Unseen Forces

The speaker discusses the concept of the unseen world and how it affects our lives. They talk about the kingdom of God and how it should be our goal. They mention that Satan will be locked up during a thousand-year period and describe how the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Jesus. The speaker emphasizes the importance of knowing the truth and how it unifies people. They mention an encounter in the School of Tyrannus and discuss the idea of reasoning and understanding. They also mention the role of universities and how they were originally founded on Christianity. So we're kind of on an interesting topic tonight. We all like to think about the unknown and the mystery and what's behind the scenes. What's God doing that we don't understand? And we don't understand a lot about the unseen world, but yet the unseen world understands us very well and it manifests itself very well through things that are seen. In fact, we're all made by the unseen world, right? We're all made by an unseen God that became seen here on earth, of course, later on, but we are all made by the spiritual force and that spiritual force still affects us today. So we're gonna look at that in more detail. You'll notice a couple of the verses that we covered last week will show up again, but we're gonna dive a lot deeper than we did. We brushed over them last week at the end of last sermon. So, but before we get started, let's go ahead and go to God in prayer. Dear God, we come before you now just to clean our slate, forgive us for our sins, purify our hearts and our minds so that we can just hear your word as we need to hear it today. It's a lot more powerful than anything I'll ever say. So help me to stay out of the way of what you wanna accomplish and we commit this to you in Jesus' name, amen. So last week we talked about the kingdom. We talked about how the kingdom should be our goal and it's a reward for us to be able to serve in the kingdom in some capacity, maybe even as a judge to get some justice in this world for once. And then we see that Satan will be locked up during this thousand years. And we see that during that thousand years, the lions are gonna be laying down with the lambs and Jesus is gonna be the king and the law enforcer and the earth is gonna be filled with his knowledge. So we look forward to that time where we don't have these evil forces all around us, constantly just nagging us and trying to ruin our lives. But we need to be prepared. We need to know how to respond to that. So let's get into this tonight. It's in Acts 19, we're gonna start in Acts 19, verse eight. And this is kind of where we left off. And he entered the synagogue and continued speaking out boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. So first he talked about the kingdom and persuading here just means to give confidence, to give confidence that this kingdom is coming because the Jews thought Jesus was supposed to come and set up the kingdom, remember? They thought he was gonna come and go ahead and rule from David's throne and all this stuff. And that's why a lot of Jews today, still today, don't believe Jesus was the Messiah because, well, he was supposed to come here to rescue them. But often just like we do, we think of the rescue in physical terms. We want justice now. We want Jesus to reign and be, well, we have a president, and other places call him kings, but we want Jesus to be the president of this world and to rule with authority. And so he came in more of a spiritual sense to set us spiritually free. But there's a lot of people that don't understand this truth. Truth is something, he says he's speaking out boldly about this truth, and truth is something that already exists. It's something that we just have to take the veil off of. It's not something that we have to create. It's not a new thing. We're just responsible to take the veil off and show people the truth. And that's an awesome thing when that happens. Just like Russell Brand, he was a character and a really messy guy for many decades in pretty raunchy movies and stuff. And just a couple months ago, he gave his life to Christ and got baptized. And he's one that just loves to dive in deep to everything. Fortunately, he dove into the right pool and he's diving deep into Christianity. And it's just an awesome thing to see when the blinders are taken off and he's set free and those people are set free. So, the greatest obstacle here says to discovering truth is being convinced that you already know it. We get in our own way of understanding and knowing the truth because we just think we know it all. So, if we can get past that know-it-all phase, do you guys know any know-it-alls? Go ahead and point somebody out in here. Anybody? Any know-it-alls? So, that's one of the biggest obstacles. Even as Christians, that's where we get all these denominations from. It's just a lack of taking the veil off of what really the truth is. And we try to do that as much as possible so we stay as unified as possible because the truth unifies. We shouldn't have all these denominations, honestly. We should have one denomination if we all just know the truth, right? Verse nine goes on. It says, but when some were becoming hardened and disobedient, speaking evil of the way before the people, he withdrew from them and took away the disciples' reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus. Now, he has an interesting encounter here in the school of Tyrannus with some spiritual forces. But going back here, he lasted three months there and that's the longest he lasted in one location. He mentioned Jesus as the way for the first time here. And what does that mean? He's kind of catering to that culture, maybe. They want to know, like, what's the