Man in his wisdom makes an image like himself. Do we really love ourselves that much? Would you really want your son or your daughter to be exactly like you? Are you that perfect? You hope that they would have all the nice features of your beautiful wife and her kindness and her sweetness and her gentleness and all this. And just as sure as you have a child that you want to be this way they’ll be like YOU. And that isn’t always the most pleasant thing is it?
But we are looking here tonight at an attempt that may or may not have been made, we may be looking at a hoax. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is or is not a hoax. The thing that I see is that the possibility exists! Where they can take a cell from you and create another human being from your cell. And I’ve spent most of last week thinking about tonight and wondering and praying and asking the Lord what I would preach on. And my thoughts all seemed to run to the End of the Age and to those things that we face and then these articles came out. So my special thanks to brother Jim Hinkley and the PI for their articles because I’m going to turn to the book of Revelation.
And when I turn to the book of Revelation, what we have said to you thus far suddenly takes on great importance. I think somebody said something about the word of God either last night or today, and that is that you can read it and you can reread it and you always see something that really didn’t seem so important before. And in reading these scriptures that I’m going to read to you tonight, there is one facet, there is one outstanding statement in each of them, there is one reference in each of them that stood out to me in the light of what is before us tonight.
The thirteenth chapter of the book of Revelation. Reading from the eleventh verse on for a few verses here, “And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”
In the thirteenth chapter of the book of Revelation there are two beasts that appear. The first is the Anti-christ. The second is that which is called the False Prophet. Now there isn’t a thing that I read in the scriptures tonight that is not significant and is not contemporary with today’s life. For all of a sudden, we find that in many circles there is great emphasis being laid upon prophecy, the gift of prophecy, and people are being taught by the precepts of men to prophesy. They are being encouraged to give messages in tongues and interpretation and if they do not understand how these gifts of the Spirit work, then they are given classes where they may learn how to exercise these gifts of the Spirit. I find the early church did not have classes in these particular areas, in the manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit. They didn’t need classes because the Teacher dwelt within. If you have the Teacher dwelling within, after all isn’t He the one who operates the gift?.