GYC 2013: Before Men and Angels

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Composite Christian: Character Development

Scott Moore

01-God vs. Satan: You Decide the Winner

This message was presented at the GYC 2013 conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

If you are looking for the composite Christian character development out of the books of Daniel and Revelation, you are in the right place.

If you're not and you need to be somewhere else, you will want to run there because that seminar is starting about right now as well.

I pastor 2 churches here in Florida Conference.

The lady that I get to co-present with is Tondo Malombo and she is right here and she'll tell you all about herself I'm sure in the next session.

What we are going to do in this session is we are simply going to talk about salvation being something understood by the children of Israel as have already happened.

The great theme of this presentation is the fact that because God saved the children of Israel from the dragon Egypt, this is why you see in the Old Testament book of Revelation, God's people are again saved from the dragon, which is who in the book of Revelation?

If you have a question on what I'm presenting, I would encourage you to raise your hand.

I will do my best to acknowledge you when I come to a stopping point and you can ask the question.

If I don't know the answer to your question, I'll simply say I don't know and move on.

Please don't get offended if that's the case, because I do not have a monopoly on the truth nor scripture.

So, praise the Lord that we can all study and find ourselves approved by God.

Father in heaven, we are in this room, we are here at GYC because Lord you have called us to be here and we ask that you will speak to us as individuals.

Please touch our hearts and Father we pray that we will leave this place much closer to Jesus and we ask this in Jesus' name knowing that it is according to His will.

So the title of today's message is God vs.

You decide the winner and I've subtitled it Saved from the Dragon.

The Dragon has lots of connotations when it comes to the book of Daniel, books of Daniel and the book of Revelation.

I want you to open with me to Isaiah, the 43rd chapter.

If you want these notes, I'm happy to give you these notes, You just have to come in and type your own email address down so that when I copy and paste it, if you don't get it, it's your fault, not mine.

So, some people email me and say, why in the world didn't you send me that information?

And I'll say, because you typed it in wrong.

But if you need a Bible, my encouragement to you is get 1 at lunchtime, okay?

Forget lunch, fast today and go buy a Bible.

Isaiah 43 verse 11, very short verse, it says, I, even I am the Lord and beside me there is no what?

Isaiah 43 verse 16 says, let's start in 15.

I am the Lord your Holy 1, the Creator of Israel, your King.

Thus saith the Lord, verse 16, which maketh a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters.

When did the Lord make a way in the sea and a path in the waters?

When He led the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the Red Sea, look at what it says in verse 17, which bringeth forth the chariot and the horse and the army and power, they shall lie down together, verse 17, they shall not rise, they are extinct, they are quenched as toe or toe and that's just like flax, it's like pinching out a match.

God says that I am the Lord and there is no other Savior except me.

When you read further down as we just did you see that that Savior God, that 1 Lord is tied to the Exodus.

Now go with me to Hosea the 13th chapter.

You're in Isaiah, you have Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, and then you have the book of Hosea.

So you're turning to the right from where you were.

Right past Daniel you have the book of Hosea and we are in the 13th chapter, Hosea chapter 13 and verse 4.

This idea again of God being the only Savior, it says here in Hosea the 13th chapter and the fourth verse, Yet I am the Lord thy God from the what?

Okay, so when I pause and ask for a question, you can feel free to answer.

It says here, Yet, Hosea 13.4, Hosea 13.4, after the book of Daniel you have Hosea, Yet I am the Lord thy God from the what?

Again, here God is identifying Himself as the Savior that saved his people from where?

It says here, And thou shalt know no god but me.

Okay, the only 1 God, the true God, the 1 that saved the children of Israel from what?

From Egypt, continuing on, for there is no Savior beside me.

For the children of Israel, when God brought them out of the land of Egypt, they were saved." Get this concept.

God says, I'm your God because I'm the Savior that took you out of Egypt.

This was the concept in the mind of the children of Israel.

We were filming something for a school that I was working with not too long ago and there was a gentleman that was Jewish And he was a Hispanic Jew.

By lineage, he said he was a Jew, which I thought was very cool and very interesting.

And so we were talking about health and living healthfully, and he said to me, as he was smoking his cigarette, he said, I don't have to worry about that I said why he said because I am a Jew I said so what does this mean he says it means that no matter what I do I am already and what do you think he said I am already saved for the mind of the Jewish individual that was that came out of Egypt they were saved from Egypt now you and I are going to discover that the Bible calls Egypt a dragon or Leviathan or Rahab which is another name for this dragon.

