Clough Dispensations Lesson 8

The Dispensation of Israel – Dispensation of Law continued

Tonight we continue with our dispensation of the Law and again we want to emphasize the chief characteristic of this dispensation because after all, the advantage of dispensationalism centers on the fact that we are able to categorize history and if you are able to categorize history you are able to refute Hegel because Hegel was the man that said we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. And if you know dispensations you can understand and categorize history and thereby refute that proposition.

Now in the dispensation of the Law that extends from Exodus 20 to Revelation 19, remember the chief characteristic that we’ve been saying all along here is that when God entered into a contract with this particular nation, the Mosaic Covenant, He showed very clearly that when God operates He blesses as people respond to Him and cursing and discipline fall on those who would reject Him. And this rule is no better seen than in studying Israel’s history, and as we said last time, you can go through Leviticus 26 and through the five stages of discipline and realize that God is involved in this discipline business, and that the big issue as far as believers are concerned is obedience to His Word, responding positively to it. And this would mean, for example, in every day life claiming the promises of the Word. This is what He wants us to do; after all, He’s given us 7,000 separate promises in the Bible and they’re geared and engineered for one reason basically, and that’s to sustain us under the pressure situations of life. He wants us to operate on the basis of grace, He wants us to realize that He and He alone is the one capable of getting us out of a jam. So often times misery in the Christian life and discipline and sorrow and heartache can usually be traced to somewhere a failure to respond to God’s grace in some way; either failure to claim the promises, defiance of His authority, insistence upon our own way of running things versus His. And usually discipline can very easily be explained if you know some of the principles God works with.

So this is the chief characteristic of this dispensation; blessing, positive volition, cursing associated with negative volition. And we have the concept that grows out of this that God is King… God is King! This is basically the issue here in the Law; who is the King of Israel. God is the King of Israel. And with that we will transition to the section where we left of last time where we were dealing with the additional material that we find revealed in the dispensation of the Law that had never been revealed before in history. And you remember we were tracing the two parallel lines of divine revelation in the dispensation of the Law. One parallel line that we were working with and finished last week was the fact that God is their King and that He would reign in the future. He was reigning during the time of Moses, during the time of Joshua, during the conquest of the land, and He stopped reigning, you remember, in 586 because He removed the Shekinah glory; Israel lost her national independence forever and a number of other things happened so that at that time God ceased to be in a real way present with Israel. Now that was due to the fact of the discipline forecast in Leviticus 26.

So this is one parallel then, a set of prophecies that looks forward to God as King, and we traced it through Isaiah 52:7-10; through Psalm 47, 96, 97, 98 and 99, Isaiah 9:6 and Micah 5:2. These are the passages in the Old Testament that point forward to the fact that God Himself is the King and He is the only King of Israel.

Now there are two further verses in the same theme that I want to give you. The first one is in Psalms 24. Again, this is another in that chain of prophecies that has to do with the fact that God and God alone is the King of Israel. This is important to realize this because any culmination of history that falls short of making God the literal King of Israel is not a culmination of history. If the nation has looked forward all these years to God being their King, and history comes down to the last quarter and the bell rings and it’s all over, and God is not their King, it seems to me it blows the whole Old Testament. You might as well just dump the whole thing. So in order to have the prophecy function and be fulfilled God literally has to be their King.

In Psalm 24, which is one of the Psalms that points to the fact that God must be their King, I want you to look at a few things and ask yourself some questions, if for example you were assigned to interpret this Psalm and explain in detail some of these references. Here is one: Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they who dwell therein. [2] For He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. [3] Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? Or who shall stand in His holy place?” Obviously that refers to Jerusalem. But notice in verse 7, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. [8] Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.” Now that is very familiar from Handel’s Messiah, it’s frequently sung at Christmas and Easter, but often times we sing it without realizing what we just said.

If you look carefully at verse 7 you’ll see some things that perhaps you didn’t see before, if you look carefully. “Lift up ye heads, O ye gates.” This is what we call a metonymy, it’s like referring to the President saying something, we say the White House said this morning. Now obviously the literal White House did not say it, but the White House stands for the President’s authority. And so here the expression “O ye gates” stands for the individual city councils in these townships. And so it’s speaking to all the cities in the land of Israel, and it says “lift up your heads, O ye” which would be the city government, “and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors,” another metonymy, and the King of glory shall come in. Now in what form can God come through a gate? If the King is the Lord Himself, how can the Lord come through a door? And I suggest to you that even in this Psalm, forgetting the Psalms I’m going to show you, this Psalm has an intimation that something is going to happen to make God able to walk through the gates.

