And you know, you wonder sometimes, you know,
there's all these denominations, there's all these religions out there.
How do we know which one's right? Everybody's got an interpretation,
but you know what, friend? That's not true. Okay.
You've got people who interpret the Bible correctly,
rightly dividing the word of truth.
And you've got people that twist scripture to teach what they want it to teach.
The Mormon church is built on the lusts of men like Joseph Smith and
Brigham Young, who wanted to just have a harem of underage girls.
And that's what they did.
They had a harem of underage girls.
And so they're going to build a doctrine around that. Oh, you know,
you can't go to heaven unless you get married girls and you want to go to the
real. Hey, you want to go all the way to last deal or you want to go celestial.
Hey, stick with me, babe. You're going to be in the highest level of heaven.
The celestial. Okay. That's where this doctrine comes from.
It's a bunch of dirty old men in Utah,
bringing a bunch of underage girls into the harem,
wanting to be married to 10 wives, 15 wives, 20 wives.
They're a bunch of perverts. That's what's going on.
And so they're going to build a doctrine around that.
And let me tell you something, the Bible, because it has 31,000 verses,
you can pretty much get the Bible to say whatever you want it to say.
If you take verses out of context and if you just grab a line here and grab a
line there and just rip it out of its context, twist it,
especially when you go get some other version of the Bible,
you can get the Bible to pretty much say whatever you want it to say.
If you want to twist scripture because there's 31,000 verses,
there's so much material to work with or with a good and an honest heart,
you could approach scripture and just take it for what it says and just read
what it says and not read into it. Things that aren't there.
You can just read it and read, okay, here's Jesus. He's baptized.
He's got 12 disciples. He's going around doing good. He's doing miracles.
He's preaching. He dies on the cross. He's worried about his mom.
He takes care of mom. He does, you know,
there's no mention of him being married or having kids or anything like that.
But if you want to read that into the text,
you're going to go dig for some passage in Isaiah. He shall see his seed.
And then you're like, where I'm trying to find Jesus getting married in the Bible.
Well, he attended a wedding. Must've been his wedding. If not,
then tell me who's it was. Cause if you can't tell me who got married,
I'm going to say it was Jesus. Well, you know what?
I can tell you that it wasn't Jesus. It wasn't Mary.
And it wasn't any of Jesus' disciples because they were all guests who were
invited. Okay.
But you see how if you want to approach the Bible with a weird doctrine,
you can put it in there. You can put whatever you want in the Bible.
And look, every weird Catholic doctrine, they have a verse to back it up,
but it's out of context. 100% of the time,
it doesn't actually say what they're saying it says when you actually read it in
context. Every weird Mormon doctrine, they can point you to something. Every,
I got a thing in the mail giving me all the biblical justifications for
worshiping Mary for this, you know, transubstantiation.
I mean, look, they have a verse for everything, but it's out of context.
It's being read into the text and not what the text actually says. You know,
you've got to read the Bible and take it at face value. And you know what?
I'm all for looking for deeper meanings because the Bible's really deep, right?
I like all the symbolism and the allegory and the deep meaning,
but you know what?
Always make sure before you go deep to get what's on the surface,
that should be the first thing, the first,
the first stage of Bible preaching and teaching should be just,
what does the text actually say? You know, I mean,
the first thing that I'm going to do when I'm reading the Bible and I get to a
story of, you know, Hagar and Ishmael and Hagar and Ishmael get thrown out.
You know, I'm just going to start out by just saying, you know,
Hagar and Ishmael got thrown out, you know, and tell about that story.
Then we'll go into the spiritual implications of, you know,
Hagar represents the Old Covenant and Isaac represents Christians.
And, you know, but that's secondary.
We always start with this.
Otherwise, people would say that the events in Genesis,
you know, they didn't even happen because it's all allegory.
There was no Abraham. There was no.
Let me tell you, Abraham was a real person.
Ishmael was a real person.
Isaac was a real person.
Noah and the Ark, that actually happened.
Those are real people.
Now, but we'll also say, okay,
the door on the Ark represented Jesus, right?
The flood represents damnation.
Being on the Ark represents salvation.
There's only one way, one door, Jesus.
But you know what?
Before I even begin to talk about that,
the first thing we're talking about is
God actually flooded the whole earth
and Noah built the Ark and went on the Ark with his family
and they were spared the physical destruction
of drowning in the flood.
You know, we don't want to lose sight of the main story.
Yes, I love the symbolism.
Yes, let's tie it in with the gospel of Jesus Christ,
but let's not lose or negate what the Bible actually says.
Okay, we need to go with just the surface meaning first
and make sure we nail that down.
Then let's go into the deeper meanings.
Instead of just always looking for something weird.
And that's why I started out the sermon
with be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines.
There are people out there,
they're just looking for something new, right?
It's like their goal, their search in the Bible
to see if they can find something nobody else found.
And the weirder it is, the cooler it is.