So we are going to see that the 1 true God and his deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt is tied or the 1 true God is tied to the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt.

In the saving history, this saving history of God being the 1 true God, deliverance of Israel from Egypt, This saving history was recited in confessional statements.

This is not the meat of our study, so we are going to skim through this.

We're only going to look at 1 of these verses.

Please go with me to Deuteronomy, the 26th chapter.

So you're in the book of Hosea, so you're going to go to your left, and you're going to go to the book of Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy, right before Joshua, the 26th chapter.

You know, I had an opportunity to sit down with my conference president recently, and he was asking, what would you do in order to energize a church?

And I shared with him, I said, you know, Elder, I haven't been to the schools of higher education ever since I was converted.

And this book has the power to change people's lives.

So you may be sitting in this class right now, and you may be thinking, this guy is talking way above my head.

If it is, say, hey, bring it down a level and I'll do my best, right?

Nomthandazo Malambo-Amankwah

02-God vs. Satan: Death Before Dishonor

This message was presented at the DYC 2013 conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.dycweb.org.

We're going to get started even as people are trickling in.

My name is Thando, that's short for Nomthandazo, originally from, I don't know where anymore.

Originally from Zambia and Zimbabwe and South Africa and Swaziland and Ghana.

If you want to know how, you can ask me during the break.

But originally from Africa, currently based here.

Good, so I'm not the only 1 who's struggling with writing papers and doing readings and all that exciting stuff.

But it's good to be on break and to be here for GYC.

So in this session what we are going to do is we're going to continue with our theme as we're looking at character development in the context of the Greek controversy And we want to take a look at some of God's people over the years who've been faithful and what we can learn from them about what it means to follow characters and to stand in this controversy on God's side and how critical that is for our lives.

Let's go ahead and begin with prayer, and then we'll get into our study for this morning.

Loving Father in heaven, we are thankful for this time.

We thank you for what we're learning so far here at GYC.

And Father, even as we sit through this seminar, we're asking that you speak to us.

We're asking dear Lord that you would open our hearts and minds to comprehend your word and that you would touch each 1 of us individually.

May your Holy Spirit be present here to speak to us and encourage us.

So I'm talking here to students of the word, right?

So when you think back to the books of Daniel and Revelation, specifically Daniel chapters 2 and 7, can you list the 4 world empires in Daniel 2 and 7?

So as we develop this theme, talking about this great controversy, this cosmic conflict in which we are caught in the crossfire, we're going to look through each 1 of those world empires and we're going to pick specific characters of the Bible that lived during those times and study their lives and see how they stood faithful in this conflict, even withstanding the influence of their time.

And so in this session, we want to look at Babylon.

Now because you're all great students of the word, amen?

Because you're all such great students of the word, I'm going to assume that you're familiar with some of the historical context of Babylon, yes?

And so we'll not cover that in much detail, but I'll give you a brief background and then I want us to hone in on Daniel chapters 3 and 6, will be the meat of our study this morning.

Now, President Barack Obama on January 24, 2012, delivered in 1 of his most eloquent speeches a blueprint for an America that is built to last.

And as I was listening to his speech, the thoughts sort of crossed my mind that, you know, the Bible says that there is nothing new under the sun, and that, you know, this rhetoric that Obama was using of this America built to last was something that King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had actually built his kingdom on.

You will know King Nebuchadnezzar as a statesman, a soldier, an architect, ruler of Babylon, the first world empire we find talked about in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 and the context of the book of Daniel.

Now King Nebuchadnezzar, just to give you some interesting background here, Babylon in the way in which he built it, It was actually built to last forever.

You just have to bear with me as I go back and forth.

But Babylon, in the way in which Queen Nebuchadnezzar built it, it was laid out in a perfect square.

And I want you to use your sanctified imagination here to picture how it is that he built Babylon.

It was laid out in a perfect square measuring 15 miles on both sides, 24 kilometers for those of us who use the standard system of units.

And the walls of Babylon are estimated to have been about 300 feet high, that's 91 meters, and some 87 feet thick.

And the walls were so wide, if you want a pictorial sort of explanation, so wide that at least 3 chariots could ride on top of the wall side by side.

That's how thick the walls of Babylon were.

This was a kingdom that was built to last forever.

Now, King Nebuchadnezzar, in his building of Babylon, built a city whose architectural splendor was unsurpassed.

And Nebuchadnezzar ensured that no enemy could actually scale the wall of the city and capture it.

