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And so once more, thank you very much for your kind invitation to come and speak with you on these few occasions. Tonight I choose to use the time you have so liberally given me to tell you some substantial reasons why I personally believe the Old Testament is the word of God our Creator. The Old Testament, as you know, is the first half of the Bible, and nowadays it has become for many people an exceedingly obscure book. Few folks these days know much about the New Testament, and children are to be heard around our streets who say they do not know who Jesus Christ was. And if the New Testament nowadays is to many people a closed book, the Old Testament is something that they cannot even imagine what it could be. You listen to any quiz on the BBC, and questions about the stars and the galaxies and dinosaurs will be answered with alacrity. Questions that come from the Old Testament, more often than not, draw a blank. It is a largely an unknown book. And I want to tell you tonight why I believe that that book, so largely unknown today, is indeed the inspired word of God, of our Creator. Not only a record of things that happened in the past, but a means by which, if we allow him, our Creator will talk directly to the hearts of us, his creatures. Many people I know, if they know anything about the Old Testament, will complain that as far as they are aware, it's a s- a book that talks about savage battles, with people destroying other tribes in the name of their religion, and people find the very idea offensive. Comes as a surprise to many such people that the lovely exhortation, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, that comes from the Old Testament and comes from one of the very earliest books in the Old Testament, namely the book so-called Leviticus. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. And as we ponder our modern world, now coming to the end of this second millennium, we shall immediately see, shall we not, that such advice, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, is by no means old fashioned or out of date. Our century, the most progressive for its sophistication and inventions, will go down as the bloodiest century in all these two thousand years since the year of our Lord Jesus Christ. It has been the most violent century without exception, and continues to be. The Old Testament word that God spoke to his people in that far off day remains relevant in the extreme to our modern so-called civilization. God's demand, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. So allow me then to give you some reasons, I count them substantial, they are only some among many, why I believe this Old Testament is the word of our Creator. First of all, it tells us right from the very beginning just exactly who and what we are. In the beginning, it says, as it writes its first page. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, which he did in successive periods of divine creation, rising to its climax when on the sixth day God said, let us make man. And then listen to the wonderful story. Let us make man not as our slave, not as our drudge. Let us make man in our image, and let them have dominion over the earth. So now the Bible, this Old Testament, tells us what exactly we are. We find ourselves in this vast universe, on this planet, for a few fleeting years. What are we? What were we made for? Where are we going? We're traveling, certainly, whether we will it or not, traveling with the passing of the years, and as we get older, the years pass with an ever increasing rapidity. Who are we and what are we? I heard of a student once in the doldrums, as some students get, and particularly if they've been on drugs and drummed up a lot of, uh, unhealthy excitement. He described himself as an eczema on the face of the earth. Ask any drug addict what they are. What will they reply? The The Bi- Bible says we're ma- men made creatures of God, made in the image of God, made to have dominion over the earth. More important, if you will, than all of the galaxies that fly in space. You may think at first moment that's an exaggeration, but I think if you will ponder it, you'll find how that is obviously true. Take, for instance, the nearest star to us, which is the sun in the sky. Mighty big, isn't it? Vastly big. Compared with my brain, why my brain is so tiny, and the sun is so big, you see. But then you'll be, uh, not wise to think that significance lies in size all the time. A cartload of old hay isn't so valuable as an ounce of gold, is it? Size isn't everything. And what's more, you know, the sun, for all its tremendous size, all it is is a lot of old gas with elementary particles creating their own fun in their glorious atomic furnace, doing us a good service by sending us heat and light and so forth and keeping us alive. That's all it is, a lot of old gas. And I unashamedly, without pride, tell you that, uh, my brain, tiny as it is, is more significant than the sun is, and you can see that is so, can't you? And your brain even more so, because I know the sun is there. The sun doesn't know I'm here. If it did, it would shine a bit more, I think, in my part of the world. I know it's there. It doesn't know I'm here. What is more, by the help