Biblical
Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 85
Continuing on the prophets, we entitled this section of the Biblical
history as the king’s discipline because this internal. The other events were contrasting the
We looked at the golden era of Solomon and that teaches an area of the
doctrine of sanctification, but in particular growth and wisdom. Then we went to the kingdom divided and that
spoke of sanctification again, but this time the doctrine of God’s chastening,
and how that was to lead to repentance.
We’re now finishing with the kingdoms in decline period, again doctrine
of sanctification, and this one is a little more intense, instead of just
chastening to repentance it’s chastening to repentance and it raises the whole
spectacle of a promised final solution to this thing. It’s that that we want to look at
tonight. As we come to the prophets we
want to remember that these guys are all serving a function under the sovereign
of God in history.
When we studied David we saw that David’s heart was sensitive toward
God and you have conviction of sin, the confession of the sin and the
restoration to fellowship. That
restorative process is the thing that’s being revealed through the Davidic narratives. But when we come later in time, after David
in history, the prophets have to cope with something else. That is the hardening of the nation’s heart,
a group that has basically disobeyed long enough, many of them probably
believers, who disbelieved long enough that carnality became compounded in
their lives and when this process occurs, one of the corollaries, one of the
things that happens, is that we get false pictures in our heads about God. A. W. Tozer said that all the church’s
problems can be laid at the door of one simple problem: whenever the church has
gotten a wrong answer to the question “what is God like,” she’s always in deep
trouble. Every heresy, EVERY heresy in
church history has proceeded fundamentally out of a wrong answer to the
question “what is God like.”
So the prophets begin, not by attacking merely the social issues. Those are involved, but only involved to the
extent that they illustrate the primary issue. Social issues are revelations of
deeper issues, and the deeper issue is the destruction of the mental
strongholds and demonic idolatries, demonically agitated or demonically
energized images of God that men carry around in their hearts. These become fastened, as it were, or glued
to the flesh. So when we operate in the
flesh, when our patterns, our thinking, is carnal, these things build up they
have to be cleaned out and the cleaning out process is very painful. The prophets were engaged in this ministry,
and they had to do it by showing that the opposition, the rebellion, the sin,
was fundamentally wrong and in collision with the Mosaic Law.
On the right side of the chart we show the illustration of Elijah’s
ministry: a total failure of economic security and religious promises of the
Baalist agenda, in direct contrast to the Word of Jehovah. Those two phrases illustrate Deut. 13 and
18. Those are the two canons of
truth. Men are evaluated in terms of two
issues, what we call the rational test, does the belief line up with the Word
of God or not, that’s the test of Deut. 13:1-4.
The test goes on to say don’t expect miracles, miracles are not proof of
orthodoxy. They never have been proof of
orthodoxy. Pharaoh’s magicians did many
miracles; it’s not a proof that Pharaoh was a believer. Deut. 13 cuts to the quick and says the issue
is whether or not there is rational and logical consistency with the Word of
God previously revealed. In this case
the Word of God previously revealed was the Pentateuch.
The second test that is given in Scripture is an empirical test, that’s
Deut. 18 but it’s a negative empirical test.
It’s a test that says if you have a genuine prophet, who is genuinely
telling you what the Word of God is, then it will surely come to pass. Not 90% come to pass; not some obscure
partial coming to pass that can be interpreted 500 different ways like
Nostradamus or somebody. The Scriptures
will come to pass in 100% truth, with clarity.
That’s the issue that’s going on in the overall ministry of the
prophets. We developed that and we said
that the prophets used many devices, and we’ve been studying those
devices.
We said that the prophets largely operated trying to deal with a
two-track problem. On the one hand, the
prophets insisted that God’s promises in the Abrahamic Covenant would be
true. God’s sovereign announcements that
the land, the seed and the worldwide blessing will come to pass, will come to pass. But they also had to deal with the fact that
in terms of the Sinaitic Covenant we have something that makes God’s blessing
continent on human obedience. What this
covenant argued was that God is a holy God, He cannot compromise His
holiness. God has integrity and it
doesn’t make any difference what we do, He is not going to alter His
character. He will never alter His
character. Any concept of the plan of
salvation has to deal with the integrity of God.
That’s why it’s an unanswered question in the Old Testament, the
prophets are trying to show that if you have obedience you have blessing; if
you have disobedience you have cursing.
Over here God promises blessing, so the question that the prophets had
to address is over here you have God’s sovereignty; over here you have human
responsibility. They’re dealing with
that all through the books of the prophets, trying to balance this.
