Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

There is a scripture in the 35 chapter of Exodus that opens up a subject I don't recall hearing very much ever said about. Numbers 35, beginning in verse 30:Whoever kills any person, the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any person to cause him to die. Moreover you shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall be surely put to death. And you shall take no satisfaction for him that is fled to the city of his refuge, that he should come again to dwell in the land, until the death of the priest. So you shall not pollute the land wherein you are: for blood it defiles the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. Defile not therefore the land which you shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel. The only way that the land can be cleansed of blood is by the shedding of the blood of the person who originally committed the murder. Don't . Now, it's interesting: the land is dirt; we walk on it every day; we live on the land, and the land is something we take for granted. And here is a categorical statement that suggests that murderers—unavenged murderers—actually defile not merely the society, but defile the land. I think that's kind of curious, in a way, that he should say that, and that it should be presented to us in that way. You know, it's been a long, long time since God has spoken to us. The fact is that it's been some 1900 years since the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation. As far as we know, there has been no direct revelation of God to Man since, that has been conveyed to mankind in general. Maybe he's talked to one person here or there for their own benefit. But as far as I know, God has been silent for over 1900 years now…and maybe for some little time yet. But it occurred to me that the land may be speaking to us. Now, I'm not talking today about environmental issues that can be solved by politics. I'm not talking about that at all. I'm talking about something much more serious than that—something where politics is really not the solution. This issue is not political, but moral. The land does figure prominently in Old Testament scripture—the defilement of the land, the effect of the land, and what we have done with the way we've lived our lives here. The land does figure strongly to it—but in ways that are not always very apparent. One of the things I'm going to try to do in the sermon is to make these things more apparent.

Years ago, while living in England, I saw some graffiti on an overpass that declared “War is Obsolete”. This was in the glory days of the “Ban the Bomb” movement. There were well-intentioned people who favored unilateral nuclear disarmament. The British could afford to think that way, because the American bombs could be counted on to keep the Russians in check. At the time, I wrote a magazine article that opined that war was far from obsolete—that history told us Man had never developed a weapon he did not eventually use. Time passed, and so did my opinion. In fact, it has been 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and no one has been killed by a nuclear weapon in all that time. No one could hope to win a nuclear war, and so there was no reason why any sane person or nation would start one. In all those intervening years, the only nations that had any nuclear weapons were allegedly sane. Well, more time has passed, and now we have to deal with powers that show very clear signs of not being very sane. And the insanity has allowed nuclear materials and technology to leak out of their tightly sealed boxes and into the hands of people who are certifiably insane. was a reasonable doctrine in a world where we were dealing with reasonable people who loved life. Now we are dealing with unreasonable people who care nothing for life, not even their own. You could even say that they love death. I don’t think we yet understand the religion or the psychology of the 9/11 hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center. But with the advent and spread of the suicide bomber, everyone is now thinking that we will ultimately have to deal with nuclear suicide bombers, and that is truly unimaginable.

I told you so. Months ago, I told my audience that Christians were making a big mistake when they allowed themselves to be characterized as , or . There are those who believe that Jesus was a conservative. Others believe he was a liberal. Neither group understands the first thing about Jesus. I warned my audience that getting locked up with one political party, block or movement allows the Christians and their agenda to be dismissed. Now this sounds like a revolutionary idea, but it is Christianity 101—the basics. We are a people apart, a holy people. We can fight the culture wars, but it has to be fought as individuals, not as a political bloc. We are not really an army in this world, we are infiltrators. We have a message and a witness, and it is that message that is our business.

We Christians have an anxiety about us—about who we are, about our failures, about our differences, about our spats—and we let these anxieties prevent us from doing and saying things that need to be said and done; not only in church, but in the community and in the world. Peggy Noonan - Link 1 | Link 2

When all is said and done; when the Millennium is passed; when the Great White Throne Judgment is finished, and the last of all the loose ends are tied up; when the earth has been melted down with fervent heat; when there's a new heavens and a new earth, and the heavenly city New Jerusalem has descended upon it...who will you be?

One of the most exciting discoveries in my life was when I learned that the festivals of the Bible actually contained an outline of God’s plan—an outline much more complex than I had at first imagined. They are loaded with illustrations, with analogies, with symbols and types of the plan of salvation, the life and work of Jesus Christ, of end-time events culminating in the Kingdom of God...and even events beyond the end of this world. But there is a curious anomaly in this festival that we observe here today, and at least a couple of different angles on trying to understand it. There are theories that have been advanced through the years that we have observed it, and we need to talk about it.

