[Darris McNeely]: Well, I think as we all know, today is a very special day in America. It's 9/11. And it's the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. 20 years ago today. There are many stories of heroism that occurred on that day. There's one about a man who actually imagined the attack would happen, and he prepared for it. I'd like to tell you the story of that man here for a few moments here this afternoon. That man who imagined 9/11 could happen, such an event, and actually prepared his people for it was a man named Rick Rescorla. Rick Rescorla was from Cornwall in the United Kingdom. He had been kind of a mercenary. He had fought for the British in Crete, I believe, sometime in the early 1960s, and then he had found his way to Rhodesia, fighting down there and some of the wars of that period.

And then when all of that ended, he hadn't had enough fighting, and so he came to the United States of America with a friend of his named Dan Hall. Because America was anti-communist at the time and he wanted to fight the communists and so he joined the American army, and he wound up going to Vietnam in the mid-1960s. In fact, Rick Rescorla fought in the very first major engagement in Vietnam in what is called the Ia Drang Valley. The story of that two-day engagement was told in a movie made a few years ago by Mel Gibson called “Once We Were Soldiers.” And Rick Rescorla played a significant role in that battle, actually. And when it was over and his tour in Vietnam was over, he wound his way through a number of jobs and eventually found his employment as head of security for Morgan Stanley, a major brokerage company who had offices as main headquarters in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

But as Rick Rescorla was trained, and one of the things he learned in Vietnam, after that battle, the Ia Drang Valley was over, General Hal Moore, who commanding forces there, sent his men back across the field to sweep it, as they said, to make sure that there were no men still alive, and to bring the bodies back. And of course, that had great danger as well for the men and even after the battles there because enemies were still out undercover there. When Rick Rescorla went to work for Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center, he had a mind that began to look about safety. He was head of safety, corporate security for Morgan Stanley. He brought his friend Dan Hill to the World Trade Center and they looked it over. He said, “What could happen at this place? There could be an attack that could cause great damage and loss of life.” And his friend and he went into the parking garage under the World Trade Center and they looked around, in fact, they actually just walked into it. At that time there was no security. They walked right into the parking garage, walked around, and he noticed a major load-bearing column that was there, and Dan Hill said to his friend, Rick Rescorla, he said, “Somebody could drive a truckload of dynamite right into this building, park it right next to it, walk out, and ignite it, and it would go off.”

Well, that actually did happen. That actually did happen. In 1993, there was a truck bombing, some of you will remember, at the World Trade Center that was engineered by Muslim terrorists. A number of people were killed, it didn't bring the towers down, but it created some damage there. And it proved to be almost prophetically correct by what Dan Hill had said. And so from that point forward, Rick Rescorla began to rigorously train his Morgan Stanley employees how to evacuate the building. He would call a drill on a spur of the moment and demand everybody go down the staircase and leave the building. He would walk into an executive boardroom where they were meeting and even tell the executives, “You're going to leave too.” They didn't want to because they thought it was kind of something they didn't need to do. But he did that for years, training everybody what to do in the event of an emergency, another bombing, as they would have thought it. He knew something would happen. It was the World Trade Center, it was the center of American capitalism, and he knew that America was a target from its enemies.

And so on 9/11, Rick Rescorla was in his office in the South Tower when the first plane struck the North Tower. And he saw the smoke, and he immediately began to evacuate Morgan Stanley employees. He got his bullhorn and his whistle and his flashlight. They went down the staircase. He got virtually all of them out. In fact, he got 2700 employees of Morgan Stanley out that morning. And then, because he had remembered his lesson, from the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, he said, “I've gotta go back and make sure I got everyone.” He had to do a sweep. So, he went back up to make sure everybody in his part of the building was out. We never saw him again. The South Tower collapsed and they never found his body. Rick Rescorla saved 2700 Morgan Stanley employees that day. About six or seven did die for some reason - I'm not sure all the details there. But he saved the majority of his employees. He got everybody out, and when they were secure, he went back to make sure that he had not left anyone behind.

Rick Rescorla saw what could happen and he prepared his people for that. And he saved many, many people. It's an amazing story. It's just a story of courage and preparation. Months later after the United States had put together a Blue Ribbon Panel to investigate what happened and why with 9/11, you can find this on the internet, they issued a report. You don't need to read the whole thing. You can just read a few paragraphs down. And under the general findings of the 9/11 Commission report, you will read this. “What we can say...” - this is a quote - “What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al Qaeda plot. Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. The most important failure,” the report goes on, “was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat from the terrorists. The terrorist danger was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress.” A failure of imagination. A failure to imagine that terrorists would hijack fully loaded jetliners and use them as guided missiles. Didn't even cross their mind.

Now, they knew there were terrorists out there and America had enemies. The U.S.S. Cole had been bombed just a year earlier at Harbor in Yemen with the loss of life of a number of American sailors. And other attacks had been launched. But no one imagined that they would do what they did that Tuesday morning in September of 2001. Had they done so, they could have walked it back possibly because they then traced what happened with those terrorists. They discovered that they had enrolled in pilot training school. But you know what? They didn't want, while they were being trained, to learn how to land a plane. Just to take off and fly a jetliner. Had someone imagined in the FBI or other security services, something like that, they could have possibly contacted flight schools, and then on the alert and quite possibly apprehended the terrorists in advance. But there was a failure of imagination, and as a result, steps were not taken to do that.

In fact, some of you maybe remember, I used to be a big fan of Tom Clancy novels. I read all the Tom Clancy novels in the 1980s, techno terrorist thrillers. One of his plotlines was a Japanese pilot commandeering a Japan airliner and flying it into the United States Congress building with all the Congress fully assembled and the President of the United States, and the cabinet and everybody and killing a lot of people. That's how the book ended. And this was in mid-1980s when he wrote that. Tom Clancy had an imagination and he concocted such an idea. But unfortunately, leaders and government, those tasked with the security of the country didn't see it.

Now, knowing the story of Rick Rescorla, knowing the failures that did take place and the failure of imagination, that's kind of come to my mind as the lead up to this 20th anniversary developed. And as I was thinking about it and recognizing a few things, there's a lot of lessons to learn from this story and from this event. For us, in God's Church, the lessons are spiritual in nature. And yet, I would like to take that thought of a failure of imagination and turn that to our need to use imagination and exercise imagination, which is really just another word for vision. You envision something. You have something in your mind's eye that you want to be, where you want to be, and you make efforts and your mission is to get to that vision. It takes imagination to think through a lot of aspects of life. And there's some important lessons for us spiritually here.

I'd like for you to turn over to 1 Thessalonians 5. When I heard Mr. Clore turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, I thought, “He's going to take my verses.” But God's in charge. He knows how all these things are going... He's working with us all. I'm going to read right up to where he began. So, we're going to fit hand in glove here today for both of our purposes. 1 Thessalonians 5, which is a well-known passage and familiar to us in terms of what Paul was led to write by God's Spirit, by Christ, to write to us about understanding the events of the future, the Day of the Lord. And I'd like to begin reading in verse 1, 1 Thessalonians 5 because our role is to see the future, and to prepare, and to do that now in a time of safety while we can. And to take instruction, admonition from the Word of God on all aspects of our life, but especially when it comes to the events of the day of the Lord. And I think that what we are here today and as 9/11 20 years later, the most important thing I think for us and God's Church to take can be some lessons from this passage here.

Let's begin in verse 1. Paul writes, “Concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you.” Now, times and seasons implied periods of time, more than just one day, more than a week. It can be more than a month, a time and a season. We all obviously, understand the seasons of spring, fall, summer, and winter, and many months and each of them. But a season can also extend beyond to...a time can be a period of several years of a time in which we may be in school, when we may be developing our lives and our career and our early years of our employment, or our times can be the later years of retirement and those of the mature years, as we like to call them and that period there. But times and seasons really apply to the long stretch of human history and how it can be divided up at various times. And certainly, Paul is projecting forward. But understanding our modern world, how and why it is, is an extremely important matter for us in 2021. To understand and to know how we got to this point. And the world, with the United States of America, with the issues and the challenges that we are working through as a nation that are rather staggering and can be certainly depressing when we think about them too much.

