GYC SE 2012: Ultimate Purpose

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Lessons in Warfare

Dean Dennis

The Last Man Out

You know the importance of this material that you've given for presentation.

We ask that you bind the devil wherever he is right now.

We ask that the technology come into cooperation with what your wishes are, Lord, and that your name may be glorified.

We just ask that whatever the matter is with the technology today be cast aside so that your word may go forward to your people.

Let me start with this quote that I wanted to share with you originally.

In the book of education, I want you to understand the setting of this entire discussion that we're going to go into over the next 3 hours or so.

It's in education page 190, and it reads, the student should learn to view the word as a whole and to see the relation of its parts.

He should gain a knowledge of its grand and central theme, of God's original purpose for the world of the rise of the great controversy and the work of redemption.

He should understand the nature of the 2 principalities that are contending for supremacy and should learn to trace their working through the records of history and prophecy to the great consummation.

He should see how this controversy enters into every phase of human experience.

How in every act of life, he himself reveals the 1 or the other of the 2 antagonistic motives.

And how whether he will or not, he is even now deciding upon which side of the controversy he will be found.

What this is simply saying, friends, is that whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we are surrounded by a great controversy that's raging all around us.

That controversy is between Christ and his angels and Satan and his angels.

How many of you keep that at the top of your mind every day?

Because that's something that should be paramount in our thinking as we go through our life from day to day, that we are in the midst of a great controversy.

And what I want to share with you is a series of topics called Lessons in Warfare.

And taking illustrations from real life battles and other conflicts that have taken place in history and in the Bible and drawing a spiritual parallel from that.

I cannot get the view correctly to see my notes.

And this is the first time this has happened.

It says, the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

I want to share with you another passage.

It says, only be careful and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things that your eyes have what?

Seen, or let them fade from your hearts as long as you live.

Teach them to your children and to their children and their children after them.

And what that's saying is that we should have an understanding of what's happened in the past.

Amen, We should know about things that have happened in the past so that we can apply them to things that may happen to us presently and in the future.

I want to tell you a story about a man by the name of Hiro Onoda.

Hiro was a Japanese soldier in the midst of World War II.

We're talking about faithfulness, loyalty, dedication.

On December 17th, 1944, the Japanese army sent a 23 year old soldier by the name of Hiro Onoda to the island of the Philippines.

He was sent there with a team of other soldiers, a small group that were to conduct guerrilla warfare in the jungles of the Philippines.

Onoda was, as he was departing his mission, his commanding officer gave him some very specific instructions.

He said, Hero, under no circumstances are you to take your own life?

He says, whether it be 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, whatever the case may be, do not give up.

And if you know anything about the Japanese soldier, if his commanding officer tells him, do not take your own life, that's a very significant statement because even in that very war, World War II, Japanese soldiers were taking their own lives as kamikaze pilots.

So there was some honor tied up in losing your life in battle, even at your own hand.

But he was told, under no circumstances, hero, must you take your own life.

He says, if you have to eat coconuts, eat coconuts.

If you have to eat bananas, eat bananas green.

That's a very, very significant point that you should remember in this story.

So by February of 1945, the Allied forces, they attacked the island of the Philippines and quickly overtook the defenses there.

As they moved inland, Onoda and his team of men, they retreated back into the jungles of the Philippines.

And it consisted of himself and about 4 other men.

They survived rationing their rice supply and of course eating coconuts and green bananas like they were told to and every now and then they would kill 1 of their local cows in order to survive.

Soon 1 of the soldiers that he was working with found a note saying that the war ended in August of 1945.

So Onoda and his soldiers, they decided that it was a hoax.

It was propaganda by the enemy set up to lure them out so they would give up their position.

But they were given instructions never to give up.

So they ignored it and 1 year went by, 2 years went by.

Planes would fly over the area, dropping flyers out because they knew that these soldiers were there saying come out the war is over.

They eventually got letters and pictures of the loved ones of these soldiers dropping them saying the war is over come out but these soldiers would not give up their positions under any circumstance because they thought that this was a effort of the enemy to lure them out and overtake them.

So Onoda and his men lived in the jungle for years Constantly, occasionally engaging and carrying out acts of sabotage.

They ended up killing several residents of the Philippines.

Whenever they would come into the jungle to try to find them, Onoda and his men would fire on them as if they were enemy forces.

At a certain point, a few of his men snuck away.

And in the course of time, between having skirmishes with local residents and local militia.

His men were killed and it was Onoda himself who was the last man standing.

That was 29 years after World War II ended.

And the way he was convinced to stop fighting was that a 29 year old college student from Japan heard about his case and said, I'm going to go and I'm going to find him.

