Biblical Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 82
We’re going to try to develop the basis for
the prophetic section of the Bible. I want to begin by reviewing what the
prophets are about. There are many
different prophets in the Scripture, many different books sin the Scripture,
written by prophets, including the historical books that were also written by
the prophets. These guys had an agenda
and we want to think about why the Holy Spirit set up prophets to start
with. Why these guys? We know from the Mosaic Law Code there were
priests, and we know the priests dealt with sacrifices, they promoted worship,
they taught the Torah to the people, they were teachers, they were doctors, the
medical work that was done under the Sinaitic Covenant was largely administered
through Levites, which shows historically that medicine was not a business, it
was a ministry. We have that function,
but the problem is along come the prophets.
What are the prophets about?
We want to look at the chart on page 36 again
to firmly fix in our minds so that as we get into details we won’t lose the big
picture. We went into a little about
law formats and this sort of stuff, we’ll review some of the covenants as the
basis for how the prophets are working.
Before we do any of that, before we get into any of those details, I
want to review this process of restoration.
This is a chart that we’ve developed after the David chart. The David chart didn’t have this top row on
it. That was missing in David, because
in David’s situation he had no prolonged period in which he was out of
fellowship to build up carnality in his soul, to build up strongholds that had
to be torn down. David was very quick to respond; even after he sinned he was
quick to respond to the prophetic word spoken to him by Nathan. For that reason it’s not very visible when
you look at the David narrative.
Nathan’s role probably lasted not more than fifteen minutes. It isn’t quite as visible, it’s
layered. So this chart we developed
showing not the section of the David stories, but the Elijah story because
Elijah is a very fiery figure, he’s easy to remember and your mind sort of puts
it together better. Let’s review these
four steps.
Table Showing Divine
Chastening Preceding Restoration to Fellowship
Step in the Restoration Process Illustration
in Elijah’s Ministry to Israel
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Divine Chastening: destruction of mental Total failure of economic, security and
“strongholds” of demonic idolatries to religious
promises of the Baalist agenda;
clear the vision of Who God really is. direct
contrast with the Word of Yahweh.
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Conviction of Sin: Being made aware of the Public confrontation at Mt. Carmel with
demeaning of God’s character by distrust of a dramatic fulfillment of the Word of God.
His promises and the specific disobedience
to his Will.
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Confession of Sin: Repentent turning from Viewers of Elijah’s challenge confess that
autonomy (excuses and blameshifting) to Yahweh
is their King and final authority,
submission to the Cross as the sole point of bowing to the ground in reverence and taking
contact with God (responsibility for the sin captive the false prophets of Jezebel.
and cleansing by the Cross).
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Restoration: eternal forgiveness of God through Israel’s economic prosperity returns with the
the Cross but with temporal consequences not coming of the rain; Ahab and Jezebel are
necessarily removed. destroyed. Yet national problems remain.
The first thing that happens when there’s
been a prolonged period of disobedience by the people, by people locked into a
covenant agreement with God, and that’s the whole thing in this, God does not
abandon covenants, so if we’re in covenant with Him, even though we turn
against the covenant He is going to pursue because the covenant has got to come
to pass. So it’s as though we are
locked into these things. It makes for
a very rough ride when we’re disobedient.
So divine chastening occurred and the illustration we had from history
so we can see what that divine chastening looks like, this is not just
religious hokey words here, this is an actual historical thing.
I put the “Illustration in Elijah’s Ministry
to Israel: Total failure of economic, security, and religious promises of the
Baalist agenda,” remember how those stories all conspired to show that. The god Baal was supposed to provide rain to
under gird his economy. Baal was supposed to protect them, military
security. Baal was supposed to be the
one to have fellowship with them, etc.
All those promises of the Baal cult failed, and in Elijah’s way they
were dramatically disproved by circumstances in history. That was part of God’s working. There was a direct contrast to the Word of
God, the “Conviction of Sin.”
On the right side of the chart two things are
going on in this box. The first thing
that’s going on is that up to the semicolon in that box is Deut. 18 at
work. The two tests out of the Mosaic
Law were how does God authenticate Himself and disprove the false
prophets. It’s always that what they
promise does not come to pass. We can
generalize that to our lives that false religion never finally delivers on its
promises, Deut. 18. The other test is a
“direct contrast with the Word of Yahweh,” and that’s Deut. 13. Even if miracles happen that is not proof
because false religion has to pass this test: is it fitting with the Word of
God, regardless of the miracles, all the hoopla, does the teaching of the false
religion match the Canonical Scripture.
That’s why the Bible is so important; it’s the only tool we’ve got to
measure truth from falsehood. It’s the
ultimate criteria.
