Clough: The Nation Israel-The Church Lesson 3

North Stonington Bible Church – 10-15-02

This will be the third talk in a series of three that go beyond the conference. What we’re trying to do here is to focus on the next great event happening after the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ, which was Pentecost, when having arrived at the throne the Second Personality of the Trinity was able to send the Third Person of the Trinity to earth to replace Him, the Holy Spirit. And with that we have the formation of a new entity called the Church. We’re focusing on specifically defining the Church so that the dispensational distinctive of the Church of Christ is clear over against what Israel was in the Old Testament. This dispensational distinction is something that is often omitted in conservative evangelical classical Reformed Theology because that theology dates from 1650, that period of time when the issues back then were different than they are now. The issues back then were having to do with how people are saved and the Reformed Theology has done a wonderful work in separating the gospel, sola Scriptura, sola fide, away from Roman Catholicism.

However, what happened is what happens so often is after the Reformers got their work done the whole thing hardened up into a creed that covered everything including areas that the Reformation had not yet really dealt with in depth, and two of those areas are ecclesiology, that is the doctrine of the Church, and eschatology, the doctrine of future things; those two kind of go together. And it was into the 19^th century when a lot of the Reformed churches in Europe were identified with state governments. A guy by the name of John Nelson Darby was a priest in the Anglican Church at the time, ministering in Ireland and the problem he ran into was that the…being part of the Anglican Church which the classic Protestant state church, the Protestants, what they had done is replaced the church state of Rome with church states of Protestantism and what happened there was that the Church of England, the Anglican Church, is under the monarchy of England and he found as a missionary to Ireland the Irish people weren’t too thrilled about the English monarchy and when the monarchy came out and said that in order to join the Church of England you will swear allegiance to the king, that terminated Darby’s evangelism with the Irish. So wait a minute, he says, the body of Christ can’t be so thoroughly identified with one national government. And so it was thinking about that where he realized that we’ve got to go back to the Scripture and examine what is the body of Christ all about.

So in the last hour we talked about the fact that the body of Christ, that is the Church, is not different from believers in other ages and how they’re saved. It was the same gospel in the Old Testament, not known as thoroughly but it was the same basic gospel, people got saved by trusting in Christ and Christ alone, trusting the promises that God would do something, they didn’t now all the details of the cross. And in the Church Age we’re saved the same way, by trusting in God’s promises through the person of Christ. So then what’s the distinction, and classically Reformed Theology has argued that the Church is made up of believers of all ages. Well, believers do exist in all ages, but is the noun “Church,” does that refer to all believers, or does it have a more special, restricted meaning? And so we’re arguing that the Church is not a government, it can’t be identified with one nation, it’s not a building, and it’s not to be identified with the temple. All of this was clarified in the book of Acts, so it’s sad that we have to go through this for 1900 years and still fighting about how to clarify what it is.

The Church is the group of believers who are in union with Christ, a union that did not happen until after Christ ascended to the Father’s right hand and sent the Holy Spirit, because until the Holy Spirit was sent there couldn’t be any union between the resurrected ascended seated Christ and the Church on earth. We said that as the book of Acts proceeds, you start off in the early chapters in the book of Acts and there’s very little comprehension on the part of the people on the ground there that this thing, this work of the Holy Spirit is any different than Israel, and it was treated in a very Jewish way. But as the book of Acts unfolds you begin to have these events that happen and we can summarize all of those events under one topic, I guess you could say, that just as you have the event of the ascension and session of Christ, that was one event, then you have the event of the coming down of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, you could summarize all those different things going on in the book of Acts under one heading and that is the separation of the Church or the emergence of the Church out from Israel. By the end of the book of Acts it’s very clear that the Holy Spirit is doing something new, something that had been prophesied in the upper room discourse, described and so on.

And crucial to understanding what the Church is all about is something that happened on the Damascus Road to the Apostle Paul. I personally believe that the trauma of what happened on the Damascus Road was so deeply embedded in Paul’s soul that it caused him for decades to think about this and meditate about it and do research in the Old Testament, and that’s why when we read Paul in the New Testament, in the epistles, he’s always talking about our union with Christ, we are “in Christ,” we are in union with Him, He’s made us to sit with Him at the Father’s right hand, all that phraseology.

Now think about this; if we were there on the Damascus Road and had the experience Paul had, how would we have thought? Now here he is, he has in his hand the official government papers to authorize the jailing of believers in Christ, because he wants to stamp out this Christian movement. This is becoming divisive in the nation and he does it like so many politicians think they’re going to do, they’re going to end a movement by physically destroying the people associated with it. It doesn’t always work that way. Well, he’s on the Damascus Road and he sees from heaven the Lord. Notice by the way that after Christ ascends and sits at the right hand nobody ever sees Him on earth any more. Everybody always sees Him from heaven. So He sees the Lord and He’s angry and He’s focused, this guy is focused on destroying this new movement and he hears this voice that says Saul, why are you persecuting Me. Now think about this; it’s coming from a person seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven; believers are disconnected, they’re down here on earth, but when he’s laying his hands physically on believers Jesus says you’re persecuting Me. Now that means there’s some sort of link between Jesus in His resurrection body, seated at the Father’s right hand and believers, such that when you mess with Christians physically in history you mess with Jesus.

