Lesson 71

Blessings by Knowing the Word – 30:4-14

In this section of the Word of God we have been dealing with the invitation that Moses gave the nation. You recall the invitation that Moses gave was made up of several things, several elements. It’s important that we, in this day, particularly as fundamentalists, understand what a true Biblical invitation to faith is and what it is not. There is a lot of activity, a lot of emotionalism, and a lot of activities going on in the name of fundamentalism that has nothing whatever to do with the Word of God. It’s the inheritance of a tradition and I refer to some of those things that go on in certain fundamental circles that apparently are tests of orthodoxy. I’ve had people walk out made because I never gave an invitation at the end of a service; unfortunately these people fail to understand what an invitation is.

Any time the Word of God is taught that constitutes by its very nature an invitation. You don’t have to tack something on as though the Word of God is not sufficient to invite faith, so therefore you have to add something and you add some emotional gimmick, play a few hymns, etc. get everybody worked up so they’ll come down the aisle and when they get down there they don’t know what’s going on. This is passing in the name of fundamentalism as an invitation. For your information, though some of you may feel that this is one of the great things of fundamentalism, let me assure you that this never happened before 1830. It was begun by the frontier revivalists and before that time you never had any such thing as people coming down an aisle. In the great revivals of George Whitfield and Jonathan Wesley you had nothing whatever of this sort; so just a simple fact of church history to show that this is something new, it’s a tradition and particular in this part of the country it’s considered something that’s orthodox.

Yet you notice that in Deut. 29-30, this whole section, Moses is giving a national invitation to faith. He’s calling for a national response to the revealed Word of God; he has gotten through expounding chapters 5-26 which dealt with all the fine points of the Law, and now he comes to the end and he asks the nation, will they or will they not enter into covenant with Yahweh or Jehovah. That’s the issue. You remember he has certain parts to his invitation. We do well to review these parts so if you’re in Child Evangelism or anything else you ought to know what an invitation is. It does not constitute putting emotional pressure on someone to get them to do something.

Moses type of invitation is nothing of this sort. In Deut. 29:1-9 he gave them a set of facts and he said that faith must be founded on historical facts. He was saying Israel, you have seen God work in history, you have seen these historic events and now you are to respond to this set of facts. This is actual real history; it has nothing whatever to do with some emotional religion. I don’t know why it is but if you think of it for a minute, fundamentalism should be the least emotional of all religions, because it has maximum content. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with emotion; I’m just saying that you can’t think if you are emotional. You can have emotions but you’d better make sure that your intellect is always in control, because if isn’t you cannot analyze the situation right, you cannot think through to the doctrines that God has provided for you. So faith is always found in a response to historic facts. This is what is wrong with liberalism today. Why is it that the liberals are having trouble even getting a following in many areas? It is because they are asking people to get going 60 miles an hour in 80 different directions but they haven’t given them any reasons; it’s total motivation manipulation type system.

So 29:1-9, Moses says look, I give you this set of historical facts Israel, now it’s up to you however you want to respond to these. Then in verses 10-15 he clarified just exactly what the decision was that they were to make. The decision is defined in verses 10-15 so that when the issue is made clear then the decision is clear. A person is free to reject of accept but they ought to be clear as to what it is that they are accepting or rejecting. They ought to be absolutely clear. Now that is your obligation if you are a Christian. If you are a Christian your obligation is to make the issue clear so that you don’t have a false response. If you start messing up the gospel with invitations to come to church, with things like you have to be baptized to be saved and all the rest of it, you start tacking these things on and the first thing you know you’ve muddled the waters and it will take some other person that deals with this fellow years to straighten them out. You’ve set in motion confusion when you do this, so you have to have the issue sharp and clear.

In verses 16-29 Moses said all right, I’ve defined what the issue is, now I’m going to tell you where negative volition will logically lead you. So in verses 16-29 he tells us this; in other words, what would happen when you choose negatively. Then finally in chapter 30 which we are dealing with now he says what a positive decision will lead to. And in chapter 30 you have what theologians call the Palestinian Covenant. The Palestinian Covenant goes back to a previous covenant made in 2000 BC with one Gentile by the name of Abraham. And when Abram changed his name to Abraham and became the first Jew of history he had the Abrahamic Covenant and that Abrahamic Covenant was a promise from the sovereignty of God that history would run in a certain direction. The Abrahamic Covenant defines history, and among the many things that it does it provides three main areas.

First, it provides the fact that the Jews will always survive, that no matter what happens, not matte how many Hitler’s there are, the Jew will always survive; always! He is an indestructible element of history and he cannot be eradicated.

The second thing is that the Jew has eternal title to a set of real estate in the Near East that extends from just east of the Nile Valley, northeastward all the way to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Those are the boundaries of the Abrahamic Covenant. Modern day Israel doesn’t even come close to occupying that territory. So we have those two things of the Abrahamic Covenant.

The third thing is that Israel was to be the source of worldwide blessing, that Israel and through Israel from 2000 BC onward God would work through Israel to bless the world. And the New Testament was written through Israel; Jesus Christ comes out of Israel, salvation comes out of Israel, and Jesus forever solved the problem of this debate in John 4 when He upheld the Jewish side of the Samaritan controversy. When the woman at the well said, we believe that salvation has come from the Samaritans, who were half-Gentile half-Jewish, and He said no, you are wrong, salvation is all the Jews. Therefore Jesus laid it on the line clearly and forever clarified this business we now have going around of British Israelism. In case you don’t know what that is, this is the belief that somehow Great Britain and the United States are part of the 10 lost tribes.