What is going on with all this? On the left side, first row, “Divine
Chastening: destruction of mental ‘strongholds’ of demonic idolatries to clear
the vision of Who God really is.” What
happens is that sin fogs our vision, it lowers the visibility and we no longer
perceive who God is. There’s always a
demonic element, the principalities and powers operating to project these
visions, these falsehoods, into our heads.
The church fathers clearly believed that. Paul said in
1 Cor. 8 that the things which are sacrificed
in false religions are sacrificed to demons.
It’s quite clear, that’s the statement of 1 Cor. 8. So the mental strongholds are there, and
their insidious function is to destroy a vision of who God is, because
everything else falls to the ground if we’re not clear on the nature of God
Himself. That’s why we have to be so Theocentric. We have to keep going back to God, back to God, back to God, not
how we feel today, not how we felt last week, back to God, back to God. He’s the constant, He’s immutable, He’s
omniscient, He’s omnipotent, He’s the one who loves, human love can’t even
compare with God’s love because God is perfectly secure, we can never show that
kind of love because we’re not 100% secure, we don’t think. But God is 100% secure so He’s never
threatened.
So the strongholds have to be cleared
out. Why do these have to be cleared
out, let’s go down the logic on the left side of this chart. You’ve got to clear the vision of who God
really is. Why do you have to do that?
Because what’s the next step? Conviction of sin. How do you get here if this is messed
up? You cannot go to conviction of sin
unless you have clear who God really is, because what happens if you go too
fast from this box to this box is that what you pick up here is not conviction
of sin, it may look like conviction of sin, but what it really is is social
embarrassment, or personal embarrassment.
But personal embarrassment and social embarrassment is not conviction of
sin. That’s why Psalm 51 keeps pointing
out, “Against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned.” Yes, I did wrong to Bathsheba, yes I murdered her husband, yes I
screwed up as the king of Israel, all those are very true. We’re not denying
those. Those are consequences, but they
are not the core of the sin. The core
of the sin is not between man and man or woman and man, or woman and woman,
child and parent, parent and child. The
center of sin is against God. So unless
we freely acknowledge who He is and are relaxed and comfortable there, we can’t
move down here to conviction of sin.
The role of all the prophets at this point in
Israel’s history, their role spiritually is to hit this box. That’s what these
guys are trying to do. All the books
that are written, there are sixteen of them, their job is to get down into
conviction of sin. Why conviction of
sin? To mope around forever? That’s not the point; the point is to move
down to the next thing, “Confession of Sin.”
Why is that? So we can be restored.
In other words, the idea is to keep moving to restoration, this is where
we want to be, but we can’t get down to restoration until you get to confession
of sin, you can’t get to confession of sin until you have conviction of sin,
you can’t have conviction of sin if you don’t have a clear vision of who God
really is. There’s a progress and it
can’t be short circuited. So the
prophets spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to clarify who God
was to the people. They had some very
ingenious ways of doing this, because God was the one that was doing it.
Take your Old Testament out and let’s look at
it for this prophetic section, get acquainted with this part of the Bible. The first five books we know, that’s the
Torah. Then we go through and you pick
up Joshua and Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. You can think of those as all history books. Then you pass through Ezra, Nehemiah, which
are also history books. The English
Canon was put together in a different order than the Jewish Canon. It doesn’t make any difference, it’s the
same set of books, but they’re in a different order. It probably just appealed better to the people that made up the
Greek Septuagint Version; this was done 200-300 BC. So you have Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, and you have a little
book like Ruth in there as a bridge between Judges and Samuel. Then you come to Chronicles, Ezra and
Nehemiah, also history books but they’re written after the restoration period. We skip over Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, those are all wisdom books.
Now we come to the section of the Bible where
we have the three Major Prophets. There
are sixteen books and there are three Major Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and
Ezekiel. Look how long they are, skim
through the length of the book and you’ll see why they’re called Major
Prophets. You go through Isaiah and
find there are 66 chapters, a lot of stuff there; Isaiah was one of the Major
Prophets. Then you come to the next
guy, Jeremiah; he has 52 chapters. Then
there’s a little book called Lamentations which is also written by Jeremiah,
after that. Then you come to Ezekiel; he has 48 chapters. Those are the “big three,” Isaiah, Jeremiah
and Ezekiel, and not with surprise they are known as the Major Prophets.
There are thirteen Minor Prophets. “Major” and “Minor” do not refer to their
importance; in most churches all of them are minor. We’re using the distinction “Major” and “Minor” simply to refer
to the quantity, major meaning they wrote a lot, big books, and the minor’s are
small. The Minor Prophets, if you keep
going through the text you see there’s Daniel, and these are not ordered
chronologically. I don’t know why
they’re in this sequence, but this is not the order in which they wrote, this
is not the order in which they ministered, this is not the order in which they
even lived. Just thumb through and see
size wise, these guys are smaller. There’s Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, and if
your memory doesn’t work well and you need a silly little thing to remember the
guys, you can think of Daniel, some little boy in your mind who takes a hose
(for Hosea) and he sprays jello all over the place (for Joel) making “a mess,”
(Amos). That kind of gets those in
your memory as far as the order and sequence.