I used the example previous hour, there’s thousand of believers today…do you know there’s been more Christians killed in the 20^th century than all the 19 centuries put together. And there’s been very little outcry about it. It’s strange; I think the man’s name is Michael Horowitz, I’m not sure but he’s a Jew and he’s not a Christian and he’s raising the issue about the persecution of Christians. Do you know what he says? He says you evangelical Christians are the Jews of the 21^st century, and what he means by that is worldwide Christians are being slaughtered on a scale that is unprecedented. In Muslim lands today Christians are being cut down as fast as they can believe. In the Sudan we have, right out in front of the American corporations that want the stuff that they make cocoa for drinks, soft drinks, don’t want to bother the Sudanese because it might interfere with our business, so we have a toleration of slavery and murder of the Sudanese Christians by the Muslim community. We have it going on in Nigeria. All over Africa, between the north and the south parts of Africa there is a collision between Islam and Christianity. And it’s not the Christians killing the Muslims; it’s the Muslims killing the Christians. This goes on, it goes on in Indonesia, it goes on all over the world today. So what we’re saying is that if those people, those Sudanese poor bedraggled believers are in union with Christ, then the Sudanese persecutors are actually mutilating Jesus Christ. When you touch His people you touch Him. And don’t think it doesn’t have heavenly repercussions.

So this goes on and we said it goes on because who is ultimately behind it? Is the Sudanese Muslim government actually behind it? No; behind them lurks other principalities and powers and these principalities and powers, the darkness of this world, want to get at Jesus. Now they’ve got a problem because they can’t get at Him because He sits at the Father’s right hand above all principalities and powers; they can’t touch Jesus. So the way they get back at Him is to attack His body. What is the Church called? The body of Christ. So if you want to hurt Jesus you assault His body; it’s a very simple straightforward strategy, it’s been going on and it is going on before our eyes. So it behooves us to understand that we’re in this thing called the Church, which makes us a target. It’s interesting that every group has its rights in America except evangelical Christians. It’s interesting that on university campuses we have bully faculty members who love to bully kids in their class who happen to identify themselves as Christians. It’s almost lethal in some courses to let it be known that you’re a Christian.

I’ve said this before in previous years but I go back to this because it was the slickest trick I’ve ever seen on a university campus ever pulled off by Christians. I had some young guys in my church and these guys were really innovative; they had this religious course they had to take, it was one of these required things, you’ve got to get so many credits of this and they had to put up with all this bologna in the course, and it was taught by a liberal chaplain and this liberal chaplain loved to find out who the Christians were in the first week so he could undermine their faith for the rest of the semester. Well, the first thing the Christians did, which I encourage Christians in university campuses to do is they took notes on this faculty member and passed it to the next people that were taking this course. So there was a little learning curve here going on, so the Christians that walked into this course knew from the other people what was going to happen. So the first thing they did was, they know that the tactic this faculty member had was to smoke out who the Christians were by asking questions, the Christians raised their hands and boom, boom, boom. So what they decided to do was this guy always would attack the Christians as these fundamental believers over here. Well they decided what they would do since he was a liberal who ostensibly believed in God, they would disguise their Christian allegiance and attack him as atheists. So they sat there and they waited, they didn’t bait when the bait questions came up they didn’t raise their hand, so they never realized that these guys were Christians. And so during the semester when he would say God does this and God does that, they’d raise their hand and say wait a minute, how does God get into this, you just told us that the Bible is not a trustworthy thing and that God doesn’t verbally reveal Himself, where are you getting God from? And it’d go on, two lectures later he’d say something, chaplain, we still haven’t heard how you justify God’s existence, where are you getting Him from, are you pulling him out of a peanut butter jar or what.

So this went on and the class was really wondering who these guys are that keep doing this. Well, the whole grade in the course, you could be a team project, you know, two or three people get together and do an essay. So these guys all worked it so they’re going to get together and do an essay, that’s their grade for the course. And the man was really far out in his Biblical criticism; he had this theory that he promoted all during the semester that God was really a God of love and all the passages you read about where He judges people and He’s a God of justice and He disciplines and so on and so forth, that all of that is primitive stuff. And as man evolved and as culture evolved we got a clearer and clearer understanding of God so that now He’s a God of love. And then what he did, he’d go through the Bible, scissor and paste it, and date it so all the passages that had to do with God as a judging God were early and all the passages that held God was a loving God and gracious were late. So he reconstructed the whole Bible that way.

So these guys sat there and they took careful notes on the methodology and so on, then they devised…it’s got to be one of the greatest counters I’ve ever heard, their paper, the team paper for project the semester was ekthratheism; now ekthra is the Greek word for hate; their thesis was that God really is a God of hate and that all the passages in the Bible that have to do with a God of love are old passages when people were naïve and when they got more real they believed that God was really a God of hatred and a God of justice. And so it came the last week of the semester and everybody had to read their paper, each team, one of the kids on the group had to come up and read the paper. So they got one of the guys that could think on his feet real good and they had him up there and he read this paper and they said you know, when he got through the chaplain knew what the game was, I mean, this guy was smart, and he figured out that he’d been had because they took his methodology and they reversed the gun and turned it right around and fired in the reverse direction. And they said when they finished that paper you could have heard a pin drop in that lecture hall because everybody was stunned, and then they finally got on, and everybody burst out in laughter, and the chaplain was really embarrassed but he couldn’t do much because it was very well done in a scholarly way. So he says I know what you guys did, you’ll get an A but it’s only for your methodology.