Continue, Psalm 24:10, “Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory,” so there is utterly no ambiguity here in the Psalm; it seems to me it is absolutely clear that the King of glory… if someone asks you who is the King of Israel? It’s the Lord, not a man, the Lord. And therefore any just plain human king is not a fulfillment of this prophecy. Now keep this is mind because at the end of a series of verses here I’m going to make a dogmatic statement. And you won’t catch the force of it; the statement is going to be that Jesus Christ as God-man is the only possible fulfillment of these prophecies, which makes, therefore, the doctrine of the Trinity true. And you will find people, usually of below normal intelligence, who understand a few verses of the New Testament and feel that the doctrine of the Trinity, because it’s a difficult doctrine and requires a few hours of thinking, is false. And therefore Jesus Christ is not God because Jesus, after all made Himself inferior to the Father, did He not in the New Testament, and so on and so on and so on, and therefore He’s not God. But my point is that He’s going to be… and it’s very easy to show from the Old Testament. But look here and remember this, that the King must be God Himself and not a man or an angel or somebody else. I guess the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Michael became incarnate or something and became Jesus but the King here is not Michael; the King here is God Himself.

One further reference in this chain; turn to 1 Samuel 8:7; again I want to impress upon you that the King has to be God Himself, not a human king. Here’s where Samuel is having a little problem, actually not Samuel so much as the nation. The nation at this point wants to do away with the existing political arrangement, and they want to go over to what I have labeled as a federalized, centralized system of government in which you concentrate power in the hands of a few men. Incidentally in history this always happens when the spirituality of a people is lost. When this happens in history inevitably power is concentrated in the hands of an elite who apparently become the only ones capable of governing. You see this goes on and on all down through history, the same old mistake. And Israel was no exception, she made the same mistake; had a perfectly beautiful system of democracy, had a system here of maximum freedom for the individual, no taxation, can you imagine this; this is almost inconceivable in our time. No taxation for political purposes, all her taxes went either into a Bible-teaching missionary type operation with the tithe or through emergency welfare measures, but there was no taxation for the big monstrosity of centralized government.

In 1 Samuel 8:6 they chose to destroy all of this freedom and adopt a monarchy. When they did so, they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” This is thinking in usual carnal human viewpoint pattern that they evidently were quite used to doing at this point. Who is their king to start with? We just got through saying the King is God, but they say “give us a king,” thinking in human terms. “And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. [7] And the LORD said unto Samuel,” now this is the most crucial verse, probably, in all these chains that I’ve given you and you usually don’t think of this as a crucial verse because it’s stuck in the middle of a narrative, but I want you to watch what God says to Samuel about their decision. “And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken,” or listen or obey, “Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.” Now this word reign is malak in the Hebrew, which means to be king. And what God is saying, they have rejected Me, they no longer want Me as King, they want a human person to fulfill this position. Now again, notice, God is King so when you see this word “King,” identify it in your mind with Jehovah. This is an equation you want to mentally draw in your mind; King equals God. And anything less than God does not satisfy the design and purpose of the whole thing. And verse 7 will clearly show you that the human king was a substitute for the Divine King; he was a substitute.

Now side note of application of this principle. The tendency will be no matter what Christian organization with which you are associated, the tendency will be when that group gets in trouble, when something happens, maybe you’re not getting all the people you want, you may not be getting the funds you need, something may happen. The tendency always seems to be to go exactly the wrong direction. The tendency always seems to be to think this way: well what we need is more effort, what we need is more concentrated human designed programs. So therefore at the first sign of trouble instead of taking a check, a careful diagnostic check of the whole outfit spiritually to find out just what’s wrong, the tendency is to forego any examination, just bypass that, and quickly plug in a human solution to the whole thing, we need extra personnel, we need a bigger program, we need a PR man to make our name known and so on, all this. This is always what happens.

And this is what Israel had; they were in a problem. Now why they in the problem they were in at this point? The reason why they were was because they’d rejected the Lord and so He was starting to reject them; He was trying to show them look, I’ve played this game two ways, and if you people want to stay in fellowship with me great; and if you don’t you’re going to have trouble. And they said we want to be carnal, so then they were out of the bottom circle, remember the top circle you’re always in there, the bottom circle you’re out and in, so they were out here and having problems. And so instead of saying look, we’ve sinned, we’ve gotten out of fellowship with the Lord, let’s use 1 John 1:9 and get back in; instead of doing that what do they do? They stayed out here and devised a system of trying to be comfortable outside the bottom circle. And that’s basically what always happens; try to invent some system that will make us comfortable in our carnality, and that’s basically what PR people do for Christian organizations; they’re designed to keep these outfits comfortable when there’s something basically wrong with them.

And this is what has happened to the whole church. Why do you go from a simple practically zero organization at the time of the apostles, within three centuries you’ve got a whole hierarchy of bishops and Popes and everything else. Now why did this happen? Don’t blame the particular individuals that are involved; you can go back through history and blame the Popes and you can blame the bishops but you’re wrong if you do that. That’s not the people to blame; the people to blame is the total church. It’s not the fault of the Roman bishop that he took over and in many cases in history he has been poorly judged by Protestants; Protestants…oh, he did this thing; at a particular point in history that’s all he could do to hold the pieces together. Now the reason why it all came about is, don’t blame the hierarchy, blame the average Joe in the pew. Those are the people to blame when the Church got top heavy in history. Those are the people to blame, not the hierarchy; the hierarchy may be partly to blame but the real… if the spirituality had not been lost there would have been no tendency to substitute organization for spirituality. This is always the tendency, to get out of the bottom circle and we need organization. Now everybody needs organization, but I’m thinking in the illegitimate sense of trying to plug up a tremendous gap.