First of all the tribes were never lost, because you have them recorded in the book of Revelation. And Britain is not in any way identified, Anglo-Israelism is not bona fide, England cannot be identified with one of the ten lost tribes and I’m sure that if you were to go up to an Englishman and tell him, do you know you’re one of the ten lost tribes he’d probably vomit. Englishmen wouldn’t appreciate it and the Bible doesn’t authorize it and it’s utterly wrong. It’s being used as a cloak in certain political circles for anti-Semitism. Watch that, and we’ll get on the other side of the issue before we finish the chapter but I want to present a balanced picture; there’s no Biblical base for this anti-Semitism that somehow all of us are suddenly the ten lost tribes and the Jews are counterfeits, etc. this business that’s cranked out on the radio and in certain publication is anti-Biblical.

We have this Abrahamic Covenant, Abram became Abraham; the “ham” was added on because “ham” is the Hebrew word for people, “am” is father, and Abram is high places, so you have father of high places, father of heights. And here you have Ab-ra-ham, the father of a nation, the father of many nations literally with the “ra” prefix so you have the man’s name changed because now his status in the plan of God has changed.

This Abrahamic Covenant is amplified three times in your Bibles. You encounter it first in Gen. 12, 15, 17 & 22. That’s where the main content of the Abrahamic Covenant is outlined and then when you move over to Deut. 30 you have the first amplification of the Abrahamic Covenant. This amplification goes back to the second clause, this eternal title clause and it tells you more information about the land and the relationship of Israel to that land throughout history. So this Palestinian Covenant goes back to the Abrahamic Covenant amplifying the eternal title clause.

The second time that we have the Covenant amplified in Scripture is in 2 Sam. 7, where we have the Davidic Covenant; this is an amplification of the phrase of the survival of the Jew, for in 2 Sam. 7 God says that Son of David shall reign forever. In other words, out of David’s loins would come a dynasty and that dynasty would rule forever in the world. If you study the Davidic Covenant in 2 Sam. 7 you will come, automatically, even without the prophecy of Isaiah 7, to the fact that there must have had to have been a virgin birth; there must had hade to have been a virgin birth. Why? Because under David, David had many sons; David had two sons that are important in this, Solomon and another son called Nathan. Solomon was the royal seed of David; it was Solomon’s son that would have the regal title to the throne, and so Solomon’s son would go on down and the name would be transmitted through Solomon, from father to son, father to son, father to son, they would have regal title or the legal title to the throne.

However, along came a man by the name of Jehoiakim; he lived around 590 or 600 BC, just before the nation collapsed and he was an apostate. And Jeremiah in Jer. 33 declared Jehoiakim, or sometimes he’s known in the Bible as Coniah, declared that he would be childless. Now Jehoiakim had children, so the prophecy wasn’t that he would be physically childless, but that he would lose the right for his children to rule on the throne. And therefore we have Coniah written childless by the prophet Jeremiah around 600 BC. But this introduces a problem; if the royal seed has been cut off by a prophecy it looks like God has given us two prophecies that are logically contradictory. Except in history they are resolved in a very mysterious and wonderful way because we come down into the New Testament and we have two people, Joseph and Mary.

Joseph is explained in Matthew; in Matthew 1 it starts with a big long genealogy of Joseph and it relates Joseph back to the son of David by Solomon. In other words, Joseph is related and has to be to authenticate Jesus Messianic claims, he had to be related to David and he is through Solomon on His father’s side. But, he had to be this on the father’s side, by the way, because the father was the one that inherited titles. However, we also know that Coniah was given the fact that he could not have any children sitting on the throne, so therefore we have it worked out in history that Joseph, who carries the royal name, his son, literal son can’t sit on the throne or it violates this prophecy. So you might say you have God in a dilemma, how is He going to bring the Messiah into the world, keep the royal title to fulfill 2 Sam. 7 and yet at the same time not violate Coniah’s childless prophecy.

How it is done is amazing. What happens is that Joseph becomes the legal father of Jesus Christ, giving to Jesus that legal title to the throne but Joseph is not the physical father of Jesus? If He were then the prophecy of Coniah would be violated and Jesus’ claims would be invalidated. But Mary, when you read her genealogy in Luke 3, you find that she is related to David, not through Solomon, through the legal line, but she is related to David through Nathan and since Mary is related to David through Nathan, she has the genes of David, so the Davidic Covenant can be fulfilled out of her loins. So Mary can give physical birth to Messiah but Joseph can’t be the father of Messiah. Joseph is the legal father of Messiah to give Messiah His title but he can’t be the physical father of Messiah so therefore we have Mary as the actual physical mother of Jesus but Joseph can’t be. You can work all of this out totally independent of the prophecy of Isaiah 7.

This is why we say again and again these things like the virgin birth, like the substitutionary atonement of Jesus on the cross; all these things do not stand alone as miscellaneous facts. The Bible must be considered as a logical unit. You can’t pick and say well, I’m not sure about the virgin birth, Genesis, etc, I’ve studied biology and I’m not convinced of this so I throw it out, I don’t see what it gives me as a Christian. What it gives you is logical consistency with the prophecy. The whole thing hangs together logically and if you start dumping pieces out of it you wind up in utter contradiction. This is why the prophecy of the virgin birth is not necessary to defend the virgin birth with; the virgin birth can be defended simply on the Davidic Covenant.

