Mr. Heaster's Final Speech
2-1-29 The Need For Proper Understanding
Good evening. I would like to tell you a little bit about one of the
stories you will hear from the old folks in London in Southeast England
where I am originally from. They talk back to what it was like in the
war in 1940-41 and they will tell you how they used to go out into the
backyard and look up at the sky at night and they would see the British
fighters fighting the bombers and whenever one of the German bombers came
down there was a kind of cheer went up and a sort of praying for our boys
up there kind of thing. It seems to me that's what the Abrahamic Faith
people are doing. You are looking out of yourself all the time, up, to
where this battle is going on, this evil spirit being outside you, and
all the time you are missing the real point, the real enemy. The real
enemy is not outside you, the battle is not going on up in the sky somewhere.
It is going on here, inside you, in your own mind, in your own heart.
That is why I think this issue is not academic.
This thing is fundamentally practical because if you take on board this
idea that the devil is indeed your own human desires and all these metaphors
spring into life - it's a roaring lion, it's a snake hissing through the
grass towards you - and it makes you realise the urgency of being spiritually
minded. I suggest to you that that's where true Christianity is different
from any other form of religion in the sense that we realise the importance
of spiritual mindedness and of developing the mind of Christ and doing
battle within ourselves.
Now, Mark is saying this isn't a salvation issue. Well, I'm not so sure
about that because anything that has implications with the sacrifice of
Christ is very important. Christ destroyed the devil by his death on the
cross because he had our nature. Now I would suggest that is very fundamental
because he goes on to say that Christ did that for the sake of the seed
of Abraham. Now the seed of Abraham is something that you know quite a
lot about. He says that Christ was not of angels' nature but he was of
man's nature so that he could save the seed of Abraham by means of the
fact that he had human nature and that he overcame that devil, that human
nature, in his death on the cross. So then if we are the seed of Abraham,
then we have got to understand these things. This is why we must be baptized
into Christ by full immersion into his death, into his resurrection, so
that we share in the death and resurrection of Christ. We must be baptized
so that is he our representative, so that because he had our own bad nature,
the devil within him, and because he overcame it, if we are in Christ,
then we also will be able to overcome sin and to reach salvation. That's
an important point that Christ was not a substitute as I believe the Abrahamic
Faith Church teach, but he was our representative.
So then, those promises to Abraham and to his seed were that they should
inherit the earth for ever and it's only by properly becoming the seed
of Abraham that we can be saved. I suppose we have to say to you like
Christ said to the Jews, " Don't immediately think once you hear
me say that, oh we're okay, we are the seed of Abraham" because I
would suggest that our baptism is only valid by reason of the beliefs
that we held when we went under that water. I would suggest that unless
we properly understand the nature of Christ, the nature of the Atonement,
and indeed, our own nature, then I would question whether we really had
that correct knowledge at the time of our baptism. Please, see the need
for proper understanding.
Now, just a couple of final points to wind up with, we are told this issue
is not particularly that important; it is as academic, Mark told us, as
when the Gospel of Mark was written. Well, some of the things that have
been said are not that academic. For example, that we can hypothetically
sin in the Kingdom of God. That's fundamental, absolutely fundamental
to gospel of the Kingdom of God. It doesn't sound like much good news
to me if hypothetically we can sin, if we have not escaped the devil,
if we have not escaped human nature. If we can theoretically sin through
eternity, then for eternity theoretically the devil is still alive. If
the devil theoretically makes you sin, and he has told us that theoretically
you can sin in the Kingdom, then theoretically the devil is alive, the
devil has not been destroyed. What happened on the cross? If the devil
was not destroyed theoretically, he's there for ever.
You are very touchy obviously about the fallen angel question, and I suggest
why the Abrahamic Faith Church is so touchy when you start talking about
" did Satan fall, was he an angel" is because they are faced
with this problem of " Did God create Satan?" Mark more or less
admitted that is a real problem area. Of course it's a problem area if
Satan is a sinful personal supernatural being and God created him - well,
that is an affront to almighty God. Is this a debate about academics?
Are we talking about semantics here? I don't think so, I think we are
talking about the holiness and the righteousness of God in day by day
living.
Now, Mark admitted that in the Old Testament, there was no warning to
Israel about Satan causing them to sin, but he admitted that there was
a warning about our own natural desires causing us to sin. By baptism,
we are the new Israel, so I would suggest that for the believers today
the issues are still the same. There is no being prowling around actually
physically going to try to make us sin, but what we have got to watch,
just as Israel had to, was our own human nature, and to overcome it. Now
as I have said, sin is personified. We agree on that.
Now the point I would like to leave you with is: if you agree that sin
is personified, and come on it must be personified, you can't get away
from it - as a king, as a paymaster, etc. - if sin is personified, and
as you also admit that the word Satan and Devil can just mean an enemy,
an adversary, it doesn't always have to mean this supernatural being outside
you, then what's your problem in accepting what we are putting to you,
that sin is personified, and that personification has a name - the devil,
the enemy, Satan, our great enemy, which is ourselves. Now if then think
of this problem of evil in the sense of disaster, calamity, like Job having
all those problems, if you feel that angels are bringing those problems
into your life, fine, fair enough, so they are, but as long as you don't
say that those angels are actually sinful beings, or that they are some
supernatural force of evil or sin outside you, and that are somehow against
the will of God. I think in some ways, Mark had a very hard job this afternoon
because there are so many contradictions that he's got to grapple with
and that he has to persuade people of. What I suggest is that what has
happened or what the Abrahamic Faith Church do in your literature about
the devil, you pick a lot of passages like " the prince of this world,
the god of this world, Satan transformed as an angel of light, Satan fell
from heaven" - things which superficially have a bit of ring to them
about Satan and sin falling from heaven, and you put them together and
come up with the conclusion you do. But I suggest that when you analyse
passage by passage what those particular scriptures mean, you are in trouble,
because you realise that they cannot all refer to the same being or to
the same incident. For example the passages that talk about Satan falling
from heaven. You can't line them all up and say, yes, they are all talking
about the same thing. There's problems.
And so, in conclusion, then, we do have a lot of respect for you, for
your enthusiasm for Biblical scholarship, and your desire to get back
to Bible teaching. What we are saying, is that there is a very fundamental
difference here and it is important as far as we are concerned, and yes,
we do believe it could affect salvation. And so we put the message out
to you quite clearly today that you have got to re-evaluate whether you
really understand the cross of Calvary, whether you really understand
the blood of Christ, and whether you really are " in Christ"
by having been properly baptized into him; whether you really understand
his victory over sin, whether you can enter into the degree to which he
strove against the sinful tendencies inside him, the sinful nature, and
the glorious degree to which he overcame.
That is our Hope, that's the thing which motivates our lives so that we
can live in the true knowledge that Christ has conquered sin and that
we are not worried about some spectral battle up in the sky, but we know
what he has done for us and we know what he has achieved in prospect for
the whole human race. And so it just remains for me to say, we really
do mean it, may God bless you, may God open your eyes to the scriptures,
may God give you travelling mercies as you all go home. We do hope you
will stay afterwards and chat with some of us. Our desire is that eventually,
we might all walk in his Kingdom.
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