For example, in this particular case it was this problem in 1 Samuel; you had the situation that God was going to be king over the nation and He told these people again and again and again, just rust Me, I will provide you with rulers. Now isn’t that a simple thing? It’s a simple promise; if you just relax and trust in My promises I’ll raise up the men that you need to run the show. So just relax, and if I’m slack and I don’t give you the man you need right away, just relax, he’ll be there. And that’s the Judges, that was the function of the Judges. It’s the same thing in the Church Age. God says look, I’m going to provide you with pastor-teachers, you don’t have to go appointing people and going through all this effort, I’ll raise these men up, they’re gifted men, I give the gift and I empower them so just relax and wait on Me and I will provide. Actually I wonder sometimes why people have such a hard time because it seems to me the thing to do is relax, but they don’t want to relax, they want to tense up, they want to panic. And so they want to immediately oh, we’ve got to solve it right now.

And so Israel had this. Essential they were saying in 1 Samuel 8 we’re tied and sick of waiting on the Lord to provide personnel, so what we’re going to do is appoint our own, and what better way of appointing personnel than to have a monarchy; you always know who’s going to be king that way. See, that’s why you have the monarchy, you always have someone there that you can be sure of, you can just relax and well at least we know who’s going to be the head. Whereas the other way, the faith way, the correct way, the grace way would be well, we don’t know who God is going to pick, we know He’s in charge and He’s going to pick the right people and raise them up at the right time. But no, people don’t want to do that, they want to try and do it themselves and so this is what has happened in 1 Samuel 8:7, “they have rejected Me,” don’t want God to rule over us. But God accommodated Himself to this point, just as in church history God accommodated Himself to man’s weakness. And many years He operated and still does through organizations that are not really biblically sound, and He operates through some of them. He’d rather not, but giving the fact there’s nothing else around He basically does. And it’s the same thing here, God did not like to operate through the monarchy, but nevertheless He made the best He could with it, and of course in history we find out the monarchy did serve a function, in that it looked forward to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So this is one line of the set of parallel lines and you want to keep that in mind because now we’re going to deal with the second of the two parallel lines. The second parallel line of prophecy during the dispensation of the Law concerns the fact that after they got the kingship installed a promise was made to one of the kings, and that’s in 2 Samuel 7. Just keep in mind now that you’ve got one parallel line saying God is King, which has to be literally fulfilled; it’s got to be that way. But now we’re picking up a second set of prophecies.

2 Samuel 7:2, this is King David, and he wants to provide a place for the Lord. David, you might say was a sentimentalist in some ways, but he wasn’t. It sounds like he was but he was actually a very tender man and in verse 2, “the king said unto Nathan, the prophet, See, now, I dwell in an house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells inside a tent.” In other words he’s saying look, I got a house to live in, and God’s tabernacle is sitting out there in the rain. Let’s make a building for it. So he figures he’d been blessed and he wanted to pass the blessing on, you might say. So he wants to build something for God and God says well I appreciate it David but you’re not going to give anything to Me, I’m not in the receiving business. God is always in the giving business, never the receiving business. And so God says well I appreciate your offer but don’t worry about it because I’m going to build something for you that’s better than what you’re going to build for me. And this is what he’s going to build for David in verse 12.

2 Samuel 7:12, “And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thine own body, and I will establish his kingdom. [13] He shall build an house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. [14] I will be His Father, and he shall be My son. If He commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men; [15] But my mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee. [16] And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee; thy throne shall be established forever.”

Now there are some find points in this whole statement and those of you who are looking at fine print before you sign your name look carefully; this is a contract, called by theologians the Davidic Covenant. Now let’s look carefully at the prophecy; understand it for a moment. First, verse 12; what is verse 12 prophesying? It’s saying after David dies, “I will set up your seed,” singular, who will “proceed out of your own body,” that’s obviously, here’s David, now let’s tally up what information we’ve got here in the text. Here’s David, his seed is going to be a son, the son is not mentioned here, but it’s a son which we know to be Solomon. That’s one thing we know, a physical son of David. Okay, verse 13, “He shall build a house for My name,” that’s the temple. Did Solomon build the temple? Yes. So, son equal Solomon and Solomon built a temple and that prophecy was fulfilled in history. Now, verse 14, “I will be his Father and he will be My son.” Now here is where you get the designation, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Father and Son designation historically came from this passage and this tips you off as to what is meant by the Father/Son designation of the Trinity.