of our modern scientists, I know how the sun works. The sun doesn't know how I work. A baby's brain is more significant than the sun. And the vast galaxies that swirl in space, what are they except great collocations of suns? That's all they are. So much stuff, so much gas, so many elementary particles. The Bible that says, and you, as a human being, are more significant than any one of them or all of them put together. Made in the image of God. Made to have dominion. Hence man's remarkable ability. We salute all the tremendous progress that mankind has made, do- do we not, through science, using a God-given intelligence to understand and begin to control their physical environment. That's what God intended, anyway. Made in the image of God. And you will see the same thing if you read a little bit further into that first book of the Bible, where God straightly forbids any man to murder his fellow man. Why shouldn't you murder your fellow man? Have you never felt you'd like to? Well, perhaps not you. But you see, if you had a computer, that in spite of your patient application to its keyboard and its CD ROMs or rompers or whatever they're called, it will say, aha, uh, and it didn't suit you, there's nothing to stop you putting your fist through it, is there, and kicking it to pieces. Why shouldn't you? It's only an old computer. It may have learned to speak. Marvelous. E, but uh, there's no reason why you shouldn't put your foot through it and destroy it. But if your neighbor doesn't happen to please you, you're not supposed to put your foot through him and destroy him. Why not? The Bible forbids it because man is made in the image of God as God's representative, as God's viceroy, and to murder a man is to do insult to his maker. What a magnificent doctrine it is, and what a sorry world ours has been, even this modern century, as a result of men forgetting this fact. We used to tell the Russians, we tell them still, though they're rather sensitive about it now, to tell the Russians that if Stalin had believed what the Bible said and says, man made in the image of God, Stalin would not have eliminated sixty million human beings just for the sake of his political theories. For theories that in the end they had to admit were wrong and didn't work. Man made in the image of God. In the ancient world, men lost hold of this fact that man is made in the image of God. The Bible explains to us they didn't like to retain God in their knowledge, and any intimate knowledge of our present generation would show the aptitude of that remark. Men prefer to forget God. The result was, however, that when men forgot God, they didn't turn to worshiping nothing. You observe your fellow men if you haven't observed it before. Man has to worship something. He'll make a god of something. And when men lost touch with and lost hold on the reality of the living God, they started to make themselves substitute gods. They deified the sun and worshiped the sun god. They deified the moon and worshipped the moon god. They deified the god of the storm, and they called him Baal. They deified sex, and they called her Aphrodite among the Greeks or Astarte amongst the Babylonians, and they worshipped her and reduced themselves to animals in the process. Then some people, they, they, they made a goddess out of chance, you know, and they worshipped her as well. And others made a goddess out of fate, and they said, que sera, sera, what will be, will be. And they worshipped and believed in fate, mindless, purposeless, red fate as the ultimate power that controlled their lives. That was a part ago. Are men any different nowadays? A generation that's lost its hold on the living God, sometimes led by scientists. And as we were saying in our first lecture, the scientists will tell them there is no God. So what are we? We are just the accidental product of mindless forces. Let's stop with that and think about its implication. Is that what we are? We don't control the universe. If there's a God who made us, made us for a purpose, we have glorious hope, don't we? There's no God. If there's no God, if we're the product of blind forces, mindless, then there's no purpose in life. You know, in the ancient world, there was one exquisite torture that people thought up to torture their enemies with. They would put them in a cell. It would be almost completely dark, but enough to see the walls. After the prisoner had been there some months, maybe, he suddenly wake up to the impression that the place wasn't quite so big as it used to be. Noticing this day after day, he would begin to get alarmed and start to measure it with his feet and would find that two of the walls were gradually and slowly coming in. And then, of course, his intelligence got to work and saw that if this continued, one day those two walls would meet and crush the very life out of him. He had the intelligence and the arithmetic to measure it and see what was going to happen. He had no power to stop it happening. You know, ladies and gentlemen, if there be no God, you are a prisoner like that, in a prison house. And the prisoner is this universe, and the jail keepers are the mindless powers of the universe, the great forces. And if there's no God, and it's these mindless forces that produced you, let me remind you