Those four men, Minor Prophets, they ministered in various ages and I’m
sorry to say, we don’t really know why they’re sequenced the way they are.
Then you come to Obadiah, and you can see
Obadiah is like the book of Jude, you don’t have to worry about going to sleep
before you reach the end. Obadiah,
Jonah, we all know Jonah and the whale, Micah, and Nahum. If you want some stupid little thing to
remember them, you can think of Jonah saying O when he fell in the water and he
got in the whale and the whale was taking him towards Israel and he thought
that was his car (Micah) then when he finally went to Nineveh he created mayhem
(Nahum) with his gospel. You can
remember these guys, another sequence: Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, again, out
of sequence historically, out of sequence thematically.
Then you continue through and you see that
the next four books are HZHZ, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Zechariah. There are two pairs of H’s and Z’s. Then you come to the last guy before
Matthew, Malachi.
Those are the sixteen books and sixteen books
are a lot of books; it sort of suggests that since the Holy Spirit is the
author of all of these books that He must have had a pretty important program
on His mind to put all these in the Canon, even though we don’t bother to read
them any more. What are these guys
doing? What is their central role as far as producing that awareness of God? Here’s how all sixteen guys went about producing
an awareness of God. They did so by
explaining how and why God worked in history.
All these guys are centered on history; they are actually historians in
the finest sense of the term.
Some of these guys worked in the northern
kingdom, some of them in the southern kingdom.
But whether they were in the north or in the south, their ministry was
always focused on the same thing, clarifying who and what Jehovah God really
looks like; who is this God with whom we have to do? The southern kingdom was named Judah; the northern kingdom was
named Israel. How many dynasties existed in the south? One.
Why is that? Davidic Covenant,
(I’m talking about after Saul). You had
Saul, the first dynasty, and the Saulite dynasty really isn’t a dynasty, it’s
just one guy. Then you have David and
all of David’s sons and lineage. That
dynasty survives from the time of David, which is approximately 1000 BC, down
to the destruction of the southern kingdom in 586 BC. There you have 400 years of one dynasty ruling. In the light of world history 400 years
isn’t that long, but if you subtract 400 from the year 2000 and it takes you
back to 1600. How many of us and our
ancestors were running around here in 1600?
So this would be like we had a continuous family leading this country
since the time of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown. That gives you a feel for how long the
Davidic line lasted.
The average reign length in the Davidic line
was 17.7 years. In the northern kingdom
there were nine different dynasties, and the total length of time for the north
was from 930 BC, the date of the civil war and the splitting of the kingdom,
down to 721 BC, two hundred years. So
here you have a kingdom one half the duration of the southern kingdom as far as
length of actual monarchies go, it had nine different dynasties in those 200
years. See the instability in the north
compared to the south. The prophets are
concerned with that; the prophets deal with that. Why is the north so flabby,
what is going on with all the turmoil and the assassinations, the political
upset and all the rest of it going on in the north. We don’t have that in the south, almost had it several times but
the dynasty always survived.
On page 38 in the notes I want to draw your
attention to a sentence. There’s a
famous incident that I want to show you how fragile history is, and how often
it’s only one person that makes the difference, in strange ways at strange
moments in strange circumstances. I
quote 2 Kings 11:1-3; this is just a quick snapshot of the low point in the
southern kingdom for the Davidic dynasty.
This is when, had it obviously been for God’s promises, the whole
dynasty in the south would have gone down the drain. “When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead,
she rose and destroyed all the royal offspring.” This cute lady is related to guess who in the north? Who was the
other cute female we had? Jezebel.
Here’s Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, she
saw her son was dead so she killed off all the royal offspring. What Satanic thing is being done in verse
1? All the royal offspring? What does God’s promise say about royal
offspring, what great covenant? Davidic Covenant. What did God say was going to happen to the Davidic line? It was going to survive. Who is it that’s really trying to destroy the
Davidic line? Satan. Here you have a demonically inspired woman,
very intimate now to the throne in the south, after her family took care of the
north and polluted and contaminated the northern kingdom, now they’re coming
down to the south to see if they can take the south out. And she almost does. 1 Kings 11:1 is the closest in history that
the Davidic line ever came to being totally destroyed, and had it been
destroyed God’s promise would have been forsaken and God would have been shown
to be a liar. The prophets record all
this.
Just to show you how thin the line was, and
how God, in His sovereign grace and in His power worked to maintain His
promises in Scripture. [2] But
Jehosheba, the daughter of King Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash the son of
Ahaziah and stole him from among the king’s sons who were being put to death,”
and the Hebrew indicates here she stole him right in the process, while these
guys were being knocked off. How she did that the Scriptures don’t really tell
us. But somehow this woman maneuvered
her way in as the slaughter was taking place.