Let’s look at this a moment. What is a father/son relationship? He’s taking David’s son and God is essentially saying I’m going to be his father David, after you die I’m going to be his Father, so that even though his physical father is not living, I will be His Father and I will guide him, and so now we have for the first time in Scripture a Father/son relationship. You’re going to see this again and again tonight, on down to the time when Jesus Christ says I am the only begotten Son of God. So you have the Father/son relationship designating at this point in history a personal relationship between God and His king... a personal relationship between God and His king.

Then let’s see what else it says, verse 14; “If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men.” Now here is discipline, here is discipline. You say well, I thought this prophecy terminated in a sinless person. That’s correct but the condition in verse 14 gets you out of a jam; notice the sentence is “If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him,” now this applies to every king in the line. So you have David, you have Solomon, you have Manasseh, and so on, on down the line, you have all these kings; every one of them would be in a father/son relationship, and if one of them got out of line he got disciplined.

But notice 1 Samuel 7:15, “But My mercy shall not depart away from him,” which means here again as with the Abrahamic Covenant and as with every unconditional covenant you have the same mechanics working. The two mechanics in an unconditional covenant are (1) an eternally secure legal position, and (2) a temporarily change relationship, top and bottom circle again. Remember we have it with the Abrahamic Covenant, you have this problem. You have the fact that Israel has been given the land forever; that’s the top circle, that’s their legal ownership. The bottom circle is she occupies the land or she might not occupy the land; it’s still hers legally but she may or may not be in the position to enjoy it based on the fact whether in history she’s in or out of fellowship with God. Now you have the same thing here with the king. So let’s replace Israel now with king. So with the Abrahamic Covenant you have the mechanics operate on Israel; replace the word “Israel” with “king” and then you have the Davidic Covenant operate on “king” just like you had the Abrahamic Covenant operate on “Israel.” And so what does God say in verse 15? He says top circle, “My mercy will be with you forever.” But bottom circle, verse 14, “If he commit iniquity” I’m going to spank him. So you see again you have the top and bottom circle.

You have this all through the Bible and why people can’t see the Christian life… it’s there in the Abrahamic Covenant, it’s there in the Davidic Covenant, and it’s here in the New Covenant with the Christian believer. So this is where we get this top and bottom circle business. You have to distinguish between the top circle of your relationship as a Christian that’s legally secure, no matter what you do it’s legally secure, but down here, this is not secure; that’s the game of the Christian life, staying inside the circle; that’s the name of the game. So this is where your action is. This is where your stability is. You have to remember in the Christian relationship this is the way it is. ll right, so here it is with the king.

Now let’s look at some more things; there’s two additional points I want you to see in this prophecy. One of them is in verse 12, notice how careful God engineers this statement. Just as though you were a businessman and you were getting yourself involved in some contract, and you’d be very sticky about the wording of that contract. Now God is omniscient, infinitely more intelligent than any other person in the universe. Therefore, how much more will He be a stickler for words in His contract. Now watch the wording of the contract.

1 Samuel 7:12, “I will establish his kingdom,” period, nothing else is promised to Solomon. All that is promised to Solomon is his kingdom; “I will establish his kingdom,” and that’s all that’s promised. Now watch what happens; down in verse 16 more is promised, but it’s not to David’s seed, it’s to David himself. “Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee,” all right, so let’s see what we can add up here. To Solomon we have a kingdom established; to David, let’s list the points what David has: it says that his kingdom will be established, just like Solomon, but watch what else is promised, “your house will be established.” What’s “your house?” The “house” is the physical family of David. So we’ve got something else here, we’ve got family. Now what else do we have, “thy house, and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee; thy throne shall be established forever.” All right so now we have many things said about David that are not said about Solomon. Do you know why this is so? Before Christmas we’re going to show you the doctrine of the virgin birth. I’m going to show you why the virgin birth is something that is stated from one end of the Bible to the other; it’s not just grounded on one verse in Isaiah.

The virgin birth is the answer to this problem. Why is it that you’ve got David here, Solomon here, David’s promised many things but Solomon isn’t. Because later on down in the line of kings you have one king after another come out of here, down to Jehoiachin, and Jehoiachin, he was the last official king to sit on the throne. And God said righteous man childless, and it was a curse that He assigned, it wasn’t a very pleasant task but He told Jeremiah, I want you to go to the king and write him childless; it means that from this point on in history not another man from the Solomonic line will ever sit on the throne of Israel because God has pronounced that line… that line is terminated.