that those same mindless forces will one day destroy you. One of these days, a little germ, virus or whatnot will get inside you. It has no sense in its head. You will have the intelligence to see what it's going to do to you. All your intelligence will not be enough to stop it doing it. And it will destroy you. Your body, your brain, all your aesthetic sense, and make a pulp of you. Beyond it, no hope. It is obviously to me, ladies and gentlemen, that we have to choose. What are we going to believe? We're going to believe those who, with considerable intelligence, spin these theories that we're the products of mindless forces that one day mindlessly shall destroy us. Shall we believe them? That is to make a mock even of our intelligence. That is to tell us that ultimately our intelligence counts for nothing. Our intelligence will be destroyed and made a nothing of by mindless forces, and when they've destroyed us, they won't even know they've done it. You believe it? Does it sound true? Oh, listen to God's wonderful book called the Old Testament. It says, no, that is the lie. The truth is that the living God is our creator. He made us for himself. He designs a glorious eternity of friendship with him, made us to have friendship with our creator and enjoy his fellowship forever. That's the truth. The other is the lie. When Jesus Christ was on earth, he traced that lie to its origin, to the very father of lies, Satan himself. For he was a liar from the very beginning, he stood not in the truth, and he is a murderer. Why cannot our modern men and women see that in getting rid of God in their thinking, they are consigning themselves to this fearful meaninglessness? The men and women do, don't they? And they go along worshiping. Well, nowadays, I gather the old goddess Chance is, is very much in the upping, isn't she? Her star is right high in the firmament, Chance. Well, now you have the lottery, don't you? And people pray to chance. You don't, of course. But if you went, uh, in the Far East, you'd see the people queuing up in the Buddhist shrines, consulting the priest and, uh, putting their little prayers on a whatnot and paying for the prayer and offering it to the gods that they might be directed to choose the right football number in the football pools. And people today worship the god, the goddess of chance. Their hope for a bright future rests upon that non-entity, chance. Sad and sorry, isn't it? I say to all my atheist friends, I say, look, let's test our theories, shall we? How they work out in practice. Come, here's a woman, she's thirty three years old, mother of three children. She's been diagnosed as having terminal cancer. Shall we both come and speak to her? What do we say? I said, I'll go first. I'll say, my dear, I'm exceedingly sorry to hear what the doctors have said. I want to tell you there's hope for you, my dear. For you are created by a loving God who loves you personally. You have sinned like the rest of us. The God who made you loves you, and so that you might be forgiven, came in the person of the Son of God to die for you, that you might be forgiven. One day, if you trust him, he will raise that body of yours from the grave and give you a body like to the glorious body of the Lord Jesus, that you might enjoy with God, your maker, an eternity of bliss. What is more, my dear, I shall say, even the pain that you now suffer is not meaningless, you know. For God says that our affliction, which is for this moment of this temporary life, worketh for them that love God an exceedingly great weight of glory. There's hope for you. If you will accept God's son as your savior. I say, come on, atheist, you talk to the woman. And what will the atheist say? What will the mere worldly man say? Hope you will win the pools, my dear. What can the atheist say? Sorry to hear. But there you are, that's how it is. We're all going that way, and in the end there's no hope. Your suffering is absolutely meaningless. When you're dead, you're done for. They won't add it, but they might as well. You might as well shoot your brains out. Oh, my dear friend, will you not listen to God? God, your maker, who made you and loves you, and longs to give you the honor he designed for you, made in the image of God, made to reign with Jesus Christ, God's son, for all God's eternity, and enjoy with him all those ambitious projects that God will put afoot through the unending ages that are to come. Why will you believe the lie that says you are utterly, ultimately insignificant, without meaning or purpose, and that your very intelligence in the end will be overcome and reduced to nothingness? There's a second reason why I believe the Bible, the Old Testament, is the word of God. Only one amongst others, you'll see, but I believe it's the word of God because it tells us another thing very significant about ourselves, and that is that feeling of right and wrong that we have inside us. Everybody has it, any en- except those who are imbeciles, perhaps, but everybody has it. Little children have it, don't they? You'll see. As Tommy takes Johnny's toy, you see, and uh Johnny, uh, is triumphant, and Mum comes in, and Johnny complains, but Mum reads it the wrong way, and she says, let him have it, you see, so uh Johnny gets Tommy's toy and all that kind