She took this boy out, “and placed him and his nurse in the
bedroom. So they hid him from Athaliah,
and he was not put to death. [3] So he was hid with here in the house of the LORD,” that’s the
temple in Jerusalem, “for six years, while Athaliah was reigning over the
land.” Ah! That shows you why she was
knocking off the royalty. She seized
the throne, and in her sinful arrogance she thought that she could secure the
throne by the usual political gimmicks.
This is normal; Saddam Hussein is still doing it, knocking off your
family. This is normal ancient Near
Eastern politics, modern Near Eastern politics. This is how you make yourself secure, you eradicate all your
enemies.
She was following the SOP of that time and
era, except in this case she ran into something else, and that was the Word of
God. She had a little problem, because
God said the Davidic dynasty will survive, it will never be stopped. Why? Because Jesus Christ has to come and
He’s not going to threaten and undermine the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So she can do all that she wants to do, but she got out-maneuvered here. She didn’t know it, but inside the temple… and
there’s irony in this because where is the last place she’d ever look? The temple.
She’d look in all the villages, but she was a Baalist, she didn’t bother
with the temple of Jehovah, so guess where for six years this boy was raised
and he became the king of Israel. An
amazing story, but it’s just to show you the flow of history and all the
intrigue that goes on here, and the intimate knowledge that the writers
had. Who wrote Kings? Prophets wrote Kings, we don’t know who they
were but the prophetic schools did all this historical study for us, they did
the historical analysis for us, they traced all these themes for us. Why? Because they’re telling us that history is
His story. That’s the mode of
history.
On page 38, second paragraph, “Because these
kingdoms were under the special election of God in history, their decline is a
special case illustrating the sovereignty of God over historical
processes. Processes such as political
intrigue, climatically-induced economic adversities, and the rise of foreign
powers are not left without interpretation by the Biblical writers. At point after point the Hebrew nation is
confronted with God’s freshly spoken words through His prophets. We are not left to speculate why things
happened as they did.” Notice, we are not left to speculate. This sentence is critical for history,
underline this, this is what real history looks like, in contrast to what you
learn in the classroom. “The ‘facts’ of
history are explained in terms of the reign of the Great King Yahweh over not
only His chosen nation [Israel] but also over all the pagan nations surrounding
it.”
What do I mean by that? Go through those sixteen books sometime and
count the number of countries and nations that are mentioned in prophecy. Ammon, Moab, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, the
Medo-Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, the Phoenicians, the Philistines, the
Syrians and the Assyrians, all those nations are also in prophecy. Why are they in prophecy? Because the
prophets have to interpret everything under the sovereignty of God. So if God is going to use the Assyrians to
invade the northern kingdom in 721 BC and take them out, the people’s faith
would fail if they didn’t know what?
Who’s in charge of the Assyrians?
God is in charge of the Assyrians. The analogy in our lives is does Satan have freedom to kill us?
Does he have freedom to afflict us like he did Job? Of course he does, but in
order for us not to get discouraged we have to understand that over and above
him there’s an unseen hand at work.
That’s the prophetic message, that no matter what the scourge is,
whether it’s nature, drought, hail, fire, the Assyrian military, whatever it
is, over and above it all is the omnipotent sovereign hand of God. This is the view of history.
“All the material in II Kings, II Chronicles,
the minor prophets (e.g., Obadiah, Joel, Amos) and the major prophets (Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel) refutes the unbelieving critics of Scripture. For the past two centuries,” this is what
you’ll get in high school or college, “these critics, operating from a pagan
frame of reference, have tried to ‘educate’ the world into seeing this period
of Biblical history as the model of ‘social reform.’ The prophetic cries against social evils, these critics claim,
are early examples of the modern radical agenda of revolutionary socialism,
world government, and environmentalism.
These unbelievers insist upon using the Biblical prophets as their
forbearers, overlooking the obvious truth that the prophets believed
unswervingly in the Creator-Savior-Lord of the Bible!”
“In this chapter, therefore, I will show
exactly the opposite from what is commonly taught in high school and college
classrooms. We shall discover that the
Biblical prophets were reactionaries, not revolutionaries. Moreover, they operated under the authority
of God’s transcendental ethical standards that applied to all men everywhere;
they were not inventors of ‘progressive’ and ‘new’ standards in so-called human
social evolution. In direct opposition
to the usual secular propaganda, these prophets will be seen to originate vast
amounts of literary prophecy—literature that utterly contradicts the critics’
own secular view of history! Out of this study will emerge further insights
into divine chastening and our sanctification.” The idea is that these men called the prophets, yes they cried
out against social ills, but it’s all inside a framework not shared by the
classroom, not shared by the intelligencia today.