In the pages of your Bible, you may find something mildly surprising. You find holidays, quite prominently, and in both Testaments. Not only that, but they are found observed by the Church in the New Testament. These festivals are called and around them flow the entire history of the people of God—from the Israelites, to the Jews, to the Christians of every race and nation. And not only the history of God’s people, but their future as well. I first began celebrating the festivals of the Bible nearly 50 years ago, but I can’t say that I really understood them in the beginning. What I did was to follow the old rule: So, since God said to do it, and all I had to do was take off work and go to church, I thought, That was a simple first step. And because it was the custom to teach and study the meaning of the days in their seasons, year by year I learned the rich history of God’s dealings with his people, especially at those pivotal points in their history, like the original Passover. To those of us who have been keeping the holy days for years—in some cases, for all of our lives—the practice seems so natural, so right. We all know what blessings we get from it, we all know how encouraging it is to us, we know what it means to us to spend that eight days together and how uplifted we can be when we go home from the Feast of Tabernacles. The scriptures supporting the practice seem so obvious. Why doesn’t everyone see it? Why, we wonder, doesn’t everyone observe the holy days? The most obvious reason, frankly, is that most Christians know little or nothing about the holy days. They just have never heard of them. One person will say , and another will say, They just frankly have no idea. For many of them, the Old Testament is about as uncharted as the Atlantic was for Christopher Columbus. They really don’t know where anything is if they wanted to look for it. For those that are maybe a little more familiar with the Bible, the holy days have been dismissed as being Jewish and irrelevant to Christians. OldNew; and they just make that simple demarcation and never really inquire any further along the line. A few people, on the other hand, have studied the subject and arrived at a conscious decision not to observe the holy days. Why? What is the rational, philosophic, theological, or scriptural basis for people to make that decision? I found to my surprise that studying the reasons that people advance as to why they do not keep the holy days has turned out to be a very useful study. A number of very interesting things have arisen from it—things that I guess I had taken for granted, had not really looked at as carefully as I might have done; and in the process of asking myself the question that I’ve asked you——and beginning to look carefully at the reasons advanced by those who don’t, I have found some things that have turned out to be rather interesting to me. Note: The article Ron mentions in the conclusion of this message later became an appendix in his book on the holy days, , titled . That appendix can be read here.

There have been some truly great men who held the office of pope down through the centuries, and some men who were…well, not great. Some have been venal. Some have been violent. Some were put in office by imperial authority. Some were murdered in their beds. There have been times in history when schism found leaders and left the church with more than one pope, believe it or not. The word is unfamiliar because there hasn’t been one for 500 years. What’s that? Well, an anti-pope is a claimant of the papacy in opposition to a pope elected according to canon law. To give you an idea of some of the ferment that existed in the past—in the 11 century alone there were 5 anti-popes, and 8 of them in the 12 century. That’s 13 anti-popes in 200 years. (Excommunications, naturally, flew back and forth.) It’s ironic that since the Protestant Reformation there have been no anti-popes—almost as though we flushed out all the dissidents and went forward. The Reformation, though, was a schism within the Roman Church, as was the split with the English Church under Henry VIII. But in the modern world, we have seen nothing like this. That does not mean we will never see anything like it again. It’s entirely possible that we could encounter the old word on the evening news in the years to come. I’ve told you all this to help you understand something else that may well come to your attention in the next few weeks. For generations there have been those who referred to the Catholic Church as [Revelation 17] and who believed that the last pope would be the Antichrist. Each new pope could be the last pope, and may fulfill many of the prophecies of the and Antichrist. He will, according to these would-be prophets, be the little horn of the prophecies of Daniel and one of the beasts of Revelation. Heavy stuff. But take any self-proclaimed prophet with a grain of salt. Where does all this come from? Some comes from an anti-Catholicism arising from conflicts in the dim past, and indeed there have been popes in the long history of the church that deserve condemnation. Catholics probably know that better than anyone. After the Renaissance popes provoked the Protestant Reformation (and they really did) the Catholic Church made some reforms of its own. Still, there are those who want to label the last pope as the man of sin. So, where did this idea of a for the last days come from? Well, we can thank the Apostle Paul for that. In one of his earliest letters, he spoke of the imminent return of Christ. Or at least it sure sounded imminent to his readers, within their lifetime. Well, this generated a flurry of concern, and Paul has to deal with it in his second letter: Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. This is pretty strong; and as bad as some of the popes have been, none of them ever got close to this. Who, then, would do something like this?