And he had built a ditch of similar dimensions around the city and he flooded it with water and this was to make sure that it was difficult for anyone to even come near the city wall.

So are you getting a picture of how he had built the city here?

And water supply into the city was provided by the great river Euphrates that actually flowed under the wall down through the middle of the city.

And here's an interesting fact for you, that the way that Nebuchadnezzar had actually built his city and secured it in everything that he thought this has to last forever, he had made sure that even if his city was besieged, the inhabitants of the city could survive on the food supply stored in the city for 15 years.

This is the kingdom built to last forever.

And this is the context in which we find Daniel and his 3 friends in Bible on the Great.

This stone epitaph was found among the ruins of the ancient Babylonian kingdom and when they deciphered it, it actually read, May it last forever, which was the wish of King Nebuchadnezzar.

Of course, we know that that did not happen, but his desire to have his kingdom sort of last forever informed a lot of the way in which he managed and some of the decisions he made, including the context for Daniel Chapter 3, which you know the story, amen?

Because he wanted his kingdom to last forever.

Now, given this background, let's hone in on Daniel and his 3 friends and the situation in which they find themselves.

Because this is the kingdom that they actually came into.

So now take your Bibles with me to Daniel chapter 1.

And we're going to read, see I'm gonna have a little bit of trouble here because I need both the PowerPoint and my flip chart.

But okay, so Daniel chapter 1, let me get there myself.

If you're not there, please say have mercy.

Okay, I'm reading from the New King James Version.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it.

So That's just setting for us the historicity of Ramkhanez as king of Babylon coming to Jerusalem to besiege the city and taking with him captives.

Daniel and let's name them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Now scholars of the word tell us that these men at the time of this besiege and their capture were very young, either late teens or early 20s.

So I want you to picture what it must have been like for them.

You know, you're growing up in Jerusalem, raised by godly parents, I mean, looking at their life history, we can assume their parents were very godly.

And you're just in the spring of your life, you know, you're really just at a place where you're thinking about, if it were us, you know, where you want to go to school, what you'll do with your life.

I mean, you're in the spring of your life.

And then this tragic event happens, and you find yourself having to take this difficult journey to a foreign country as a captive, as a slave, to a place that you don't know, among people you don't know, to a land whose philosophy and religion totally differs from everything you've ever been taught.

And how difficult that must have been for them as young people.

And we really want to take a look more in depth at their experience here.

The Bible says, and this is again familiar to us, the king instructed Ashpanez, the master of his eunuchs, to bring some of the children of Israel and some of the king's descendants and some of the nobles, young men in whom there was no blemish, but they were what?

Good looking, that's the word I was looking for.

If you have the King James Version, it says what?

Okay, and then the New King James says good looking, but either way, same idea, same concept.

03-God vs. Satan: Infallible Men?

This message was presented at the DYC 2013 Conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

Father in Heaven, we want to thank You so much that we got at least something to eat.

We pray now that as we feed our soul on Your Word, that You will show us the difference that 1 man can make.

And Jesus, we pray that we will be that man, that we will be that woman that makes a change in this world for you and brings honor and glory to your name.

We pray this, Jesus, asking that you will bless us this afternoon.

Well earlier today at our first session, does anybody remember what we talked about?

Alright, we talked about Egypt and Egypt being the promise that we are going to be redeemed in the future right and then what did we talk about the second period okay Sure, I'd be happy to use it.

He said the other side was just the, it's just extra, for extra battery.

This thing just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning.

So I'm just going to take that out and we're just going to go without that.

You're doing a fine job brother, you're doing a fine job.

Let me know what you need, we'll be outside.

How many of you had a paper route when you're growing up?

It's not an odd question, we're just talking about paper routes.

All right, we have prayed this morning, we talked about being delivered from Egypt and that reality was a promise of what was going to take place in the future of us being delivered from the dragon or Satan.

Then in our second class we focused on 2 different chapters of the Bible And does anybody remember what those chapters were?

And what did we discover from Daniel chapter 3 and Daniel chapter 6?

I just turned that thing off and my computer started working.

All right, and we're gonna go back to Daniel chapter 6 now.

So let's open our Bibles to Daniel chapter 6.

Daniel, Ezekiel, Daniel, so we're to the right of the book of Psalms.

Daniel chapter 6 to the left of Hosea, if you get to Hosea.

Daniel chapter 6, and we are going to begin reading in verse 1.