So he went into the jungles looking for Enoda, knowing that there was a soldier out there who was still fighting World War II.

And how many of you would be able to approach this gentleman knowing that he was firing on people thinking that they were the enemy?

But he finally found him and convinced him that the war was over.

But Onoda said, listen, I will not surrender my position because I have been given instructions by my commanding officer never to give up.

And I have to hear it from him that this war is over.

So what the college student did was he went back to Japan.

2 weeks later, he found a notice commanding officer.

He was no longer thinking about the military as much as he was when he gave Inoda those orders.

And they, he came and got Inoda, but he didn't come without authorized papers from the government of Japan releasing Inoda from his duties.

And he went before Onoda in the jungles of the Philippines.

He gave him his discharge papers, decommissioning him.

Onoda looked at them and it says that he had a moment of silent anger.

A Stern Warning

This presentation, whenever I give it, this particular 1, I really struggle with this 1 because it uses a really sad event as the basis of the illustration.

An act of war that I feel, and many people feel, was an atrocity.

And it was an atrocity, sadly, that our country had something to do with.

So I'm not trying to make a political statement here.

There is a spiritual truth that I want you to understand as I share this information with you.

But Christ is very, very clear in giving us the understanding that we are in the midst of a spiritual battle.

And there are certain understandings that we can come to if we put ourselves in the mindset of a warrior.

Because someone who's in the midst of a battle, if you're not in the mindset of a warrior, you'll be killed.

And if we are in the midst of a spiritual war, we need to have the spiritual mindset of warriors.

So Statement from Darkness Before Dawn that Sister White makes.

For it excites the worst passions of the soul and then sweeps into eternity its victims, steeped in vice and blood.

It is his object to incite the nations to war against 1 another for he can thus divert the minds of the people from the work of preparation to stand in the day of God." That's how Satan uses war, using it as a way to sweep people into a state of being lost.

So this presentation is called A Stern Warning.

A Stern Warning and then Final judgment comes.

Stern warnings from above always precede revival.

Okay, I want you to hear, say that again.

So a stern warning from above always precedes revival.

Soon after revival, final judgment follows.

I'm going to spend a couple minutes talking to you about World War II.

It's set apart from all other wars by significant events that involved the mass death of civilians.

It's set apart from any other war because of events that involved the mass deaths of non-combatants.

Events like the Holocaust and other atrocities set World War II above.

This horrific war resulted in a reported 75 million deaths.

World War II, we think about it in terms of this, of something happening a long time ago when the world was in some state of barbarism.

World War II, my friends, took place in this modern era when man was civilized, when mankind was educated.

The automobile existed, the airplane The automobile existed.

Modern medicine, the way we understand it today, existed.

The United Nations And the League of Nations existed.

Higher institutions of higher education existed.

And yet the entire globe was at war to the point where in a matter of less than 10 years, 75 million people lost their lives.

I'd like to share an account with you of 1 of the greatest atrocities of this Second World War.

Perhaps it will be instructive in your understanding of deeper spiritual truths that are relevant to our day.

By August of 1945, the world by that time had been in a state of total war.

For 9 years, this had been going on and the incessant slaughter and bloodshed had taken a serious toll upon the nations of the earth.

Victory had just been secured by the Allies in Europe and the United States at that time turned its full attention to the second front of battle which was where?

The US was now determined to bring the bloody war to an end because they're looking at the situation and they realize that we can lose more men in Japan than we lost in all of Europe.

When you compare the losses, the human losses of America to most of the other nations that were major players in World War II, ours is just a drop in the bucket.

And we lost hundreds of thousands of men.

Okay, I want you to understand, I want you to wrap your mind around this.

We lost in America hundreds of thousands of men.

And our losses were nothing compared to Russia, Germany, Great Britain, or France.

So look it up when you get home 1 day, the casualties of World War II.

So we're looking at this situation with Japan and to invade Japan it would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, if not millions.

So for the 6 months prior to August of 1945, the United States decided to intensely firebomb 67 Japanese cities and ask them to surrender unconditionally.

But tragically, the Japanese government ignored this ultimatum and President Harry Truman signed an executive order.

And this executive order was unlike any other that had ever been signed.

It authorized the use of a secret weapon on the nation of Japan, and this weapon would prove to be a game-changer.

It's 1 that would wreak devastation on a scale never seen by human eyes before or since.

But before this weapon was deployed, the government attempted to warn both the people and the government of Japan, what was approaching.

They didn't want to just unleash this weapon.

They wanted to warn them first, because it was so fearsome, what was about to happen.