It’s that framework we want to look at, and
we want to do this with the idea in mind that two great events, that came to my
attention over the last three or four years that I can cite of how we watch the
news on TV, we read the newspapers, Time Magazine, we discuss this and that,
have talk shows, 60 Minutes and something else, and this is how we pick up our
history. What’s been the greatest
historical event in our recent lifetime; what’s been the greatest historical
event in the last decade? The fall of
the Iron Curtain. We’ve heard all about the economic reasons for the fall of
the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin wall, and we’ve had this little piece
of data here, and we’ve talked about the implications of the collapse of
Yugoslavia, and our minds are buried in a pile of information. Why did the Iron Curtain fall when it
did? Chuck Colson spent a lot of time
thinking about this through his contacts in Eastern Europe and he wrote a book
called The Body.
If you read that book you’ll see how he
documents in all the countries where communism fell, Christians were key. In fact, the last May Day celebration in
Moscow under the days of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was the premier of Russia,
and they always showed those pictures of Red Square where those solemn Russians
with their overcoats and hats were sitting there and the military would be
parading by. They always made a big
show of these things, missile after missile, tanks after tanks, mechanized
infantry units going by this review stand, and there were the Soviet
bureaucracy standing there watching it. What the papers never reported is what happened in the last
parade. In the last parade at the end
of one of the military units came by Gorbachev there were three Christian students
who happened to be Russian Orthodox and they held up a gigantic cross and on
their cross and in their chanting at the end of the military parade was Christ
has risen, and then they turned to Gorbachev, they looked right at him, and
they said Michel Gorbachev, Christ has risen!
That was the year the Iron Curtain fell. Coincidence? Not at all.
In Poland it was the Christians, Catholics
and Protestants together who refused to go along with communist doctrine. They would have to be forced to obey this
little thing and that little thing, but basically it was just foot dragging,
and the communist bureaucracy could never rule efficiently because they could
never get the people willingly to go along with them, there was always this
foot dragging on the part of the so-called religious people. Chuck Colson in his book has a dramatic
story of what happened in Romania when one pastor, who continually preached the
Word of God of God, they had to fire him, they were going to kick him out, so
the Romanian secret police came to the church, the pastor and his wife knew that
the police were going to break in and take them. So they said to the congregation, you get out of here and pray
for us, we don’t want you involved in this.
So the troops came in and arrested them, but a funny thing
happened. Spontaneously in Romania all
over the country there arose…, nobody knows why because this was not planned,
but for some reason the ministry and the testimony of these Christians had so
encouraged the non-Christians who were just bystanders to this whole thing,
they all of a sudden started lighting candles in the street by the
thousands. In desperation they ordered
the secret police to try to shoot the machine gun in the crowd, and then the
police became so convicted of what they’d done that they turned against
them. That was the downfall of Romania.
What Colson points out is that the press
never once reported this, never covered it.
All they give us is the drivel and a pile of undigested historical
material. A pile here, a pile here, a
pile here, a pile there, and you go to the university campus and they have
these big PhD discussions on the economics of the system. It wasn’t the economics of the system; it
was that God had basically said the time is now. I am personally acquainted with some of the underground work that
was done to prepare for that day. For
years Christians ran a smuggling operation through the city of Vienna, a
clandestine operation, nameless, largely under the sponsorship of Campus
Crusade but it was what we would call in the military the black world, they were
never on the organizational charts, the money that was funneled into them
always disappeared into certain accounts, and was never given an accounting,
the people who participated in this operation were nameless. And they disappeared; these people disappeared
for probably some of them ten years, nobody knew where they were, they just
went to Vienna. Then all of a sudden
they were no longer in Vienna. What
they were doing was establishing seminaries all through Eastern Europe to train
pastors for the day of freedom, ten years prior to the fall of the Iron
Curtain, careful preparation was being made.
And they were all led into this by the Holy Spirit because the Holy
Spirit knew that in the decade this curtain would fall, and He wanted the
believers to be trained.
So there’s exciting stories if we could just
have prophets in our day like these guys, who could peel away all the facts and
say look behind the facts. Look at
what’s going on here, some neat things are happening. I just heard the other day that prior to the breakthrough in
Watergate there was a sermon preached in the city of Washington D.C. that led
to a conviction of sin on certain people’s part that eventually resulted in
Watergate. Never heard of that in the
newspapers. Why? Because our God is the God of history and He’s always
operating there. But you see, it goes
back to what we started with. The problem the prophets fought with, the
problems that we are fighting, even in our very view of history itself is that
we have to have a vision of who God really is. The only way you get that is to
see His footprints march through time.