We have the Abrahamic Covenant, as amplified in Deut. 30 by the Palestinian Covenant, and it’s amplified in 2 Sam. 7 by the Davidic Covenant, and it’s amplified by the New Covenant in Jer. 31. The New Covenant amplifies the worldwide blessing clause and tells in detail how Israel will become a worldwide blessing. All of these covenants are important because it stems back to this one great Abrahamic Covenant that was a declaration in 2000 BC by God that history would drive forward in a certain defined direction, and all the prophecies of God’s Word have to be interpreted in the light of these covenants. This why you must know the Old Testament before you can study the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is not a closed book. So many people say the book is so hard; so many symbols are all defined back in the Old Testament. You pick up your symbology from the Old Testament; move it over and Revelation falls pretty easily; it’s not the most difficult book in the Bible. Probably the most difficult book in the Bible is Genesis, not Revelation. The reason is Genesis is so elliptical.

In Deut. 30 we come to an exposition of this Palestinian Covenant and in verses 1-3 we have it summarized. Again this is the style of the Hebrew writers. Please remember that the Hebrew’s writing style starts off with a starting statement and then gives you the details. It’s sort of like a newspaper story, they give you the story in a nutshell first and then they develop the details. This is why Genesis 1 & 2 do not conflict.

Deut. 30:1, “And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee,” and after this word “thee” in 30:1, all the rest of it is prophecy. All the rest of this is in a future tense or the imperfect tense, speaking of that which has not yet happened. “…and you return your heart,” actually it means to change your heart, “among all the nations, to which the LORD thy God has driven thee, [[2] And you will return unto the LORD thy God, and you will obey His voice according to all that I command thee this day, you and your children, with all your heart, and with all your soul, [3] And then” the “then” is just something that the King James translators supplied, “And the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations where the LORD thy God has scattered thee.”

That is the summary statement of the Palestinian Covenant. We covered that last time; tonight we will finish verses 4-10; these are the details of the Palestinian Covenant and beginning verse 4 we have the statement, “If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from there will the LORD thy God father thee, and from there will He fetch thee.” The word “driven out” refers back to the five cycles of discipline in Lev. 26. In Lev. 26 we have the nation Israel under a conditional type covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, they are promised certain things in these, these are temporal blessings. You remember the two circles we draw for the believer: the Mosaic Covenant would correspond to the bottom circle; the Mosaic Covenant is a conditional covenant. The Abrahamic Covenant and all it’s amplification the top circle. For one thing they were promised to be a testimony; another thing they were promised economic blessing, occupation of the land and military victory.

These were the four basic things promised if the nation, in time, would submit to the Word of God. If it would not, then of course Moses said there would be discipline. In place of being a testimony they would be a reproach; in place of economic blessing they’d have economic catastrophe; in place of occupation of the land they’d be in the Diaspora; in place of military victory they’d have military defeat. But it wouldn’t be a certain transition, Lev. 26 teaches us, there would be five definite steps in history to attain this goal and we call those the five degrees of discipline or the five cycles of discipline. God would being to spank them and He would begin to lower the boom down upon the nation; if they did not respond then He would heat it up some more to the second degree, or the third degree, fourth degree and fifth degree. The fifth degree of discipline upon the nation and when the fifth degree was reached there would be certain objective signs in history so that they could tell that this had come about. One of those signs would be they would be cast out of the land, they would be deported. This is why in 586 BC we know that the fifth cycle occurred because in 586 Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonian Empire came in and destroyed the area around Jerusalem and deported a mass amount of people.

So we know objectively that in 586 the fifth cycle hit and that’s what verse 4 refers to, “If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven,” a fulfillment of this disciplinary operation, “from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from there will He fetch thee.” Now this is a promise that reward in the future would undo the fifth cycle of discipline, it wouldn’t last forever, this fifth degree would be annulled. Who would do the gathering? It’s important that you look here; it’s the Lord that does the gathering. And you could say, as some of the amillennialists say, oh, well this was accomplished in 516 BC because in 586 we have the nation going into captivity, for 70 years it was in captivity, and it came back to the land in 516. But did it? No, all of Israel never returned to the land in 516 and you have one book in the Bible written to tell about the people that never returned, the supposed ten lost tribes that are not lost, and that book is the book of Esther. Esther was written to show what would happen when these people stayed out of the land and that’s why the whole book of Esther, you can’t find the word “God” in the whole book, and yet if you read it in the Hebrew there’s a certain section where you get, if you quote it the English, Elohim, and it’s obvious that the man who structured this book said that God’s name, this is “Elohim,” God’s name, and certain sections of the book begin this way. So the book of Esther is a testimony to the hidden-ness of God, and the man deliberately, whoever it was that wrote Esther deliberately designed it this way so that God’s hand would not be obvious in the old fashioned way of Moses’ time, but it would be hidden in the providential working of history, would care for those who had never been back to the land, had never come back to the land. And the very hidden-ness of God, and yet His presence they are hiding is shown in the structure of the book, for the book is written with God’s name as an acrostic, hidden in the very text itself. So God’s name does occur in the book of Esther, it’s a testimony to God’s providential care.

So we can say that objectively when historically considered this prophecy you’re looking at in verse 4 has not yet come true. It is future and this is why we are called the premillennial school of prophetic interpretation, namely, premillennial, meaning that Jesus Christ comes before the 1000 year millennium. He comes “pre” and we say that there must be a millennium in history to fulfill this prophecy. We claim it has to be because in every other case when prophecy has been fulfilled it is always fulfilled literally. For example, did Jesus or did He not come to Jerusalem riding on a mule? He came on a literal mule, that’s what the Gospels say. You can find that back in Zechariah and Jeremiah, that Messiah would ride into Jerusalem on a mule.

