Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is a program
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bringing you
thought provoking insights
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and information
on religious liberty
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through the ages
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right up to our
present situation,
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and in the United States
and often around the world.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
editor of Liberty Magazine,
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and I want to talk to you
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about sort of ancient events.
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I said through the ages.
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Let's go really
back to 600 years BC,
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because I want
to talk about Daniel
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and his friends,
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and their captivity in Babylon,
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the capital of the
known world at that time.
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When you read the history there,
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God's people, of course,
have been delivered by...
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I don't think God
delivered them up directly,
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but God warned
that by their neglect
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of some of the precepts
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that He'd laid down
through His prophets
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that they were
likely to be exposed
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to the negative
things around them
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and that included
conquest and captivity.
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So King
Nebuchadnezzar, the leader of...
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The king of
Babylon came sweeping in,
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destroyed the city,
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killed many people
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and took many
captives and hostages.
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And so Daniel
and his three friends
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found themselves
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probably as members
of the ruling families
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found themselves in Babylon
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probably too found
themselves emasculated
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so they could better
suit the king's purposes.
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I remember being
really troubled by that
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as a young guy, but
it's almost certainly so.
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That was the standard practice
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to remove any
possibility of other affections,
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also to remove the possibility
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that they would
breed with the conquerors.
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They didn't want that,
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and that they wanted
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to easy facile
servants of the king.
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And we know that
Daniel and his friends
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were put under
the command of Arioch,
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I think his name
was the head of the...
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of the eunuchs.
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And so this, the training began.
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I want to talk about
just several incidents
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in the story
that's outlined there.
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But to put it into context,
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remember where Babylon was
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because we know where, now
where the site of Babylon is.
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It's just about 60
miles down the Euphrates River
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from the present
day city of Baghdad.
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You know, Gulf War 2
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taught us a lot about geography,
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but maybe people forget
this biblical aspect of it.
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I remember Mark
Twain, a humorist of sorts.
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I grew up reading
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Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
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Not so funny, but
very good for young people.
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But Mark Twain was alive
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at the time of the
US military intervention
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in the Philippines.
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And he said
once, darkly, he says,
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"Foreign wars are God's
way of teaching geography
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to Americans."
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And I noticed the
other day, our President,
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this is before the
election, so President Trump,
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I don't think himself
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always the
greatest on geography,
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but he thought he
had a reporter recently,
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they got a bit snarky with him.
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And so he says, you know,
"Point on this map to Ukraine.
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Point to Ukraine"
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And the woman was
able to so he got so mad,
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he dismissed it but
an unfortunate majority,
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probably people
are not too clear
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on where things are.
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But I'm telling you, Babylon,
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just down the
river from Baghdad,
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and at that time
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it was the
greatest city in the world.
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The hieroglyphics
we have from that era
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show an advanced civilization,
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the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon were...
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While they're gone,
they've been accounted
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by contemporary
references and projected forward
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is one of the great
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seven great
wonders of the world.
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This was a moment
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when these young Jewish guys
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taken from a
relatively obscure city
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and taken to the New
York City of their time,
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or let's say, the Paris,
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I know there's
some overseas viewers,
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so it's not just New York.
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But this was an amazing shift.
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And they're in the
middle of this pagan,
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non-Jewish culture,
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they were ready and able
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and forced to stand
by their spiritual guns
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and witness to that nation.
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The singular story
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that I think is important is
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after Daniel had interpreted
the dream for the king,
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which is quite
a story in itself,
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the king misunderstanding,
or by his personality,
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misinterpreting the
dream as applying to him,
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rather than explaining
the kingdoms through the ages,
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he built on the Plains of Dura,
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about an 80 foot
statue, all of gold,
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I'm sure covered in gold
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because there's barely
enough gold in the world
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to make such a statue.
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You know that all
the gold in the world
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could fit into a
warehouse in a cube.
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There's not as much
of it as people imagine.
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But a gold covered statue
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was erected and
the king demanded
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that everybody bowed down
to it when the music played.
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Daniel seems to have been away,
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but his three
friends were there.
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And when the
music played they stood.
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And the king,
obviously knowing them
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and obviously, being
friendly toward them,
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said contrary
to the instructions
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before that,
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which were said, you
know, you're going to be killed
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if you don't bow down.
