first Bible study, one guy went mad. So that's probably what'll happen if you don't get saved. So keep this in mind then. We've got a wonderful, at the heart of the universe and Francis Schaeffer used to talk of this. The heart of the universe, the equation is not this. Time plus chance plus matter equals the universe. And we'll put mankind in there. Just put time, Schaeffer pointed out, is impersonal unless you believe in father time. Chance is surely impersonal by definition. And matter is impersonal unless you believe in the personality of a hydrogen atom. And I had a guy write to me in LA about 40 years ago with a three-page discussion on the personality of a hydrogen atom. At least he was thinking. You can't have three impersonals adding up to a personal. So you can get a structured universe, hopefully by chance, from that. Another way of putting this would be like this. Time plus frog plus princess kiss equals handsome prince. This is called fairy story. But if you do it like this, time, a lot of time, plus frog, plus something here, handsome prince. It's called science. So our base is this, that even if we didn't have the amazing discoveries that we've found, it seemed like every week something new comes out simply underlies the amazingness of the creation, the amazingness of who we are, fearfully and wonderfully made. Even if we had none of that, we have a bottom line apologetic. You cannot get personality out of impersonality. It doesn't happen. And most of the people who've pushed that thing to the limit have realized even if you want to throw a guy out, you've still got to put somebody behind. Martians, beings from other dimensions. You've got to get personality in there somewhere. We even call it mother nature. It's not nice to fool mother nature. Who made her a mother? So keep that in mind. We're actually dealing then with a universe that shows we, the universe inside us is, we mean something. Love means something. Friendship means something. Family means something. And you can deny these, but you can't take them out of the equation. One of the guys whose big thing was the time plus chance plus matter thing, he actually brought his daughter up in a glass bubble to examine, make sure that all the influences, she's quite normal. She's only had like three divorces so far, which is about up to par. He, his whole deal was we are just chemicals reacting to our environment. So he bought, introduced the chemicals, the things he wanted influencing to check out his equation. And I read this mother and a daughter, a little girl got on an elevator with him in the university he was teaching. And here was the professor and he looked at the mother and he looked at the child and he said, and what is the subject's name? Steve Taylor, who did, writes some great poetry for Rolling Stone magazine, he's a Christian. Put it in a little thing, went something like this, my love, she said to me, when you get down to it, we're nothing more than a machine. So I chained her to my bedroom wall for future use. And she cried. You can't get away with the personal. You can't take it out of the equation. And the marvelous thing is built right into the heart of the first revelation of what God is, is that it's more than just a unity, it's a family. So take a break and we're going to come back for the next little bit. I just want to take you even further back than, not than Genesis, we can't go there, but from that history chart back further from Moses' day. And I want to show you right at the very dawn of early history and how this attack is right in our face today. We'll call it the so take a break and we will, yes, yeah, she's coming. But Osginnis had a wonderful distinction that he made between these two things. And it's, remember we were talking about the weight of stuff in the Bible, the weight, the weight of ministry to, it's almost post postmodern now, but postmodern people, postmodern kids. In the old days, I'll use these two words, one is called verifiability and the other one is believability. This one has to do with the truth content. This is where apologetics and other stuff comes in. Where scripture, if people have an acquaintance or believe that the Bible is an authentic record of things, verifiability is we're talking about, can we show that what we're talking about can be tested, objectively tested? Is there a way of verifying what we are doing? So this really has to do with the truth content of what we're speaking of. It's Kerry writing on this. Truth content. Okay. But we live in a, now we live in a postmodern culture where everybody's got their own truth. Understand? Everybody's, every, what everybody says is true. And if that sounds insane, that's another name for postmodernism, insanity. Yeah, really. It's your truth and my truth and somehow they will all get together, somehow. So it's almost like the, the illustration people used to use with the elephant, you know, with the, with the blind man that grabbed the elephant. Breeza's embarrassed now looking at me, but this is my rendering of an elephant. Okay. Three blind men were taken to a zoo and they got to pet various creatures. Right at the end, the, the zookeeper introduced them to the elephant. He said, this is an elephant. So one grabbed his leg, one grabbed his ear and one grabbed his tail. When they got back and compared notes, speaking notes, of course, they all agreed that the elephant was the coolest creature that they had ever, ever petted. And then one said, yeah, it was, it was sort of like thin and flat, like a leaf. Okay. And the one that got his foot said, no, you're joking. It was thick and huge. I could scarcely put my arms around the elephant. No, it was like a snake or something. It was small and wiggly. Hello. This is my gorgeous. This is Faye. Yes, there is. There's pizza right over there and, and stuff. This is our lady. Go grab something now. So when they got, then they argued all night. You didn't get a, you got a snake or something. You got something different. So the whole postmodern thing is nobody's, nobody can tell you what's true because nobody's big enough. So if you see, if you lose an eternal God, then that nobody can tell you what's true. It's your own