of thing, and a little shout, isn't fair. Uh. Innate in us, isn't it? We've all got that feeling of what's right and wrong. It doesn't leave us when we grow up, does it? You listen the next time you go to the Supermac or supermarket, I don't know what you call them here. It will say, and listen to the two women, there's Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Smith is saying to Mrs. Brown, have you heard about Mrs. Green? No. Mm-hmm. What about Mrs. Green? Well, she's run off with another man's wife, with another man, a woman's husband. Oh, says the other woman, she oughtn't to have done that. She's got some concept of what's right and wrong, hasn't she? She's accusing the other woman of having done something wrong. Oh yes. And the first woman replies, yes, I know, but you know her first husband, he was a terror. Oh. Now she's excusing the dear lady. And the Bible points out that that, what does it show? It shows we have an innate sense of right and wrong. And when people do wrong, we accuse them. Or sometimes when they do wrong, we excuse them. And certainly when we do wrong ourselves, we excuse ourselves, don't we? Why should we bother? What is this sense of wrong and right and wrong that we've got? Where did it come from? Is it sort of just a taste? Yeah. You say, have some, uh, have some rhubarb. No, I don't like rhubarb. What do you say? Oh, you're wrong there, you ought to. Well, no, you don't, of course. Which I said so, poor man. You, you don't like rhubarb? Well, what do you like? Oh, I like peaches. Oh, you like peaches? I say, you ought jolly well to like peaches too. No, no, I don't. Whether you like rhubarb or peaches is a, is a matter of taste. There's no right and wrong in it, is it? Ah. So as I took that to, you know, uh, Farmer Brown and Farmer Giles, and Farmer Brown says, you've stolen my chicken, chicken. And the other chap replies, I know that, I like stealing chickens. And the first man says, but I don't like stealing chickens. Well, never mind, if you don't like stealing chickens, don't steal them, my boy. But I like stealing chickens. Well, you wouldn't stand that for five minutes, would you? You can jolly well see that right and wrong is not a matter of taste. What is it then? And the Bible tells us right from the very start, that that is a feeling put in our hearts. You'll say it is the law of God written on our hearts, says the New Testament. And behind that feeling of right and wrong stands the moral authority of the Creator. I believe that. And it's exceedingly important, isn't it? You'll say, poor old John Major, God help him. I mean that seriously. But he had a little program not so long ago getting back to basics. But before he could spell the last letter in the word basics, his colleagues were defying the law of God left, right and center, engaging in all kinds of doubtful and sometimes immoral practices. And so our modern world, as it tries to decide, what should we tell the children in school? How should we tell them to behave? Then it can't make up its mind because a multitude of the teachers are atheists anyway. So there's no code that they can agree to. If... side, then of course when I tell you that you ought to behave that way, you'll say, no, but I don't agree with your code. This is what I think it should be. How shall we have any code of behavior? Except it be based on this, that the Bible declares that behind the right sense of right and wrong stands the moral law of the Creator himself. To many people, that sounds grim. They want to escape that. They want to be free to make up their own minds, to do their own thing. They're not going to be kept down by any law of God. And see what happens. I invite my atheist friends. I say, look, we'll come, shall we, to Auschwitz. We'll say the extermination camp. And we'll come and we'll talk to the victims. Now, tomorrow they're going to the gas chambers. What should we say to them? Um, as we come, they shout out, we want justice. Whatever shall we say? We'll have to be honest, won't we? And say, you're not going to get justice. Tomorrow you're going to be gassed. They say, we, we have a right to justice. I shall say, yes, you have indeed. I'm not going to get it here on Earth, but there is a God. And your sense of justice and your longing for justice is a God-given desire and longing and is valid. And the God who gave it to you is a God that one day will see that you get justice done. There's coming a day when he will judge the world in righteousness and put right earth's wrongs. Come on, atheist, you speak. They say we want justice. What will the atheist say? Well, they say you're not going to get it. What is more, there's no God, and there's no life to come. You're not going to get justice in this life. You're not going to get it in the life to come because there isn't one. And so the demented prisoner says, are you telling me that all my life and I've been hoping for justice, justice was a nothing? Yes. Oh, friends, what terrible nightmare society gets itself into, doesn't it? When it ignores the law of God written on the heart, with its concomitant promise that there is a God in heaven who cares for justice, and one day will bring every deed ever committed and every person that ever lived before his judgment bar. Therein is