Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

There Will Be No Americans in Heaven or Asians, or Africans, or...

Bob Stewart

01 The New Celebration of Culture

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in heaven, Lord, we do want to thank you for the opportunity to study this subject today.

As we look at culture, it has become a really big thing.

And we just wanna look at it, Lord, from a biblical point of view and be able, by the time this series is done, to answer the question, will there be any Americans in heaven or Africans or Asians or whoever it may be?

So all of you have noted that there's a big, culture's a big deal today in the world, right?

And we know it mostly as the concept of diversity.

They don't so much identify it as culture so much as they do diversity, right?

And for a certain political spectrum, that's a dirty word to be talking about diversity.

But I really had a burden last year because when actually I was doing a camp meeting because I heard some things about our church being involved in culture and diversity and celebrating stuff.

And I felt like there was a perspective that wasn't being shared.

And so I felt like the Lord wanted me to share a seminar this year.

So hopefully this will be a blessing to you.

Now this is a little synopsis of what we're going to be doing today.

Today we're going to be looking at the new celebration of culture.

Tuesday, what the enemy knows about culture that We don't.

And Wednesday, how many cultures are in the Bible?

And then Thursday, the world has an identity crisis.

And Friday, the culture that will be in heaven.

You know that you have to start with a good foundation, right?

So I'd like us to turn to Matthew 7, 7.24, and we're going to look at what Jesus said here about building a house.

And actually we're going to look at verse 24, that'll be the where we'll start.

And it says, therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock.

And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house and it did not fall for it was founded on the rock.

Now everyone who hears these sayings of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand, and the rain descended, the floods came, the winds blew and beat on that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.

Now, this may not sound like it's talking about culture, but what we're talking about here is building a house.

And We already mentioned that every family has its own culture.

You as parents or whatever just influence your children to grow up a certain way.

In my world, it was always yes ma'am and yes sir.

And I could not stop calling people yes ma'am and yes sir until I was in my 40s.

I never called people by their first name or anything.

And that was a culture, the Stewart family.

And there's some, now that's a good thing, I think.

It teaches respect for elders and things of that nature.

So that's what we do, that's what culture tends to do.

So how many cultures are there in the world?

So if you read the write-up here, you know the answer.

If you didn't write it, then you may not know.

Do you remember, anybody read the write-up?

Now that is actually a disputed number because if you do look up that, if you Google how many cultures in the world, some will say nobody really knows, right, because there's just so much diversity out there.

But there is 1 source that I found that said 3, 800 plus.

And as you can see there, we're talking about world cultures, country cultures, subcultures, tribes, right?

You could say city cultures, things like that.

Definitely New Orleans is different than Lansing, right?

So culture is a thing that incorporates a lot of things.

So we're going to take a look at just kind of examine how culture started here today and we look back at the Garden of Eden.

And when God created Adam and Eve, did they have a culture?

Now, actually we haven't defined culture yet, but we're going to by the time we get here.

At least we're going to define it according to the cultural experts of our world.

So they had a heavenly culture to begin with.

Now, Of course, it didn't last very long until sin came into the picture.

And once sin entered the picture, even though they had begun their life with the imprint of God the Father's cultural, you know, fingerprints on them, What happened?

Did it continue to be only God's fingerprints?

But they continued for a while, and we don't know all the story.

Ellen White fills in some of the blanks there, but you know, Adam and Eve had more children and they began to develop their own culture, family culture.

This was the beginning of culture for the human race.

Now, oftentimes when we think of culture, we think of Chinatown, you know, or Mexico Town, or you know, just the different places and cities, the big cities where they got that sort of a thing.

And it only makes sense that culture started from the first parents.

Just as I said, God put his fingerprints on Adam and Eve, that was a divine culture.

And then as Adam and Eve began to raise their family, their children, they added an element that God had not originally had.

Because God did not have that when he first started imprinting upon them.

But now, even though Adam and Eve were still close to what we would say perfect, yet they had the element of sin in them.

And so that element began to influence their influence on their children, all right?

And then of course we came to the point where actually, if you were kind of out of line, there were more children there on the first slide, or second slide there, but we come to the point where the first major sin of the siblings comes in, right?

And that was a major earthquake, you might say, in the beginning of the human race and human culture.

And so now murder comes into the picture.

And we know as we read the Bible that Cain, you know, became the father of those that were refusing to follow God and went off on his own and began to develop his own family, his own tribe, his own nation, city, etc.

And he imprinted upon those, those particular ideas, those concepts that he valued.

02 What the Enemy Knows About Culture That We Don’t

Father in Heaven, Lord, it is good to be here this week in Camp Meeting.

What a special treat it is for us to have a little bit of heaven on earth and being able to fellowship with 1 another and listen to your word.

Lord, as we continue our journey in this class, as we seek to understand the culture of heaven that will be in heaven, We pray that your Holy Spirit will once again be our guide and give us insight into the things that we talk about today.

So Lord, we invite your presence and we thank you for hearing and answering our prayer.

I was noticing that you were looking at the books there and it made me think, how many of you grew up in a family where reading was kind of emphasized or you saw it illustrated in your parents and stuff?