But see, this is a good way to come back, you answer a fool according to his folly and when you have a fool on the faculty you answer him according to his folly, you do it submissively and courteously but there are ways of doing this. I was telling the people another thing Christians have pulled off, a different fellow, he was a strange one, but he was in this course where the professor would again try to smoke out the Christians the first few weeks of the course by asking questions. And his thing was evolution and he would cram evolution down every lecture so this fellow sat in that class and said you know, I’m getting tired of this stuff; I’m paying good tuition, that’s the other way to think about this, by the way, you’re hiring these people to give you an education. They’re not the big boys, you’re hiring them to do a job, you know, like a plumber or an electrician, they don’t like to be called that but if I hire an electrician I want him to do the wiring, I don’t want him to sit here and give me lectures and I don’t want them to give me fuzzy wiring. So when I hire somebody to teach me something I want them to teach it. I don’t want to sit there and listen to a lot of garbage and indoctrination. But they get their money because they’re on tenure.

So he sat there, okay, we’re going to answer this fool according to his folly. There was a little girl, a very petite girl, this guy was a big guy, over 6’ close to 200 pounds, and he was friends with this Christian girl in the class and he said hey, how would you like to be in a little deal with me. And he worked out a deal with this Christian girl so they sat in the front row in the lecture hall and about halfway through the semester he’s going on and on about evolution and so he walks into the classroom just about when the lecturer gets up and he’s ready to start, he had it timed perfectly so the guy was sitting right there; he walks up and the front row was all taken, students in every seat, no seats except the one that little girl. This is all prearranged, he comes up to the girl, picks her up and throws her on the floor and sits down in her seat. Of course, everybody is horrified that this is happening. And he says Mr. Simpson, is this the way a gentleman acts, and the kids look back up at him and he says Sir, I’m just applying the ethic that I’ve learned in your course, survival of the fittest, I’m bigger than she is and I have a right to the chair. Of course, there was a little discussion after that, but the point is what do you answer to that. You see, that’s taking a person’s foolishness to the logical conclusion. If you’re going to teach this stuff learn to live with the consequences of what you’re teaching, don’t go to a halfway house, you know.

So there are ways of handling this kind of abuse but you have to really be careful how you do it, I’m not advocating rebellion in the classroom, but I am saying that Christian students do not have to put up with all this abuse that they’re getting. If you were a Jew or if you were a female with a gender thing they wouldn’t do that to you, but they can get advantage of Christians. We’re about the only minority that doesn’t have protection like that. So you have to be ingenious and also realize that “we wrestle not with flesh and blood,” you know, there’s powers behind all this, but the powers are there because of this. We’re identified with Jesus Christ and the world hates Christ so we’ve got to learn that that’s the kind of stuff that we have to take.

Let’s go on and we’re going to look at the difference between the Church and Israel and we’re going to do it by looking back at Israel because we want to get clear in our minds that when we read something in the New Testament that speaks of the Church, we don’t want to import concepts that we got from Israel. So we’re going to make this distinction, we’re going to think about Israel as an entity chosen by God and we’re going to think about the Church.

Turn to Deuteronomy 30, this is toward the end of Moses’ life and Moses is looking forward, down the corridors of time to the nation Israel, and in verse 1 he says, “So it shall be when all these things have come upon you,” the addressee, personal pronoun refers to Israel, the Church isn’t here, “have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all the nations where the LORD your God has banished you, [2] And you return to the LORD your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul “according to all that I command you today, you and your sons,] [3] then the LORD your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where God has scattered you.”

So there’s a promise here of a return, of a return to the land, and we could go on through Deuteronomy 30 and the rest of it but I think you know the Abrahamic Covenant, that Israel has been told in the Abrahamic Covenant that the seed of the Messiah will come through her, Abraham’s seed will continue in the human race, you will have a land given to Israel, a specific land, and Israel will be a worldwide blessing. Then in the Mosaic Covenant you have this land promise, Deuteronomy 30, spelled out with all the boundaries. So you have the geographic boundaries given and so on.

Now here’s the thing about reading this literature. Think of it in the same way you would read a mortgage agreement or a contract, a business contract. Think about how we read contracts. Now wouldn’t it be nice if you had a loan agreement and you could interpret it allegorically. Just think of what would happen, for example, if you had a homeowner’s policy and you were, say in Oklahoma some place, a tornado comes through and it just trashes your house and the policy says that they will reimburse you, you know, for loss of your house. But you go to put the claim in and the agent comes back and says well, your family survived didn’t they; that’s what we meant when we said your house, it was your family, you know, your mother is still there; you’ve got all your kids, so you survived. There’s not one person in a million that would argue that this is anything but contract fraud. So it’s straightforward that any time you have a contract what is the hermeneutic you use to interpret the contract. It’s literal. And why is it literal? How else are you going to verify or falsify that both parties of the contract obeyed the contract. It’s only by literally interpreting the contract. Well then, why do people have such trouble when they come in the Bible and they see the word “covenant?” That’s what the word “covenant” means, it means a contract.