You say wait a minute, wait a minute, doesn’t this violate the terms of the Davidic Covenant? No it doesn’t because it says here in the Davidic Covenant that David’s house, not Solomon’s, David’s house will be established forever, and that is why in the Gospels you have Jesus Christ through Mary traced back, not to Solomon, but to David. Mary’s genealogy is given in the book of Luke. Jesus’ mother, who was responsible for His physical humanity, comes from David, not from Solomon. Mary’s great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, was a man by the name of Nathan, who was a brother of Solomon. And so therefore Mary is not related to King Solomon, she’s related to King David but not Solomon. On the other hand, Jesus’ legal father, Joseph, now Joseph was not His physical father but he was a legal father and He had to have a legal father. Now this is the most amazing work of God in history; He had to get this young Jewish girl tied up with this Jewish boy that they’d have a romance and a marriage and that it would fulfill all these prophesies and not mess up all these names and contracts and everything else. It’s amazing. You didn’t know that God was in the romance business but He was. He worked this out so that Mary would emanate from David through Nathan; Joseph would come from David through Solomon, thereby when Mary would have her baby virgin born it would mean that Mary in her humanity would transfer this promise on to Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ was of the house of David, but it also meant that since the royal family could not be ruled without a legality, Jesus had to have a father, a legal father who would transfer the right to rule upon Him. And that is Joseph. And this is why you have Mary and Joseph in the New Testament with two different genealogies; one in the Gospel of Matthew, one in the Gospel of Luke.

So this is the details of this second parallel line of prophecy; there’s going to be a Messiah who is a human being; that’s the second. The first line was that God is King; God is King! But the second line that we begin to pick up is that Messiah is going to be a human being and He’s going to come from the seed of David. Let’s see some more.

Psalm 2, these are the first of a set of what we call royal Psalms. I gave you a list when I dealt with the parallel line that God is King, I gave you a list of Psalms and we called those Psalms the enthronement Psalms. And the enthronement Psalms had as their theme God is King. Now we come to the set of Psalms known as the royal Psalms and the royal Psalms all have as their pitch that Messiah is going to be a Son of David in His humanity. So we have Psalm 2 and what does Psalm 2 say? “Why do the nations rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing? [2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against His anointed,” the word mashiyach, “anointed” in the Hebrew is the word from which we get Messiah. This is saying, “Why do the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His mashiyach or His anointed one, or His Messiah, “why do they take counsel together against His Messiah, we would translate it in the Greek Christos which means Christ.

What else do they say, Psalm 2:3, “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. [4] He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” Verse 6, I have set my king upon My holy hill of Zion,” so here you have God distinguished from His king who is sitting in a place, point location. All right, what else does it say? Verse 7, do these words look familiar, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee,” which means something. The word “begotten Son” does not refer to the virgin birth. The word Jesus is God’s only begotten Son means that He is the only authorized Son in this legal God-King relationship, for in the ancient world when they coronated a king and they put the crown upon his head, they would always say, “This day thou art begotten,” and they’d drop the crown on his head and it was a signal for his coronation; it was a signal that from that point on he entered into a legal relationship that he did not have before; he entered into the father/son relationship.

Psalm 2:9, speaking of what He is going to do, He is going to “break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Verse 11, “Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.” And then verse 12, “Kiss the Son,” which is an idiom in the Old Testament for worship in the sense of obedience to a ruler. So here you have one Psalm pointing to the fact of a human Messiah. 2 Samuel 7, Psalm 2!

Turn to Psalm 18:49, “Therefore will I give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the nations, and sing praises unto Thy mane. [50] Great deliverance gives He to His king; and shows mercy to his anointed, to David, and to his seed forever.” Now let me ask you a logical question; if the promise is to David and his seed forever, how can the promise be fulfilled? There are only two ways you can fulfill that promise of verse 50; either you have to have David’s line infinitely going on, because remember this is the king forever…forever, infinity; you’ve got to have an infinite succession of king or if the line stops it’s got to stop on an infinite person. That’s the only way you can have this wind up. So one of two things is going to happen, and that again a hint that more than humanity is meant.

Psalm 20, the next in the royal Psalms; Psalm 20:5, “We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners….” Verse 6, “Now know I that the Lord saves His anointed; He will hear him from His holy heaven,” and the word “anointed” is Messiah.

Turn to Psalm 21:2, “The king shall joy in thy strength, O LORD; and in Thy salvation how greatly shall He rejoice! [2] Thou hast given him his heart’s desire, and hast not withheld the request of his lips,” again the Messiah.

Turn to the next royal Psalm, Psalm 45:1, this is a very famous one because of it’s quotation in the book of Hebrews. “My heat is overflowing with a good matter; I speak of the things which I have made touching the king.” So again this is talking about the king. “My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.” And this is what he writes about the king, beginning in verse 2, “Thou art fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into thy lips; therefore God has blessed thee forever. [3] Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. [4] And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness….” Verse 6, notice, this is addressed to the human king but what does he say, “Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever; the scepter of Thy kingdom is a right scepter. [7] Thou lovest righteousness, and hates wickedness; therefore God, thy God, has anointed thee with the oil of gladness,” referring to the filling of the Holy Spirit. So isn’t it interesting here, he’s talking to the King and he says God, Your God has anointed You. You see, you begin to catch overtones here, that the Old Testament is not silent on just how Jesus Christ is going to fulfill these things, so here again we have the king.

The next royal Psalm is Psalm 72, “Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son. [2] He shall judge Thy people with righteousness, and Thy poor with justice,” and so on. And you have in verse 8, “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” So it’s a universal kingship; this is again prediction of the Messiah.