Why would He ride on a mule, not a horse? Because the King of Israel could never ride a horse, Solomon did in defiance of the Law but he was to always ride a mule because he had to remind both himself and the people that he really wasn’t the king, the Lord was the king. So when Jesus Christ as Messiah comes in, fulfilling in His humanity the prophecies of the King, He comes riding on a mule. See, it all fits together. And then he rode through this gate in Jerusalem, and there’s a prophecy in the Old Testament, there’s what is known as the East Gate, and the East Gate Ezekiel says will be shut and no man will open it. And it’s interesting, when the Turks shut this gate there have been attempts to open this gate up again; to this day it is still shut, and Ezekiel’s prophecy says that gate will stay shut until Messiah comes again.

It’s very interesting, but the day the Six Day War began, I am told, that the Jordanian Arabs in the eastern section of the city of Jerusalem tried to open the gate, they had scheduled the demolition of the East Gate to allow traffic from Jordan, east of the Jordan River, to come over into Jerusalem from the east side. The very day that the construction was to begin was the very beginning of the Six Day War and the gate work stopped and that gate on the East Side of Jerusalem still stays shut. And Ezekiel’s prophecy says that gate will remain shut and no man shall open it; prophetically it is guarding and protective in history. Here we have the display of the sovereignty of God, God didn’t come down in a lightning bolt and stop it. But in His mysterious providential way He is keeping that prophecy literal and no man shall open it. No man shall open it ever, because it won’t be opened by the Lord Himself when He comes.

This prophecy in verse 4 is another such prophecy, that God Himself will bring Israel back into the land and people laugh at this and say ha-ha, the Jews have been scattered forever; then in 1948 we had the formation of the land of Israel. So God says once again that the Jews have a function. But then we have to guard against the misinterpretation for some people say that Zionism is a fulfillment of this prophecy and here we have to have balance. On the one hand we tread against those who would be anti-Semitic and say that the Jews are behind everything, that they are the troublemakers, that they are the ones that falsified and the Englishmen are the true Jewish people and all the rest of this mixed up mess that results in anti-Semitism. We have to guard against that.

On the other hand, we have to stick to the prophecies literally and Zionism does not fulfill verse 4, the Lord “will gather thee, and from thence He will fetch thee.” You could say wait a minute, isn’t prophecy fulfilled sometimes providentially, didn’t you just say the East Gate was fulfilled in sort of a sneaky way through prophecy? Why then couldn’t God do it this way; why isn’t what we see before our eyes now a fulfillment of this prophecy? The answer is found in the last words of Jesus Christ. Turn to Matt. 24 when He briefs the disciples just before He was to be crucified, they asked Him certain questions about the sign of the end times. Jesus here expounds the framework for the rest of history, on down through His Second Advent. One of the remarkable things is that most of the people who would not take the Bible literally are always wrong in these very areas in which Jesus Christ prophesied.

In Matt. 24:1, “And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple, and His disciples came to him to show him the buildings of the temple. [2] And Jesus said unto them,” and this is a tremendous thing, Herod’s temple, a tremendous edifice, “See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. [3] And as He sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto Him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world?” Here incidentally you have one of the cross sections, those of you who are interested in teaching, you notice how the Lord Jesus Christ taught.

This, by the way, is one of the most fantastic studies in Scripture, to study how Jesus taught His generation. He would always make some statement that would precipitate controversy and curiosity, and not tell you what it was. He’d wait for your response to what He said and then when He saw that you were interested, then He went ahead and explained, but He never, you might say, “cast His pearls before swine.” He made the statement and those who were interested would come and ask Him questions. He didn’t go brow-beating people, He made a statement and He let their own volition act in response to the statement. And when people would say yeah, I’m kind of interested in that, Lord, you were talking about this, what did you mean by this, and then He would launch into the dissertation.

And here he had the request, they didn’t understand it, so in verse 4, “And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. [5] For many shall come in My name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” Notice verse 6, “And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” In other words, throughout history there will be wars and rumors of wars. True Biblical Christianity knows no world peace before the return of Jesus Christ. This is why Christians that get into the sentimental mold of thinking always… everybody desires peace, nobody likes war (except a few oddballs) but nobody really truly desires war. People in the military are usually not the ones that want war, they don’t like it, they’re the ones that get shot at; it’s usually some crazy civilians that push them into it. Here we have the statement made by the Lord Jesus Christ that wars are going to continue, “see that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass,” and what He’s saying is that if you’re smart you’ll understand that history will be filled with war and until Jesus Christ returns you might as well make up your mind, the best way is to live as peaceably as possible with people but don’t be deceived by someone that comes to you and says I’ve got the panacea for all the world, just follow me and I’ll give world peace. It is impossible. Peace is possible in limited areas for limited time, but what Jesus is saying here is you can’t have a program to end war before He returns.

Verse 7, “For nations shall rise against nation, and kingdom against nation; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in various places, [8] All these are the beginning of sorrows. [9] Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted,” etc. false prophets etc. Then in verse 15 He gives an indication of why Israel is reforming today. In verse 15 it says “When ye, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whosoever reads, let him understand), [16] Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains,” in other words there’s to be an objective signal in history. And in Jerusalem… here we have the eastern end of the Mediterranean and there are some mountains over here, actually across the Jordan Valley, down in the wilderness, around the Dead Sea you have tremendous mountains. Now you have Jerusalem up here. In order for this prophecy of verse 15 to be fulfilled, what’s necessary? It says “when ye see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet.”