I want to always understand our times and our period. I've just shifted in recent times my own way of approaching it. We've finally cut the cable last December and I don't have cable news to, you know, watch for hours and hours and I haven't missed it a bit. We were in a hotel room in Missouri a couple of days ago and we turned on one night and there was Fox News. So, we watched a little bit of Fox News. And after about 10 minutes, I realized, “I don't miss this at all.” So, I turned it off. I watched a rerun of “Blue Bloods” on my laptop and was much happier as a result of that. The modern world that we are in had a source, a beginning. It came from events and ideas shaped over long periods of experience. When you look at 9/11 and what that did to the United States, America had had a period as they were talking about it that time, a holiday from history.

Now, here's what that means. Go back to 2001, we were about 10 years or so from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. And we were about 9 years past the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 when that event took place. And when all of that happened in the 1989, 1982, the Cold War, in a sense, was supposed to be over. America won and democracy and freedom was on the march. It was a time of great, you know, joy and peace and, you know, was going to break out and security. And America kind of went to sleep in some ways and then 9/11 hit. We were attacked on our soil for the first time since Pearl Harbor. And the pundits were saying America had a wake-up call. We had had a holiday from history, history now came to our door once again, and the reality smacked us in the face by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Well, that's an interesting and kind of a narrow way to look at events and history. It can have its application and limited understanding, I think. But the point of what Paul is saying here, I think, to us in the church is to recognize that we have to develop what I call a biblical worldview that allows us a long view of history from a biblical perspective as we understand God's divine purpose and plan and what He is doing. And we understand what God is, what He is doing, the purpose of our human life, and the purpose of history and events and developments that take place. And we understand that. That understanding gives us confidence. And it does give us hope and a measure of understanding that should eliminate uncertainty and fear. It's not going to help us chart the path of the stock market so we can buy low and sell high and make a killing. But we understand truly that there is a long arc of history, and that biblical arc is the one we are to understand.

And Paul said, “I had no need to write to you about that.” And in one sense, as we look at these passages, we can appreciate the fact that a biblical worldview anchors us in security and understanding and wisdom of our world today and the world to come. We know how it ends. We know what God's plan and purpose is all about. He goes on in verse 2 and he says, “For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night.” Now, there's that phrase that Paul uses here. Peter uses it as well in 2 Peter. So, it's used twice, once by Paul, once by Peter in the New Testament. Christ even alluded to it with some of His statements about prophetic statements in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. He didn't use the exact phrase, although in John 10 He talks about a thief that breaks through and comes and deceives. But the idea can also be found through Christ's teaching as well. It's talking about events that come without warning like a thief in the night when no one expects it, when the villages and the community has quieted down, when people have gone to sleep. And it's an important illusion, and it understands.

There's a story from history that most don't know. But in 1962 when the first blocks of the Berlin Wall were put up in the city of Berlin in Germany at that time, the Soviet Union chose the time to do it precisely for a purpose. They chose very early on a Sunday morning in August to do it. Why? Because they knew the United States government would be asleep. Sunday morning. And if they weren't asleep in their homes, they were asleep at their beach cottages on a summer day in August on the weekend, and they would all be have been dispersed and away from communication centers of power and they could strike quickly and begin to put that wall up before they could even scramble to get back together and formulate a response. They did it, in a sense, like a thief in the night when they began to erect this wall in Berlin that cut the city in two and became an important feature in the Cold War and the story of Europe during that particular period of time. But it's talking about catching people unprepared, sleeping, off guard.

This warning given to us today as disciples in advance is meant to be by Paul, an admonition to prepare, to use imagination. To use imagination and be spiritually prepared for events that are going to come to us in our own life as well as some larger events that will take place. We have to be close to God. We have to be faithful. We have to be exercising diligent faith to be able to deal with a twist and a turn in life that can come to us as Mr. Clore's sermonette pointed us to. Things that will happen to us, a trial, the loss of a job, an injury, an illness. We have to be prepared then to deal with that and to recover from the initial shock. And, yes, the questioning and even the anger and bewilderment, but then to return quickly to a position of faith. We have to think that through at times, and we need to do that.

When it comes to the larger events, how many of us imagined COVID-19? I have to admit, I didn't. I'm not saying that to chide us, but COVID-19 caught us up into something we had never been a part of, a pandemic. And how we reacted to that, we know, God knows, individually and as a church. But to use imagination, to be spiritually prepared for events so that we are not caught off-guard is what Paul is talking about. In verse 3, he says, “For when they say peace and safety, then sudden destruction comes upon them as labor pains upon a pregnant woman and they shall not escape.” It's like a snare, and to be caught in it, at times from certain events, there will be no way of escape. People will have to write it out, deal with it, and be impacted by that.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast and a thought was put out that helped me to understand this verse a little bit better. I've read this many times. When they say, “Peace and safety,” almost like that's a headline. And we may have been thinking, “Well, one day we'll...” It's like when Neville Chamberlain came back from meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1939, and he was waving a piece of paper he had in agreement that Hitler didn't want more of Europe. And Neville Chamberlain was saying, “We have peace in our time.” Well, just a few months, the World War II erupted. There was not peace in that time. And sometimes I've even imagined looking at this verse, we'll see a big headline. They'll be saying, “Peace and safety.” It's not necessarily like that. That's not exactly what this means. But there will be something to understand. And here's what I think is important to note.

Today's world is governed by an idea that human nature can be perfected. Human nature can be perfected. And believe me I grew up in the church of God. I learned at a very early age, human nature cannot be perfected. I had certain scriptures drilled into me about the nature of man and how corrupt it really is, and I learned that. And that is a biblical truth. Human nature can only be changed by and through the power of the Holy Spirit upon conversion. That's how human nature can be changed, and we will still fight that until we are transformed at the resurrection and become a part of the family of God. But human nature cannot be perfected, but that's been the ruling underlying thesis of Western liberal with a little L, republican with a little R, not capital R, and an elephant after it, governments for more than 200 years.

For more than 200 years, the Western world and its governments have had this enlightenment-derived idea that given enough time, given enough diplomacy, given enough talk, given enough education, given enough science, given enough of human reason, the nature of man can be changed, and peace and safety can be achieved by human effort. And that has been around for more than 200 years as an idea that has had starts and stops, but is still with us to this very day. It led to the creation of the League of Nations at the end of World War I, that Great War, and the idea that war couldn't happen again. It led, again, after the end of World War II, to the creation of the United Nations. That if nations could come together around a table and talk enough, they could stop conflict, they could stop war, and certainly nuclear war, which was the big scare after World War II.

And it's interesting that in recent years since the last 50 years or so, we've had so many conflicts. Even more than that, you have to go back to Korea. Undeclared wars. And yet thousands of people die. Vietnam was essentially an undeclared war. The 20-year war in Afghanistan that now is supposedly ended was an undeclared war, but thousands and thousands of Americans died and other soldiers. But it was an undeclared war. And perversely, in diplomatic speak, that is, in a sense, better than a World War and it is, in a sense, a step diplomatically toward the end of war. One of the greatest follies of the 20th century was in 1928 where the League of Nations passed what was called the Kellogg-Briand Pact. And it was actually an act of the League of Nations outlawing war. They said, “No more war.” Only three nations, Germany, France, and America signed it. Within 11 years from the signing of that pact, World War II began. It wasn't worth the ink and the energy that it took for diplomats to move their signature across the paper, much less the paper it was printed on. It didn't happen.