The next royal Psalm, Psalm 89, this is a song of praise about the Davidic Covenant of 2 Samuel. Psalm 89:3, “I have made a covenant with My chosen, I have sworn unto David, My servant. [4] Thy seed will I establish forever, and built up thy throne to all generations,” again predicting the kingship of Messiah and so on. Verse 20, “I have fund David, my servant; with My holy oil have I,” made him Messiah “anointed him.” Verse 24, “But My faithfulness and My mercy shall be with him; and in My name shall his horn be exalted.” And then it goes on to make predictions that obviously never came true about the literal David, so it must be David coming again or a greater David than David.

The next royal Psalm is 101, this is a Psalm of David in which the king, the Messiah, vows to be a perfect leader, and so you have in this Psalm, Psalm 101:2, “I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way.” Verse 4, “A perverse heart shall depart from me, I will not know a wicked person,” here you have even have the attribute or the characteristic of sinlessness, which is interesting. In other words, Messiah vows to be sinless, so now not only do we pick up He’s humanity, He’s God, but He’s sinless; you pick up all sorts of these elements.

The next royal Psalm is 110 and this is the last one I want to take you to tonight. I think you’ll begin to see how much content the Psalms have. It would be nice if we could go through our hymnal and pull out some of the doctrines that we can pull out of this Psalm, the hymnal of Israel, but unfortunately we have a few lamebrains that wrote our hymnals. Psalm 110:1, “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at My right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Now obviously that sounds familiar because it’s applied to the Lord Jesus Christ. [2] The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion; rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.” Verse 4, “The LORD has sown, and will not repent, Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” Do you know what that the King of Israel had to be a priest after the order of Melchizedek, when all the priests of Israel was a priest out of Aaron and the tribe of Levi? Because David’s not of the tribe of Levi, he’s of the tribe of Judah, and if the King is going to be a priest he can’t fulfill the Old Testament priesthood because the Old Testament priesthood, to be a priest you had to be a Levite and you can’t come through Judah. Messiah comes from Judah, how can He be a priest then. The only way He can be a priest is by a new priesthood, the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek.

The final reference is Isaiah 53 to show you the humanity of Messiah. It’s a very famous passage; those who do not believe in a Messiah have had tremendous difficulty over the centuries of explaining just what this section Isaiah if speaking of if it’s not of Messiah who is it of? It has to be of somebody. But just think of this; read Psalm 53 in a relaxed way, remembering that this was written six to seven centuries before Jesus lived, and what do you get. Look at Isaiah 52:13, “Behold, My servant shall deal preudently; He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. [14] As many were astounded at thee—his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men—“ a prophecy of what Jesus looked like in the cross, so those of you who have seen these nice artist depictions of the crucifixion, just forget it, chuck it, because no artist has ever painted what Christ looked like on the cross. In the first place, nobody could see what Christ looked like on the cross because it was dark and in the second place, those artists who have depicted Him just before the darkness or after the darkness have never fulfilled this verse, verse 14. If an artist really wants to paint the crucifixion they should study carefully this passage of Scripture.

Isaiah 53:3, “He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief….” Look at verse 5, “He was wounded for our transgressions,” now who else is that talking about, “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities the chastisement for our peace was upon him, and with his wounds we are healed. [6] All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Now can that be the nation Israel? People say this passage is a prediction of the nation Israel; how can it be the nation Israel when in verse 6 here it’s talking about the iniquity of the nation is put on Him? You’ve got a distinction set up even in the chapter between this person and the nation, so how can the person be the nation. See, it just doesn’t fit. The only possible interpretation of this is Messiah. Look at verse 9, “He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,” Joseph of Arimathaea, “because He had done no violence, neither was there any deceit in His mouth. [10] Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, and He shall prolong His days,” etc.

People will tell you in religion course after religion course after religion course, I’ve seen liberal chaplains tell some of our college young people that the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement is not found except in the writings of the apostle Paul. Would you please tell me, what then, is being taught here in verse 10, when it says Jesus was made an offering, the Messiah is an offering for sin. Now that is a substitutionary atonement; by substitutionary atonement I mean that Jesus Christ on the cross took our sins upon Himself; our sins were nailed right there on Him and judged there. Now that is substitutionary atonement; it means Jesus substituted for us, under the judgment and wrath of God and people say that’s something Paul dreamed up. Well obviously they haven’t read Isaiah 53. Fortunately…fortunately one of our young people was able to challenge the Presbyterian chaplain over on campus and ask him about it and the answer was that he never particularly thought about that. I would judge that would be pretty typical of the man’s ministry.

