Well, I’d like to summarize what I’ve had to say. I started off by saying that for me this is not really a debate in that sense. This is, for me, an opportunity to meet, hopefully, with a minority of people who might be here, listening to this in the transcript or here tonight, who are searching and seeking for something. For those of you who, as I say, are like me and lay awake at night and look up at the ceiling, fixing your eyes on the light socket or whatever it is up there…the shadow of the street light or whatever on your ceiling. And you’re there, in touch with yourself. I’m talking to those of you who, in those moments, beneath the surface, have your doubts about all this stuff. Who are maybe involved in these things, but actually underneath have those doubts. And yet within the paradigm that you’re in, you can’t admit them, scarcely to yourselves. It is to those, that minority, that I want to talk.
I said that we are here looking at the tip of an iceberg. As far as I’m concerned, what I submitted to you tonight, is that all these false claims of Holy Spirit possession just simply do not match with the nature of the gifts as they were possessed in the first century. And not only so, but the whole tone of the New Testament is that those gifts were to be taken away and that they’d be poured out again when the Lord comes. And yet, there’s a whole load of other issues there, within what is to me (and I’m sorry to call) an Apostate Christianity. Whereby one wrong idea leads you to another wrong idea. Marie did actually mention in passing the idea of a Trinity, or the three that bear witness. And it seems to me that the whole idea of possessing the Holy Spirit is related to the idea of the Holy Spirit being a person, which is related to the idea that God is not one, but there’s a Holy Spirit there, there’s Jesus there as God, and God the Father, etc. Now, within the scriptures, those ideas simply aren’t there. The word “Trinity” never even occurs. So when people say “that by the Holy Spirit”, they’re telling me why God is a Trinity. Well, the Spirit word of God does not use the word Trinity at all. There is one God, who is the Father. And the Lord Jesus was His son, of our nature…one of us. Who had all our humanity and all our struggle, all our pain and our hunger as men and women, who went this way before. Who is exactly like you and me. Who knows your loneliness tonight. Who knows right in the heart of how you feel because he was a man. He was not God Himself. He was tempted as we are, and God Himself can’t be tempted. And above all he died, whereas God cannot die. And he rose again, therefore, as our representative. And in the final end, we need to be baptized into him by immersion, not by sprinkling, but as an adult. Now you may say, “yeah, sure, I was baptized.” That’s not the point. Acts 19, people were re-baptized once they understood the true message, because (as surely everyone here would agree) belief must come before baptism. And yet, what is belief? Belief is not just a feeling, it is belief of something. It requires a certain amount of knowledge. I don’t mean academic knowledge, but some level of knowledge.
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Now if we have the wrong knowledge, and if we have the knowledge that does not lead to eternal life, if we are believing as it were a false gospel…we’ve got to be re-baptized once we’ve found the true gospel. And the true gospel is that which was preached to Abraham so many years ago. That he and his children would live forever on this earth, in the Kingdom of God. On this earth, not in heaven, not going on some rapture, but here on this earth. And this is a real and a concrete hope that you and I can look forward to in the future, if we are properly baptized into the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I want to have contact with you. We don’t want to leave this debate as passing ships in the night that meet each other than we go different places. That’s my email, dheaster@bbie.org, that’s the local brother in the state you can contact. We want to hear from you. I couldn’t answer all your questions, but email me those questions, your comments, your disagreements. And there’s a lot of literature out the back there that’s completely free. And please make it your goal to systematically analyze the message of the Bible for yourself. There is a book there that is a correspondence course, and also other literature. Take it and criticize it and pull it apart and email either my brother Ray there or myself with your comments and your disagreements or whatever. Let’s realize that these things are important. That there is a true gospel and there is a false gospel that mimics the true gospel, with false claims of Spirit possession. Just as there were true gifts of the Holy Spirit and there will be many people who thought they had the Holy Spirit, Jesus says….
NOTE: TAPE CUTS OFF HERE – PART OF CLOSING MISSED WHEN FLIPPING TO OTHER SIDE