P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

“BUT AN ANGEL TOLD ME SO!”

It happened in the summer of 1949. A young preacher named Billy Graham was getting ready to lead out in an enormous citywide crusade right here in Los Angeles. This rising young star with the North Carolina accent and fiery rhetoric was the youngest college president in America. Just 30 years old, he was already occupying the president’s office at Northwestern Schools, a Christian institution of higher learning. The future seemed unlimited.

However, there was a quiet war going on inside young Pastor Graham’s heart. Others didn’t know it, but he tells the whole story now nearly a half century later, in his recent memoirs entitled Just As I Am. None other than Billy Graham was having doubts about the authority of Scripture.

Even at the age of 30, he was encountering the arguments and debating points of some liberal theologians who were literally carving up the Bible. Major doctrines were being called into doubt; this passage and that passage was being relegated to the ash heap in some scholarly circles. And Billy Graham was in doubt. Did he still believe the Bible was God’s Word? Did he still believe it had authority? Was it filled with mistakes? Did it bear the mark of heaven’s inspiration?

Right before the L.A. campaign, Graham went to something called the College Briefing Conference held at Forest Home, a retreat near Los Angeles. And there the dark thunderclouds of doubt really pounded at him. A good friend, a man he really respected, was embracing all of these liberal concepts . . . and why wouldn’t Billy go along with him? It’s ironic to read it now, but this man actually said to him:

“Billy, you’re fifty years out of date. People no longer accept the Bible as inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple. Your language is out of date. You’re going to have to learn the new jargon if you’re going to be successful in your ministry.” And later this same man was overheard to say to another friend: “Poor Billy, I feel sorry for him. He and I are taking two different roads.”

Well, these many decades later, all of us could perhaps judge who took the right road after all. But the story doesn’t end there. It got to be a crisis there at the retreat center, with young Billy Graham pulled in two directions. He was almost in tears, up in his dorm room each night studying through the Bible. How could he preach in that big L.A. crusade if he didn’t believe this Book anymore? He finally decided:
“If I could not trust the Bible, I could not go on. I would have to quit the school presidency. I would have to leave pulpit evangelism. . . . It was not too late to become a dairy farmer.”

He went out that night and took a walk in the San Bernardino Mountains. And he simply bared his soul before God there in the moonlight. He put that Bible of his on an old tree stump and confessed to God that he didn’t understand everything there was in those pages. He admitted that he was confused, that he didn’t know and comprehend all things. And then all at once, the Holy Spirit gave him the ability to pray this prayer:

“Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word — by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”

And you know, he got up from his knees and never looked back. That was 54 years ago, and we can see what it means in a man’s life when he accepts this Book, the Bible, as the final court of appeal. Whether there are doubts or questions or fears or unanswered gaps, when we accept by faith that this is the Word of God, some incredible things happen.

I said yesterday that a person can choose this Book — or not choose it. You don’t have to take the Bible as your Guide; you can reach out right this very minute and change the radio to a rock-and-roll station or to the stock market numbers for this Tuesday. But friend, here during National Bible Week, I want to say this as clearly as I can: I thank the Lord that He’s given us this precious old Book as the ultimate authority in our lives. And right here I certainly want to choose it to hold that place in my life.

Which place? First place. I’ve decided that this Book, the Bible, is going to be for me the final court of appeal.

What really does that mean to Christians? Yesterday we talked about a person who had a dream, and she decided this dream was the source of new truth. Well, dreams might bring truth and they might not. And this particular dream flat-out contradicted the Bible. So what do we do then?

It gets a bit closer to home than that. Listen. A couple of years ago Pastor Tim Crosby and I invited our listeners to share some of their angel stories with us. And did we ever get a flood! An avalanche! It almost took those two years to turn them into a book which has been reprinted and snapped up now about twenty thousand times: In the Presence of Angels.

But here’s my point. Do I believe in angels today because many Voice of Prophecy listeners — solid citizens, I’m sure — have had encounters? Does my confidence come from those stories? Well, I have confidence in those stories, but I don’t believe in angels because people say they have seen them. I believe in angels because the Word of God says there are angels.

Back to Billy Graham for a minute, who, back in 1975 wrote a marvelous little book entitled simply that: Angels. And in this book he confesses that in all his years of ministry, with all the miracles he’s experienced, he’s never once seen an angel. But then he goes on to say almost word-for-word what I just shared. Let me read it for you right from page 15 of his book:
“I believe in angels because the Bible says there are angels; and I believe the Bible to be the true Word of God.”

Let me take it a step further than that, even. Friend, you might get a message from a being you think is an angel. You might go to a séance or have an NDE — a near-death experience — where a beautiful being of light floats down and tells you that Paradise is a beautiful place where everyone goes at death. There are grassy hillsides and beautiful fountains . . . and there may or may not be any mention of your needing to have faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior. Let me ask: are you going to believe that being of light, or are you going to believe the plain teachings of this Book called the Holy Bible? You know, there are angels . . . and there are angels. Are messages from beings of light going to be the final court of appeal, or will it be the Word of God for you and for me?

You know, as information flows into our lives from a million different Web sites and media sources, we have to weigh them, don’t we? Here’s a billboard; over there’s an angel. Or maybe we have a dream. Next Sabbath or Sunday you hear what sounds like a very solid sermon. And here on the radio there’s this guy named Melashenko and a hundred others like him, all with their sermons and toll-free request lines and books to give out. And we have to evaluate it all. Should this message be allowed in? Should we put it in the foundation of our value system? Or does Reverend X’s messages get deleted from our data file?

It’s hard to do that, isn’t it? Yes, no, yes, no . . . and a hundred gray maybe’s. God help us all, because there are evil angels and dreams that come from the dark side as well as the heavenly side.

But friend, when we turn to the Bible and allow it to truly be the final court of appeal, that’s not the case. Back in the year 1949, young Billy Graham said to himself: “This is the one Source I’m going to always trust. Always! I’m never going to waver in that again!” And we see the results.

There are two beautiful verses of Scripture which adds to this very confidence. As we think about angels and dreams and radio preachers, we have to be thankful for what it says in First Thessalonians 5:21:

“Test everything. Hold on to the good.”

And maybe we’re emotionally worn out by that challenge. But aren’t we then thankful for what the Bible says about itself? Aren’t you grateful for II Timothy 3:16?

“All Scripture is God-breathed” — “given by inspiration of God,” says the King James — “and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

Isn’t that tremendous good news? In this one Book, it’s all from God. It’s all reliable. Every page and every day and under every circumstance. Other books come and go; their theories have a little flash of popularity and then get discredited. But this Book of books, this final court of appeals, is true on every page, every chapter, every verse, every time, everywhere. You don’t have to sift out and sort out or pick and choose like you do when you listen to someone like me or the next radio preacher to come along. Friend, this is the Word of God. It’s not just true, it’s the truest. It’s the truth.

Two days from now — and even today, right now — I think we all do have something to be thankful for.