Was the U.S. Supreme Court Fully Right About Studying The Bible?: full transcript and answers

▶ 0:00 Today we’re going to ask this question: was the United States Supreme Court fully right about the constitutional right to study the Bible? We’re going to remind you of the 1980 Supreme Court decision that quoted from a 1963 Supreme Court decision—so thus two witnesses confirming. And this is what the Supreme Court said: the Bible may constitutionally be used in an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics—what we know as morality, Bible morality—comparative religions, or the like. The Supreme Court thusly said it is constitutionally legal.

▶ 0:58 History in the Bible: it’s true from creation to 100 A.D., or over 4,000 years of history. Civilization: the pre-flood civilizations to Abraham and the Hebrews, to the Assyrians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, and all the other civilizations that came with it—all the Canaanites and all the “-ites” in Canaan land. We have a recorded history of civilization. Ethics: as we have shown you, Bible morality sums up all the law—Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and the prophets. Comparing religion: the Bible’s one holy God versus a sect, a group out of that group, and the doctrines of men which create sect groups in groups, and then idolatry,

▶ 1:59 devils, the worship of devils, witchcraft, and animism—which is a spirit is in the rocks and the trees and everything—and even the evolutionists say that humans are part of nature. Now, what did the Supreme Court miss? See, they gave us these things, but what did they miss and just told us to deal with it? Well, Jesus, number one. And Luke 24:44: all things must be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms concerning Me. So Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah down to Malachi and all the prophets in between wrote about Jesus, and 150 Psalms wrote about Jesus.

▶ 2:55 Eternal life. John 5:39: search the Scriptures, the Bible; in them you think you have eternal life, and they testify of Me. The Scriptures tell us about life after death. And you won’t come to Me that you might have life. So not only is there eternal life, but the door to eternal life is Jesus Christ. The last-day judgment they overlooked. Matthew 12:36: every idle word men shall speak they will give an account in the day of judgment—and thus just idle words. But in Revelation 20:12, at the great white throne judgment, they were judged according to their works, their behavior, written in the books. God’s keeping a record of our speech and of our behavior.

▶ 3:47 In John 5:22, the Father judges no one but gives all judgment to the Son. So Jesus is what the Bible talks about. Jesus is the door to eternal life, and Jesus is the one we are going to have to give an account to of the words that we speak and the lifestyle that we lead. They also missed that the Bible talks about the spirit world. For instance, God is a Spirit, an invisible Spirit; the Holy Spirit is a Spirit; angels are ministering spirits; cherubim and seraphim are creatures of the spirit world; demons and Satan are spirits.

▶ 4:42 Witchcraft: except for drugs and witchcraft of the flesh, the Bible says there’s three sources of witchcraft, but one of them source is demonic. The next thing they missed is happiness. Everybody is looking for happiness, and the Bible says in Psalms 144:15, happy is the people whose God is the Lord. John 16:22: Jesus summed it up and says your joy, your happiness, no one can take from you. That’s how powerful it is in the Bible. Acts 5:41: we have proof of that. The apostles were beaten, and after they were beaten they departed rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name. So we actually see a fulfillment of joy that people could not take away and circumstances could not take away.

▶ 5:36 Now the Declaration of Independence, by the way, gives us the right to Bible happiness. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal,” and they were endowed by their Creator with certain unchangeable rights, and among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Happy is the people whose God is the Lord—a joy that no situation and nobody can take away. Another thing they missed is how to escape the lake of fire judgment. We’ve told you this before: I believe and have faith in Jesus. You’ve got to admit you’re wrong, confess your sin, confess your crimes. You’ve got to repent and turn from those wrong. You’ve got to be baptized in water. And then you need to grow. Growing to this aspect: you’ve got to add to your faith. I don’t care if you’re a humanist or an atheist—whatever you believe in, you have no excuse not to add to your faith virtue or moral excellence

▶ 6:42 and knowledge about moral excellence, and self-control that you behave moral excellently, and patience with yourself and others while they’re attaining moral excellence, godliness—that’s such a respect for God that you obey His moral word—and a love that does no harm to his neighbor. We have to add these things because we didn’t get them when we were saved. 2 Peter 1:10 is where these “add to your faith” come from, and Peter said there, if you do these things you will never, never fall. So see, we’ve got to add these things. It’s our responsibility to add moral excellence and the knowledge of it and self-control and patience to our life.

▶ 7:36 Now these same principles will work in civil crimes. Sin is a violation of God’s law; crime is a violation of a nation’s law—same word, same terminology. In James 5:19 it says if anyone wanders from the truth, he who turns a sinner, a criminal, from the error of his way shall save a soul from death. And so the objective is to turn that criminal from their way and save them from a physical death possibly here, or physical destruction, and especially eternal destruction. 1 Peter chapter 2:13: submit to every ordinance, every law of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors as those who are sent by the king for the punishment

▶ 8:28 of evildoers and the praise of those that do good. And so civil government is designed to correct the criminal, to turn them from the error of their ways. To sum it up: the Bible purpose of a just government is to punish those that harm others and themselves, and the purpose of punishment is to correct the criminals so they may lead a good moral life, and if they refuse to be corrected, remove them from society. If they refuse to change their ways they shouldn’t be allowed to hurt people anymore. Again, these same principles work in civil crimes, the civil world.

▶ 9:22 We must believe and have faith in a just judicial system and its officials. We must admit that crime is wrong. We must turn from that which is wrong and add to our faith moral excellence, the knowledge of moral excellence, self-control so we can operate moral excellence, patience while we’re getting there—or to ourself and others—and a respect for government, a just government, to obey just laws, and love others by not harming them. And if the criminal will not change, they’ve got to be removed from society. What do we do when the law or officials are bad?

▶ 10:27 We need to do good, like people did when the slave laws and the Indian laws and the separate-but-equal laws and the women-inferior laws were bad. Remember the signers of the Declaration of Independence: 12 of them lost their homes, they were burned to the ground; nine died in the war of independence; five were captured and tortured mercilessly. They paid a price for taking a stand for what was right. A person by the name of [unclear] Lee was imprisoned 25 years for helping slaves escape. Jonathan Walker was branded with SS on his hand—“slave stealer”—by, in court, a burning on an iron. He was scarred for life and fined and imprisoned. Quakers were the first in 1678 to stand up against slavery and against women inferiority, and it took over a hundred years of them preaching it and living it for America to finally catch on. Other people were fined. Thomas Garrett was fined $165,000 in today’s money and kept on helping slaves.

▶ 11:41 So we’ve got to disobey laws and stand up against corrupt officials that want to enforce them. In the Bible the midwives would not abort Hebrew babies, and God saw that act and blessed them with a family of their own. He did good to them for not aborting babies. And we have a right to stand up against Roe versus Wade and the abortion of babies because adults lack self-control. Daniel prayed when the law said you can’t pray. When the law was passed he went and prayed publicly, and he was sentenced to be executed in the lion’s den, and God intervened. The apostles who rejected the censorship of the Scriptures and speech—they said don’t you talk about Jesus from the Scriptures anymore—they were beaten, they were killed and they were jailed, and they said whether we ought to obey God or man, you decide.

▶ 12:34 John the Baptist was beheaded because he preached salvation of repentance and water baptism, and he publicly disapproved of Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife. And we have a right to stand against same-sex marriage in America. We need to do what other good people did both in the Bible and in our nation’s history and stand for right laws and stand for right morality in America.