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He says, you know,
"Let's play the music once more.
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Another chance, boys.
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If you bow down now,
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all will be
forgiven and they said,
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"King, we don't
need to think carefully
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about answering
you in this matter.
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Our God is able
to save us from you.
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We're not under your power."
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But they said "Even
if He didn't redeem us
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from this punishment,
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we're not going to
obey what you said."
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This is an amazing
denial of a secular king
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claiming their loyalty.
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And he said to them, in
case they had any question,
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he says,
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"Why don't you
respect me or my gods?"
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He put the two together.
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Which by the way
is a great temptation
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at the moment in
the United States.
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Church and state, long separate
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are coming
together very quickly,
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where to be an American,
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a good American is being equated
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especially by
the religious right,
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with sort of the
godly, Protestant thinking.
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And, you know,
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that they might have
small amount of history to it,
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but it's not a good dynamic.
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So the king was not
impressed when they refused.
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And so he sent
them into the fire.
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And there in the fire,
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he saw them
walking around and he says,
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"Didn't we put
three men into the fire,
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now there's four.
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One like the Son of the God."
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He didn't say like God,
just a divine personage.
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So it was very obvious
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that God was working
even in that pagan city,
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that they were redeemed
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from the secular
power of the king,
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that cause and effect
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were not quite
operating as normal,
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that the faithful
could be redeemed.
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Then Daniel
himself a little later,
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when he was...
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well respected the
king, given special authority,
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we don't quite
know what his job was,
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but he was known by the
king working closely with him.
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And the political enemies
conspired to set the king up
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to trick him
into condemning Daniel
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for praying to his God,
rather than to the king.
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And Daniel was
thrown into the lions' den
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as the punishment
required, and delivered.
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And he said to the
king, he says, you know,
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"My God has delivered me
from the power of the lions."
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I thought about
this a number of times
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and relating it to our day,
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I'm reminded of
something that Ellen White,
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a young woman
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who with her
husband, James White,
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both of them were part
of the Millerite movement.
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And after the disappointment
they remained faithful,
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studied their
Bibles with others,
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realized that the
date setting was not good.
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In fact, Ellen White once said,
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"No time prophecy after 1844."
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So, Adventists, don't set dates.
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But we came out of a
date setting phenomenon,
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there's no question.
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And Ellen White wrote
to Adventists early on,
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when they believed
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and I still believe
that God was influencing
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what she said and did
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that they were
portentous dreams,
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let's just put it that way.
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She shared a dream
she had in the early...
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In the late 1800s rather.
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And I want to
relate this to Daniel.
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Not that everything
happened 600 years ago.
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Six hundred years ago the
fires could not burn them.
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Six hundred years ago,
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the lions' mouth was
not full of ravaging teeth,
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they were shut by the angels.
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In our day, there is
threat on every hand.
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Even as I'm dictating this,
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the Coronavirus is
freaking the world out,
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we don't know, a
month, two months from now,
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whether this will
be another black death,
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another plague,
another massive die off or not.
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But we do know that in our era,
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those sort of things hang
over us as a grand threat.
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And we do know that
when such things happen,
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other bizarre
social phenomena follow,
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there's no question.
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The inquisitions in Europe
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followed hard on
the heels of the plague
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that wiped out
about a third of Europe.
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One thing breeds another.
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And Ellen White wrote something
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that I want to share
with our larger audience.
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It was given to Adventist.
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The early group of believers,
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and you can
believe the dream or not,
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but what the
message she got out of it,
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I think is
something for our day.
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This is what she wrote.
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It's not really a
normally published thing.
00:11:07.63\00:11:09.76
It's in...
00:11:09.80\00:11:11.13
called Manuscript releases,
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which is circulated
but not in any book per Se.
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She says, "In the night,
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I was I thought, in a room,
00:11:17.64\00:11:21.04
but not in my own house.
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I was in a city
where I knew not.
00:11:25.28\00:11:28.98
And I heard
explosion after explosion."
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I remember first reading
this around the time of 9/11.
00:11:32.99\00:11:38.53
And there's no question
that from a religious point,
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liberty point of view,
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things have not
been the same since 9/11.