Well what did Daniel the prophet speak of? All the liberal religious professors always say Daniel was written way late, Daniel was written after it all happened. Now isn’t that very strange, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before the events that Daniel prophesied happened. So therefore we have the liberals and the opposition today trying to refute the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls because they can’t allow prophecy in their system; they can’t allow it, it refutes their whole position theologically. But Daniel was not written after it happened. There’s no possible way you could interpret the book and get it right. Daniel speaks of four kingdoms and if Daniel was written after it happened you don’t have the Roman kingdom so you only have three kingdoms. It doesn’t fit the book so the book doesn’t make any sense. The only way the book of Daniel makes logical sense is to take it prophetically, that Daniel was speaking on down through history of four kingdoms: first, the Babylonian; second the Medo-Persia; thirdly the Greeks, the Grecian kingdom, then the Roman Empires as it dissolved and would later reform. This abomination of desolation had a preview when Antiochus Epiphanies but that wasn’t the fulfillment’s final of Daniel’s prophecy. But there will come a time when this desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel must occur.

Now what was it that Daniel spoke about? Daniel spoke about a time when the antichrist would come and set an image in the temple and force all worship of Jehovah to stop so that they would worship him. Historically this did occur at one time; Antiochus Epiphanies in what we often say a partial fulfillment of prophecy, prophecy has this feature about it, you’ll get a partial fulfillment in history to give you the shape of things to come and then you get the final fulfillment in history, so you have this partial/final. The partial was fulfilled by Antiochus Epiphanies when he literally did this, but Jesus Christ says it’s coming future to Him; Antiochus Epiphanies was behind Christ at this time. So Jesus says there’s yet another final fulfillment of this prophecy; there is going to come a time when the antichrist will so dominate the situation he will walk into that temple, set up an image to himself, and say worship of God will cease, you will now worship me because I am the Christ. Remember, the antichrist is not some sort of boogey man; people get the idea he’s going to have horns and be dressed in a red suit. That’s not the antichrist, not the one you find in Scripture. Antichrist means he is in place of Christ.

Now what would be the most logical form for the antichrist to take in our generation? The antichrist would take the most logical form of being a tremendous world leader. He’ll be a man that will come on the scene and be a very impressive individual; he will be a man that the nations will look to to provide the long fought leadership to end the world’s great international problems and in that moment he probably will attain his ascendancy. But this man, whoever he is, will walk into the holy place. Well, if we are to be consistent in our interpretation of Scripture the only thing “holy place” refers to that the Jews would have understood in that day was the literal physical temple, the holy place. So this means that before this prophecy comes the Jews must re-establish a temple. This is why Biblical scholars, fundamental scholars are very interested in what’s going on in Jerusalem. Why, for example, in the Six Day War of 1967, when the gained the control of the territory, it was interesting that that real estate is now in Jewish hands. Of course today we have the Dome of the Rock now on that exact location, but we hear talk now and then of the Temple and we’ve even had reports that in this country quarry is being made of the rocks that go into the Temple. So it’s on the Jewish mind to set up the Temple. But I want you to notice something, that the Lord is not behind it directly. All we can say is that by the time antichrist comes the Temple will be there, Israel will be regathered, at least partially, not altogether for I’ll show you another verse in Matt. 24 that shows this is only a partial regathering.

Let’s look at the facts we’ve accumulated so far. There must be a partial regathering of the nation Israel. Second, there must be a temple. Third, there must be this antichrist in history, whoever he is he’s the mystery man, he’s the one called 666 in Scripture. Verse 15, you have Daniel the prophet; this is a future event and these three things summarize it.

Now, the Lord Jesus Christ goes on and He says in verse 16, when you see this objective sign, you’d better get out of here, just evacuate the area, get out and get out fast. In fact He says in verse 18, “Neither let him who is in the field return back to take his clothes. [19] And woe unto those who are with child, and to those who nurse children in those days!” Verse 20 again shows you the nation is regathered because he says, “But pray that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day.” Now He’s talking about the seventh day, which is Saturday, not Sunday. Sunday is not the Sabbath day; Saturday is the Sabbath, and therefore it replies that the nations customs, their sabbatical worship will be established. So you have all these things that must occur before this prophecy can occur. This is why we are living in a very interesting time. I’m not saying that the current regather of Israel is the final regathering. The Arabs could kick Israel out and she could remain for the next 400 years, and then maybe 400 years from now she gets regathered again. But usually the consensus of most Biblical scholars in this point that are interested in prophecy is that this gathering of Israel that we see before our eyes is very significant because it sets up the political situation to make this prophecy possible.

Now the Lord Jesus Christ goes on and gives us certain other things in verse 29 of Matt. 24. Here He says that during this Tribulation, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give its light, and the stars shall fall from heaven,” by the way, the word “stars,” people say oh, stars, that’s a mistake in the Bible, stars don’t fall; well, it’s a mistake in your interpretation because the word “star” is any bright light and is used in the Bible for meteors or anything; anything that’s light, it doesn’t have to be a technical star or astronomical restrictions of the term. “…stars shall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.” Now verse 29 gives you a set of physical phenomenon that will be observable. Please notice, the Bible is very real. These people want signs and God is giving them signs, so when these things happen then certain things are going to appear. This is why during the Middle Ages when you had people not very well educated in the Bible, every time they saw a shooting star of something they’d say the Lord is coming again. This is why everybody said ha-ha, these ignorant stupid people of the Middle Ages. Well, they were ignorant because they didn’t tie the whole prophecy together. You don’t have to run to a bomb shelter because a comet is coming; nothing to do with it. You have to have the abomination of Daniel first and these other things.

Verse 30, “And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven;” and what this sign is nobody knows, all we’re told in Scripture is that the “sign of the Son of man shall appear in heaven and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn; and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” What this looks like I have... some day when we get in Revelation I’ll give you some hints about it but there’s no defined content about this.