right way? What's the right direction to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? What's the right way to go? like reasoning skills in order to be able to help us communicate to the world on how to reason and how to think. But just like Thomas Paine said this, said to argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. So Paul knew this, like once they got to that point, he's just like, okay, I'm moving on. This place is dead. They're not going to hear what I want to say and most people have had years and decades and a lifetime of hardening and being dead, spiritually dead. So it's hard to administer medicine to somebody that's dead, right? Doesn't do a whole lot of good. What is reason? Well, I always like to go back to the original source, Webster's 1828 dictionary. You can go Webster's 1828 dictionary.com, but they've modified that dictionary to remove God out of it because almost every definition have had biblical references in it. But reason means a faculty of the mind by which it distinguishes truth from falsehood and good from evil and which enables the possessor to deduce inferences from facts or from propositions. One example here, to exercise the faculty of reason to deduce inferences justly from the premises, brutes do not reason. Children reason imperfectly. So that's kind of a good way to look at it. People that just think they know it all, they're brutes. They don't want to reason and yet they say that they're the masters of reason. You know, you go to these college campuses and they just have it all figured out. They are know-it-alls and they are artfully skilled at making it look like they know everything too. And then children try to reason at least, that's a step, right? So at least if we can reason as sloppily as children do and be open to the ideas of the truth, that's a good first step. So they became defiant. They became defiant, which led them to be without reason. And he left and went to the school of Tyrannus and this school, I think we have a picture of where it was, not much left of it today, unfortunately. But you can go over there and see a lot of these places that Paul had taught in. But that's the school of Tyrannus, what's left of it. And it was just a lecture hall and that's where they would hold school in the morning, particularly according to history books, it said that the students would meet in the morning because the sun got too hot in the afternoon. So then that would open up that hall and it would be empty for anybody to go in and use it in the afternoons. So Paul took advantage of this. Paul most likely was a tent maker in this city because he was not being financially provided for. So in the mornings, maybe he would go make his tents and stuff. And then in the afternoons, he would know the hall was open. So anybody that wanted to hear, he would go in and teach the truth to them. So much like, you know, colleges or universities are meant to be this way, too. We still have guest speakers come in and different things, as long as you're not conservative, you're allowed to go in there, I guess. But university literally just means this, a university is properly a universal school in which are taught all branches of learning. This is according to the Webster's 1828 Dictionary of the four faculties. What are the four faculties that he mentioned? You don't think they'll mention these now. Theology is the number one, medicine, law and sciences. So theology was number one back then. Almost every one of these elite schools were founded on Christianity. There's a couple different words, you know, universe is from the old French in the 1580s. They used it meaning the whole world, the cosmos, the total existence of things. So uni means everything, like totality. And the Latin universum also means all things, everybody, all people, the whole world, literally turned into one. So you see that second part of that, that word means turning them into one to be converted, to be transformed. So transforming or converting people all into one. What was originally, what were they trying to do? They were converting all people into one mind in the truth of God's word and theology. But now they've removed theology, so they got to fill it with something else. So they have their truth of, for example, I was on the Harvard campus a week or a couple weeks ago, and they have this whole gender studies department, which is a religion. There's no scientific proof that this chemical imbalance in your brain is legit. But they have a whole department, and it's a religion that has replaced the theology part of it. The Harvard mission statement, Boston's amazing if you guys ever get to go there. I got to go there a couple of weeks ago, and you see stuff from the 1600s. I saw Paul Revere's grave and a lot of these Harvard founders were buried there too. But the Harvard mission statement from 1636 says this, let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is, what's the number one thing? To know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. So the founders of Harvard College got together, you know when you come up with a mission statement for a business or something, it's kind of a serious thing, you all get together and you all got to agree, it's supposed to be the foundation of what you do. So amazing how far they've come. But it didn't take long, it only took 80 years for them to start drifting off course. By around 1700, Cotton Mather, I don't know if you recognize that name, but he was one of the pastors that preached around Boston quite a bit. They saw that Harvard was losing its founding purpose, it was losing this mission way back then even, it was being attacked back then. They were so concerned that Cotton Mather started another college called Yale. And now