00:11:42.00\00:11:45.53
Among other legal
shifts, the Patriot Act,
00:11:45.57\00:11:49.77
brought a broad
array of restrictions
00:11:49.80\00:11:52.87
on individual freedom
00:11:52.91\00:11:56.61
and oversight on
individual action
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that really is against
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the very
principles of the constitution
00:12:01.25\00:12:03.65
that protect,
00:12:03.69\00:12:05.02
supposed to protect the privacy.
00:12:05.05\00:12:07.46
Since 9/11,
00:12:07.49\00:12:08.82
also the religious
deck has been stacked,
00:12:08.86\00:12:12.29
where we see
00:12:12.33\00:12:14.10
religious
fundamentalists of one sort
00:12:14.13\00:12:16.03
bringing most of these
terrorist actions to us.
00:12:16.06\00:12:19.03
But the
authorities not knowing much
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about any religion
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have come to the conclusion that
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fanatical religious extremists
of all types are dangerous.
00:12:27.81\00:12:32.31
Or to put it another way,
00:12:32.35\00:12:34.25
it's been stated to
believe your Bible deeply
00:12:34.28\00:12:40.22
so that you'll order your life
after it makes you an extremist
00:12:40.26\00:12:45.59
and a fundamentalist.
00:12:45.63\00:12:48.13
So these are dangerous times.
00:12:48.16\00:12:50.23
And I first
noticed this quote on 9/11,
00:12:50.27\00:12:54.27
when the buildings exploded
with the collisions with the...
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The airline has collided
with these two buildings,
00:12:58.11\00:13:00.51
when they collapsed,
00:13:00.54\00:13:03.11
the shock to New York City
and indeed the whole country,
00:13:03.14\00:13:06.51
the whole world was severe.
00:13:06.55\00:13:08.48
They have these
towers of complacency,
00:13:08.52\00:13:10.62
these Hanging Gardens of Babylon
00:13:10.65\00:13:12.75
come crashing down
into the middle of a city
00:13:12.79\00:13:16.22
where people were
running for their lives
00:13:16.26\00:13:17.96
and screaming with horror.
00:13:17.99\00:13:21.16
It's something that
certainly in our lifetimes,
00:13:21.20\00:13:23.33
we will never see again.
00:13:23.37\00:13:26.43
It was...
00:13:26.47\00:13:27.80
As one writer
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in a French
magazine pointed out,
00:13:29.20\00:13:30.67
he says, "It was real."
00:13:30.71\00:13:32.41
But he says "It
was worse than real.
00:13:32.44\00:13:35.38
It was symbolic."
00:13:35.41\00:13:36.91
And symbolically
modern complacency,
00:13:36.95\00:13:40.95
these structures of
our modern technology
00:13:40.98\00:13:44.65
came crashing down,
00:13:44.69\00:13:46.45
and the threat was visceral,
and real, and immediate.
00:13:46.49\00:13:50.36
And we were not protected
by distance as we imagine.
00:13:50.39\00:13:55.13
We're not protected
like the drone pilots,
00:13:55.16\00:13:57.63
they sit in front of a screen,
00:13:57.67\00:13:59.13
half a world away
00:13:59.17\00:14:00.50
from where they're
zapping people to death,
00:14:00.54\00:14:03.04
all of that affection
disappeared in a moment.
00:14:03.07\00:14:06.54
And we saw people
living in New York City,
00:14:06.57\00:14:09.24
in the middle of a city,
plummeting to their deaths,
00:14:09.28\00:14:11.75
rather than to burn and
to fall with the buildings,
00:14:11.78\00:14:14.38
an amazing moment.
00:14:14.42\00:14:16.62
And after a short break,
00:14:16.65\00:14:17.99
I'll come back and
I'll finish this quote.
00:14:18.02\00:14:19.79
An amazing quote,
00:14:19.82\00:14:21.22
which shows not only a
perception of an event,
00:14:21.26\00:14:26.23
possibly the event that we saw,
00:14:26.26\00:14:28.10
but how we
should respond to this.
00:14:28.13\00:14:30.07
Stay with us. I'll be back.
00:14:30.10\00:14:31.87