You cannot outlaw war as long as there are human beings. And yet this is the thinking. And so, there is this thought that, in a sense, we are moving through human reason to a time of greater peace and greater safety, and a global world can create that. This is the idea that is there and it is false. War will not be outlawed because of human nature and the existence of evil from its source, the prince of the power of the air, Satan, the devil. We keep the Day of Atonement each year to be reminded of this central tenet of the Bible that until Satan is bound by the angel with the key to the bottomless pit for 1000 years, as Revelation 20:1 tells us, until that occurs, human nature will eventually lead mankind into conflict, battle, war, and loss of life. The world is a very dangerous place. Issues divide people more than ideology and even theology. The biggest issue is spiritual. It is spiritual problems. And it's traced all the way back to Genesis.

Human civilization is built on the foundation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's built on that foundation. And not until human culture grows from the tree of life will peace and safety be assured. And that's what the Feast of Tabernacles is all about, isn't it? We go to the feast to imagine a world at peace and safety. That's what the Feast of Tabernacles is all about, to get as, I began hearing when I was 12 years old and attended my first Feast of Tabernacles. We go there to get a foretaste of the world tomorrow. And that's why we go. We go to imagine a world that will be when Christ returns and that the government of God goes forth from Jerusalem and all nations begin to go up there to learn the ways of peace. That's when human nature will be changed because the source of evil will be cut off.

He goes on in verse 4, “But you brethren are not in darkness, so that this day should overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of the day.” Notice the emphasis in verses 4 and 5 on you. “You brethren.” “They will not overtake you.” “You are sons of light and sons of the day.” God's making a direct statement to each of us that we are not in darkness, but in light. We can see. We can understand. We can imagine. And we can see the future. We are not in darkness. Those of us that get to work in the building, we go by the paintings that David Teague has painted on each of the Holy Days. My favorite is the Day of Atonement. And he explained it to me one day, “When you look at that picture, you see that it's lighter at the bottom and people's eyes are open. And as you move up that picture, it's still a little darker and people's eyes are closed, picturing that it's gonna take a time to move from darkness to light and that people's eyes will be open.” That's on the Day of Atonement. But our eyes are not shut today if we are disciples of Jesus Christ. “We are sons of light,” he says, “and sons of the day, not of the night or the darkness.” We don't have to be caught unaware if we're able to imagine the future and to take the steps to prepare in advance.

The Holy Days of God, which we are now into these fall days with Trumpets on Tuesday and Atonement on Wednesday, and then off to the Feast, and then The Eighth Day, they outline God's divine purpose for mankind, each one of them having a special part of that story to tell. When we keep the Holy Days, we then understand the flow of prophetic history. We can know where we are in our day when it comes to the prophetic timeline that God has placed down. We can know where we are and understand. Yes, we can look at the world and it's got some very frightening things going on right now. And my answer when people ask me, “How close are we?” We're closer than we were. I can tell you a story. Just two nights ago I sat at a table with some family, all of whom used to be in the church. All of whom grew up in the church but have gone their ways. And one of them said, “Darris, you might disagree with me, but I think we might be pretty close to the time of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.” And I about fell out of my chair. I said, “Well, I don't disagree with you.” I said, “We're closer than we were.” And I like to use the term, we're seeing I think maybe the trailing edges of that day of the Lord, those times ahead.

But when we keep the Holy Days, we have an understanding. We're in the light. Sons of the light. Sons of the day. A first fruit lives in the light of truth. And that truth gives hope and encouragement and true peace of mind. And it allows us to imagine beyond the bad news of today to the good news of the world to come and to see how all of these events where they will lead, but to not be upset, to not be mistaken, to not fall into the category of the sons of the dark and have need of enlightenment. We know what is happening. We can live with an expectant hope. In verse 6 he says, “Therefore let us not sleep as others do, but let us watch and be sober, for those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. Let us watch and be sober,” he says in verse 6. Which reminds me of what Ezekiel 33 says, “For God said to the Prophet that I will set you as a watchman over Israel to warn when a sword comes upon the land.” And those verses in Ezekiel 33 lay out a timeless duty for the people of God, for the church of God.

That is the role of a first fruit today to be a part of that job in a collective sense of being a watchman. And when we lose sight of that truth, our light will dim. We will not be a sharp in our focus of who we are, what we are to do, what our mission should be as a church, nor the times in which we live. And if we go too long without that understanding, we can descend into darkness and we can go to sleep spiritually. You read that very carefully what God said to Ezekiel, “Warn them. And if they take heed and save themselves, you both will be saved. If they don't, they'll be responsible for what happens, but you have done your job. If you don't do your job,” God said to Ezekiel, “and the sword comes and takes them away, I'm going to hold you responsible.” I have heard that, again, for decades, in my time in the church. I believe that that has an application to us today. We have been a part of a long work of God, charged with a job of giving a warning message of a sword to come upon the land and of the world to come beyond that. And that is truth. I believe that is truth.

And we have to imagine and envision ourselves in that role at times and appreciate that. We are not called to be part of a social club. We socialize and we grow in fellowship and we love one another and spend time. Yes. But that's not the purpose of the church. That's another thing I learned very young. The church is not a social club, that we are called now in advance of all of those who will come up in the Great White Throne period. We are called now to do a work. And that work has a warning watchman element to it that is very important. That is truth. That is our truth. And if we don't see that, we don't believe it, to what degree we don't, we could be in danger of living in darkness and being asleep, and we need to heed that warning. We need to understand that.

Rick Rescorla. He saw a sword coming. He actually did in his own way, time and place. And he prepared his fellow employees and he saved lives. Can we do any less? Can we do any less in our role in understanding the depth of our calling and why we are called now to understand the truths of God to be a part of His church, in advance of the time when all the others of mankind will know that? We have to imagine and see ourselves in that role. In verse 8, he says, “Let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love and as a helmet the hope of salvation.” Now, here's truly something we cannot afford to fail to imagine is what verse 8 says. We cannot afford failure on this point. Christ said that his disciples would be known by what? Love for one another. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you have love, one for another.” We are to put on a breastplate of faith and love here. The dark forces of the spirit realm are gathering for another attack.

This last one, COVID-19, I believe was meant to destroy the nations holding the Abrahamic blessings. It didn't happen, not completely at least. It was kind of like that truck bomb in 1998 that went into the World Trade Center and caused a shatter for them, but it didn't bring it down. We haven't been brought down yet. And you have to fall out from COVID-19, it's had a tremendous impact on the world and it's impacted the church as well. Events of recent years have divided the church of God physically and to many different groupings, and the spiritual battle to destroy each part of the Church of God if you want to put it that way. To destroy a spiritual... That battle gets stronger on a regular basis. The information glut of the internet age has scrambled people's minds, creating confusion. Too often we see that in our own midst. The first fruits of God need to be able to see and to imagine what can happen to cause us to lose our first love, that filial love. That's what is mentioned there in Revelation 2 to the church at Ephesus that lost their first love. It's the filial love, that of brotherly love. That's what is being talked about there.

If we find that we've lost a little bit of that, then we need to heed that message to the church at Ephesus and repent and do the first works and make sure that our love has not been hindered by the events of the last year and a half. Because there's more to come, and we're going to need to be together, spiritually, drawn together in love to help one another. Well, verse 9 has already been read here, but it's good to read it again. “God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him. Therefore, comfort each other and edify one another just as you are also doing.” We have to be like Abraham and the others and be able to imagine the world to come.

Turn over to Hebrews 11. A sermon of this nature I realized it speaks to what we're told here in Hebrews 11. The faith chapter. The stories of those people who went out without having seen everything. Hebrews 11:8, “By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went, out not knowing where he was going." But can we say that he had to use some imagination along with that obedience? I don't think it was just blind obedience that he did when he went as Genesis 12 tells us. I think that he thought it through and I think that he took a deliberate step of faith. He didn't know where he was going. “By faith,” he says, “he dwelt in the land of promises in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him with the same promise.” Verse 10, “For he waited for the city, which has foundations whose Builder and Maker is God.” Abraham began to see that city. This is what we're being told here. He imagined it. He imagined that city whose foundations and the builder maker was God.