But now in verse 31 He begins to tie things together and He gives us a hint about this regathering problem of Deuteronomy. “And He [the Son of Man] shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other,” almost a verbatim quote of the passage before us back in Deut. Jesus Christ know His prophecy, and what He was saying is when I come again, when the Son of Man comes, then He will gather His elect from the four winds, this is the gathering that fulfills Deut. 30; not Zionism.

[Blank spot] this is the gathering, the preliminary gathering that you have here that we may be seeing before our eyes is not the direct work of God in response to prophecy. It is a prerequisite for the fulfillment of prophecy but it is not the direct work. We have to have the regathering and we have these signs and then we have the true regathering; that’s the regathering spoken of.

Now some people would say that what we have here is the regathering of the Church, after all, don’t we say that the Church goes down through history, and the Church goes into history and then we have the Second Advent and that’s the end of history? No, again we have to develop a logically consistent approach from God’s Word in the area of prophecy. How can we do this? Well, if you continue reading the passage, let’s find out a few facts. First we have that He will collect His elect. Now if you examine the word in the Greek and how it is used in the Gospels it refers not to Gentiles but to Jews, in the Gospels, now in the epistles it’s something else again, but in the Gospels “elect” refers to believing Jews. That should signal something, believing Jews.

Now He goes on and makes a few more statements. He goes on and says in 25:31, he makes a statement about some more people that He will gather, “When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, [32] And before Him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. [33] And He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. [34] Then the King shall say unto them on His right hand, Come, ye, blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: [35] For I was hungry, and ye gave me food; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; [36] Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” [37] Then shall the righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we hungry, and fed Thee; or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? [38] When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in: or naked, and clothed Thee? [39] Or when saw thee sick, or in prison, and came unto Me?”

In verse 40, “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” Who are the “these My brethren?” They’re the elect, the elect of Matt. 24. But now we have two other groups, we have the elect and we have the sheep and we have the goats. The sheep are always indicative of believers; God picks the stupidest animal out to represent the believer. Then we have the goats. As a pastor I often think one of the greatest courses they could have in seminary is to take the whole class out the whole semester and study sheep raising and understand all the idiosyncrasies of these idiotic animals, where you have to lead them around by the nose to get them anywhere and it’s a beautiful picture. God created the sheep just so later on He’d have a beautiful illustration of dumb believers. This is why the pastor is called a shepherd, he has to go chasing around, blowing their noses, etc.

So here we have the sheep and the goats. These are two classes of who? Of Gentiles; these are the kingdoms of the nation. The word “nation” is the word for Gentile. So isn’t this interesting, there we have two classes of Gentiles in view. So we have almost as it were, two entirely distinct events surrounding the coming of Jesus Christ; first the gathering of the Jewish believers with the angels; they sit down, the Lord sits on His throne and says now all the Gentile nations come forward, stand at attention. And then He says now your attitude… and He judges each person into the Kingdom, whether he’s accepted or rejected, he’s judged on a strange thing, and you say wait a minute, isn’t this salvation by works, look at all these things, here He’s separating the Gentiles on the basis of their attitude toward “these my brethren,” these elect people that He has gathered from the four winds. Now that’s a strange kind of judgment until… until you study the prophecies of what’s happening in this period of time.

What is happening in this period of time, seven years prior to the return of Christ, in the seven year period called the Tribulation, what has happened in there is an intense form of persecution against these believing Jews. Wherever they go in the world anybody that identifies them in any way, shape or form is automatically condemned by the beast for the beast, and this is very interesting, he has a system of politics plus religion and it’s all brought up [can’t understand word/s] and everything else, and he has a whole world unified him; politics and religion together. He’s built up a fantastic machine and he is able to dominate so that the book of Revelation says that you can’t buy or sell except you have the mark of the beast. It means that he has economic control over every one. So therefore these acts are significant that Jesus is saying. What is happening, it’s like The Diary of Anne Frank, you have a believing Jew and she is being hounded by the Nazi’s in that case, but here you have a case where you have believing Jews in the Tribulation and they’d be hounded by the beast. Here’s the G-2 squad and so on, and they try to find out, are you hiding a Jew here. And these people that are going around witnessing about the gospel, the coming Kingdom, Messiah, etc. let’s take a check of your house and they’d walk through your house and they’d find one in the basement and one in the closet, etc. and bang, come on, we’ve got a little jail cell for you down here. So you get hauled off. So what happens? The test of faith during the Tribulation is their response to these believing Jews.

So now we have something and this, to make a long story short, I want to show you why this is not the Church. These are Jews and Gentiles together. They are distinguished, they are treated separately, and they go into this Kingdom. Here we have a time line, Jesus Christ comes again 1,000 years and they inherit this Kingdom, we know in prophecy they have children, they go on in all of life, but contrast this step of prophecies with 1 Thess. 4. In 1 Thess. 4 we have another set of prophecies about the Second Advent of Christ and they don’t fit, except if you distinguish between the two events, because Paul says in 1 Thess. 4:13, “But I would not have you be ignorant, brethren, concerning them who are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. [14] For is we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also who sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. [15] For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,” okay, that’s two classes, “we who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,” here’s the coming of the Lord, “shall not go before them who are asleep.” Those are the dead. Verse 16, “For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. [17] Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

So we have what we call the translation or from Jerome’s Vulgate version [can’t understand words] from the word [can’t understand word] the rapture, and this rapture is not the Second Advent of Christ, the two events are separated by a time [can’t understand words] of seven plus. We have the rapture and we have the return of Jesus Christ. This is the termination of the Church; then we have history going on for a short while for the book of Revelation, all these prophecies, etc. and then we have the Second Advent and here we go back to the Jew/Gentile distinctions that happened before Pentecost. The Church is ended here for several reasons. First, in this prophecy you have both living and dead believers translated into a resurrection body. Now watch the logic here, if you have every believer, even those who are dead, of course their souls are in the presence of the Lord but their soul is reunited with a resurrection body, at an instant of time, let’s make it 1000^th of a second after Jesus Christ blows the horn, whatever He’s going to do, and you have the rapture, how many believers do you have left on the earth that don’t have resurrection bodies? You don’t have any left; all believers at this point, that exist at that point in history and on up to that point as far as the Church Age is concerned, all have resurrection bodies. That’s one thing to watch. But if you look over in Matthew 24-25 that’s not so. There you have the people in their natural bodies going into the Kingdom. How do you [can’t understand word/s] between the two, you have a problem there.