truth. And the difference between that and, um, it's called epistemology. How do you know what is true? And the three baseball umpires are great illustrations, the old classic way of finding truth, old classic way of epistemology, finding out how to know what is real. Baseball umpire one, the classic guy would say there's balls and there's strikes and I call them the way they are. Okay. The second guy, the modern, the modern guy, that's the previous generation, rationalist, materialist. The modern guy would say there's balls and there's strikes and I call them the way I see them. Postmodern would say there's balls and there's strikes and they're nothing till I call. There's no, there's no connection with objective reality at all. The trouble with that is if nothing is real until you call it, you're not going to have any rules. If you have no rules, you'll have no gain. And probably that one of the best illustrations of that was the original roller ball. When they're trying to get rid of this guy and one by one they keep changing the rules until there are no rules at all. Unfortunately he still wins. So if you have a culture that no longer has objective reality, you'll have what happened in Wimbledon about five years ago, an American player was playing somebody else and he was so disgusted with his umpire who kept calling shots out that he was absolutely sure were in. There was no, you know, the buzzer thing going on at that time and calling shots in that he was sure were clearly out that he finally in the middle of playing and he was winning. He wasn't like losing. He, it was like it wasn't, it was quarterfinals or something. It wasn't even early rounds. He threw his racket down on the court and he walked off and his wife, who was a gorgeous model, went up and slapped the umpire on the face. He got fined $30,000 for his wife's slap, but he would have been out of tennis for the rest of his life if he, see that? Well, when they asked him afterwards, well, you know, what did you quit? He said, I was in a bar last night and I, I had this umpire was with some other umpires and I overheard him and he's, he's from France. The three leaders of postmodernism all came out of Paris and this is what he said. This is how I decide. I decide what was in and out. That's the way I call it. It's a true postmodern umpire. And he said, I heard him say that and I thought it was just a joke. And then I get the blighter and he's the one who's umpiring my game. So the boil down take on this is if you keep changing the rules until there aren't any rules after a while, there's no game either. So we got kids now are very hungry for rules and Islam, the rules might be wrong, but they've got rules. They'll die for those rules. You understand? That's why when one of the Royal boys from the Royal family wore a Nazi uniform that freaked out everybody 40 ways from Friday. Why is he doing that? The Nazis were disciplined. Remember that whole thing? We are the master race, the, the best music, the best of everything. And we purge anybody out who isn't. So to him, it was just like, Hey, this is a cool uniform. You don't have that whole history of the horror that that represented the people who were decided as being not worth keeping and where they bashed their teeth out and took the gold to make context for their missiles and took the skin and made lampshades out of them. And what Greg Boyd in the opening of his God at War talks about these two real story, this commandant and somebody else looking at this little Jewish captive girl, the brilliantly beautiful brown eyes saying those would make a great necklace and actually pulling them out of the little girl and making a necklace out of these eyes. So what kind of mind is that that could do that? So the postmodern culture is actually moved away from verifiability. It doesn't care what your truth content is because everybody's right. You understand that? It's, it's this, it's a syncretism. It's not this versus this. It's thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They did that in politics, economics, they called it Marxism. That was the dialectic that ran behind Marxism. So all you have to do to move the country one step closer to Marxism in early days was you create a force here. You could threaten the society, threaten a college, demand the right to park your Volkswagen on a roof. Doesn't matter whether it was stupid or not. The more ridiculous it is, the more attention it would give. So you create this force out of that culture. And they believed in this like a Christian answers, believes that God answers prayer. If you create that, that attack out of that culture will arise something to oppose it. And then in the clash of those two, it will take the world one step closer to world communism. That was the base of it. And it was called the dialectic, the diamet. And the, the, I think America saw that in Kent State, Kent State things. I mean, it's just a word now, history. But Kent State, there were some very strong Marxist type students that kind of really pushed the faculty and they got so freaked out, they called them the National Guard and people who really could care less about that radical cause. When the National Guard started shooting people and their fear, the whole campus took a step closer to the radical few. So it was simple for a Marxist. All you had to do is find a point of tension and push it. And then you believe that as the reaction came and people saw it, you'd won the step closer to world Marxism. And Marxism has probably been called a Christian heresy because its original idea was get rid of selfishness. Well, isn't that what Jesus has promised? And two, that we should have all things in common like the early church did. I mean, remove the element of love and put in the element of delivering people from economic selfishness. If you could be free of economic selfishness, you would be unselfish. It didn't really work either in Russia nor in China. A classic example is Chairman Mao, who had brilliant military strategy. He took the villages, then he took the cities. But he read somewhere that a very powerful nation should have, I think it was coal and oil and steel. But they didn't have a lot of steel. So