Yale was now the theological foundation once again. So instead of trying to get Harvard back on track, they're like, okay, we'll just start another one. And Yale is kind of a big school now too. But of course, what happened to them? Probably not too much later, they got taken over. But here's me at what Harvard should have been, what Harvard was back in the 1600s, a divinity school. It was a theological seminary, basically. But you had this huge Harvard campus. Daniel, you like that picture of me? Is that what's happening? Harvard Divinity School, this was what it was, you know, way back then. So I had to get a picture by that sign. And it was tucked all the way back in the back of the campus, you know, where his gender studies was right out front. So that's crazy how things change. So Harvard was named after a Christian minister. Yale was started by a clergyman, and another, Princeton, first year, was the main professor that was taught. You know, I was the only professor back then at Princeton. His name was Pastor Jonathan Dickinson. So a pastor literally founded Princeton. Princeton's crest, we have a next picture there, I believe. And it still says this. And I think the only reason it says this is because, does anybody know Latin? No. But it means, under God, she flourishes. So the students are too dumb to read that, apparently. Otherwise, they probably would have changed their crest, but the crest still exists. And it means, under God, she flourishes at Princeton. So that has survived, because nobody did any research. So I was on the college campus of MIT, too. MIT is not too far away from Harvard, if you've ever been to Boston. And I like technology, so that was really cool. That was founded way back in the 1600s. And so I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to see some really cool stuff here. And all these campuses have museums, like full-blown, awesome museums. So I saw this visual arts museum. I'm like, oh, cool. Some visual arts would be pretty cool, technology or something. So they make us check our bags. This was the most serious museum, where we actually had to check bags. And they had, like, 10 workers in there. It was crazy how well-monitored it was. We walk into this room. It's about the size of a school gym. And there's a couple ropes hanging from the ceiling. I'm, like, excited to be visually stimulated, or whatever they say in their slogan. Couple strings. I'm like, OK, I don't know what that is. But there was this barrier, kind of like a makeshift wall. I'm like, oh, we're supposed to go behind it. That must be the highlight of this room. So you go back there. And I see this. Literally, I go there. And I see this. And there's guards in this room. Couple pieces of toilet paper on the wall. It's probably Scott brand toilet paper, I don't know. But literally, this is where we've come. And me and my friend kind of have a conversation. It's like, are we advancing as society? Are we getting more creative or less creative? When you see the architecture over there, the 300-year-old architecture is way better and way more resilient. Oh, let's wait till Shelly's phone stops ringing. All right. The architecture is way better and way stronger, way more resilient and cool to look at than it is now. Now they just build straight up structures that our kids as kids will probably never see, because they just tear it down. But this is where we're at. When this shows you is a good example of the spiritual world affecting the physical world and making us kind of dumber and farther away from the truth and reality. But then Paul here, he encounters the reality of evil spirits. In verse 13, but also some of the Jewish exorcists who went from place to place attempted to name over those who had the evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, I adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preaches. Seven sons of Sheba, a Jewish priest, were doing this. And the evil spirit answered and said to them, what if you were doing this? Like, wow, you're not expecting a response from an evil spirit. You know, if we encountered or thought somebody was demon possessed today and we said, I adjure you, get out of that person or something, you wouldn't expect a response, right? I don't know if anybody's had any experiences with evil spirits. I could have sworn one time I was house sitting, and me and my girlfriend were sitting there watching TV. Don't worry about it. And then we heard this voice. It said, what you doing? Like, we were just sitting there watching TV and we both looked at each other like right after we heard the voice. It was behind us, it wasn't the TV. But we're like, was that, because that house was supposed to be haunted or something. So it kind of freaked us out. But you'd be freaked out if you heard an evil spirit say this. An evil spirit answered and said to them, I recognize Jesus, and we looked at this last week too, and I know about Paul, but who are you? Audibly, a spirit is speaking to you now. This is weird. And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them and subdued all of them and overpowered them so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded. So what does, does evil spirits have power? Do evil spirits have power? Yes, it's not something to mess with. You're gonna wind up naked and wounded. So don't mess with them. Only you should allow the power of God to come over that room and let him take care of it for you. Just like the creepy story in Mark 1 through 13, we're just gonna look at 8 and 9, but here Jesus is encountering this evil spirit on the road. And he says in verse 8, for he had been saying to them, come out of the man, you unclean spirit. And he was asking him, what is your name? And he said to him, my name is Legion, for we are many. Now the word legion in this time period, you know how many people that represents in an army? Yeah, some people say up to 10,000, 6,000, somewhere in between there. Either way, it's a lot. And you imagine one spirit is able to overpower, to pump out 6,000, 10,000 spirits in one being. I'm like, how do you fit that many spirits in a body? Well, they're not physical, so they're spiritual. But amazing that all these demons gathered all together for this one important man called Jesus. So you can see why they concentrated maybe. But demons not only physically harm, but more importantly, what we have to watch for is they deceive. 