It goes on verse in 11 and 12 to talk about Sarah. But let's pick it up in verse 13 again. As a pause is made here to describe all of those who died in faith not having received the promises, but having seen them off far off, they imagined them. They had vision. Having seen them afar off, we're assured of them, embraced them, and confess they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. All of these men and women of faith in this chapter saw something afar off and were assured that it was going to happen. We have seen the kingdom of God a far off in our minds from scripture, from sermons, from teaching for decade after decade. We have seen that. We have been instructed. We go to the Feast, as I said, to get a foretaste of that world to come and to talk about it, to imagine it because we believe that it is going to come because we believe scripture. We confess that we are strangers and pilgrims on this earth.

Verse 14, “For those who say such things declare plainly they seek a homeland. And truly, if they had called to mind that country from which they come out, they would have had opportunity to return.” We always have opportunity to go back to what we came from. I spent two days this week in my hometown to make a quick visit to see some family and it's a nice hometown. I was born in a small town, as the song goes. All right? It was a good place to grow up. It really was. Southeast Missouri. But I left it when I was 19, 20 years of age and I went to follow this calling. And I'd never lived there a day since. Visited many, many times. I'm glad that I went on to other things. I appreciate the formative years that I had there. But I've never wanted to go back to the life that I had there. I have always looked at that...that was one part of my life that kind of ended and a second part began, with college, marriage, and the ministry. You have chapters and phases of... We all have chapters and phases of our lives. I've never wanted to go back to the life that I had there other than to see family and church friends, church members, and the years have whittled those down in recent times. But just still a cause to go back. But I've never wanted to go back to what I had, in a sense, before the church and before this life that I've been called to.

In verse 16, he says, “But now they desire a better, that is a heavenly country, therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God for He has prepared a city for them.” This is the future that we are called to imagine and to see. And as we keep the Holy Days, and particularly the fall Holy Days, there is a great deal of the future to understand, and to have hope, and to grow in faith, and to be knit together in love with each other as we keep these holidays, these festivals before God in the places where He has chosen. And we go to rejoice before God and to learn to fear God, and to imagine that life every day. Not just every day during this period or during the feast, but every day of our life, we have to get up imagining the world to come, imagining our role to be in that kingdom, imagining our job as first fruits, and not being asleep, living in the light of God's calling and in this day, and moving relentlessly forward.

America has tragically forgotten the lessons of that day, 20 years ago, when it was attacked. Unfortunately, we are divided further than we've ever been before and we've declined further. Yeah, I think the day of the Lord is closer. Not the day after tomorrow, but it is closer. So, as children of light, let us exercise our imagination and see our future. Let us exercise love and faith and hope. We live under the shade of the tree of life. We confess that we are pilgrims on this earth and we look for that coming Kingdom of God. Let's live like we believe it. Let's exercise our imagination and prepare for that world to come.

[Frank Dunkle] So, I wanted to talk a little bit about stories. Stories are something that are entertaining. They can also be very educational. Along with studying theology when I was at Ambassador College, I minored in media history and continued that when I did my doctoral work. So, I want to draw on the past. 

If you consider several decades ago, when TV was brand new – movies hadn’t been around so long – those who were making shows for the screen weren’t certain how well audiences would perceive the subtleties of the characters in their stories. So what they did in those early days is, many of the characters would be very simple and basic – two dimensional, you could say. As an example, think of the old black and white westerns. It’s hard to find those nowadays, but in those westerns there were good guys and there were bad guys – not much in between and, if you weren’t certain, the good guys always wore white hats, the bad guys wore the black hats.  As I said, there wasn’t much of the subtlety that could be found in literature, and had been for centuries, in novels and short stories. But that’s changed as producers learned how to portray that subtlety. And then they realized that they could do it quite well onscreen. Now movies and TV shows include many characters that are just as complex as you can find in works of literature.

As a matter of fact, modern screen writers have developed a love for what’s called the anti-hero.  Now when I say anti-hero, that’s not somebody that’s working against the hero, but somebody who’s against the stereotype of a hero – that is, someone who is the protagonist – the lead character – but who isn’t necessarily morally good or all good. And of course, in these stories, they like to portray the antagonist as not always completely bad. And a really good story will lead some of these characters through what’s called a character arc, where they change and develop and grow.

Now, I could consider some examples from great works of literature – Dostoyevsky or Melville or someone like that – but I like the easier route of using pop-culture for examples. So take, for example, Batman.  Okay?  He’s a good guy. He’s not always a paragon of virtue, though. He’s willing to skirt the law to accomplish his goods – trample on some people’s rights for his greater goal. And then, if you see the comparison of someone who is the good guy, compare him to Superman. He stands for truth, justice and the American way. You know, he wouldn’t violate the speed limit if he were driving his car. When he flies, of course, that’s a different matter. He wouldn’t neglect to pay his dog’s county license fee, let alone beat up an informant to get some information. So, that’s the contrast between hero and anti-hero.

What I’ve noticed in recent years, in movies and TV – now these aren’t shows I’ve gone out of my way to see – actually most of them I haven’t – but comedy has developed the practice of wanting to take a position that’s normally very good and put a bad person in there, like Bad Teacher was a movie a few years ago – Bad Judge, even Bad Santa, for those who celebrate Christmas. Literature professors love to look at stories like that, especially if the character goes from being good to bad and changing. You know it might be what we call a cautionary tale. There would be many points in the class where you’d want to lead a discussion with the students and say, “Why did this character do certain things? What was his motivation, what resulted, how could it have been different? What did the characters learn? What do the readers learn? Are those two the same?” And the question that might be in many of your minds is, “Why is he going on and on about this in the sermon on the Sabbath? When are we going to get to the Bible?” 

Well, I’m going there right now, of course, because the Bible is a great work of literature and has a lot of interesting stories. Now it’s not fiction. Of course, God is the ultimate author who worked through a number of different men to write these lessons. There are legal treatises. There are stories. And the Bible stories have many valuable lessons. Does the Bible have any anti-heroes? Does it have cautionary tales? Well, whether we consider them that way or not might depend on how we interpret some of the characters in the stories. In that case, there’s a principle I learned in studying history that applies equally to literature. It is that, “What you learn will largely depend on what questions you ask.”  If you ask the right questions, you can get some good information.

Let’s consider one of the simpler cases to start off with as an example. Rather than a bad teacher, or a bad Santa, what about a bad prophet? Would we have any of those? You know, these are people who are supposed to be good messengers of God. But what if they turn out to be not so good or they dramatically turn? I want to consider starting off with the story of Balaam.

Balaam had an intriguing story, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time there, because we tend to look at that one a lot. But it’s intriguing to think about who he was, where he was, what he could have been – perhaps what he should have been. The story is in Numbers, chapter 22.  We’ll hit the highlights here, but we’ll begin with…of course, this is as the children of Israel are about to enter the Promise Land. God has been working through Moses for forty years to lead them through the wilderness – prepare them. The older generation had died off. The younger ones are getting ready to come in. And the nations that were already dwelling in or near the Promise Land got a little nervous when this huge, powerful nation starts moving in. So, beginning in verse 8, we’ll see the king of Moab sends a message. Oh, actually I want to begin in verse 5 – sorry, in verse 5 – the king of Moab sends a messenger to a person that he considers a prophet.

Numbers 22:5-6 – Then he sent messengers to Balaam the son of Beor at Pethor, which is near the river – that’s the Euphrates – in the land of the sons of his people, to call him, saying – and the message was – “Look, a people has come from Egypt. See, they cover the face of the earth, and are settling next to me! Therefore, please come at once, curse this people for me, for they are too mighty for me. Perhaps I shall be able to defeat them and drive them out of the land, for I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed.” This indicates that Balaam had some connections. People perceived him as having some power.

Now, we know the story went on – and I’m not going to go through all the story – but Balaam wanted to get the money that was being offered, and pronounce curses. But God said, “No, you have to say this,” and he ended up pronouncing blessings. Then later, because he still wanted the money, later chapters show that he would sell advice to the kings of Moab and Midian – to send their women in to seduce the Israelite men – and so that God Himself would punish them. But there are a couple of things that we can see here that intrigue me. Let’s read in verse 8:
V-8 – …He – that is, Balaam – said to the messengers, “Lodge here tonight.  I’ll bring back word to you as the Lord” – or as we often say, the Eternal – “speaks to me.” So, the princes of Moab stayed with Balaam, and when God came to Balaam, He said, “Who are these men with you?” And of course, He goes on from there giving him instruction. 