On page 41 of the notes we started with the first of three themes that
you see in the books of the prophets.
These themes are repeated in all the books under different expressions,
different ways, in a slightly different manner by the different prophets. The first theme is that Jehovah, or “Yahweh
ruled surrounding pagan nations as much as He ruled
Then we went on in the notes to the second theme, page 42, “
At the bottom of page 43 is a paragraph I want to draw your attention
to, we don’t have time to do it but it’s an exciting study, in the Q&A
people brought this up one night. “To
empower the prophets’ communication of His disgust and hurt over the nation’s
disloyalty, the Lord put them through many carefully-designed personal
trials. Hosea was called into an
adulterous marriage so he could personally experience something of the Lord’s own
grief over the nation. Jeremiah spoke
also in the analogy of the marriage and the Sinaitic Covenant.” The prophets often had to live out in their
personal lives a situation that was analogous to the way God saw the situation. It’s very interesting because apparently what
God is saying is only if you do that can you experience what I experience.
For example, this is why God had Abraham offer Isaac. That passage in Genesis where Abraham offers
his son, it’s interesting if you check in the concordance, that’s the passage
that introduces the term “the only begotten son.” That’s where that term first occurs. This is not a New Testament theological term
first applied to Jesus. That’s a term that occurs in Genesis describing Isaac,
and it’s an adumbration, so it’s a forward look, it’s a preparation of the
ultimate, the only Begotten Son and the Father who loses that Son. So by experiencing these sorts of things God
is having a communication process take place.
We mentioned, page 44 of the notes, that the Davidic monarchy was
announced to have terminated, that the line of David, and here’s where you have
to watch the fine print of Scripture, several things here. The Davidic Covenant promised the
continuation of the seed of David and the
This leads to all kinds of genealogical issues that arise through the
Gospels in the New Testament, because many scholars believe that Joseph, the
human husband of Mary, traces his lineage back here, whereas Mary traces her
lineage back to the seed of David but not through this line. That makes Joseph and Mary a very unique
couple. It also explains a lot of
genealogical problems that people appear to have trouble with in the New
Testament. The idea for our class is
that this is just another sign that God has set up; He’s terminating the
blessings on the nation. He’s doing
something else here; He’s basically eliminating the Law in one sense, as an
active covenant. The lawsuit is it, this
is all over.
Now we’re going to look at the third theme and that’s the resolution to
this problem that’s created in the Old Testament: “Yahweh, solely because of
His sovereign, elective grace will Himself bring about the righteousness
necessary for the blessing of
This is the theme that we’re going to study tonight. Just to review, Deut. 32:26, the national
anthem of
So to protect God’s integrity and His holiness, going back to the
Abraham, “what He had promised He was able also to do,” now He says, in verse
28 He begins to announce a new thing.
Here we have God’s prophetic program.
Now we’re going to really start into Biblical prophecy, not in all the
details but the basic outlines of Biblical prophecy, the millennial issue, the
pre, post and a-millennial issue, because here’s where we get involved with it.
“For they are a nation lacking in
counsel, and there is no understanding in them. [29] Would that they were wise,
that they understood this, that they would discern their future! [30] How could
one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had
sold them, and the LORD had given them up?” In other words, God’s saying when I
start causing these things to happen in history it should be intuitively
obvious, if you’re trapped in these circumstances, that you draw
conclusions. It’s really interesting
that He expects in verses 29 and 30 believers involved in history to draw
conclusion just from the circumstances, utilizing the insights in the
Scripture, but being able to evaluate your circumstances.
He goes on and He discusses what He’s going to do. Verse 35 should look familiar to those of you
who have read Romans, “Vengeance is Mine,” that’s where Paul gets this
from. It’s very interesting that he quotes
from this. That’s one of the exciting
things about the Old Testament, if we taught the New Testament the way we
should be teaching it, because most of us don’t know the Old Testament, we
would start in and get in Paul’s epistle, we’d hit this verse and he’s quoting
the Old Testament, then what we’d have to do is go over for weeks the Old
Testament to get the context of that one verse before we could go to the next
verse. Paul taught people who knew the
Old Testament, and he refers casually to it.
To us when we read it it looks like these are just casual things and
he’s quoting; they’re not casual things.
He cites things assuming…ASSUMING that the hearers of his message have
enough training in the Old Testament to pick up the nuances. We don’t because we have Gentile backgrounds
and most of us have no background in the Old Testament.