1 John 4, 5 says, those people belong to this world, so they speak from the world's viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God, and those who know God listens to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has a spirit of truth or the spirit of deception. So you've heard of testing the spirits, and this is how you do it. You don't automatically assume it's coming from a good place. And there's nothing greater, no greater tool than the enemy uses is deception. So if you think it's a good thing, it may not be a good thing. So just be very careful, because that's the key, and the foundational principle of Satan is deception. Genesis 3, 2, the woman said to the serpent, we may eat from the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die. You will surely not die. So here's a temptation. Satan comes in and amplifies that temptation and encourages you to take advantage of it. And he says, you surely will not die. The serpent said to the woman, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The lie of all lies. You will know the truth if you just live a lifestyle that's contrary to God's design. You will be totally yourself if you live opposite of God's design. That's the lies that Satan says. Evil never intends to keep its promise. The first lie, you will be happier. You hear this from the enemy. You'll be happier. The short-term pleasures is the way to go. You will be rich, meaning put your job and everything else above what's the most important thing in your life, God and family. The ends justifies the means. This is a big tool of Satan's deceptions. The ends justify the means. If you see people doing things that are immoral to get a moral end, they're not on our side. And it may be an immoral end too, but Frederick August von Hayek says this, the principle that the end justifies the means is an individual ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivism ethics, it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. And this is what we see today. We have a collectivist society that says, hey, you know, orange man bad, for example, or do whatever it takes to get him out of office or do whatever it takes to get anybody that speaks bad about abortion, even if it means physical abuse or imprisonment, like they've imprisoned some of these older ladies that go to abortion clinics to pray, literally. There's ladies that are in jail because they went to an abortion clinic to pray. Individually, you put morality aside, but more importantly, the ends justifies the means is a foundation of a collectivistic society. And this is where socialism goes hand in hand with the ends justifies the means. Communism does too. Majority rule does too. Believe it or not, democracy does too. That might be a surprise to you if you think we're a democracy. Democratic rule, democracy rule, the ends justifies the means comes into play. When a tragedy occurs, we act emotionally. So that's why democracies are so bad because if we were true democracy, every time something bad happens, say COVID, okay, let's take a national vote. Should we make everybody locked down? Well, you have the media telling everybody should, you may get 51%. Yeah, imprison everybody in their homes. Well, that's why we're not a democracy because people react emotionally. We're a constitutional republic so that it's slowed down and it protects our freedoms from this mob type of rule. Because if we were in mob rule, you'd have Hitler in Germany, was able to convince people to put, and that it was okay to put people in gas chambers. Do you not think that the left would be okay with putting a Trump supporter in jail for life just by majority rule with no evidence of wrongdoing? Of course they would. Ayn Rand says this, collectivism holds that the individual has no rights that his life and work belong to the group, to a society, to the tribe, to the state, to the nation, and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to his own interests. Kind of like the government really can overstep, you know, like in the case of Charlie Gard over in the UK several years ago, I don't know if you recognize that name, but a judge literally decided to put this baby to death. And I think I have a picture of that up there. The parents were fighting to give him a fighting chance he was born with a genetic disorder and they wanted to give him a chance because this was a kind of an unknown disorder. They thought, let's give him a chance. There's a chance he could come out of this if modern medicine would develop or whatever it might be. But they were on, you know, they were on the church or the welfare's dime. So a judge got involved and said, no, pull the plug. So they had no choice. They pulled the plug and the little baby died because of one judge's ruling. Pretty crazy. Judges are very powerful. One judge's ruling can put millions of unborn babies to death just as in abortion. But we know that every individual is made in God's image and created very intentionally, created not by accident. And Jesus is right now looking forward to meeting every single spirit that is here on earth because we're spirits, we just happen to have a body, right? So we're all looking forward to that time. And I think it's going to be a really, really personal experience when we meet Christ, which I can't fathom the timing. Like there's billions of people up there, right? How does Jesus have time to personally come to me and say, welcome to heaven? But I think he does. And I think he will. There is no time in heaven. That is a very good point. But still my brain can't comprehend that. If Bryce's brain can comprehend that, come on up here and explain it to me. I cannot comprehend that, but I'm excited for it. But we're not made by accident. Psalm 139 says, For you form my inward parts, you wove me in from my mother's womb. I will give thanks to you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. And 17 is really cool. God thinks a lot about us. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God? They cannot be numbered. Again, how does God have time to think about me all that time? How can God think about me? I mean, I've turned my back on him so many times, but yet his thoughts and his love for me it can't be numbered. He says, I can't even count them. They outnumber the grains of sand. And when I wake up, you are still with me. Despite us turning our back on him, despite us not being very close to him many times, he's still sitting there in heaven thinking about us so often that we can't number those times. Just crazy. We don't often think it's possible that a culture could turn its back on God as much as he loves us, as much as he sacrificed for us. His death on the cross, the provisions that he gives us every day. How could we turn our back on him and do evil? And how could we allow evil to thrive and even condone evil, even promote evil? Well, there's people doing it today. And we see these demonic manifestations come and through people and their actions, kind of like Margaret Singer. She may probably had a demon in her, I'm pretty sure. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, by the way. She said this literal quote. She said, colored people are like human weeds and need to be exterminated. Now, what race group does Planned Parenthood mainly cater to? Yeah, the African-American people. She wants to go and kill their population. And somehow, only through spiritual forces could they be convinced that Planned Parenthood is a good organization. Well, Hillary Clinton was also convinced. She says, I admire Margaret Singer enormously, her courage, her tenacity, and her vision. If you have people that are supporting these people, you know that you're on the wrong side and you're messing with the spiritual world. We don't often think of it that way. You're messing with demonic influences being shown through actions and through people. So, there are outward examples of this spiritual warfare. We don't often hear demons talk to us, you know, but we definitely see their influence all around us manifesting in the physical, through words and through actions. Ephesians 6.10 says, Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. And schemes comes from the word method, from the word methodia. I think of methodical. It's the same root word. So, he's methodical in the way he handles. This is, we're losing a lot of ground as a Christian nation here, aren't we? We're being fought against by a very methodical enemy. So, that methodical enemy uses deception and planning and they're so strategic and organized. And you wonder how these movements go worldwide, like the LGBT movement somehow, boom, went worldwide. Even during the witch trials, you know, I went to Salem too. Even the witch trials, they just innocently, this girl had a medical problem and she'd have seizures. Well, they took that and used it as an excuse for demon possession. And now everybody that acts a little bit weird that they don't like, they can put to death. And somehow that went worldwide. They didn't have the communication we have today, but somehow it went worldwide. Just amazing that that happened. And we know it's because of a spiritual influence. It says, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm. And this is a struggle like in an Olympic setting or a war setting. It's a fight. It's a battle. And we know that His biggest weapon is deception. So how can we battle back? By lifting the veil off of the truth. We're not defining the truth. We're just saying what the truth is. You know, be a good representative of the truth. Don't always act like you know the truth because maybe you don't, maybe you do. But we absolutely do have a source of truth. And that's God's word that we lay our foundation on. And we can fight back against this deception and fight back against the culture, just like our founding fathers put biblical references in all our founding documents, started schools so that we could learn the truth and have that foundation. Those have all been ripped away from us. Louisiana's governor just now mandated this week that the Ten Commandments be put up in every classroom in the whole state of Louisiana. That's a good step forward. We need to be strong. He's going to be under attack. He may even end up in prison. I would not be surprised with how methodical and terrible our enemy is. The ends justifies the means. So don't give in to deception. We're not going to move forward. I had a video and stuff we'll pick up next week because we're out of time now. But let's go ahead and close in prayer. Dear God, I thank you for the word and how you help us to be prepared as we go out into a crazy world of all kinds of deception coming at us. Help us to clearly know the truth and help us to have the skill to lift the veil off of that truth as we walk out these doors today. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.