But have you ever wondered...? Balaam here refers to God by name, and in most translations that we use, it’s the capital LORD, from the YHWH – the Eternal One. Some people say, “Yahweh.”  How did he know that name? God had to specifically reveal it to Moses. And we wouldn’t think that it was well known, or maybe even at all known, outside of Israel. Is it possible that Balaam had some sort of relationship with God that was aside from Him working through the nation of Israel? Don’t know for sure. It’s an interesting question to ponder. Whatever way it was that Balaam knew God, what a disappointment – to have been any type of prophet – to know God – and then turn away from Him as completely as Balaam did! It’s just sad. There’s where I say, “If they made a movie about Balaam, calling it Bad Prophet might not be a bad one.”

But let’s turn our questions another direction. What if there’s a chance that Balaam really didn’t have any relationship with God? But, perhaps, he had relationships with the spirit world in another way. In other words, what if he was playing for the other team? In that capacity, he would have heard about this powerful Creator God – the YHWH – who was supreme. Now he got to work with that God directly. I think that would be sort of like, if you were a semi-pro baseball player suddenly getting a call from the Reds, saying, “We want to come up and pitch for us in the playoffs.” (Now, it might be a big stretch to consider the Reds would be in the playoffs…that’s another story.) But think of it. If this was Balaam’s first contact with God and with the nation of Israel, we know that the story says that they went up on these mountaintops – one after another – and said, “Slay seven bulls and build seven altars,” and then he went off to get the message from God, and he started saying these great blessings on the children of Israel. Do you think he ever looked down and listened to the words coming out of his mouth, and then thought, “Maybe I should go down and join them!” And if he didn’t think that, why not? Was he so attached to being a big fish in a small pond that he never gave thought to going to the only pond that really mattered? (I know I’m mixing my metaphors a little here, but, if I’m dealing with literature, maybe I can get away with it.)

We just don’t know what he thought. We don’t know if he learned anything. But we can consider what we learn from his story. What do we learn? As I said, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with this story, because I’m far from the first minister to turn to this passage in a sermon, and I imagine we’ve learned a lot of things over the years from it. I think of the answers to just two questions that we might easily ask and answer. Is there a better way to have a good life than by following God’s commands? No, not from the story of Balaam and, of course, a lot of other stories. Is there any other worthwhile competing source of power, of prestige, of wealth? No, of course not. We could think of a lot of other questions that we might ponder with Balaam, but I wanted to set that as an example in order to get us into this mode of thinking.

I want to turn to another interesting story that we don’t look to quite as often. It’s found in 1 Kings, chapter 13. 1 Kings 13 tells the story of a young man, who later is referred to as a prophet. He’s rather naïve, and he’ll meet up with an older, more experienced prophet. Well, he called himself a prophet. If he was, it turns out that he, also, was a bad prophet. 1 Kings, chapter 13 – we’re dealing with the time after King David’s grandson, Rehoboam, had refused to lower the taxes and be somewhat conciliatory toward the nation of Israel, and so the ten northern tribes split. They formed their own kingdom. Of course, all this fit with God’s plan. And Rehoboam would continue to rule the kingdom of Judah. But the northern tribes set up a man named Jeroboam as their king. He was concerned that, if the people went down to Jerusalem to worship, they’d fall back into following David, so he set up a competing religion. And, of course, they set up altars, golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and proclaimed a great feast in the eighth month. And, as God sometimes does, He sent a prophet to denounce this practice – to make His views known.

So let’s pick up the story in 1 Kings, chapter 13, and verse 1.

1 Kings 13:1-3 – Behold, a man of God went from Judah to Bethel by the word of the LORD. And Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense. Then he – the man of God that was sent – he cried out against the altar by the word of the LORD, and said, “Oh altar, altar, thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, a child, Josiah by name, shall be born to the house of David, and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you. Men’s bones will be burned on you.’” He was saying, “This altar is going to be desecrated and utterly polluted.” And he gave a sign that day, saying, “This is the sign….” Well, I’m not going to read through all this, but he said, “God’s going to work a miracle and break the altar and the ashes will spill out.” And God showed that this was His message. That miracle happened.

And then when Jeroboam was a little put out by this happening, he pointed out with hand and said, “Arrest that man!” and his hand and arm turned leprous. He couldn’t even pull it back. By that time, Jeroboam realized he was dealing with, truly, a man of God. So he said, “Please pray that I’ll be healed.” And God worked another miracle and healed Jeroboam’s arm.

Now I’m running past this, because I want to get to what happens afterwards – that’s the focus of my story. In verse 9, after God had worked this miracle, and Jeroboam now has significant respect for this young man…actually, I wanted to back up to verse 7:

V-7 – And the king said to the man of God, “Come home with me and refresh yourself, and I will give you a reward” – invites him home to have dinner and “I’ll give you something.” But the man of God said to the king, “If you were to give me half your house, I wouldn’t go with you, nor would I eat bread or drink water in this place. For so it was commanded me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘You shall not eat bread, nor drink water, nor return by the same way you came.’” And so he went another way, and did return by the way he came to Bethel.

Now that alone would make it kind of an interesting story. You don’t see this kind of thing happening very often. But now it’s going to get, I think, even more interesting, because the story is not finished. He’s about to meet the bad prophet. In verse 11:

V-11 – Now an old prophet dwelt in Bethel. And his sons came and told him all the works that the man of God had done that day in Bethel. And they told their father the words which he had spoken to the king. And so he’s interested. I think, if you read the story through, he asks them to saddle the donkey. The words, saddle the donkey, come up half a dozen times. (I was going to skip it, but now I’ve talked about it longer than it takes to read.) But he does, and they saddle the donkey, and they go to find this young man. And he finds him resting under a tree, which makes sense. You know how you feel when you’re fasting. How would you like to have God say, “I want you to be fasting and travel about 20 miles to give this message and come back.” So it’s not surprising, he finds him resting. And the old prophet invites him to come back – “Come back to my place and I’ll give you some food and water.” And the man tells him the same thing that he told King Jeroboam – “No, I’m not allowed to eat or drink while I’m here. And I can’t even go back the same way.”

And now, let’s see what the bad prophet tells him – in verse 18:

V-18 – He said to him, “I, too, am a prophet . Look at that! I’m a prophet, too, just as you are. And an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘Bring him back with you to your house that he may eat bread and drink water.’” He was lying to him.

That’s always intrigued me in this verse. He says all this and he’s lying! And I say, “What?” The Bible says he’s a prophet. Prophets aren’t supposed to lie to people. Well, then again, I think also, Prophets aren’t supposed to believe just anybody that comes along and tells them something that contradicts God had told him.” But this young prophet had to learn that lesson the hard way. He went back with him. And I’m sure he had some motivation, as I said. Imagine you’ve been fasting for maybe even longer than a day, and you’ve covered many miles, and someone says, “God tells you to come and have something to eat!” I’d be eager to do that. And when he does, it turns out that God hadn’t given that message as we already know now. In verse 20:

V-20 – Now it happened, as they sat at the table, that the word of the LORD came to the prophet who brought him back. This is the bad prophet. Now he cries out to the man of God who came from Judah, saying, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because you have disobeyed the word of the LORD and not kept the commandment which the LORD your God commanded you, but you came back, ate bread, and drank water in the place which the LORD said to you, “Eat no bread and drink no water,” your corpse will not come to the tomb of your fathers.’” And it says from there, he would go ahead and leave. And I’ve always wondered, “Wouldn’t you think there would be pretty awkward silence after that?” They’re kind of looking at each other, and, “What do I do now?” Well, he decided to go on his way.