That’s the story of these prophets. So we want to look carefully at what they’re
doing to us. We’re going to do that through the mechanism of the structure the
prophets worked through. How did the
prophets analyze their history? The prophets analyzed their history in terms of
covenants. So it gets back to the fact
that if God is cursing the nation…, all sixteen of these guys are writing to
audiences that are hurting, they are hurting economically, they’re hurting as
far as military defeat, Jeremiah ministers at the end of his nation, he has to
sit there and watch foreign armies come in, rape, pillage and destroy his
countrymen, and he is given a mandate by God to go tell his country to
surrender. And Jeremiah says you must
be kidding, we Jews are going to surrender.
Yes! Why is that? Because this
is the fifth cycle of discipline under Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and I have
ordered it and you are going to submit to it.
Can you imagine what a popular man Jeremiah is? Now you know why he wrote the book
Lamentations. That’s what he had to
live through.
These guys were all living under extreme
pressure, under awful suffering, and it comes back to this again, the diagram
of evil. Cursing can’t be cursing
unless there’s a God behind it. If
there’s no God behind it, it is all worse than suffering, it is totally
meaningless. You can take a heck of a
lot of suffering and pressure in life if somehow lodged in the depths of your
mind you know that in spite of all the pain, suffering and heartache there’s a
reason for it. But take away that
reason and now watch your strength ebb.
You collapse because there’s no sense fighting it any more, there’s no
reason to it, no rhyme and reason.
That’s when suffering becomes unbearable. It’s bearable while you have a purpose to it. It’s unbearable when there isn’t any purpose
to it. So the prophets go back to God
and His covenants to say, God, you’re mixing good and evil, what are You doing
in all of this suffering and sorrow?
Let’s look at what they are going to do: “The
Covenant Background of the Prophets,” on page 39. [blank spot] … all the cultures of the world together under a one
world covenant, then by controlling that covenant he controlled the world. So there’s this scheme by the evil one to
unify the nation under Nimrod. What
that did was it spread toxins, spiritual toxins throughout the human race, and
would have taken the whole human race out spiritually unless God did some
thing and what He did in 2000 BC, He started a separate nation. That’s the call of Abraham. God said I’m going to create a
counterculture. From Abraham on there
is tension in the air. The world at
large is attracted to the fruit of the kingdom but hates the root. There’s this ambiguity, Abraham is a pilgrim
and sojourner on earth. We follow in
his steps; we are pilgrims and sojourners on earth. A pilgrim isn’t at home.
Why aren’t we at home? Because civilization until the return of Christ
is controlled under pagan principles of the evil one and there’s only refreshment
and regeneration through this line that God started.
Out of this covenant God made three promises:
He promised a land, a seed, and He promised that the world would be redeemed,
there would be a worldwide blessing through this counterculture that He was
growing up in the wake of Abraham. On
page 39 we review those three promises.
“First, He promised that Abraham would supernaturally father a family,”
the key word there is the adverb “supernaturally,” because it’s not just the
natural seed of Abraham. Think about
it. Abraham’s first seed of the covenant, was Isaac born naturally or
supernaturally? The whole story is that
he was born supernaturally. That colors
how we interpret who is Abrahamic seed.
Remember the first time something happens in the Bible it usually sets
up the interpretation for everything that follows. So when you see that the first seed of Abraham was a supernatural
seed, that clues you that it’s not quite the simple thing that you think it is,
that it’s just the physical seed of Abraham, it’s physical all right, but it’s
a certain subset of all the physical things.
I mention this to you because you might want to write on the side of
your notes a word that’s new to us as we move into the prophets. The prophets started the doctrine of the
remnant, it first appears in the Old Testament prophets, and that follows from
this idea that this seed here is a supernatural seed within the physical seed.
Then the promise was for the land; that’s the
second promise. “God promised that this
family would possess eternal title to specific real estate from Egypt to the
Mesopotamia. This promise included not
only land for the Hebrew nation but also for the location of the future cosmic
Temple of God, the everlasting Jerusalem.” When the New Jerusalem comes, it’s
the New Jerusalem, it’s not the new London or the New Berlin, it’s the New
Jerusalem. Why? Because it’s coming
back to the same location, with the same lineage, the same heritage as the
modern city of Jerusalem.
The tension that goes on for the number one
promise is still going on today. Where do you see it? What are we seeing every
day on the front pages of our papers?
The pressure is on Israel to trade land for peace. They traded land for peace a number of times
and it never seems to work out, everybody else gets the land and they don’t get
any peace. But that’s why Netanyahu is
not going to give up any more land, and people in our side don’t like that
because they consider this a radical step.
But the idea is that the Arab nations around Israel have said,
Palestinians have said and still have not removed from their documents, their
goal is the annihilation of Israel. In
spite of all the Oslo accords and all the yak yak about peace, the Palestinians
under Arafat have never once given up, the stated objective is to eliminate
Israel from the face of the earth. What
does that come into conflict with? God
said Israel is not going to be removed from the face of the earth, and the land
is Israel’s because it’s His, not because the Jews are better, because God says
that’s the way I’m running the show, if you don’t like it, lump it, but I’m
running the show this way.