Let’s go to Jesus Christ. We’ve seen from the Old Testament that the deity and the humanity, these parallel lines have to converge at some point. The parallel lines have to meet at some point and where they meet is in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is why we say the classical Chalcedonian definition is that Jesus Christ is true humanity plus undiminished deity, united in one person without confusion forever. That is the classic statement; it ought to be memorized by every Christian. You have every element in that statement. First you have true humanity, that’s one thing of this statement; the next item in the statement is undiminished deity, so that’s the second thing you’ve said about Jesus Christ. If people ask you who Jesus Christ is you can rattle it right off: Jesus Christ is true humanity plus undiminished deity, united in one person without confusion forever, period. So true humanity plus undiminished deity united in one person, that’s important; Jesus was not a schizophrenic, that He had two personalities and He was a man one time and then He was God the next moment and so on. He spoke out of His humanity and deity ultimately, but He is one person. So you have true humanity, undiminished deity united in one person. And then without confusion, that is put in there to guard against the fact that He became… it’s like red and yellow mixed make orange, and so God and man mixed make neither God nor man. And to prevent that from happening the people put that phrase in there; without confusion, they didn’t mix, the deity and the humanity don’t mix. Creator can’t mix with creature; the boundary is forever. And then the final statement in this statement is forever. So there you have it in a nutshell, one simple sentence to explain what we mean by the Lord Jesus Christ: true humanity plus undiminished deity united in one person without confusion forever. As I say, every Christian should know this cold.

Now let’s look at the Lord Jesus Christ in the New Testament and what we’re looking for is signs of His deity; obviously He is a man. The question people raise, as one lady in a discussion with me raised this: well, if He’s God why isn’t it more obvious in the New Testament that He’s God? There’s a reason why it is not obvious and I’ll show you that as we go through. I’d like to discuss five points about the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, or just put Jesus Christ and the Law and this will include the deity. Jesus Christian and His relationship to the Law because we’re studying the dispensation of the Law; I’d like to cover five things about the Lord Jesus Christ and His relationship with the Law.

The first one, found in John 8:46, the Lord challenged His generation. The one man who would observe Him at any point in His life and convict Him of sin, in John 8:46 “Which of you convicts me of sin?” Now, people say that Jesus never claimed to be God. Will you please tell me what man on earth would get up and make a statement like this in his right mind? I mean it sounds nice in the King James, you read along and it says well, which of you convict me of sin, and you just go on and miss the whole point of the thing. He’s sitting up there and asking, someone show Me where I made a mistake. Show Me, and nobody stood up, and these were His enemies that He challenged. So the first thing we notice about Jesus Christ and the Law is that He perfectly kept the Law; John 8:46, Romans 10:4. Jesus Christ perfectly kept the Law.

Now the second thing about the Lord Jesus Christ, He fulfilled the typology of the Law. In other words, everywhere the Law specified something about Messiah, Jesus fulfilled it. He gives you the principle in Matthew 5:18 where He says one jot nor one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law. Now basically what that is, those of you know some Hebrew will realize that the Yodh, it’s pronounced j-o-t in your New Testament, He says one jot or one tittle shall not in any wise pass from the Law. God actually means Yodh, and the Hebrew letters, say on a scale like this, here’s Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Dalet, and Yodh would be like this, it’s the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet of the consonants, and He’s saying that will not pass from the Law until all have been fulfilled. He’s going to far as to say that not one letter is going to pass out of this Law until everything is perfectly fulfilled.

So then we find that the Lord not only perfectly kept the Law but as far as the tabernacle and so on, the idea that He was to perform certain functions that are pictured in the tabernacle, He did all these functions. So He fulfilled the typology of the Law.

The third thing, and that is found in Matthew 10 which is important to understand; Jesus appealed to Israel and why His mission was a little different from ours today. Jesus perfectly kept the Law, He fulfilled the typology of the Law, and now we come to the fact that He appealed for His Kingship on the basis of the Law. He made His pitch that I am King, and He made it on the basis of the Law. Now here’s where He sends the twelve forth, Matthew 10:5, “These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not,” now watch this, those of you who think that Jesus always preached the same gospel we preach, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter not, [6] But rather, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Now doesn’t that pretty well circumscribe the preaching. It was addressed to only Israel at the start of Jesus’ ministry. Why? Because this was the message, verse 7, “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Now if the kingdom of heaven is at hand what He is saying is that the King is here to set up His kingdom. And so you could go two by two into the villages and preach the fact that the King has come and He is ready to set up His kingdom. He is ready, in other words, to bring in the final age of history. Verse 8, and “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons; freely ye have received, feely give.” So this is the point that He’s commissioning His people to go only to Israel and announce a specific thing.

Now ask yourself something, if He sent the twelve out to the Gentiles, did they understand? If they came up to a Gentile, say in Greece and say hey, the King has come. The Gentiles aren’t going to understand the message because they don’t know, what king, what king are you talking about, Alexander. What’s the deal? The Gentiles don’t have the background.

So the first mission of the Lord Jesus Christ was to the lost sheep of the house of Israel to announce the fact that His kingdom had come; the gospel of the kingdom. Now as a footnote and appendix to this point, just remember that they rejected the King; that is why you are saved today, because Israel rejected Him from being King and out of her rejection crucified Him and as a result of His crucifixion we have our so great salvation. So you can be thankful in one sense that they rejected the Lord.