Now, it’s interesting. When you read this, the punishment is that he wouldn’t be buried in the tomb of his fathers. That’s no indication of when that punishment would happen. It occurs to me, he could have been thinking, “Well, that’s going to happen years from now.” The punishment could come even after he’d lived a full life and died of old age. You could speculate that, but as it turns out, a lion met him that very afternoon and killed him. So the punishment wouldn’t be delayed. He would be killed, and for reason, apparently, God worked with the lion, and he just stood there. He didn’t tear up the corpse. He didn’t attack the donkey. And word gets back to the bad prophet. He learns of his fate, and tells his sons, “Saddle up the donkey,” and we see in verse 29:

V-29 – The prophet took up the corpse of the man of God, laid it on the donkey, and brought it back. So the old prophet came to the city to mourn and to bury him. And he laid his corpse in his own tomb, and he mourned over him, saying, “Alas! My brother!” And so it was that after they had buried him that he spoke to his sons, saying, “When I’m dead, then bury me in the tomb where the man of God is buried. Lay my bones beside his bones, for the saying which he cried by the Word of the LORD against the altar in Bethel, and against all the shrines of the high places in the cities of Samaria, will come to pass.”

And we know, if we look ahead, they did hundreds of years later. It would be a long time before that did occur, but the prophecy was fulfilled. Later on, after the northern kingdom had been taken into captivity by the Assyrians, when Josiah came to throne and began reformations in Judah, he came to that area and did desecrate that altar, and dug up bones, and burned them on there – but not the bones of these two prophets, because that story had been around all that time. It’s interesting. As soon as he sees this – “What’s this?” – somebody tells him the story. It was passed on from generation to generation, and they all knew it. And you wonder, “Could that have been the prophet’s reason for lying?” Boy, that would be pretty…makes you wonder, “I’ll lie to this guy, so he’ll be killed and buried here, and then I can be buried with him, and not have my bones desecrated.” That seems a stretch…I’m asking questions that I don’t necessarily know the answers to.

Why did he change from bad to good? Did this bad prophet learn his lesson? He lamented, “Oh, my brother!” Was he truly sorry? What did he learn? We might not be able to answer, but there’s another question we can. But, before I go on to that, what about the young man? What did he learn? As I said, perhaps an awkward silence after the prophet told him, “Oh, you’re going to be punished for this.” What was going on in his mind from the time he heard that until he saw the lion? We can’t really answer those questions. (And I’m bad at doing this. Sometimes I ask these questions, and you go, “Why did you ask me in the first place?!”) Why is this story in the Bible? Well, I can answer that question with the other question? What did you learn? When we study this, we can ponder these questions about it, and we might not know for sure what they learned, but we can learn valuable lessons. We, living right now, today, in this era, can learn great things from studying these stories.

One lesson stands out to me right off the top of my head. And I think back to what happened in the church in the 1990s, and it’s a lesson that everyone should have read this story and learned. It’s summed up very well in Galatians, chapter 1 – Galatians 1, beginning in verse 8. In my mind, I’ve got this verse connected with the story of the lying prophet. Paul writes:

Galatians 1:8 – Even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As I’ve said before, so I say again, “If anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you’ve received, let him be accursed.”

For that young man, God might have added, “Even if a prophet tells you something different than what you’ve been instructed, don’t believe him! Even if the leader of the church should stand up behind the lectern and say, ‘Playing golf on Saturdays is fine,’ ‘Ordering pepperoni on your pizza is okay,’ don’t believe him! Believe what’s in the Bible! Don’t be led astray by liars!”

And that’s just one lesson that we can learn from the bad prophet. I’m sure there are many others. But as I said, I’d like to move to some prophets that aren’t necessarily bad, or always bad, but there are some of these cautionary tales of people who vacillate. And they might go back and forth as to what they learn or what they did. As I said, we could find many characters like that in the Bible. Obviously, Paul had formerly been Saul and persecuting the church. John Mark had been the fellow who ran away naked from the Garden of Eden, and then didn’t continue with Paul and Barnabas on the missionary trip. And then later, he turned out to be very valuable. But I want to stick with prophets for the course of this sermon, since we’ve been focusing on them, and it fits with the…well, it doesn’t fit with my title, actually. I thought about calling this Bad Prophet. And then I thought, “Well, if people see that on the Website, I wonder what they’re going to think about the United Church of God?” So I thought calling it What Do We Learn? might be a little better. But, if we look at prophets who have had their ups and downs and changes, one that gets my attention is Jeremiah.

Now I’ve spoken on Jeremiah more than the others, and he’s been a favorite subject of mine, partly because more than most prophets, Jeremiah shares his thoughts and feelings. He wrote about his own life far more than most of the other prophets. Most of them get a message from God, put it down – put it down on paper, speak it aloud…. You don’t look in Ezekiel…well, in Ezekiel you do learn a little bit about what he did, but that’s because God asked Ezekiel to do a lot of weird things, and so he had to write about that. But let’s turn to the book of Jeremiah and see some of what Jeremiah experienced. And we can keep in mind, what can we learn?

Jeremiah, chapter 1 – actually, we’ll start out at the beginning, in verse 5 – Jeremiah 1, and verse 5 – God is speaking to Jeremiah (I wonder if it surprised him one day):

Jeremiah 1:5 – The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I ordained you to be a prophet to the nations.” And he said, “LORD God, I can’t speak. I’m just a kid!” It says, “I’m but a youth,” but I think in the vernacular…. So I can just imagine…we’ve just heard that the church is hiring younger men to train for the ministry. Probably some of them thought, “I can’t do that! I’m just a youth!” And God answers, “Don’t you say, “I am but a youth,’ for you shall go to all whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you’ll speak.” I don’t know if He was harsh in that – probably more comforting. “I know how old you are, Jeremiah. I formed you in the womb. I want you to do this job.” But it’s not hard to imagine that a prophet who was called when he was very young – and some people speculate he might have been a teenager! Can you imagine back to when you were sixteen years old, having God call you up on the phone one day, and say, “Hello, I’ve got a message for you. I want you to go out and deliver it to the children of Israel” – or Judah, as the case may be.

Jeremiah probably had the kind of mood swings that all of us, as teenagers and young adults, do – had some difficult times. And so it’s not surprising – if we turn to chapter 9 – at this point, he’s upset. He said:

 Jeremiah 9:1 – Oh that my head were waters, oh that my eyes were a fountain of tears, so that I could weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. So, he had the mood swings – up and down. And at times, he felt pretty sorry for himself.

Moving ahead, to chapter 15 – Jeremiah 15, and verse 10 – it says:

Jeremiah 15:10 – Woe is me, my mother…. I don’t know if teenagers say, “Woe is me,” much anymore, but maybe they should. It has a certain ring to it. Woe is me that you’ve born me! I wish I’d never been born! …I am a man of strife, of contention to the whole earth! Even though I haven’t lent money for interest, or people lent to me for interest, every one of them curses me. I haven’t been borrowing money from people, but they all hate me!

This reminds me of a scene from a movie – to get back to some of those pop culture references. In many stories, the protagonist has this time of doubt. And that’s something that’s different with the anti-heroes, because in those old westerns, the cowboy with the white hat on, he never doubted what was right. He never hesitated to do it. But Jeremiah is a hero with feet of clay. And that’s mixing metaphors again. What’s interesting is, when I say that in church, all of us think of that statue that Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream that had feet of iron mixed with miry clay. But those who aren’t Bible scholars just think of it as an analogy. It’s a metaphor for a hero who has faults.

(I know I’m giving away some of my roots, but I’ll be honest. I grew up reading a lot of comic books.) If you’ve heard the name, Stan Lee, he invented a lot of the modern marvel comic heroes.  And he made a point, that when he started in the sixties, he wanted to make his heroes different than the old ones of the fifties, who were like the cowboys with white hats. So he said they would have, in their costume booties, feet of clay. And a lot of their stories focus on these challenges – not necessarily whether they have the power to do what they need to do, but do they have the confidence? Can they overcome their inner-personal relationships? And a lot of times, in a story like this, the climax comes not with a great battle, but with the hero having this self-doubt and this need to overcome. And the climax of the story is when often someone he trusts comes to him, and they talk it out, and he realizes what he can do. So this internal conflict, that’s what makes him the anti-hero – because he’s not wearing a white hat. And once it’s resolved, then he might still go on and fight a battle, and hopefully, it’s entertaining.

