An epic story for the ages.
That is what you’ll hear in this PODCAST, courtesy of James and the wide window he opens for us.
Enjoy!
Thank you for listening, and for sharing this message!!!
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God bless you richly as you listen.
This may well be a PODCAST that you will never, ever forget.
We are going to take a little trip together. And we will learn to think Middle Eastern along the way.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that we have a holiday weekend to digest all of this.
Thank you for listening, and for SHARING this message!!!
Please remember that depending upon your web browser and connection speed, it may take up to 60 seconds for this podcast to begin to play.
God bless you richly as you listen.
Picture him there, a grizzled, stooped, aged apostle, marooned on an island of rock, confined to a cave.
See him in your mind’s eye, with quill to parchment, writing fast and furiously in a mad dash to record everything that he is now seeing and hearing.
Our old (and at the time of his writing Revelation) very old friend, the beloved apostle John.
Writing, as you will hear in this PODCAST, what sounds like fantastical tale in specific, yet an all-too-plausible scenario in the abstract. A story that brings to a climax the epic collision that has plagued this planet and every person who has ever trod its blood-soaked soil since the beginning of history.
The climax of the collision of good versus evil.
As we were so graphically reminded just last Thursday in the south of France.
Here in Revelation both good and evil are personified.
Here the wellsprings of good and evil are identified by name.
Here this human-history-long all-out war finally, mercifully coming to its end, thankfully with good as the victor, and evil as the loser.
When I mentioned a moment ago that this epic tale sounds fantastical in the specific, understand that we are talking about spirits, angels, demons, devil, Jesus. A unique combination of physical and spiritual forces fighting to the death that sounds like the kind of stuff ready-made for a Hollywood blockbuster.
I wouldn’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes and curving their lips into a smirk that says, You don’t really believe all of this, do you?
+ Just this week, I was listening online to a TED talk (Technology, Entertainment and Design), brings together elites, the intelligentsia of world, during which a TED talk presenter mercilessly mocked and ridiculed people of faith who believe in things like you will hear when I read to you from Revelation 16.
I will be the first to admit that what we are about to outline in this podcast indeed sounds fantastical — in the specific. But in the abstract, no one can deny that there is operating in our world today two distinct colliding forces: one for good, and one for evil.
About that, nobody laughs.
Whether its on the grand scale of someone in a van mowing down innocent pedestrians gathered in the south of France for a Bastille Day celebration. Or as modest as a child throwing a bit of a temper tantrum because he or she doesn’t get what they want.
Let the record show that a good many TED talks are devoted in one way or another to just that collision.
It is as though we are caught between two worlds: One of unbridled evil in which people do to people horrifically unimaginable things. While at the same time, others of us try our best each day to surrender to our better angels, as even TED Talk presenters will sometimes call them. And when they do indeed invoke that phrase, our better angels, no one in that elite audience of the world’s intelligentsia laughs. (I guess its OK to invoke the image of angels in the abstract, just not in the specific.)
Well, in this study, we will invoke the image of angels, good and evil, and a whole lot more, and will do so without laughing because this is deadly serious.
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God bless you richly as you listen.
Last week, when talking about Jesus “watching Satan fall from heaven,” we were encouraged by the fact that Satan is a defeated foe.
As you will be reminded in this week’s PODCAST, Satan isn’t losing the war; he has already lost it.
Be that as it may, however, the devil is winning his share of battles, and the destruction he causes is painful in the extreme.
Of all of the names of Satan I shared with you last week, of which there are many in the Bible, arguably the most personally troublesome is the one found in Revelation 9:11. Speaking of the demonic realm,
“Their king is the angel from the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon—the Destroyer.”
I say “most personally troublesome” for three reasons:
1. There is a suffix added to the adverb translated “in Hebrew,” as in “his name in Hebrew is Abaddon,” which makes this term particularly forceful. As if to say that Satan is the ultimate destroyer going all the way back to the very beginnings of the Bible.
2. His “most personally troublesome” name because the word means to destroy, corrupt, to exterminate, or to kill in battle or in prison, as in a prison of addiction.
3. His “most personally troublesome” name because, as you well know, it is painful enough for us to personally experience the devil’s devastation in our own lives. But it is exponentially more painful to watch when he has his way in the lives of those near and dear to us. It is one thing for us to suffer personally the consequences our own regrettable choices. Indeed, to have to stand by and watch helplessly as those whom we love suffer the consequences of their regrettable choices? That is agonizing beyond description. And I don’t need to add a suffix to that word agonizing to make it more forceful. You know how much that hurts.
Yes, his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon—the Destroyer.
Yet, with all of that, as will be illustrated and demonstrated, underscored and emphasized in this PODCAST, Satan is a defeated foe.
Please remember that depending upon your web browser and connection speed, it may take up to 60 seconds for this podcast to begin to play.
God bless you richly as you listen.
You and I are embroiled in a cosmic collision of good and evil, a spiritual war that is taking place in real time, in the present tense, on a scale of epic proportions.
As you are about to hear in this PODCAST, there can be no doubt in any thinking person’s mind that this war is real, and that it has a profound affect upon our world and our lives.
Even an atheist who denounces the existence of God as a delusion, the reality of Satan as a myth, and the authority of Scripture as a collection of fairy tales, cannot deny that operating in our world today is a force for righteousness and a force for unrighteousness, and the daily-if-not-hourly collision of the two.
This is how the Apostle Paul described this to the Christ-followers in Ephesus:
“A final word: Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on all of God’s armor so that you will be able to stand firm against all the schemes and the strategies and the deceits of the devil. For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places. Therefore, put on every piece of God’s armor so you will be able to resist the enemy in the time of evil. Then after the battle you will still be standing firm.”
Words that are downright sobering, if not outright chilling. But words that are equally revealing and encouraging.
Sobering and chilling because who are we to stand firm against an unseen enemy like that? Specifically, the Devil and his many demons?
Revealing because this does indeed describe exactly what we are witnessing in our world on a daily basis.
Encouraging because as Paul made clear in Ephesians 6, as Jesus made equally clear and His 70 messengers indeed experienced here in Luke 10, this war is eminently winnable.
Indeed, as you will soon hear, this war has Already.Been.Won.
We are less than 6 months from the crucifixion. Jesus will spend these final days visiting every town and village in the South of the Land: Judea and Perea. In anticipation of His visits, Jesus sent out 70 emissaries to prepare the way.
He sent them out as gentle lambs in the midst of ferocious wolves, an unmistakable allusion to the hostile spiritual climate they were about to enter. This was but the latest skirmish in an ongoing spiritual war.
The battle lines were drawn. The harvest was ready. Even as they stood on the cusp of the Crucifixion, there was a godly remnant primed and ready to hear and receive their message:
God’s peace could be theirs.
So off they went, on a several-weeks’ excursion into enemy territory, all to bring God’s message of peace to the tormented souls just trying to survive day-by-day.
Back to Jesus they finally returned, in order to give Him their reports and to debrief their experiences. Which is where we join the narrative here in Luke 10:17…
Please remember that depending upon your web browser and connection speed, it may take up to 60 seconds for this podcast to begin to play.
God bless you richly as you listen.
Dewey Bertolini’s Podcast
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Dewey Bertolini 