hope. Ah, but of course, if we begin to talk like that, then there's another question that comes up, and not merely about nations, surely, but presently about ourselves. Because we can forget about Hitler and Stalin and nation- national troubles and so forth. Because if there's a God who has planted his law within our hearts, then we ourselves have a personal question, don't we? We have not kept that law. I haven't, have you? Does it matter? This third reason why I believe the Old Testament is the word of God. Because from the very earliest, God began to teach people when they were smitten in their conscience with a sense of the guilt of sin, he began to teach them the way of forgiveness through a substitutionary sacrifice. He taught them, for instance, that when they were guilty before God, then they might bring a lamb, perhaps, and they brought it to the altar that God had ordained, and they laid their hands upon the head of the, of the lamb and confessed their sin. And the lamb was killed, its blood shed. It was sacrificed upon the altar. And God laid it down as a principle that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. That can sound hard when you first hear it, can't it? But it is the, the prescription, the command of a God of love. You see, if I get drunk, and I drive my car at eighty through your residential road, and I knock down your daughter and kill her, does it matter? When terrorists shoot people in Northern Ireland, does it matter? Or do we say, well, let's forget it, it's happened now, so we forget it, brush it under the carpet. But if I kill your daughter through my irresponsible behavior, the God of heaven will never say it doesn't matter. For he loves your daughter. And he loves your daughter with an eternal love. He will never say it didn't matter. Therefore, with God, forgiveness is not just agreeing to forget it. God has to uphold the values of his law, the values of his own heart. God himself says there's a payment to be made before that irresponsible man can be forgiven. That was what God was saying. When he told the ancient people, and Israel in particular, that for forgiveness of sin, I were to bring a sacrifice, and it would die in the place of the sinner. Many people misunderstood that, you know. They thought, came to think it was a kind, simply of a fine. You did something wrong, oh, you said that, that's going to cost me a penny or two. I shall have to go to the temple and, and, and, and hand in a sacrifice, and then I shall, that will be the fine paid, and I shall be free again. Uh, you'll see. Carry on the next time. You know, like it, not with you, of course not. What am I thinking? But like some people, when they go downtown and they're hurried to get in the bank before it closes, and they want to park, and the only parking place, uh, free is double lines, and they know they oughtn't to park on the double lines, but they must have the money before the weekend, you'll see. So, so I say, oh, well, bother it, if I get caught, I'll pay. Uh, uh, and they park on the double lines, and they go and they come out, and they've got a ticket. Well, they pay the ticket. But, you know, there's no repentance in it. If they're in a hurry the next time, they'll say, well, it's worth it. They'll, they'll park on the double lines again. The fine is just a fine. And some people can to think about God's sacrifices like that. They're not just fines. There was a man called Cain in the Bible. You'll see he brought out God a sacrifice, but God didn't accept it. Why not? Because Cain was wicked. No intention of repenting. When God found fault with Cain and his sacrifice too, Cain showed his true colors and murdered his brother. His idea of sacrifice was just a kind of a s- a fine that you paid God that allowed you to carry on as before, unrepentantly. That's not what God taught his people. God taught his people to know that, uh, if they would find forgiveness, there must first be repentance. But if they truly repented, then God would forgive them. God would forgive them by showing them first that the penalty might be paid, must be paid, and a substitutionary sacrifice be found. I was talking to some atheists in faraway Georgia, in Tbilisi, just last year at Easter time, and as we sat around the table, all these scientists, all of them scientists, atheists as far as we knew, the matter came up of these Old Testament habits, you know, the sacrifices in Israel and how they were taught about a substitutionary sacrifice. And I, they said to me, well, what use was that, an animal dying for somebody's sins? What use did that do? I said, well, in the end, it didn't do anything, do you see? Well, why then did God have the whole arrangement then, if it's impossible for bulls and goats to put away sin by laying down their lives on behalf of a sinner? What was all point of it? And I used an illustration from my far off youth. I said, I did remember when I was a little boy, very little, I should think, our parents gave us a toy shop. There was a, uh, toy cash register thing, and there were bottles of toy sweets, and there were bits of toy money dressed up to look like real money, you see. And we were meant to play with this toy, so the girls kept the shop, being the bright ones amongst us, they kept the shop, you see. They