The third promise is that this will
ultimately redound to the salvation of the world. Israel is the key to global peace. We see this in the Gospels when the Lord Jesus Christ says O
Jerusalem, I will not come back to you until you say “Blessed is He that comes
in the name of the Lord.” When Israel
is ready to receive the Messiah, that’s when world peace will happen. So Israel is still the key to world peace,
though not in the sense that most politicians think.
So this is heavy on God’s sovereign
promises. Look at all three of these. How many of these are dependent on man? Ultimately none of them are dependent on
man. They are all promises of God’s
sovereignty. Yes, He works through men,
and yes, men are involved in this, but the ultimate security for promise number
one, promise number two, promise number three is God’s sovereign omnipotence,
period. This is a covenant of sovereign
grace. Nothing is going to stop the
Abrahamic Covenant. Hitler tried it,
lots of people have tried it, Herod tried it, nobody is going to ever undo the
Abrahamic Covenant.
The second covenant is the Sinaitic Covenant,
page 40, “In contrast to the Abrahamic Covenant, the Sinaitic Covenant revealed
not God’s obligations to Israel, but Israel’s obligations to God. Rather than God’s swearing to Israel as was
the case with the Abrahamic Covenant in Gen. 15:7-17, God required Israel to
swear allegiance to Him to institute the Sinaitic Covenant policies. The outcome of these policies was contingent
upon the response of the people: obedience would reap blessing; disobedience,
cursing.” So here we have a covenant
emphasizing human responsibility. It is
contingent, blessing only follows obedience, positive volition toward God; rejection
of God brings cursing. That’s the side
of this formula.
Now the problem is, as I point out in the
middle paragraph on page 40, this sets us up for the prophets, “At first
glance, there appears to be a conflict between the Abrahamic Covenant that
guaranteed a redeemed destiny for Abraham’s seed through the sovereignty of God
and the Sinaitic Covenant that required a human response of repentance before
blessing. How can God’s sovereignty
guarantee future bliss when such bliss is contingent upon human conformity to
His holiness?” A classic case, they
still argue about it. But this was
implicit in the covenantal structure of the Bible. “Specifically, how could the prophets speak of a future kingdom
of God when there was no permanent repentance in Israel after all their
efforts?” There’s a tension that is not
answered until the prophets make this dramatic announcement that they will
about the New Covenant, and we have to see how this resolve things. But it’s important to understand how God
works.
We’re going to conclude by looking at the
doctrine of election, page 40-41. There
are four things that we list there; we want to apply them to the time of the
prophets. Point number one under the
doctrine of election: “Election rests upon creation, specifically, the
Creator/creature distinction. Without
the Creator/creature distinction there can be no final plan to cosmic history,
only chance or impersonal fate.” That
gets back to the diagram that we’ve gone through over and over, that there are
only two ways to go, either God is there as the Creator/creature or there
isn’t, and I don’t care who they are, once you deny the Biblical God you have
to wind up on the right side of the diagram, always. What you wind up with is man is an ultimate victim; there is just
fate or chance that reigns, finally.
Election makes utter nonsense unless you hold
to the God of the Scripture. If you
believe in the God of the Scripture then election is just a corollary to His
existence. He designed the universe. Ultimately we can fuss about why He allowed
sin and why did He allow Satan, why did He create Adam and Eve, why did He have
the garden, why did He do all this? But
the bottom line is He’s the one who calls the shots. He chose a history that included evil. Could He have chosen
another kind of history? I don’t know,
ask Him some day. But He chose this one
and He created the world with a potential for evil, and He knew very well the
day He created the world that His own Son would die horribly on the cross to
pay for sin. It was all included in the
package. Why did He do this? The Bible gives us ultimately only one
answer: He did it for His glory. That’s
the final answer.
So election rests upon that foundation. The verse I quote, Rom. 11:33, if you look
at the context of that verse, that subject material that Paul is discussing
just before 11:33 deals with none other than the election of the nation
Israel. And here’s how Paul concludes
his discussion. Does he say we’ve got
it all aced, I can give you fifteen points and tell you God’s plan? He doesn’t say that. He concludes Romans 9, 10 and 11 with this:
“How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways.” What is that? The incomprehensibility of God!
Paul, the apostle, for all his intellect, probing to the very depths
that the human mind can probe into the Word of God wound up finally with this
answer: I rest my case on the incomprehensibility of my God. Notice he does not say He is not loving, God
is loving, we can comprehend that He loves us.
What Paul is saying is that we’re not omniscient. The
incomprehensibility of God means that my mind, as a creature’s mind, can never
grasp the thoughts of an omniscient mind.
