Four Hundred Year Argument - Part 4
Copied from the sermon notes of Pastor Don Elmore
March 7, 2021
Scripture Reading: Acts 26:6, 7
6) “And now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto OUR fathers:
7) Unto which promise OUR twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come. For which hope’s sake, king Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews.
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Who would call Raphael Warnock, one of the two new senators of Georgia, a valid Christian pastor? “America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness,” he preached from his pulpit. Warnock is a black pastor of a black church in Atlanta. It is the church where the former communist civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. (real name: Michael King) pastored. Warnock hates the military, the police, the nation and he is very, very, very pro-abortion. Is any true Christian, especially a pastor, pro-abortion? He also is a communist. And he is a so-called Christian pastor! Hogwash!
The second Georgia senator, Jon Ossoff, said the following: “I’m descended from Ashkenazi [Jewish] immigrants who fled pogroms in the early 20th century, and I grew up among relatives who were Holocaust survivors.” [Ossoff (has an Australian mother and a Lithuanian Jewish father, who came to the United States in the early 1900s) was born in Georgia in 1987. The second world war ended in 1945. Ossoff was born 42 years after the war was over. So, when Ossoff was growing up, it would be around the year 2000, (he would have been 13 years old), his relative holocaust survivors (on his father’s side) had to be at least 75 years or older. Do you think that he grew up among relatives who were Holocaust (death camp) survivors? Did all the survivors from the death camp, who survived, who he mentioned above, move to Atlanta from Lithuania? Or do you think he just said this for political advantage?

Et tu, Brute?” from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Just seconds before the assassination of the Roman emperor and being stabbed to death, Caesar sees one of the young Senators with knife in hand and exclaims “you also?” Imagine the last words out of your mouth is the surprising question to someone you thought was a loyal friend, but instead your executioner. To live by the sword is to die by the sword has become a common refrain for pacifism, but Jesus' admonition to Peter lobbing off the ear of the high priest's SWAT team member was not anti-sword; it was protecting Peter from being arrested himself, even though Peter was just trying to protect his Master. After Jesus was betrayed by Judas, the cops moved in to make the arrest. In hindsight, Peter should have aimed his sword at Judas, but this was a perfect moment of predestination as Jesus told him, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?" John 18:11. The metaphor of a cup often signifies a measure of divine affliction, possibly derived from the custom of some nations putting someone to death with a cup of poison. Jesus had come to die as a sacrifice for sin and betrayal was a necessary ingredient to teach us many lessons which we'll explore today.