Now the fourth thing about the Lord Jesus Christ and the Law. We found out He perfectly kept the Law, He fulfilled the typology of the Law, He appeals to His Kingship under the Law, and now the fourth thing, Jesus Christ and His deity. How do you prove the deity of Jesus Christ from the Bible. There are basically four ways to prove Jesus’ deity. First, John 8:58, and the first proof of the deity of Christ from the New Testament is that He has the name of God. Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily I say unto you before Abraham was, I am.” And the word “I am” in the Greek is the word ego eimi, and ego eimi is used in the Old Testament, it’s the Greek translation, to equal Jehovah. And Jesus at this point, and several times, do you remember the Roman soldiers were coming up in the Garden of Gethsemane and they said hey, where’s this Jesus guy, and He said “I am,” and whoof, the Romans fall down. Well why did they fall down, Roman soldiers aren’t usually known to fall down in history, in case you don’t know military history. But they walked up here with this armor and the first thing you know, He says two words, “I am,” and clank, clank, clank, clank crash, they all go down. Well, it’s a fact that at certain points in Jesus’ ministry His deity flashed forth, in unexplained reasons. Do you remember the mob scene, where they were about to stone Him and all of a sudden it says He walked through the crowd and was gone; those mysterious things that happened during Jesus’ earthly ministry that are flash points of His deity, where these things occur.

So the first thing to prove the deity of Christ is that He claimed the name of God, I am, ego eimi, John 8:58.

The second thing about the deity of Christ in the New Testament is that He claimed to have the attributes of God. I’ll just briefly run through some of them; one of them is in this verse, eternality. Who has eternality but God; He says, “Before Abraham came, I was existing.” Again, can you image a man getting up on a soap box and saying something idiotic, before George Washington was, came to be, I always existed. You just have to put yourself there. I think the cure for people who say that Jesus never claimed to be God is roll playing; I think the next time this comes up I’m going to write out the parts and say look, you play this part, we’ll just set up a five minute skit and we’ll act out in front of your eyes the very theme of this Gospel and you tell me whether He was claiming to be God or not.

So, the attributes of God; eternality is shown here; omniscience, shown in John 2, He knew what was on men’s minds. His omnipresence was shown in John 1 where Nathan said something to the Lord and He said yeah, Nathan, and He proceeded to give Nathan’s autobiography. And he said, hey, where’ve you been. And He said don’t worry about it Nathan, before you saw me I saw you sitting under the tree over there; so there He has omnipresence. Now I want to show you one passage in Matthew for His omnipotence, Matthew 8:23. We’ve seen His eternality, His omniscience, His omnipresence, and now His omnipotence. This is the time when stilled the winds and the waves. “And when He was entered into a boat, His disciples followed him. [24] And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, so much that the boat was covered with the waves; but He was asleep. [25] And His disciples cam to Him, and awoke Him, saying, Lord, save us; we perish.” I am always amused by this statement; first of all, they’re in this boat, can you imagine this boar rocking around out there on this sea, in a fresh water sea when you get a wind it kicks up far faster and far more treacherously than salt water on an open plain. That’s one of the rules of buoyancy and so on. So you have this situation, this boat going all over the place and the Lord’s there relaxed, sleeping. He knows who’s in charge, no problem, so He just relaxes. Everybody is panicking, chewing their nails and everything else, and He’s sound asleep. Today people would say hey, what pill did you take. So here He is, perfectly relaxed and they wake Him up and say look, would you wake up here, we’re in a problem. Verse 26, “And He saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then He arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm,” and the Greek indicates it was immediate.

If you’ve had a little training in physics you know what the problem here is. How do you remove that much kinetic energy in that short of time. That was kinetic energy that was removed out of the system, plucked out of the system almost instantaneously; where did it go. You have a destruction of kinetic energy violating one of the principles of physics, the law of conservation of energy. Then verse 27 they made this statement, “But the men marveled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

The background for making that particular remark is found in Psalm 89:9, that was not a random remark, as though they were standing by and wondering, good night, what’s this guy, everything depends on his word. Now it’s not just a random remark like that, there was a design behind it. The reason is in Psalm 89:9 where it’s speaking of God and it says in a point of praise, “Thou rulest the raging of the sea; when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them.” That was a work that only God could do to the Old Testament way of thinking, and here you have Jesus come up and stills it, just like that. And to a person trained in the Old Testament, that is an attribute of God’s omnipotence.

At this point we’re going to stop, halfway through the four evidences of the deity of Christ; we’ve covered He has the name of God, He has the attributes of God and next week we’ll go to His works and His worship and finish up this section of the Law. But I’m trying to take you through the Lord Jesus Christ under the dispensation of the Law, not the Church, because when we get in the Church Age Jesus has an entirely different function and I want you to catch it. The Law illuminates the person of Jesus Christ.