That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. That’s where the case rests.
If you don’t want to rest your case there, if you don’t like that,
here’s the only other option: you’ve got a little finite mind running around
the universe with no plan and that ultimately makes these minds meaningless
because there’s no greater mind out there than these little things, just little
bubbles floating on the ocean.
The second point: Election presupposes a
fall. There had to be a fall and a
destruction in order to be elected from it.
God chose Abraham out of a fallen set of beings; you can see that by two
prophets. I give you two prophets, I deliberately
picked these out and you can find them for yourself if you have a study Bible,
go to Romans 9 where Paul discusses the issue of election, look in your cross
references and you see that the potter illustration was taken by Paul from two
Old Testament prophets. The potter
illustration and clay in Romans 9 was not made up by Paul. Paul refers to Isaiah and Jeremiah, that’s
where he got it from. It was not new
with Paul. Another illustration that
there is very little new in the New Testament.
Three: “Election reveals new thought from
God’s mind.” Often even guys at
seminary don’t pay attention to this.
Election always has surprises; you never can predict what God is going
to do. We see that in a little sense in
the way He works in our lives. You
trust God for something, trust God for something, trust God for something and
you think from the way you prayed that it’s going to come this way. How many times have you seen your prayers
answered in the most weird bizarre way, it comes in from the right or the left
or behind you and then you realize after you back off from it and think about
it for a while, gee, that was a pretty efficient way He did that; He not only
answered my prayer, He answered four or five unspoken prayers, He dealt with
this person, that person, this person and that person, a marvelous game of
sovereign efficiency. But there are
always these surprises, and the surprises come because our God is omniscient
and He’s incomprehensible to us.
Fourth thing about this is “Election is God’s
basic eternal promise,” and it’s this one that rests at the bottom of the
prophetic messages of the Old Testament.
It’s very simple to grasp. “If
the final state of the elect is promised, then every factor leading up to that
state must also be promised. Implicit,
therefore, in the Abrahamic Covenant promise to Abraham’s supernaturally
generated seed are the ministries of the prophets among them. Whatever
requirements that the Sinaitic Covenant required,” the Sinaitic Covenant
required circumcised hearts of obedience, positive volition toward God. God said at Sinai, O that their hearts would
be circumcised, that they might obey Me. That’s a prerequisite of that Sinaitic
Covenant. So “whatever the Sinaitic
Covenant required due to God’s holiness (repentance, circumcision of the heart,
blood atonement) must have been included in the Abrahamic Covenant.” It’s that truth that now will emerge into
something new, the New Covenant.
“The prophets, therefore, from Samuel to
Jeremiah had a ‘dual track’ ministry.” That’s what we’ll discuss next week, the
“dual track” ministry of the prophets.
I’m going to demonstrate that you can take every prophet of those
sixteen books, and you will see that the message in all sixteen of them
consists of two tracks. Here they
are: “On one hand, they prosecuted
Yahweh’s case against the nation for its disloyalty to Him and announced the
imposition of the Sinaitic Covenant cursings upon it.” So in one sense the prophets always have
this stream of accusation and bad news.
“On the other hand, they also preached that the nation would certainly
enter a future Kingdom of God promised in the Abrahamic Covenant. Different prophets had different ways of
expressing this duality.”
What we’re going to do starting next time is
go through some of the formats that were used.
If you look ahead in the notes, on page 41 you see that one of the
things the prophets did is they preached that “Yahweh rules surrounding pagan
nations as much as He ruled Israel and Judah.” If you want to read an exciting
story, read Isaiah 36, that’s a neat story, it’s a great illustration of all
the shenanigans that went on and why Isaiah walked in as a prophet in the
middle of a big mess and he said what he did.
Notice in Isaiah 36 how King Hezekiah conducted himself as a
leader. He screwed up at first, but
when the pressure came on, King Hezekiah was sitting there and he listened to
something, and the pagan ambassador from Assyria made a big mistake. He came in there and he was trying to
intimidate Hezekiah and that’s hoopla, but he overextended himself, and this is
always the case. Watch this maneuver,
it’s sort of like super martial arts that God has in history, where the forces
of evil strike and at first they seem victorious so now they get their
arrogance up even more and they strike again.
Only one problem, when they make the second strike God grabs their arm
and pulls it and they fall flat on their face.
Isaiah 36 is an illustration of that, and it also will show you how in
actual historical time one of the great prophets ministered to a decision
making leader the prophetic message and how it was applied. It’s a super chapter about that.
On the bottom of page 42 you’ll see the
second theme, “Israel and Judah had broken the Sinaitic Covenant and could
therefore have no claim on Yahweh’s protection.” It seems contradictory but all these things will be pulled
together when we study the New Covenant that’s coming up.