When you’re in archeology and you go into these digs and you get down there and people say ooh, there’s some neat stuff for the Bible in archeology. Well, 95% of what they dig up has nothing to do with the Bible, it has to do with business contracts, the cuneiform clay things, they’re all so and so bought five something of grain and paid me six shekels for it. They were business records, and it’s amazing how much of the archeological digs just come across clay tablet after clay tablet after clay tablet, it’s Joe Smith paying somebody else for this, and I hauled so much water for him, and it’s business stuff. But you know, they weren’t using allegorical interpretation for those contracts; it was literal, and moreover, something else to remember. If you make a contract in 1970 and the contract runs, say it’s a 30 year mortgage, to the year 2000, you have to stay literally interpreting that for the duration of the contract. Right? Okay; are these contracts still in force? Absolutely! Then why aren’t we interpreting them literally. We should. See, the word “covenant” because it’s not the word “contract” people get this religious… religion is dangerous, it promotes sloppiness. So they see this word “covenant,” well that sounds religious to me, and so once they get that religious spooky thing, now all of a sudden we’re going to be free to interpret everything allegorically. So the land doesn’t mean the land it just kind of means blessing; and the Church kind of inherits all these things. Of course the Church never inherits the curses that Israel had, it only inherits the blessings. So we have the whole Israel thing is replaced by the Church; now you can’t do that and have any kind of integrity. Moses is addressing Israel, not the Church here in Deuteronomy 30. And he’s talking about a land and he’s talking about a certain history.

He goes on in Deuteronomy 32:1, there’s a big lawsuit here by the way, it’s called a rib proceeding, “Give ear, O heavens, and let me speak; and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.” That’s a call to witnesses and in this case it’s a witness between God’s behavior and Israel’s behavior, and if we had the time we could go through verse by verse and it’s a whole history of Israel, along with their defection, and finally, when God will avenge back in verses 40, 41, 42, God will bring a vengeance and restore the nation Israel. So we can’t just dismiss this Old Testament stuff; this is literal stuff.

On our way to the New Testament I want to stop at Daniel 9:26; now this is very specific literature, very detailed. Remember Daniel was the foreign minister of the nation which we today call Iraq. He got along with Iraq and Iran; Iraq was Babylon and Iran was basically Medo-Persia at this time. So Daniel is very concerned with history and the international scene, what’s going on. And particularly…start at verse 25, he’s troubled with the fact that when are the Jews going to come back to the land. And under Jeremiah the captivity was supposed to be 70 years; at the end of those 70 years there was to be a restoration and indeed there was a partial restoration but not a complete one, and the reason there wasn’t a complete one is because of verses 25-27. “You are to know and discern that from the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. [26] Then after sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined. [27] And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week, but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate,” and you say what it this? What this is is a prediction that God is going to extend a period of time of seven times seventy, or 490 years of history; this is a 490 year extension to Daniel’s day. And he’s telling them, and there’s no excuse why they couldn’t understand how this applied to the Lord Jesus Christ, it was right there all the time, there was 69 weeks devoted, seven years beyond this, subtracting seven years, 483 years between this decree and when it says Messiah shall be cut off. It’s quite clear and it’s quite accurate. So the Lord Jesus Christ was cut off in the 483^rd year of this history.

Then the Bible says that “the prince who is to come will destroy the city.” Now the prince of the people who is to come is the Romans; the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. And then it talks about another person, verse 27, “he will make a firm covenant with the many for one seven,” week is just the word for seven, “for one seven.” So that speaks of sometime in the future this missing seven years will come back into history as it were, and the antichrist will make a treaty with the nation Israel for seven years. That hasn’t happened yet, and one of the identifications will be that (a) there has to be a restoration of Jews to the land to get a nation of Israel, you can’t make a treaty with somebody that’s not there; and of course we know in 1948 what happened? You have the United Nations authorizing the Jews back officially to become their own people. You see, this didn’t happen in the Reformation, and the Reformers could play fast and loose here with what’s going on with the Jews and the restoration of Israel and all the rest. We can’t; Israel is now back in the land, so potentially this could happen any time. But what it will be will be someone, and that’s a big debate in the study of prophecy, but some guy, some political leader is going to make a treaty with that nation for seven years and in the middle of that seven year period he’s going to break it, and the Bible elsewhere identifies him.

The closest person to the way this guy acts was an actual man who lived in Syria called Antiochus Epiphanies. Antiochus Epiphanies pulled the same stunt with the Jews and tripped off the Maccabean Revolt. What he did was, and this is kind of intriguing from our day of being politically correct, he was a guy who wanted to mix culture and out of this mixture have one-world global culture. His idea was that everybody he could bring aboard this program, this political program, except the Jews; the Jews had circumcision, their athletes would not be naked in the gymnasium when they had their studies, the Jews had this peculiar sacrifice thing, Jews couldn’t stand pork and they had all these things that just irritated and bothered this guy. And so he decided he’d put an end to that so he marched into the Jewish temple and he made them sacrifice a pig, which was a desecration. And if you want to read what happened you can go to the Apocrypha, 1 and 2 Maccabees, of if you have a Roman Catholic Bible you can get in the middle of it, and you read about the Maccabean Revolt; there was one Jewish guy who was in a village with his sons and the officers come in the village to force him to do the sacrifice and so he pulls out his weapon and killed them. And he says all Jews who want to be loyal to the Torah follow me. And that was the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt; so Antiochus had a little problem doing this.