I’ve been talking about comic books, but when I first brought his up, the example that stood out to me the most is one of the Rocky movies. I hope I’m not dating myself. We were talking about students at ABC…do they understand your references? The first Rocky movie I saw was Rocky III. I was young enough that the other two had been out and I wasn’t paying attention. But in that one, early in the movie, Rocky’s the champ and then Mr. T comes along. If you haven’t heard of Mr. T, he’s this really buff, strong black guy with the Mohawk, and he beats Rocky up in the ring, and Rocky is devastated. But they want a rematch. And the whole movie – well, not the whole movie – but much of the movie focuses on Rocky dealing with this struggle. And it turns out the climax of the movie is he’s alone and his wife, Adrian, comes to him, and he has to admit that he’s afraid. “I’m afraid! I’m afraid I’ll lose. We’ll lose everything we have.” And she has to explain things to encourage him. “I’ll always be with you. And this physical stuff, we don’t need.” And he gets encouraged by this. He realizes he needs to face his fear and overcome. And of course, in the movie, the music starts playing, and we see the training montage. (Da, da, da-da-daunt) And he’s running on the beach with Apollo Creed, and he’s lifting weights, and swimming in the pool. And that’s already past the climax. When Rocky comes into the ring with Mr. T, of course he knocks him out, because we’ve already past the crucial thing. (Crucial thing – that’s not a good vocabulary term.)

Anyways, let’s go back to the story of Jeremiah. At the beginning of chapter 15, “Woe is me! I wish I’d never been born!” He doesn’t have Adrian to come to him. As a matter of fact, he’s not allowed to get married. In this story, God Himself comes to Jeremiah. In verse 19 – I sort of think he’s off on his own….

Jeremiah 15:19 – Thus says the LORD, “If you return” – that is, “If you return to Me – come back – I’ll bring you back. Jeremiah, you’ll stand before Me. If you take the precious from the vile – in other words, “Get this bad attitude out of you, and you’ll come work with Me. You’ll be My mouth. Let them return to you. Let those people that are against you come back, but you won’t return to them. I’ll make you like a fortified bronze wall. They’ll fight against you, but they shall prevail, for I am with you to save you and I will deliver you,” says the LORD. “And I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked. I’ll redeem you from the grip of the terrible.”

And that’s what it took. Jeremiah goes on. He gets past this crisis and carries on. Now, you could say, “Is this the climax of the whole book?” Well, Jeremiah’s story isn’t a two-hour movie. It’s a fifty-two chapter book! So it goes on and he’ll have other crises and he’ll question again. We know Jeremiah did learn valuable lessons. That’s one of the neat things about the book. We see him go from being a young man – perhaps a teenager – to a relatively old man, going down to Egypt and watching over those kings’ daughters.

He learned a lot of lessons – developed character. Do we, also? What do we learn from reading the story? I hope a lot. I think we can…as I said, I’m mixing some of these pop-culture references, but as I said, what you learn can depend on what questions you ask. And since we have studied that a lot – at least, I’ve spoken on him a lot – I want to turn to another prophet. And I’ll confess, this is the one that started me thinking along this line of reasoning. And it’s the story of Jonah.

Almost everybody knows the story of Jonah – or, most people like to say, “Jonah and the whale” – but if you’re like me, you remember, in the church, being told, “It doesn’t say a whale. It says a great fish.” As a matter of fact, I was intrigued, looking at the Hebrew, which is better translated, Jonah and the sea monster. Well, whatever it was…. But do you ever wonder why there are so many children’s stories? Many of these children’s Bible story books have stories about Jonah. None of them have stories about Joel, or Amos, or Haggai, or Zephaniah. One of the reasons is that Jonah’s story is so different. The Bible doesn’t tell us much about the lives of those other prophets. And, of course, most of those other prophets devote their writing to telling the message that God gave them.

Jonah stands out. The book of Jonah has about one sentence of prophecy. That’s intriguing. It’s in there in the middle of the Minor Prophets, and the only prophecy is, “In three days, God’s going to overthrow Assyria.” And then God changes His mind about that.

Well, then the story that it tells must be important. So, if you haven’t already gone there, let’s go to Jonah. Now, of course, because we know the story so well, I’m not going to read all four chapters. We can pick up some of the highlights. (That’s assuming that I can find it in my Bible…there it is.) In Jonah, chapter 1:

Jonah 1:1 – The word of the LORD came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come to Me.” Now, it’s worth noting, that alone is pretty unusual. God sent prophets to Israel to prophesy against them.

Now, Jonah’s reaction isn’t that of a role model, but there were some precedents. I look back, you know, Moses tried to make as many excuses as possible to not go to Pharaoh. Jeremiah – we just read – said, “I’m too young! I’m just a kid!” Jonah didn’t make excuses. He just got up and ran! As we see in verse 3:

V-3 – Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish – which, by the way, is as far away as you can get from going to Assyria, He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.

Now I’m going to stop reading there, because, as I said, we know the story. God didn’t restrain Jonah right then, but He didn’t just let him go away. But I find it interesting…He also didn’t talk to him. He caused this great storm to blow up – waves crashing. It was so bad a storm that the sailors believed they were going to die. And so they tried everything they knew – throwing cargo overboard to lighten the ship. They prayed to every god they could think of, and when they ran out, they woke Jonah up so he could pray to whatever gods he could think of. Then they got the idea that this unusual storm must have come on them because somebody did something bad. In verse 7, it says:

V-7 – They said to one another, “Let’s cast lots, so we may know for whose cause this trouble has come upon us.” Now we can question, “What made them think that?” I wonder. But the lot fell on Jonah. And rather than make them wonder, he confessed. He said, “Yeah, this storm is my fault. I worship the God who made the sea, and the sky, and the land, and everything. And I ran from His presence.” So now they’re getting really afraid.

Let’s go down to verse 15 – because he tells them, “What you need to do, if you want to be saved, is throw me out of the boat.”

V-15 – So they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea. And the sea ceased it raging.
It wasn’t until I saw…well, I’ve seen a couple different versions of this…I always thought, of course, of it gradually calming down the way storms do, but there are some versions where they throw him in and pshewww…it stops. You wonder about the sailors. Did they look at each other and say, “Well, shall we pull him back in?” Well, they didn’t have the option, because in verse 16:

V-16 – The men feared exceedingly – at first they were very, very impressed, but in verse 17…

V-17 – The LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Now we might wonder, “Is that the reason this story is in the Bible?” The fact that he was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights isn’t necessarily a prophecy. Now, Jesus Christ cited it as a sign – the sign of the prophet Jonah – and He said that, likewise, He would be in the grave three days and three nights. So it is important. But, if we ask, “Is that the reason the book of Jonah is in the Bible?” wouldn’t it have been a shorter book? We got here in one chapter.

Now, we’ve got a second chapter of Jonah’s repentance. And it describes his prayer from inside the fish – which it’s entertaining to think of this. A lot of stories portray it as this big cavernous area. It’s probably not. He was in there cramped. But we learn a little bit about how well Jonah did know God’s word, because, if you read the prayer, most of it is citing from the Psalms. He knew God’s word and so he was reciting – I’m guessing from memory – he probably didn’t have a pocket Bible with him – but he knows God’s word and he makes this great repentance. And of course, God tells the fish, “Okay, spit him up!” And still, if that’s the reason the story is in the book, two chapters would have been enough. But we carry on.

In chapter 3, God is going to talk to Jonah again.