So what happened is they told the American Air Force to fly over all of Japan and rain down millions of leaflets from above.

And I want you to understand in its full picture what was about to happen.

Shortly before the secret weapon was going to be unleashed, the United States sent what we could call a forerunner with a stern warning, with the hopes of inspiring some type of revival in the form of Japan's surrender.

So you've got a leaflet being dropped, which was a forerunner, carrying a warning.

And what they wanted to do was have the Japanese government come to themselves and understand what was about to happen.

Do we understand that concept going forward?

So the US blanketed Japanese cities of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and 33 other potential targets with these millions of leaflets.

It says, read this carefully, as it may save your life or the life of a relative or friend.

In the next few days, some or all of the cities named on the reverse side will be destroyed by American bombs.

We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military.

The American Air Force now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

Heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

Sadly, the leaflet went largely unheeded.

And on the morning of August 6, 1945, The B-29 Superfortress by the name of Enola Gay carried this secret weapon.

At about 8.16am, Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.

Little Boy was the first atomic bomb that would ever be used in the history of warfare.

It destroyed everything within a 1.2 mile radius.

The temperature on the ground reached an unimaginable 10, 832 degrees.

Everyone within a 2.5 mile radius was incinerated.

A tremendous wind traveling at the speed of 2.7 miles per second was generated, causing cement buildings to collapse and broken glass to fly up to 10 miles away.

The radiation from this bomb was unbelievably strong, causing those exposed to it to lose all bodily functions and their cells to undergo apoptosis, which is a form of cellular suicide.

Between the blast itself, the resulting fires throughout the city, and the radiation burns, Some estimate that 200, 000 citizens of Hiroshima lost their lives, including 90% of the city's doctors and nurses.

Afterwards, the United States Air Force again dropped millions of leaflets warning the government of Japan and the people of Japan, urging them to surrender and warning of a second attack.

It says, America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.

We are in possession of the most destructive explosive device ever devised.

Equivalent in power to what 2, 000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission.

And we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.

If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened in Hiroshima.

Special Forces

Again, Father, we invite you into our presence.

We invite you to be a part of this discussion, not just a part, Lord, but the central feature in everything that we do say and understand at this point in time, Lord.

And we ask that you make our minds right and focus our activities, our attention, and our words upon you, Lord.

This session is part 3 in Lessons in Warfare.

And this presentation is called Special Forces.

I don't even know what time it is right now.

I want to share a couple of quotes with you that you may have heard before.

And I don't think that John at this point is talking about men and gender, but he's talking about young people.

He says, young men, because you are what?

Where are the men who will go forth to the work, fully trusting in who?

Looks like there's a time when we can't find young people.

We can't find brave young people to do the work.

And I believe right now that I'm amongst brave young people.

How do we respond to that type of challenge?

Now I'm not talking age-wise when I say brave young people.

I see people who are very young and not so young.

And I think it's applicable to everyone here.

With such an army of workers as our youth rightly trained might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon coming Savior might be carried where?

In these last days, God is establishing and assembling an army.

But make no mistake, this will be no ordinary army.

And let's take a look at what special forces are.

They are elite military tactical teams trained to perform high-risk, dangerous missions that conventional units cannot perform.

These soldiers need to be physically and mentally robust and have the confidence, courage, and skill to operate how?

Small teams, often in isolation and in a hostile environment.

Special forces are high value assets, delivering effects disproportionate to their size.

I want you to repeat that 1 after me, because it's very important.

That's 1 of the hallmark descriptions or descriptors of special forces.

Team of small people, well trained, who deliver effects that don't make sense in relation to their size.

On a moonless night in May of 2011, American commandos embarked on a dangerous mission.

4 Black Hawk helicopters, specially fitted with stealth technology, streaked across the barren landscape, well below radar level, barely skimming the desert floor.

The soldiers descended on a heavily fortified compound deep within Pakistan.

They moved with lightning speed, optimum efficiency and the utmost precision.

These Navy SEALs fast roped into the compound, advanced into the house, breaching walls and doors with explosives.

A helicopter stalled and would not take off.

Pakistani authorities, who are kept in the dark by their Washington counterparts, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed in to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation.

Of the 5 who were killed, 1 was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face.

A member of the Navy SEALs snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysis in the US who fed it into a facial recognition program.

And just like that, history's most expansive, expensive, and exasperating manhunt was over.

The lifeless body of Osama bin Laden, America's public enemy number 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again.

The raid was intended to take 40 minutes.

All told, between the team's entry and exit from the compound, they did it in 38.

Navy Sea, Air, and Land teams, commonly known as SEALs.

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GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Lessons in Warfare

A Stern Warning

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