But this man in the future is going to try the stunt once again. See history always happens twice. So in the seven year period, halfway through there’s going to be this event and it’s all related to the prophecies of the second return of Christ and so on, we’re not going to get into that right now, the point is that there are these seven years and the seven years have to do not with the Church, they have to do with Israel. The Church isn’t in here; Israel is going on here. So it has to be read in the way it would have been read at the time the prophecy was given. So the fact that Israel has come back to the land in our day is an amazing event. You’ve got people back in the land that have been kicked out of the land for 2,000 years. Now you name another group of people in history, just name another group of people in history that have been totally destroyed, wiped out, dissipated across the planet and have come back to their native land. I can’t name one. Did the Egyptians come back to their land? Well, they never were kicked out; the Arabs have mixed in with them now so it’s kind of mixed up there but you don’t have this phenomena; it’s only Israel that’s come back to its land, and it’s still causing a problem and it’s going to continue to cause a problem because of all the things that are behind it.

Let’s move on to the New Testament and see how the New Testament treats this phenomenon of Israel. Romans 11; what about the apostles. After Christianity was distinctly separated from Israel, did they understand that Israel was through or did Israel yet have a future. Paul says in Romans 11:11, “I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous. [12] Now if their transgression be riches for the world and their failure be riches for the Gentiles, how much more their fulfillment be!” And what he’s arguing there is that when Israel comes to bow their knee to the Messiah, which they will do, that will bring in global peace. Global peace and true world government and prosperity cannot happen until Israel gets right with their King because God has ordained that the kingdom will come through Israel.

That’s why at the end of Matthew there’s that famous saying, when Jesus got through condemning the religious leadership of the nation, He gave them one last word. He says you’re not going to see me until you say “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” and that was a prophecy that some day in the future, probably some autumn, part of the Jewish calendar not yet filled, some scholars think it will happen on the day of Yom Kippur, Israel will suddenly discover Isaiah 53 and they will realize after all these years of reading Isaiah 53 that that passage refers not to the nation Israel, it refers to the Messiah, and they were wrong, and Jesus Christ is their Messiah. And when they acknowledge that, that’s the trip-off, boom, now history begins to rapidly move forward and we go into world peace and the kingdom of God coming on earth and the return of Christ.

But Israel figures prominently in all of this. Paul says in Romans 11:25, For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your estimation, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. [26] And thus all Israel will be saved; as it is written,” and he refers back to the Old Testament treaties, “Israel will be saved.” Verse 28, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; [29] for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Israel has been chosen by God to play the pivot role in world history, and isn’t it interesting that today, what do you read in your newspaper every day. You can’t get Israel off the front page. Now isn’t this amazing; this is 2,000 years have happened and you still can’t get Israel off the front page; it keeps coming up all the time and it will continue to come up. And by the way, what part of Israel comes up more than any other part of Israel? The issue of Jerusalem; who will own Jerusalem? And in particular, what’s the most sensitive piece of acreage in the city of Jerusalem? The site of the temple, and right now the Muslims have Al-Aqsa Mosque on the temple, so something’s going to happen. I thought in the 1991 Desert Storm, I thought wouldn’t it be ironic if when Saddam Hussein was launching his ballistic missiles if one of his missiles took out the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

So Israel has a future and it’s distinct and different from the Church. Now the Reformed people will read through this passage in Romans 11 and some of them will have acknowledged the role of Israel but they read it as though Israel will come into the Church and lose its identity as Israel. The problem with that is in verses 26-27 he’s quoting the Old Testament contracts which are written to a nation, not to a group of Jews. And you’ll notice that in verse 26 he says “all Israel will be saved.” So it’s universal throughout the nation. So it’s very difficult to abandon a literal interpretation. Israel, by the contracts of the Old Testament, will have a future. Now that’s different than the Church, so we want to draw the contrast

The Church on the other hand is the body of Christ and it, unlike Israel, had a heavenly origin in the ascent and session of the Lord Jesus Christ, because when Christ got on the throne what did He do? He went to the Father and He sent the Spirit down to earth and it formed the Church. So the Church began on the Day of Pentecost and it did so because of a heavenly initiative. How did Israel begin? It began under a divine initiative but the divine initiative was Abraham. Israel began on earth and has a destiny for earth; the Church has another destiny, another origin, and another purpose. If you look at all the commands given to Israel, all the prophets and you read that part of the Bible, what do you see? You see Israel’s interaction with whom? Other nations. You read about Assyria, you read about Babylon, you read about Edom, you read about all those other nations. Now when you come to the New Testament, do you read about all the nations? What do you read about in place of those nations? The principalities and powers that control history. What do you see in Ephesians 6? You see a passage that says “we wrestle not against flesh and blood,” it’s not against the nations; it’s against the powers that lurk in behind the national leaders.

We’re in Romans; look at this statement in Romans 16:20, what is the enemy of the Church. He concludes this epistle and he says, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” so clearly it’s the angelic powers that are involved with the Church. The Church has a destiny that somehow relates to interaction with angels. Let’s go forward a little bit, to 1 Corinthians 6:1-3, here’s a strange passage; it’s typical of Paul, Paul couldn’t discuss anything without bringing in deep theology. In his day people weren’t watching television so much and they had a little bit more way to handle this…apologies for those of you in the industry. “Does any one of you, when he has a cast against his neighbor, dare to go to law before the unrighteous, and not before the saints?”