I did too And so I grew up in almost a library.

Libraries were very important to me, reading and stuff.

She didn't really grow up in a family where her father or mother didn't read, didn't have that imprinted on her.

And that's another illustration of how a family can have its own culture.

And So I thought that was interesting there.

Well, the title of our subject today is what the enemy knows about culture that we don't.

So I'm gonna be doing a little bit of review of yesterday, and then we'll start into the Bible today to talk about this question of what culture will be in heaven.

Now, let's remind ourselves, the title of my series is, there will be no Americans in heaven, nor Africans, nor Asians, nor Koreans, nor South Americans, anything like that.

So what in the world is that going to be?

So we're looking at the concept of culture, really.

We talked yesterday about the emphasis there is on culture in this day and age, just a huge emphasis in celebrating culture, and we saw some of those quotes, and we know a lot of it today by the term DEI, DEI, you know, diversity concept, And unfortunately, it hasn't been real unifying.

And so, what do you think the enemy knows about culture that we don't?

Why do you think he knows something that we don't about culture?

Well, here's the reason, and it's in the first slide that I have here.

He knows what the Bible is talking about when it comes to culture.

And that's what we're gonna delve into today and throughout the next week.

We're gonna find out what the devil knows that We don't necessarily know about culture, all right?

So in the beginning, of course, we have Genesis 1, 1, God created the heavens and the earth.

And as we see that creation every day of creation week, we know that God is imprinting himself upon what?

Those of us that have studied a little bit about seed germination, you know, or any science like that, we know that God has put in this seed the DNA, the imprint of what it's supposed to grow up to be.

And when this was written, or when this happened, Genesis 1-1, was that a perfect DNA?

The imprint of God, exactly how He wanted it to come out, came out because it was in an unfallen world.

But through the years we had a problem with that as we'll see in a minute now Let's go back and define this concept of culture once again Dictionary definition is the second 1 is basically what we're looking at the customs arts social institutions and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group, like the Caribbean culture or Indian culture, you know, Native American or whatever it may be.

And so When we look at the concept online in Google about what culture is, they say it encompasses the social behavior, the institutions, the norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities and habits of the individuals in these group.

And we saw yesterday that they oftentimes display it as an iceberg, right?

There's visible, seeable parts of culture, and then there are things that are underneath that are the vast majority that we don't really see about culture.

For instance, in the Native Americans, I know that it is actually, I think it's most tribes, they don't believe that you should look somebody in the eye.

Typically, you know, they don't look you straight in the eye.

And that's disconcerting sometimes for Americans because we believe that they ought to, you know, you ought to watch, look at somebody.

But there's a number of the tribes that think that it's disrespectful or their Asians are very much like that too.

And so those are customs, you know, that they grow up with, rationale for those sort of things.

Now, here's another example of a custom in a family.

In Jeremiah 35, 5 and 6, you might remember this story.

Jeremiah says, I sat before the men of the house of the Rechabites, pitchers full of wine, this was unpermitted wine, and cups, and I said to them, drink wine.

But they said we will not drink wine for Jonah Dub the son of rake ab our father commanded us saying you shall not drink wine, you know your sins for how long Forever So this father imprinted upon his children that in this family, we don't drink wine.

That's a beginning of a kind of a culture.

And when his family got together, you know, for social events, Years later, they might talk about their great-grandfather, Jonah Devin, and say, yeah, I don't know why he did that, but yeah, that's what we do.

We just, we Recobites, we don't drink wine, anything from the fruit of the vine.

And we saw yesterday about how that process began with Adam and Eve.

Because culture starts somewhere, correct?

And you know, as we talked about, family culture typically starts with the father and the mother.

And so there's a culture that starts in the family and it grows.

And that's the same way with the human family and began to evolve as the years go by.

So as we looked at Adam and Eve, we know that they were imprinted with the culture of heaven originally.

Because as I just suggested, every family is imprinted by their what?

And so you end up doing the things that your father and mother do.

In fact, I remember I've talked to a number of people, and I think I probably had this feeling myself 1 time, because there were times that my father and mother would say, well, I would ask them a question, why I had to do things that way.

And I determined that I was never gonna say that to my kids.

But you know, as a parent, you get to a point where you end up mouthing those same words that your parents mouthed, you know, because I was always going to give them a reason for why they shouldn't do this and that.

Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't.

So God is the 1 that imprinted upon Adam and Eve.

And he imprinted the only culture that he, God knows, which is a heavenly culture.

It was ingrained and it was a perfect culture, wasn't it?

It was exactly a carbon copy of everything that was in actually everywhere in the universe, no different.

But then of course when sin entered the picture, the original imprint of heaven became marred over time with the imprinting from what?

And we see that, of course, in the same sense in the biological world, in our creation.

Now those little plants that grow, they don't grow exactly how God originally intended them.

Some of them grow because they've been mutated, you know, or they've been Diseased or whatever.

They've been influenced by the sinful condition of our planet.

So it's no longer the same creation as God intended and the same way with the imprint of that heavenly culture that we're looking at here.

So as we begin this journey through the book of Revelation, we started with Genesis 1, looked at the creation of Adam and Eve, and then their fall.

