Endure To The End — The Foundation — Bible Study

(My personal thoughts — notice how often the word says DAILY. They continued daily. They broke bread from house to house. They encouraged one another daily. This is not a religion of one hour on Sunday, and one hour in the middle of the week — a seat warmed twice, and the rest of life a person's own. The first church lived it every day, together, and the Lord added to them daily those who were being saved. A faith set aside until the next meeting is a faith that hardens through the deceitfulness of sin. He is not asking for a visit. He is asking for a life.)

(My personal thoughts — notice what the Lord does with the lukewarm. Not only the cold, but the lukewarm — the one who has just enough religion to be comfortable, and not enough to be alive — that one He will spit out of His mouth. To stay joined to Him is not to hang on by a thread, warm on Sunday and cold all week. It is to burn. Better hot, He says, or even cold, than that middle thing that makes Him sick. Stay in Him, and let Him keep you burning to the end.)

(My personal thoughts — a baby in Christ may reach for the flame even after the Father has said no. That is the stumble of a child who is still learning, and the Father knows it. A grown son or daughter should know better. But here is the mercy of it: even when we sin, we are not thrown away. We have an Advocate — Jesus Christ the righteous — who is always alive and always speaking to the Father on our behalf. So we get back up. A just man falls seven times and rises again. We examine ourselves, confess what we did, turn from it, and go back to our Father's business, leaving the past behind — because God has already removed our sins as far as the east is from the west, and He remembers them no more. But do not turn this mercy into an excuse. Ezekiel gives the other side: a righteous man who turns away from his righteousness and dies in his sin will not be saved by the righteousness he once had. Peter shows the same picture in the New Testament, and he quotes the old proverb to do it: a dog going back to its vomit, a washed pig going back to the mud — someone who escaped the filth of the world through knowing the Lord, and then turned back into it, worse off at the end than at the beginning. And Jesus says to those who worked evil in His name, "I never knew you." Now hold both edges of this sword, and do not blunt either one. The Lord says no one can snatch His sheep out of His hand — no enemy, no power, no man. That safety is real, and it is His grip that holds, not ours. But look at how He describes those sheep: they hear His voice, and they follow Him. The word never shows a sheep torn from His hand; it shows the washed one turning and walking back to the mud, of his own will. Scripture holds both of these — the hand that cannot be broken open, and the warning not to turn away — and it does not melt them into one easy formula, so neither will we. Do not despair when you fall: the Advocate is real, and the road home is open. Do not presume you can turn back freely: the warning is real too. Fall, but rise. Rise, and endure to the end.)

(My personal thoughts — mark it well: if what we believe does not agree with what the messengers preached, then WE are wrong, not them. They saw Him, and heard Him, and were sent by Him. Whoever listens to God listens to them. To put a teacher above the apostles is to listen to the spirit of error.)

(My personal thoughts — even in the apostles' own day, people slipped in and twisted the teaching. How much more in our own time, when so much of what is taught is new, has no root in the old word, and is not handled correctly. Something is not true because many people believe it, and not because it is old in the mouths of men. It is true only if it agrees with what the messengers delivered.)

(My personal thoughts — and this is exactly that hour: people who will not put up with sound teaching, but gather teachers for themselves by the crowd — as many as will feed the itch of their ears, and tell them what they want to hear. A person can build a whole house of teachers, every one agreeing with him, and every one wrong. The truth was never proven by a majority, never made true by the number who believe it, and never bent to please the ear. Turn away from the truth, and you are turned — the word says it — to fables.)

(My personal thoughts — we are not free to pick and choose among God's words, keeping the easy ones and leaving the hard ones. A person lives by EVERY word. To add to it, or to take from it, is to be found a liar before the God who spoke it.)

(My personal thoughts — here is the one stone many people rest their whole argument on: the dying thief was saved, they say, and he was never baptized; therefore baptism is not necessary. Let us weigh it now in the light of the word, and see what it really stands on.)

(My personal thoughts — now weigh the thief in this light. The word never once says he was not baptized. That is something people assume, and then build a whole doctrine on their own assumption. But listen to what the word DOES say: Jerusalem, and ALL Judea, and all the country around the Jordan went out and were baptized, confessing their sins. The common people and the tax collectors were baptized. The prostitutes believed. Only the Pharisees and the lawyers refused, and were not baptized. The thief was no Pharisee — he was one of the people, a criminal, exactly the kind who crowded to John's baptism of repentance. And on the cross he did the very thing baptism was for: he confessed his sin — we are getting what our deeds deserve. Add to that the fact that the Lord's own disciples baptized even more people than John, all through that land, over more than three years. So the truth is the opposite of the excuse: the word does not lead us to a thief who was never baptized, but to one who almost certainly WAS baptized with the rest. Those who lean on him have leaned on a man who was already washed.)

(My personal thoughts — and suppose the very worst, that he was never baptized at all: even then he is no rule for you. He died before the new covenant took effect. A will has no force while the one who made it is still alive, and the LORD had not yet died. So the thief was received the way people were received in the old days, before the door of this new covenant was ever opened. And he was nailed to a cross, hand and foot, and could not come down to be baptized. God requires obedience from a person in what they are able to do. What a dying man COULD not do is no excuse for a living man who CAN. You are not nailed to a cross; you can obey.)

(My personal thoughts — so the whole excuse hangs on an assumption the word never states. It stands against the plain evidence the word does give. That is a house built on the sand, and its fall will be great. But the command stands on the rock, and it has not moved: repent, and be baptized, every one of you.)

(My personal thoughts — yet hear even this with reverence, and not with a careless assumption that you already understand it all. Many have assumed, and been wrong. And we who bring you these words do not claim to know everything. We are still learners, and ready to be corrected by the word and by those who were sent. But we dare not change what the messengers plainly said. So examine it for yourself: if we have been wrong, let the word correct us. But be careful that you are not led astray by listening to the voices of men above the voice of the apostles of the Lamb. We look at this particular question in such detail as one example of how you can still believe something even when the Bible seems, on the surface, to be pushing hard the other way. We must rightly divide the word: we cannot add to it, and we cannot take away from it.)