By the way, that’s an interesting verse; that shows you how in the early church they handled their problems. Most of it was handled in terms of the Church; they had what they called ecclesiastical courts and the Christians were known for solving a lot of their problems and do you know historically where that played out in the history of our country. People who study American history are amazed that our nation had in one generation, the generation of the founders, about six or seven brilliant people, people of the stature, you only get one every hundred years, but we had a cluster of guys, we had George Washington, we had Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, we had all these guys in one generation. And democracy started taking root in America because of something that the other nations lack, and every time we’ve tried to plant democracy in other countries it always blows up in our face because those other countries don’t have what we had. And right here in New England you had a resource that allowed democracy to take root. Do you know what the resource was? Guess where the men who formulated the Declaration and the guys who worked with the Constitution, where did they get their experience to give them the insight for the checks and balances that they wrote into the Constitution? What sort of experience did they have? Their local church; they were working, it was the local church experience dealing with the problems, they weren’t idiots, they had practical in this land, there wasn’t anybody to fish out the problem, they had to deal with it themselves, and they dealt with it locally. And they had a massive amount of experience in parliamentary law, how to deal with law, how to deal with transgressions of the law, and so forth. So when these guys came to set up the documents that control this nation they had about 2 generations of experience that these other countries haven’t had. This was in a Christian context. People forget that.

But here’s an example, back in Corinth they were doing this. Paul’s admonishing them to solve your problems; I mean, for crying out loud, and look what he says in verse 2-3 why you should have ecclesiastical courts. [Tape turns] 1 Corinthians 6:2, “Or do you now know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is judged by you, are you not competent to constitute the smallest law courts?” And then he goes on in verse 3 and makes this stunning statement. Look at verse 3, “Do you now that we shall judge angels?” You like trial programs, movies with trials and court on them, and you think that’s intriguing, that’s kind of cool. Just think of this; what do you suppose the trials will look like when you’re the judge over some angels, what are you going to do? Duh! But that’s what the destiny of the Church is. Now you don’t get that in the Old Testament; the Church has a mysterious link here with going up against the principalities and powers, such that when the Church is finished and complete and we’ve got all the crud purged from us, then we become judges of angels. Now isn’t that an amazing statement?

And we could go on to these other passages, Ephesians 3 talks about the fact that angels are watching us, even now, probably laughing. Ephesians 3:10, they’re learning wisdom about how God works by looking at you and me; what an object lesson! But somehow we and the body of Christ, somehow it’s a work of God that He’s doing in our lives that the angels are watching, seeing what is going on here, and they’re learning from it; that’s Ephesians 3:10.

So the bottom line of what I’m saying is the Church, unlike Israel has this heavenly function. Now how does the Church work; it has many, many blessings, some of you, you know the 33 things of positional truth. I just want to cover two possessions of the Church to kind of solidify how the Church is heavenly rooted and is in conflict with principalities and powers. If you want a simple acrostic to remember the blessings of the Holy Spirit, one of them is the acrostic RIBS, R for regeneration, I for indwelling, B for baptism of the Spirit, S for sealing. It’s just a convenient little acrostic to remember, RIBS. And those are at least four things you can give thanks for because they’re your possessions as a Christian.

I’m just going to look at two of them regeneration and indwelling. Now regeneration is being born again but it’s more than that; that’s become a slang term almost now. Turn to 1 John 5 because John is probably the clearest on this issue of eternal life. And what he says is that “He who has the son has life,” he’s talking here about sharing the nature of Jesus Christ. So we want to clarify that a little bit, but some qualifiers on it. Do we share His deity? No. But who was Jesus? He was God and man; He was undiminished deity and He was true humanity; he was also Jewish and He was male. Now obviously the church doesn’t share His gender, or the females would be out of this. So it can’t be that we share His gender; it can’t be that we share His Jewish-ness. That’s not passed on. It can’t be that we share His omnipotence, His sovereignty because those are divine attributes. So what is it that we share? We share what His humanity did spiritually on earth; what He proved what He could do, He encountered all the temptations that we encounter, He trusted the Lord, He was dependent upon Him, He didn’t cheat when He faced the trials, He didn’t resort to His omnipotence to handle Satan, He trusted the Holy Spirit to work in His life. So we have that sort of spiritual nature.

Now in a previous chapter in 1 John, 1 John 3 there’s a hard thing and people who have studied Johanine literature have struggled and struggled and struggled over verse 9. I’m going to suggest a way of interpreting it that I think gives insight into regeneration, and hear me out because at first it’s going to sound weird. But I’m not the guy that originated this. 1 John 3:9, “No one who is born of God sins, because the seed abides in him and he can’t sin because he’s born of God.” Now at first glance that looks like it’s teaching perfection, and we know that’s wrong. Why do we know that’s wrong right from John? Because he says if anyone sins, he’s talking about believers who sin. So it can’t mean that we don’t sin. Well, a lot of times what people try to do is say what that means is that no one that is born of God practices sin, in the sense that repetitively sins. But the problem with that is he uses the present tense elsewhere, in particularly in 1 John 5:16, he says “If anyone sees his brother sinning,” and it’s present tense, and clearly it’s a brother in verse 16, so it’s a believer, and the believer is sinning, so if you’re going to make it continually sinning then you’ve got a believer continually sinning in verse 16, you’ve got a conflict here.

So I’m going to suggest what Zane Hodges has suggested about verse 9, that verse 9 is looking at the regenerate-ness of the believer, not our sin nature, but the regenerate nature and it links with verse 6 in the near context, because remember the rule of Bible teaching, always look at the context. And in verse 6 what does it read: “no one who abides in Him sins, no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him,” and there’s a capacity of abiding in Him so that we don’t sin. It doesn’t last, because we have to use 1 John 1:9, but what apparently is being taught in verse 9 is very similar to what Paul teaches in Romans 7.