And now as we come to Genesis 4 and 5, we begin to see that there are how many camps, how many different cultures really are starting to develop in the human race?

Now there's variations obviously there, but basically there's 2.

There's those that follow Seth because Cain killed Abel and Cain went off on his own, didn't he?

And he began to develop a family life, a family lifestyle that was opposed to the things of God.

Now I'm sure that he hung on to some things, but there were, because after all, he thought it was okay to worship God with fruits and vegetables from his garden.

And so they worshipped, but they worshipped differently than what our Heavenly Father had asked them to.

And then of course you have those that come through the line of Seth.

03 How Many Cultures are in the Bible

Father in Heaven, Lord, as we spend some more time here today talking about culture and those that you are going to take to Heaven, we pray, Lord, that the word of God will speak to us.

Father, we spend all week and most of our lives studying school, we're studying the words of men and women.

But in this particular instance, we definitely need to find out what you have to say about this subject.

So Lord, guide us today and send your Holy Spirit to give us understanding is our prayer in Jesus name.

It has, I think it's in this 1, where it talks about the quote that I gave you on screen the other day, yesterday, and these are quotes from Spirit of Prophecy.

We're obviously, as Seventh-day Adventists, we want to know what does the Bible say, right, ultimately, and the Bible does say a lot, oh thank you, about this.

But we also understand that the Lord gave us a special gift in the spirit of prophecy.

And so these are some quotes, by all means they're not all of them.

This is only half of them, I'll give the other half probably tomorrow, something like that.

And it's just something to read and recognize that what I'm sharing with you is not just something that's my personal opinion, okay?

This is something that we can see in the Bible and also in spirit of prophecy very clearly.

So the question or the title today is how many cultures are in the Bible?

And I'm going to tell you right now it's a trick question.

Well, we're going to go into the trick part of it in just a second here, and go ahead and take a seat.

All right, so yesterday, we wanna kind of just briefly recap what we looked at yesterday.

We looked at what the enemy knows about culture that we don't.

We saw that in the beginning that the devil reads the Bible, whether we realize it or not, he knows what the Bible says.

And because he was created in heaven, he knows all about the culture of heaven, correct?

But he is actually the originator of a different culture because when he began to focus on himself, he created within himself a different culture that was out of harmony with what he had, how he had been created by the Father, by Jesus.

And so automatically there was some discord there, wasn't it?

And what did he do with that new way of thinking?

He began to put his imprint upon his other fellow angels and began to spread this new culture.

And so, of course it spread until there was finally rebellion, and so the devil knows all about this concept of culture, that there is really a primary culture of heaven, and really of the rest of the universe.

I don't know if you've ever thought about that.

But I think we can surmise, we don't know for sure, but I think we can pretty well surmise that even though there may be thousands of other planets that are populated by created beings in God's universe, there's really only 1 culture.

Because if God is the father of all those different creatures, then what kind of imprint is upon every single 1 of them.

Even though they may live on a cold planet, a wet planet, a dry planet, you know, whatever it may be, they might live a little bit differently, but basically they're all gonna be reflecting the culture of heaven, what God ordained.

And Satan knew that and so he's the 1 that originated the many problems with culture that we have today.

Alright let's take a look at how things progressed.

We talked about the origin of culture a little bit yesterday in Adam and Eve and we looked at the the line of Cain and then Seth, right, we saw the lineage there.

2 different cultures you might say to start.

The sons and daughters of men and the sons and daughters of God were the 2 cultures that started out in the planet.

And then after the flood we had the 3 descendants of Noah.

We had Japheth, we had Shem, and then we have Ham.

Anybody remember which 1 went off the the rail?

So it's this descendants of Ham that ended up bringing, unfortunately, back in the sinful concepts that Lucifer planted within the race.

So as we move along in the Bible we come down to Exodus and we begin to hear about some other cultures you might say.

Now in the first part of the Bible, in fact let's look at that, I should have told you to make sure you bring your Bible because we're going to do some Bible studying here and I know most people or many people have them on their phones, which is okay.

Genesis chapter 10, if we look at Genesis chapter 10, we notice that in the beginning God describes mankind in a different way.

He says in Genesis chapter 10, verse 1 through 5, now this is the genealogy of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

And the sons were born to them after the flood.

The sons of Japheth were Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshach, and Tiras.

The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz, Ariphath, and Togarmah.

The sons of Javan were Elisha, Tarshish, Kittum, and Dodanim.

From these the coastline people of the Gentiles were separated into their lands, everyone according to his own language, according to their families, into their nations." Now in that last verse it kind of gives you a synopsis of what's happening here.

At the very beginning, how was humanity known?

You're the son or you're the daughter of so and so, right?

But gradually as it moves on, as you move into the Bible, you begin to get into these family names.

And of course here in verse 5 is a key to what is picked up on in the New Testament where it says, from these the coastland peoples of the what?

The Gentiles were separated into their lands.

So this is probably the first place I think in the Bible where it begins to call people who are not of the royal lineage you might say, they begin to call them Gentiles.

Yeah, so you and I are Gentiles by birth, unless you happen to be born in the Jewish family, okay, biologically.

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