dished us out some toy money. We jolly well knew it wasn't real stuff. You couldn't buy real gob- gobstoppers with it. It was no, no, only toy money, you'll see. And we went along and we ordered the sweets from the department and got the sweets and the necessary change. And we knew it was only toys. You couldn't eat the sweets, they tasted horrible, you'll see. Huh. You say, why did your parents give you that toy money game thing? Well, to keep us quiet of a wet Monday afternoon in the first place, I suppose, but then to teach us the value of things, that sweets don't just drop out of the sky into your mouth, they have to be paid for. And though this was only toy money and toy sweets, it was beginning to teach us the price of things, the cost of it, so we should, when we should go out in the real world, we might face the fact that things cost real money. And I love that Old Testament, for God was educating people in his fatherly way to face the fact that forgiveness of sins costs. Somebody's got to pay the price of it. And these were but toy money, those sheep and oxen that they brought. They pointed to the coming of the one. The Old Testament called him God's anointed Messiah, God's own son that one day should come and pay in real money the real cost of sin. Marvelous story, that, isn't it? And as I was telling these scientists about these things and pointing out that the great sacrifice of Christ is the real thing, he paid it and it never needs to be done again. He paid it in full. One of them, a mathematician, said to me, that's all right for him, he was the son of God, but what about me? What can I pay? What a lovely thing it was to be able to tell the mathematician he didn't have to pay anything, for when Christ died, he paid the cost of sin, the price of forgiveness. Not for himself, he had never sinned, but for all the rest of us who will genuinely repent and put our faith in him. When John Baptist therefore said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John Baptist was now introducing the reality that God had been talking of in his picture language to children, so to speak, all the years down the centuries until the true sacrifice came. It's not old fashioned, is it? Well, that speaks to you and me directly. We have sinned. One day we must meet our creator. We have to repent, don't we? It's not enough to repent. Who shall pay the penalty of a broken law? Who shall pay the cost of forgiveness? How can I be forgiven and maintain my own standards, let alone God's standards, and know that the forgiveness have been, has been just? And here is God's answer, told again and again, right through the Old Testament, through all its pages, and finding its fulfillment in the New. Wonderful book, this Old Testament. It not only written centuries ago, not only did God speak its words centuries ago, he speaks them still. That Old Testament, do read it. That Old Testament is alive with the living word of the living God. And my final reason for believing the Old Testament is the word of God is because it offers us hope for the world. Therein it is different, say, from Hinduism, which teaches us that history is just going round in circles, getting nowhere. And the best thing is to do to try and escape this world. The world itself is meaningless. No, says the Bible, this is God's world, and God has a future for our world. He's going to judge the world, that is, administer it in righteousness, do you see? One day, says the Bible, this for groaning creation is going to be d- delivered from her bondage to corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Oh, marvelous hope. What is more, the Old Testament, uh, laid down the program so that we should see this is not imagination. It predicted in advance the program. It told of God's coming Messiah. It told us where he should be born. The pri- prophet Micah said it, Micah five, he should be born in Bethlehem. It told us that there would be a forerunner to come preparing the way of the Lord. He came, and his name was John Baptist. It told how the Messiah would die for our sins, according to the scripture. It told how he would be re- uh, buried and raised again the third day. It told us that he would be raised to the very throne of God in heaven, and then there would come a period. The psalm that predicted it said like this, God talking to the Messiah, sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. There would be a period between the Messiah's ascension and his coming again to put down his enemies and to rule in power and great glory. It told foretold these things. There is hope for our world. Jesus shall reign where'er the sun doth its successive journeys run. Oh, what a glory it shall be. And then shall the world be ruled in justice. He shall rule it by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof God has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised his son from the dead. That glorious hope written in the Old Testament, and the New Testament comments thus. Look, the Old Testament was saying about this program two things. It talked about how the Messiah would come and he would, uh, suffer first, and then he would enter his glory. And the New Testament says, do you see how the first bit's already been fulfilled? Messiah has come and he has