Go to Romans 7:20, this is how you can look at that without getting involved in the false doctrine of perfection ism, and yet trying to do honors with this prospectus. Now this is not a cop out here against personal sin, what it is is trying to make us aware, I believe, the Holy Spirit is trying to make us aware of the potential each one of us has by virtue of receiving eternal life and the new nature. In Romans 7:20 Paul says, “But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.” You see his ability in that verse and following, you know the whole discourse there; he’s saying that it’s the sin nature but he’s able to separate himself from that. Now he’s not coping out and saying oh well, I’m sinless. What he’s saying is that because the “I,” where his perspective is, this sin nature is not totally me now that I’ve become a Christian. I have another nature besides the sin nature, the regenerate nature and it’s that nature; if it’s truly the eternal nature it’s the new nature of Christ, it’s eternal life, eternal life doesn’t sin, that which Christ bestows doesn’t sin, now it may be weak and it needs the filling of the Holy Spirit to operate, but there’s a base in regeneration of sharing eternal life and this eternal life is given to us from heaven and the life that is given is the same that He showed while He was on earth and He’s is union with believers.

So you have, every Christian who is born again has this capacity. Now the problem is, it’s overwhelmed because of sin and it has to have empowerment and of course that’s the filling of the Holy Spirit, you’re not going to go anywhere without the filling of the Holy Spirit. But when the Holy Spirit fills us, when the Word of Christ dwells in us richly, something happens. We’re said to be in fellowship and when we’re in fellowship we’re not sinning. So that capacity is spoken of here, and why I’m pointing this out is that that is not what was going on in the Old Testament. When the Holy Spirit worked in the Old Testament He did something analogous to that, like, I think they call it circumcision of the heart, but the Old Testament saints did not have that union with the risen Lord Jesus Christ because there wasn’t any risen Lord Jesus Christ to have union with. We have this as an operating asset, and what it means is we are somehow right now, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, in your soul you have this linkage set up with Him, given to you at the moment you are born again, that intimacy, that’s the basis of abiding in Christ and so forth, being filled with the Spirit, and the techniques for living the Christian life.

Along with that we want to cover the next one which is indwelling. And the picture, if you want a picture of these, I always like to think of images; here’s the image I use to imagine regeneration. I imagine Genesis 1 when God said “Let there be light.” I always envision regeneration as a creation, that when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ He creates instantly and miraculously a new nature, He gives eternal life. That’s instant, that’s miraculous, it’s not a psychological process, you don’t go to Sigmund Freud to get this. The Holy Spirit does it, and it’s a miracle and it can’t be simulated any other way. And it doesn’t happen because of peer pressure, it happens only when you trust in Jesus Christ. So I use the picture of creation for that in my mind. And for indwelling the picture I have there is a temple, with the Shekinah glory and the glory dwelt inside the temple, and so when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell us in the New Testament era, He does so in a way He did not do in the Old Testament.

Let’s just briefly think about the difference. When you read your Old Testament and it says the Spirit came upon somebody, can you remember stories when the Spirit came upon people and they were sinful, and the Holy Spirit is still said to come upon them? Think of the book of Judges; Samson, and you have cases where apparent non-believers were endued by the Holy Spirit to help Solomon build the temple. So what do we make of this; is it condoning sin. No. When the Holy Spirit worked in Israel, here’s the way to think about it, the Holy Spirit was job centered; He empowered people to do certain things for the nation. The carpenters are said to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit that made the tabernacle. That doesn’t mean the carpenters had eternal life, necessarily. It hadn’t anything to do with their moral or ethical or spiritual; it had to do with their hands and their craftsmanship; they were good carpenters. So the Holy Spirit did those kind of physical things when He worked in the Old Testament. Moreover, when He did do spiritual things it was contingent.

What does David pray in Psalm 51? “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.” The Holy Spirit could have been removed. Well then what, did he lose his salvation? It’s not teaching loss of salvation, it means the loss of the dynasty. He had seen who? Who had God taken the Holy Spirit from just before David? Saul. It was the end of his dynasty, so David is sitting here and he’s sinned and he’s saying O Lord, take not Thy Holy Spirit from me, it means let my dynasty remain. So the indwelling of the Spirit there had to do with dynastic succession; in the tabernacle it had to do with carpentry. In Samson’s case it had to do with strength; I mean, this guy is a real bozo. And you can’t say he was some towering spiritual giant. He was a towering giant but he wasn’t spiritual; this guy was a goon that God used to start a war. People weren’t fighting evil so send a troublemaker around, this guy is, you know, one of the bar boys that goes in and before he’s in there five minutes there’s a big fight going on. And that’s what he did, that was his whole life, start fights. And he was considered to be a judge that…he had to stimulate a fight to get the separation, the Jews were amalgamating with the Canaanite culture and he had to shake it up.

My point is that under the Old Testament the Holy Spirit’s indwelling is different than it is in the Church. In the Church, number one, the Holy Spirit empowers that new nature, so that it can operate against all the stuff in our life. So our empowerment is from the filling of the Holy Spirit and that comes about because He’s indwelling. Romans 8:9 says that every believer in indwelt; there’s no command in the epistles to ask for the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that interesting; there is in Luke, the other side of Pentecost, but there’s not one command you can find to ask for the Holy Spirit. He’s already there; we’re commanded to abide, we’re commanded to confess our sins, we’re commanded to walk by faith but we’re not commanded to ask for the Holy Spirit.