The subtitle of today's, well, this afternoon's message, according to our program, is God versus Satan, Infallible Man.

And what we are going to do is we are going to look at Daniel chapter 6 to see how God's people react in the face of an infallible decree that is made, how they stand up, God's kingdom is rewarded by that.

Then we're going to jump all the way to Acts chapter 17 and the reason we're doing this is We discussed Babylon and what Babylon did in Daniel chapter 3 in making this decree that people should worship this false god or this false image.

And so we're going to look again at Medo-Persia now.

And Medo-Persia, that's what we looked at in Daniel chapter 6 before.

In Medo-Persia what you have is you have another infallible man or 1 that claims to be infallible because after all he makes a law that no 1 can change.

And then we're going to look at the kingdom of Greece and we're going to look at the multiplicity of gods in Greece and how another 1 man looked at that situation of all of these gods and got converts out of it.

So these are the references we're going over in this study.

I am there with you and the Bible says this in Daniel chapter 6.

It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 princes.

Now Darius ruled the Medo-Persian Empire for 2 years.

So all of this takes place during that two-year period that he is ruling and the Bible goes on to say, he said 120 princes which should be over the whole kingdom.

In the time of Esther, do you remember how many provinces there were and how many lords there were over those provinces?

Anyway, here we are and why do I bring Esther into this?

Because she is in the, she, her life occurred during the Medo-Persian Empire and you remember the decree that was made in Esther a law that could not be changed and then they had to make another law that people could fight back quite interesting but here we are Daniel chapter 6 and verse 2 and over these 3 presidents of whom Daniel was first, that meant that Daniel was the chief of those 3 presidents, that the princes might give accounts unto them and the king should have no damage.

So Daniel was set up to protect the Medo-Persian Empire.

He was set there to protect the Medo-Persian Empire.

Verse 3, then this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes because an excellent spirit was in him.

By the way, you saw that same spirit in Joseph.

Everything that Joseph touched prospered.

You saw that same spirit in Esther, you saw that same spirit in Daniel, you saw the same thing in John, etc, etc, etc.

When the Spirit of God possesses God's people, good things happen.

So here is Daniel set up to protect the Medo-Persian Empire, 1 of 3 presidents, he was preferred above those 3 presidents, and it goes on.

04-God vs. Satan: Patmos

Alright, so we're covering quite a lot of material here, but hopefully it's relevant and it's applicable.

In this particular session, we're going to look at the Roman Empire and we'll look at the character of 1 Bible character who lived and was persecuted by the Roman Empire and we'll focus on what we can learn from his life and his story.

And this is 1 of my this is 1 of my personal favorites, characters to study, and especially this particular message, because it really came out of a personal study and something that I was going through and God sort of led me to study this.

So I hope that it will be a blessing to you as well.

Let's go ahead and open with prayer and we'll get right into it and then I'll try to end early so we have time for some questions.

Eternal Father, we are so grateful for everything you're doing for us, for taking the time to commune with us.

And Father, we pray once again that your Holy Spirit would be here.

May Christ be lifted up and seen and may he touch all of our hearts.

So as we look specifically at the Roman Empire, I would want to study John the disciple, John the revelator on the Isle of Patmos and something from his life that, as I said earlier, spoke to me personally and that I just really want to share with you as we delve into a study of his life and his character this afternoon.

And so, you know, we really haven't gone through the historical background of you know, Babylon, Middle Persia, Greece and Rome, but hopefully you've seen some of the elements that were unique about each empire and how Satan worked through them, but also how God's people have stood faithful.

Have you seen that throughout the sessions?

And so in this session too, you know, because you're such good Bible students and you know some of the story behind Rome and their political and military power and how Rome persecuted the Saints and Rome was the empire that was you know there in Christ's own time, I want to focus on John and his experience in the context of, in the context of Rome.

Now, the Emperor Domitian, am I saying it right?

Yes, Domitian, who was emperor during the time of John the Revelator.

I don't want to focus so much on this, but you need to realize as you come to the Book of Revelation that there's a polemic going on in terms of Emperor Domitian and the Roman world and that John's experience directly in this context because you know Domitian as Emperor looked to Apollo to actually foretell the immediate future, and Domitian was actually very superstitious, even as a Roman emperor, and If you go back to the previous slide, he was in power from 80, 81 to about 96.

He being superstitious was looking to Apollo, another superstitious means, to discern the future.

Series

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Composite Christian: Character Development

05-God vs. Satan: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Transcript

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