Jonah 3:1 – The word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach against it the message that I tell you. So, go, and this time, do what you’re told!” And that time, the people of Nineveh – those rotten, violent, wicked, according to some people, fish-slapping, sinful people – they repent. They repent with fasting, sack cloth, ashes! The story even says, “They made the animals wear sackcloth. That’s, to me, one of the most entertaining parts of the book – maybe because of my weird imagination. I picture the cows, the sheep wearing sackcloth.

What a great day for Jonah, right? What prophet wouldn’t be thrilled to be that effective in his preaching and have people listen? I imagine Mr. Myers would love to get up here and give a sermon on some particular subject and have everybody respond, and say, “Yeah, we’re going to do that!” I know I’d love to have that happen. Well, who wouldn’t be thrilled at this kind of thing? Well, Jonah, so it turns out. In chapter 4, it says:

Jonah 4:1 – It displeased Jonah exceedingly and he became angry. So he prayed to the LORD, and said, “LORD, was this not what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore, I fled previously to Tarshish.” I always like to ask the question, “Why did flee?” Here he tells us why – because God is merciful. “I knew that You are a gracious and merciful God, and slow to anger, abundant in lovingkindness, one who relents from doing harm. Now, therefore, please take my life.” Jonah is so upset he wishes he could die. As a matter of fact, I’m going to introduce a movie version I’ve of this, where it shows Jonah crying, and he says, “Oh how I wish I were back inside that whale!” – which is interesting to consider.

Jonah is not in a good attitude, but here, interestingly, God doesn’t rebuke him. Instead in verse 4:

V-4 – The LORD said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” As I said, what you learn often depends on what questions you ask. I find it interesting that in this latter part of the book, God ask questions. It could have been interpreted – going from the Hebrew – you could say that it is, “Why are you angry?” Or, another way of saying it is, “How is this hurting you, Jonah? I’m not killing them. Is that making you any worse off?”

Well, if Jonah answered, we don’t have his reply. It wasn’t preserved. But we know he went outside the city, and decided he was going to sit and watch. “Maybe God will change His mind again and smite those people! And I want to see it!” Well, as Jonah waited in the notoriously hot and arid climate, God gave him a benefit – caused this plant to grow up quickly – gave him some shade, cooled the breeze coming through. Jonah was glad for that, it says. And it’s the only place in the whole Bible where Jonah is in a good attitude. But then, right away, God prepared a worm to attack and eat the plant, and it died very quickly. So Jonah, once again, lies down, feeling sorry for himself, and wishes he could die.

Now here’s where I do want to introduce…as I said, part of what inspired me on this…I brought a copy of…I’m guessing we’ve got a lot of young parents that are familiar with Veggie Tales. I’ve had the tune going through my head. Maybe grandparents are familiar. And, if you’re in between, you might be saying, “What in the world?” This is the Veggie Tale Jonah movie. And, as I said, I’m not suggesting that you put away your Bibles and just watch Veggie Tales. Now, they can be entertaining and useful, but they’re not always the same as the scripture. But this one brings out some interesting things about the story of Jonah.

And in this, they have to set the stage, so what I found intriguing is, there’s a family that’s going somewhere and they have a flat tire. And there’s a restaurant where they can go in and make a phone call, have a tow truck come. And while they’re waiting…and of course, the family’s had some disagreements and been arguing, and they meet this group of particular people. If you know Veggie Tales, it’s the pirates, who don’t do anything. If you don’t know Veggie Tales, you don’t need to worry about that. But they start telling this story, because it turns out there was this one time when they did do something with that one guy. The one guy’s name in Jonah. And so they’re telling the story to the family, and they get to the end…and of course, at the end, that’s where they portray Jonah saying, “I wish I was back inside that whale!” He’s all alone, and he’s crying and feeling sorry for himself, and they’re telling the story, and the say, “The end!” (turns his back on the audience). And they family goes (holds his hands facing upward, shaking his head), “What happened next? What did Jonah learn?” And one of them says, “The question, my friend, is not, ‘What did Jonah learn?’ What did you learn?” (I’m not doing the accent very well, but considering it was a pea that said it….)

That’s an important question. As I said, that’s one of the things that led me to this sermon. What did you learn? That a question we could ask about almost every story in the Bible. It stands out here, because many Bible narratives tell us what hero learned or didn’t learn. And they tell us what we should learn. But the book of Jonah is similar to the Veggie Tales movie in that it also ends with a question. God asked Jonah this in verse 10 of chapter 4:

V-10 – The LORD said, “You had pity on the plant, for which you have not labored nor made it grow, and it came up in a night and perished in a night. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which are one hundred and twenty thousand people, and they can’t tell their right hand from their left with much livestock?

We don’t know if Jonah ever understood this lesson or not, because God asked him the rhetorical – we could call it a rhetorical question. The obvious answer is, “Well, yes! If they’re willing to repent, we should have pity!” I personally like to think that Jonah did learn the lesson – partly because I’m one of those that side with the belief that he wrote the book. Some people disagree. There are lots of different scholarly opinions. But I say, if he did write the book, why didn’t he say, “I learned my lesson and I went back home.” If he’s the one that wrote it and said that, I think it’s because he might have had the same question in mind as the Veggie Tales. He might be leaving it for the reader, saying what did you learn. What can I learn from this?

Now we could ask a lot of questions. We could go from the sailors assuming that someone in the boat must be guilty, since they’re suffering. We could ask questions: Why did Jonah say, “Throw me overboard?” Was he trying to save them or trying to get out of going back to Assyria – going to Nineveh – figuring “I’ll drown and then I won’t have to go?” What led him to repent now that he was inside the fish?

There are a lot of possible lessons we could learn from this. A couple come to mind. One, of course, is, you can’t run from God. Jonah illustrates that incredibly well. Another is, God can hear your prayer from anywhere – even inside a fish under the ocean! So you’re never too far to call out to God and have Him hear.

One of the biggest lessons, though…I appreciated the way the Veggie Tales movie brought it out, and I’d have to explain a little bit, because they didn’t want to have somebody have to play act and speak as God. And I like that about Veggie Tales. That’s one thing that I’ve seen. So what they did is have the worm talk. You might think it’s still a stretch to have a worm speak, but if you see the movie, it fits. He’s there for a while, and he ate the plant, and says, “Well, I was hungry with all this waiting.” But when he’s talking to Jonah, who’s feeling sorry for himself, and the worm says, “Remember when you were back inside that whale? God had mercy on you. He heard you, because God is merciful and kind and He loves you!” And Jonah’s going, “Yeah, yeah.” And the worm says, “Well, did it ever occur to you that God loves everybody – not just you?” And in the movie, Jonah is like, “Huh?” It’s like he never gets it. But I can take that to heart. When I read the story of Jonah, it’s like, “Yeah, God does love everybody. I believe He loves me, but He loves everybody else just as much. As a matter of fact, I’ve given Him reason to love other people a lot more.” But probably a lot of us would say that. But, as I say, if Jonah did learn his lesson, and wrote it this way, it was a stroke of genius – if for no other reason, it gave me a good start to a sermon, but for a lot of other reasons, too. He leaves us with questions to ponder and discuss. It gives us opportunity to ask, “What do we learn?”

Now as I move toward wrapping up, I want to caution: It’s possible to take this idea too far. The Bible is a great work of literature, and you can study the stories with those techniques, but, at the same time, it’s the word of God! It should be respected as such. I don’t want anybody to think that I don’t agree that there are places where God tells us clearly what His word means. We won’t benefit from questioning it. And we want to remember that principle: Let the Bible interpret the Bible. So I’m not suggesting in any way that we’re moving away from that. God does provide interpretation. I’m just saying, sometimes you can learn more by asking the right questions. And I hope we’ve seen today, God purposefully, used a lot of variety in what He put in His word. He presents us with many interesting stories that include a lot of interesting characters. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10 that they are recorded for our benefit. So, whether we focus on the good guys or the bad guys, as protagonists, and not to mention the many flawed would-be heroes, we should not only read God’s Word to discover what they learned, but always stop and ask, “What did I learn?”