He’s also said in Ephesians 4:30 to be permanent, we’re sealed. So the Holy Spirit doesn’t leave either. And there’s a number of other neat things that He does that I mentioned in the conference, Romans 8, He’s doing this cryptic, encrypted communication apparently, He’s praying, He knows our weaknesses and He’s talking to the Son in Romans 8:6, He knows our infirmities and so on. That passage is sometimes interpreted He helps our prayer, that’s not really the force of that passage, the passage is that He’s doing the praying and He’s not telling us what the prayer is about; we might be upset if we could hear, imagine a little voice in an ear phone or something and we could listen on the conversation that the Holy Spirit is having about you and about me with the Father. Look at what this guy, Clough, has done here; we got to straighten him out. The point is that if you could listen to that it would be kind of scary sometimes, but it’s a strict private communication plus the fact Satan could listen in too and it’s encrypted communication, it’s secure so he can’t listen to it either. So what God does in our lives is a result of this secret conversation that’s going on from the indwelling Holy Spirit.

So all these riches that the New Testament has set the Church apart from Israel. One final passage when it’s all over. Let’s turn to Revelation; we’ve got to get to the end of the story. The body one day will be complete and at that time the Church is going to be raptured and in Revelation 5: here apparently is one of the reasons why the Lord Jesus Christ is tarrying before He comes back to earth; something He is doing with you, with me, with every other person in the body of Christ; He’s building the body; the body has to be complete before the next stage of history because when Christ comes back who does He bring with Him? The Church. Why? Because the Church has something to do with the ruling of that future kingdom; apparently we are in some administrative thing and it’s said here. Look at Revelation 5, it starts out with the scroll, the scroll appears to be a title to the earth and the idea there is that somebody has a right to rule the earth; it’s a given sealed scroll. But whoever rules earth must be perfect, and so nobody is found that is qualified in the eyes of God to rule, except the Lamb, and He steps forward and John is a witness to this, in verse 7, “And He came, and He took it out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. [8] and when He had taken the book,” all of a sudden there’s this bursting of praise in heaven and it goes from one end of the universe to the other, it’s amazing that suddenly at one point in time this scroll is taken, and all of heaven begins to rejoice.

Revelation 5:8, “And when He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, having each one a harp, and the golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. [9] And they sang a new song,” not a song but a new one, and whenever you see that “a new song,” in one of the cases is Exodus 15, it’s right after the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, and the women, the Jewish women come out, not the men, the women come out and they compose a song in Exodus 15, Miriam. “And they sang a new song,” so this is another new song, “saying, Worthy are You to take the book, and to break its seals; for You were slain, and you did purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. [10] You have made them to be a kingdom and priests of our God; and they will reign on the earth.”

There’s the destiny of the Church. And notice that the breaking of the seals happens, not just when Christ dies and He purchased the blood, the picture here is that He has purchased the blood and these people have come to faith throughout history. So here are all the people, people from every tribe, tongue, people and nation. So when Christ returns and He displaces Satan from the kingdom of darkness, He, in His body, His body represents every race, every people group, every language group. He doesn’t come back and just white Western Europeans here; this is black, yellow, red and white, and it’s every language that’s even been spoken, and the point here is that these people have lived through history and the trauma of… they’ve shared with Christ what? The sufferings of Christ.

You know that strange passage in Philippians, filling up the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ. Did you ever think about that? Christ suffered Satanic attacks for His ministry; the Church has suffered down through the centuries different kinds of attacks, and I believe at the end when the Church is complete, when this body is created every possible attack, deception and argument against God’s kingdom will have been answered by the Church, through the indwelling Christ, so that it’s complete. In other words, Satan’s bombarded the Church with everything he can, he’s exhausted his 20 mm canon, he’s tried everything he can and his whole ordinance supply has been expended. So he can’t say after the kingdom starts, oh wait a minute, we didn’t try this one. No, sorry pal, we tried them all and you lost; you lost every time. So there’s a perfect airtight case.

I was talking with Juan before our time here today and he brought a very interesting thing because he’s in parole work and he says you know, this is just like an appeal, the Church Age is like an appeal, the guy knows he’s convicted because the prince of this world has noting in me, the prince of this world is judged, he knew from the time the cross happened that he really fouled up, I thought I murdered the Messiah and what I did is I wiped out the whole legal claim I got on the human race. Boy was I brilliant on that one. So he knows he’s been had, but it’s a constant appeal, a counterargument, and a counterargument, and a counterargument, if you do it this way, you didn’t think about that, you didn’t think about this, and that’s what I believe is the secret of what he’s doing in our lives. So every time we lead someone to Christ we’ve led a new person out of the kingdom of darkness, who has voted with their feet and their heart, to leave the domain of Satan and to come to the kingdom of light. And every time we face a trial in our life and we choose to trust God with that problem we have refuted Satan because it’s a trial, it’s an attack, it’s a fiery dart and we’ve used the shield of faith. And every time we do that we tighten the case some more. Well God, if I just that trial, they’d deny you. Remember Job! But we don’t, we choose not to, we choose… I loved John Ashcroft the other day telling about the orange alert and he said every American citizen should be alert and defiant. What wonderful choice of words for a Christian, “alert and defiant.” Every time there’s a trial we use the shield of faith and we refute the one who threw the fiery dart. Think of it that way.

Father we thank You….