What’s the second thing? In this one who goes up and who stays? In verse 17 it’s the believers who are caught up to be with the Lord in the clouds; but in Matt. 24-25 who’s kicked out? The unbelievers are kicked out, goats, but those of you who are My sheep, you come and stay and inherit the Kingdom. So you have a second problem; you have it completely reversed.

The third thing I would say that is different about these is that here all believers are automatically separated by the resurrection, but in Matt. 24-25 that’s not true because you all come together in mass, stand in front of the Lord and then He separates them.

The fourth thing that’s different is that here you have Jews and Gentiles not distinguished, but in Matt. 24-25 you have them distinguished.

Therefore, scholars have felt that what is described here is two distinctive events. This is not fudging, this is not just grasping for straws in the wind, trying to fit something we say into Scripture because this is something that has been noted again and again in Scripture. For example, do you recall the events in the Old Testament that prophesied of the Second Coming of Christ? Isn’t it interesting that you have in Isaiah, you have Isaiah 9, where Isaiah looks forward and he sees Christ coming in all His glory, and then in Isaiah 53 you have Him coming in all His sorrow. You can imagine the people in that day; Isaiah, you’ve got a logical contradiction in your prophecy. How can the Messiah come and come in all His glory and power and set up His kingdom and on the other hand you’ve got this other prophecy saying He’s going to be killed? You can’t reconcile those, logical contradiction, irrational prophecy. Not at all because what happens is that prophecy is given to us on a [can’t understand words] sequence basis, in other words, you’ll have an event here and an event here; here’s the First Advent of Christ, here’s the Second Advent of Christ, but prophetically if you look through it they’re collapsed. So from the viewpoint of the early fathers they see the events with no time separation. They just see the events tight together and this is why prophecy until history unrolls seems [can’t understand words] to contradict. The only test that the man of Isaiah’s day that thought logically could do would be to separate the prophecies into two categories, that has been done; you can do that for yourself. Read through Isaiah and you can separate two distinct trends of prophecy and it turns out lo and behold, as history is unrolled, that’s what God intended, that there be two distinct prophecies, two distinct things.

So similarly it’s not strange that the New Testament itself has two steps of prophecies concerning Christ’s return. It has this one step speaking of the Church and its rapture with everyone receiving a resurrection body and then the unbelievers are left to go in the Tribulation, some of them become believers and then you go on seven years and have this second event. So this is not an invention to save the Bible at this point; it corresponds beautifully with what we know of how prophecy has been fulfilled in the past.

Now let’s turn back to Deut. 30. Verse 4 refers to this future regathering. “If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven,” this prophecy says “from there will the LORD thy God will gather thee, and from there will He fetch thee.” Incidentally, isn’t it interesting of another situation you have, you’ll find this again and again, people say oh Jesus never claimed to be God, but isn’t it interesting that in the Gospels where in the Old Testament you’d have Jehovah doing something, you take the text over in the New Testament and who replaces Jehovah? Jesus Christ. Now how could that happen, in a monotheistic nation if Jesus wasn’t claiming to be God? It could happen in the Greeks, it could happen in a non-monotheistic nation, but a strict monotheistic nation, for them to take Jehovah as Paul does, just drop the word out of the [can’t understand words] quote and put Jesus right in there as he does in Ephesians and does in many other places. That is tremendous proof of the deity of Christ; what it’s proof of is the Apostle thought He was God and you could say they were wrong but there’s no question under the sun that the early church considered Jesus to be God.

Verse 5, “And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.” If verse 5 is to be literally fulfilled then when it occurs in history we have to say “above thy fathers” means that it’s going to be greater than the Solomonic Kingdom. You can take the maximum point of development of Israel in the Old Testament and say if this prophecy is true it’s got to be greater than that.

Verse 6, “And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine hear, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God, with all thine heart, and with all thou soul, that thou mayest live.” This is a fore view of what is later known in the Bible as the New Covenant in which the doctrine of regeneration and being born again comes out. This is what Jesus meant in John 3 when He spoke with Nicodemus. Nicodemus says what about it Lord, how can I enter the Kingdom is what was on his mind; the Lord says no one is going to enter the Kingdom, the future Kingdom unless he be born again. And Nicodemus said how can he born again. And He said he that is born of water and of the Word, and it has nothing to do with baptism. That water there, if you will refer back to Ezekiel 36 where prophecy was originally made refers to the Word of God. I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you will be free from your sins, was a reference to the Word of God and a pronouncement of forgiveness.

Then we have the rest of this, verse 7-9, “And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them who hate thee, who persecuted thee.” There will be a switch, there will be a judgment. Now this explains, verse 7 explains the judgments of the book of Revelation. When you get in the book of Revelation if you study it carefully you will see that every one of the judgments in the book of Revelation is the judgment mentioned back in Deut. 28, except they’re directed to the Gentile world. Isn’t that interesting; that’s exactly in verse 7 what Moses says. I’ll take these curses that are upon you and I’ll turn them upon your enemies. And those are the people of the Tribulation.

