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