a command went out to all the villages, take whatever metals you have and everybody has to have a steel mill, a forge. Well, the steel was crappy steel. You couldn't build it for anything. It was useless. But these poor people were trying to take door knobs and melt them down in their walks and things to get the output of steel. They didn't have any fuel, so they cut all the trees down. The pollution problem that's in China today is directly related to that. Greater economics, no long-term look at health, any of those kinds of things. So only God is smart enough, big enough, to see consequences of things. We aren't. We're not smart enough to do it. Postmodernism simply cut him out of the picture. And so naturally, who knows what truth is? Your truth is as good as my truth. So coming back now, 20 years ago, if I preached on a college campus, I'd do a lot of that. At least five-sixths of my sermon or message or whatever it was, especially at college campuses, would be the resurrection of Christ, the early Josh McDowell material. Josh McDowell is a friend of mine. He said, if I did three things, I'd do one on deity of Christ, I'd do on the verifiability of the resurrection, and then he has a sex and dating sort of talk thing that he does too, and prophecy, the fulfillment of prophecy of things. So he was a Marxist once, got saved by the life of the people he looked at, and then found the verifiability of that. Didn't start with that, started with this. So here's the shift. Now, with this, I've found that the stuff you do to to, I'd say, catch an audience's attention and keep it, the shift is moved from there to there in terms of weight. You understand what I'm saying? Believability doesn't have to do with what you're saying, it has to do with who you are. So the point is this, if they don't believe you, it doesn't matter what you say, whether it's true or not, they're not going to listen to you at all. And you've got about 40 seconds from the time you open your mouth, whether it's in person or in public, to catch their attention and go towards that, or it doesn't matter what you say. And if they're polite, they'll just walk away. If they're not, they'll just argue, which is a good sign. You can't argue unless you believe in something. So I think argument's a good sign. It's post-postmodernism. It's moving away from those early things. But keep that in mind. Are you believable? Are you real? And this is the most sophisticated culture of all time in terms of sensing what is real, because they've had the most sophisticated technological lies any culture has ever had. I remember, speaking about Communist China, I remember the early propaganda movies, they were funny. There were pictures of people with big smiles and red apples. You know, it was just so dumb. And then I realized this really went over big in early China, but it doesn't now. The sophistication of Western media, the old days when you had a wolfman, you know, it's like, they'd stop the camera and put like one hair in at a time. You sort of, you know, gradually had to stay absolutely still, otherwise it would look blurry. But, you know, the wolfman now, you're watching somebody's face morph in front of you, or a truck turn into a monster from another universe. You see what I mean? It all happens now, and it's so realistic looking. You don't know. What that does do is it gives you a sensitivity to what is real. You see a bunch of sophisticated lies, there's a feeling that doesn't quite match stuff. Matrix. Matrix 1, amazing. Matrix, regurgitated, revomited. Ridiculous, you know. Part of the power of the first, there were the special effects. There's still cameras all the way around that gave that amazing visuals. But I think they got the idea, you know, second and the third episode was supposed to be totally mind-blowing. They got the idea that maybe one Mr. Smith, maybe a hundred would be even better. You know what I mean? It's like, hello. Very sophisticated special effects, but the story is gone, and there's no contrast. There's no rights, there's no wrongs anymore. The Savior is about as bad as the people that are against him, so what's the point? When it shows up in the box office, it embarrasses the people who put it together, because they don't know what went wrong. The fact is, if the rules keep changing until there are no rules, you not only have no game, you have no movie. You have no play, you have no music, you have nothing. You have what Schafer used to call a devilish den. Just random nothingness. So civilization doesn't end with a bang, but in boredom. If you wanted to say what is the number one thing of kids today, I'd say they're bored out of their minds. All of their senses have been extended so far, that's why you have extreme games, that's why you have parkour, that's why you have jackass 1 through to 50. How many jackass movies, and dumb and dumber and even dumber still, because kids are pushing the limit to try and find something that's real. The reality shows, what are they? What is the lost thing and this, that? It's reality, it's like get as close to real as you can. In Rome, they put real people up against real lions, and that was reality too. So there's not much stopping that today. You know, you look at ultimate fighters, you know, why not just kill them? The end, that's the way it used to be, up or down, depending on the audience. So now, I promised you, how are we doing? Is that 20 minutes? Two minutes left. In the next block we do, and I don't want to keep it too long, but I do want to take you back to the very dawn of early civilization, because we've been looking at this whole thing about train patterns and structures. I reckon our biggest attack, it's one you'll see everywhere once you see it, is launched against the family. And there was a book we did some years back, I never actually talked about this, this one here, it's called Devil Take the Youngest, that isn't a goal, that is a reality. That the war, and it's subtitled The War Against Childhood, so that's what I'm going to talk to you about. What we have going on today in the world is a real war, and the ones who get hurt most by it are the innocent, and the helpless, and the young. So take a break.