Verse 8, “And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the LORD, and do all His commandments which I command thee this day. [9] And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good; for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as He rejoiced over thy fathers.” The expression “rejoice over thee” in verse 9 is an idiom in the Old Testament for God blessing a person. If a man were to go out and say that look, my business is going well, everything is going well, he’s saying the Lord has rejoiced over me and that would be his way of summarizing that God had blessed him.

Now verse 10 is put in there to remind you that God never arm-twists. And even in this prophecy, when it is finally fulfilled, it will be by personal choice. “If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, [to keep His commandments and His statutes which are written in this book of the Law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.]” there’s a condition in here recognizing human freedom and human volition. And this is what is meant in Rom. 11 when Paul says God has put blinding on them. Let’s conclude by turning to Rom. 11:7, Paul refers to a future time in history spoken of back in Deuteronomy 30. In verses 7-8 he tries to explain why it is that all the nation Israel did not accept Jesus as their Messiah. He lays it to the fact that these people had already rejected Messianic prophecy and so when the prophesied Messiah came God said you’ve already rejected the Word, and you aren’t going to get any more signs and so I just cause blindness to come upon you, and that’s verse 8, “(According as it is written, God has given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear) unto this day.” But then Paul doesn’t leave it there, he goes on down in verse 25 and says, “For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits: that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in.” In other words, the Gentiles will go on down in history as they are today but there’s going to come a time at the rapture when it’s all over.

The game is going to be over; God is going to blow the whistle. And at that point he says, verse 26, “And so all Israel shall be saved; as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob. [27] For this is My covenant unto them,” in other words, God sticks with the literal [can’t understand word] of this covenant. He has declared certain things in history, if this prophecy never comes true the Bible is false; the Bible is absolutely a lie and a [can’t understand word] book, but this Bible claims that this is the mechanics of history here and that history does not go by chance, history goes according to plan.

Now we can make an application of this, because if we go back to verse15 we find a great tremendous hope. And I’d like to close on this note because oftentimes people say what’s so useful about prophecy, isn’t all this talk about the Millennium kind of silly and stupid. Look at verse 15, “For if the casting away of them [Israel] be the reconciling of the world,” that refers to the cross, Israel rejected Christ so therefore God blinded them and actually might say even brought about the cross, but look what came out of the cross, our so great salvation. And so he says “if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” And what Paul says is there’s the hang-up in world history, when Israel gets straightened out and you have the rapture of the Church, and you have this tribulation period, Israel toward the end of the Tribulation begins to respond to Jesus Christ as Messiah and then bang, the Second Advent and the establishment of the Millennium.

Why is this so important to us today? Because of what this doctrine of the Millennium has done already in history. Do you realize that in no other system do men look forward to a golden age? You can study many peoples of the ancient world; their golden age is always in back, not in front. Israel has the concept of a future golden age, and the prophets looked to a future golden age. Now isn’t this interesting because during the early church, let’s say 33 AD on down to say 450 AD, the early church was premillennial, with one or two exceptions that were all kooks. But it was premillennial in that they looked forward to a return of Christ, then the setting up of His Kingdom. Then around 450 we had an invasion of Neo-Platonism in the Church through Augustine and others, and they went into a system of amillennialism in which they deny that there ever will be a Millennium, this is just figurative, symbolic interpretation, and so Augustine was able to influence the church hierarchy of his time so that down through the Middle Ages you had these people at the top of the Church saying it’s amil, no such thing, but down on the bottom you had a residual grass-roots premillennialism. And this premillennialism got very weird, very bad because it wasn’t set in the Word of God and these people became very ignorant spiritually.

And they just had this vague idea; they probably didn’t know there they got it from, a vague idea of a future golden age. Now it turns out in history this was where the early anarchists of the medieval times got their idea [can’t understand name] and others [can’t understand word] and they got the idea of a future golden age, so they said ah, future golden age, social reform. We will bring in that future golden age. And you have a paradox in history that this tremendous concept from the Word of God of a future golden age brought in by the supernatural act of Christ, that future real physical political society that He will bring in by a cataclysmic process, future golden age, has become the cornerstone of a communist movement, because the communists in several of their writings attribute a lot of Marx’s inspiration to [can’t understand name], and we know where he got it from, he got it from the premillennialists. So it’s ironic that in our time the driving force behind a lot of this is to bring about a future golden age which can only come about in the supernatural way the Bible said it was to come about.

So what has happened in our time is that the radicals have borrowed the concept of a future golden age from us, turned it around, and are trying to bring in a salvation by works. See, this like the Reformation. What was the Reformation about? Is a man saved by works or is he saved by grace. That was the issue. Today, in our generation, we face an opposite issue: is society saved by works or is society saved by grace. That’s the issue. And it’s interesting that salvation, both sides believe in salvation, but the means to get there is different. The radicals have borrowed the concept of a future golden age from the Bible, stolen it from the Bible, ripped it out of its supernatural context, tried to bring it about and then they cause all this trouble because they can’t get it. Well, they never will get it; you can’t get it because it is only possible inside the supernatural framework in which it originally came about in history. So this is why these ideas are very important and why the doctrinal Millennium is not something just for a few obscure students of prophecy to study. It’s very real and very living and in our day we premillennialists have the right to say to the radicals, ha-ha, look what you’ve done; you don’t on your base have any right to look forward to a future golden age. No unbeliever has enough facts to prove that a golden age is even possible; none, and the only place they’ve gotten it is sneaked in from the Scripture.