suffered. And as surely as that first bit has been fulfilled, so will the second bit be fulfilled. So that through the scripture, through that Old Testament, we may be sure that we are not following a legend or a fable. Here is God speaking and laying down his plan so that we might compare event with the plan, see how far we are along in the program, be assured by what's been fulfilled already, that the rest shall be fulfilled. Old Testament, marvelous word of God to this present. I was in Jordan just at the beginning of, uh, uh, uh, uh, of, uh, last year with a friend of mine and his wife who have gone there to be missionaries. It's a Muslim country, as you know, and therefore you cannot go in as a missionary. He is a fully qualified dermatologist who had had determined from his student days to study medicine, become, uh, a consultant so that he might go abroad as a doctor to some Islamic country and there witness to the Lord Jesus. And now they're there. And he introduced me to some of his medical friends, do you see? Uh, they were nominally Muslims. One was very nominal, he didn't really believe anything, but if you scratched him, he was a Muslim. The other, a great and famous architect, delightful gentleman was he, a very devout Muslim, you see. And after dinner, we fell to talking about all sorts of things. I asked them how they defined life, because most of them were doctors, you see. And they said, well, we don't try, we leave that to God. Our job is to cure patients. I said, that's a very interesting point of view, you see. One thing borrowed another. And presently, of course, being Muslims, they told me that we, they're very, very gentle, I must say, and very gentlemanly men, not aggressive at all, kind and sensible men they were. And they said, you know, we all believe the same thing, don't we? We all worship the one same God, do see. So don't let's fight about anything. But they said, of course, you've got, you you've changed the Bible, haven't you? I said, really? We've changed the Bible? What, how have we changed the Bible? Well, they says you make the New Testament say that Jesus Christ died on the cross, don't you? Yes, that's what the New Testament says. Well, that's what you've changed. He didn't actually die on the cross. He was a prophet of God, and God would never have allowed a prophet of his to die on the cross, and your Jesus didn't die on the cross at all. It's you who changed it, you'll see. You've changed the original New Testament. I said, is that so? So I wonder if I could read you something. I drew, uh, my little pocket Bible out of my pocket. I said, I'd like to read you something. Um, this was written, uh, hmm, this was written at least seven centuries, I suppose, before Jesus Christ was born. And we Christians certainly didn't write it, and we certainly haven't changed it either. It was written by, uh, Jews, and was written, as I say, about seven centuries before Jesus was born. I said, wonder, could I read it to you? And I read him those lovely verses. He was wounded for our transgression. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, returned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. And there came a silence over the room. And then the architect said, you're going to say that's Jesus, aren't you? Well, I said, not just yet. I will do later on. Not just yet. I'm just going to point out to you that we Christians didn't write this. It was written seven centuries before Jesus Christ was born, and we Christians haven't changed it. And here was God telling the world what his plans were for the world's redemption, that one day his Messiah would come and he would die to bear our sins in his body, that we might be forgiven and justified. These are just four reasons of mine, oh, and there are a host of others, why I believe that by the Old Testament is the word of God. I commend it to you. God give you the wisdom and the grace and the courage and the strength to read it diligently and hear the voice of your living creator talking to you in it. Now, gracious God, we thank thee from our hearts, joyfully and gratefully, for this wonderful word that is thy Old Testament scripture. We thank thee for these holy men of God that spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. These are the words of eternity. We thank thee for them. Now, Lord, we come and we make each one his or her response to thee. Many of us long since came to the Savior and believed. Now, in these moments, we affirm our faith. And coming to thee, blessed Lord Jesus, we confess thee again as the Son of God, the Lamb of God, the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Now, Lord, we pray thy grace that having believed, we may walk and behave and live to thy glory, ever progressing in thy word and in thy practical salvation, looking for thy coming and longing to be with thee. So speak to every heart here, and if some have no faith to affirm, grant that this night they may hear the voice, the living voice of the Son of God, and find the creative power of his word in their heart, that in true repentance and faith they might come to him and pass from death to eternal life and eternal friendship with thee. These things we ask as we commit ourselves to thee now, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.