Deut. 32:35, “Vengeance is mine, and retribution, in due time their
foot will slip; for the day of their calamity is near, and the impending things
are hastening upon them.” In other words, this is a judgment upon the nations
who are judging
That’s the idea that Jehovah is going to stop the rib and somehow He’s going to bless the
nation. In the notes on page 45, in the
Bible in Deut. 29, we want to trace a theme.
We’re going to pick up a covenant that we have not studied, it is not a
major one, therefore I have not emphasized it in this series. It is a Biblical covenant, and we want to
study this covenant, because by studying it we’ll see how God sets up
history. What was one of the three
promises of Abrahamic Covenant? A land, a seed, a worldwide blessing. Now we’re going to face the issue of the
land, and by the land we don’t mean the church, we don’t mean heaven, we don’t
mean some religious experience, we’re talking about land. Land means land, sometimes called the holy
land, but actually most of the time it’s been quite unholy. This is God’s land, and that’s the covenant
we’re looking at, real real
estate here, real political boundaries.
All of that,
In Deut. 29:1 Moses introduces another covenant. This was inside the Sinaitic Covenant, so at
Sinai we have the blessings and cursings covenant; we also have along with it
this other one that’s embedded in it. “These
are the words of the covenant which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the
sons of
Then verse 14, “Now not with you alone am I making this covenant and
this oath, [15] but with both those who stand here with us today in the
presence of the LORD our God and with those who are not with us here today,” in
other words the whole generations. Verse
21, “Then the LORD will single him out for adversity from all the tribes of
Verse 28, “The LORD uprooted them from their land in anger and in fury
and in great wrath, and cast them into another land, as it is this day,” that
is during the exile, that’s the exile coming up. We’re talking about something that’s going to
happen; the next event we’re going to study is the exile, when the nation went
into captivity. Deut. 32 is written as
though the exile has happened. Notice
the context of verse 29, which we all quote as the limitations of our
knowledge. Verse 29 is the Old Testament
mystery of how is God going to, if He’s damned the nation, if He’s chastened
them into oblivion through the exile, what happens to the promise of the
land. How is God going to arrange
history to make His word come to pass?
That’s the context, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but
the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe
all the words of this law.”
I’ll come back to verse 29 before we finish tonight. That’s a key verse on how we walk by faith
and how knowledge for the Christian is different than a pagan claim to
knowledge. Now we want to move into the
first five verses of the next chapter, and observe carefully. This covenant has been called in Biblical
theology the Palestinian Covenant.
Hebrew Christians are not excited about that term because the word
“Palestine” is a Roman term that was coined in the 2nd century,
after the revolt of Bar Chochba, and it was deliberately created by the Romans
to de-Judaize the land. The word
“Palestine” is a manufactured term, not Biblical at all. It was introduced to mask over the Judaistic
nature of this land. If you go to Israel
today, I guarantee, they don’t call the land Palestine. The Hebrew people refer to it as eretz Yisrael, this is the Hebrew
word,אֶרֶץ
יִשְׂרָאֵל eretz
Yisrael meaning land. That’s
their term for it, not Palestine, eretz
Yisrael.
When you hear Netanyahu negotiates with Arafat talking about giving up
the land, this is why they have a hard time giving up land. The Moslems have a hard time because it’s
written in the Koran and in their Islamic theology that once Islam has
triumphed, you never can retreat. Islam
can never retreat from real estate it’s taken; that’s why there’s such a
collision. There’s a theological
collision in the Middle East that Dan Rather can’t understand. The collision is between the belief of Islam
that once Islam attains control of a piece of acreage, it shall not, on denial
of Allah ever retreat from that. But on
the other hand, you have the Jews that believe it’s eretz Yisrael given to them by the sovereign God of
the Scripture. That’s the collision, and
you can negotiate peace forever, but as long as you have people on both sides
of the table that believe they have a divine right to the same acreage, you’ve
got a big problem. It’s a theological,
not a political problem. The politics and
the wars are just manifestations of a religious and theological collision.
Here is why the Jews believe in eretz
Yisrael, watch the verses here.
Deut. 30:1, “So it shall become when all of these things have come upon
you,” watch this slowly and carefully, “the blessing and the curse which I have
set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the LORD your
God has banished you.” That’s a
mouthful. The first clause, “it shall be
when all of these things have come,” past tense, after these things have come
upon you. What things have come upon
you? The blessing and the curse. What is the blessing? Golden era of Solomon,
the great kingdom reign. What is the
curse? The decline of the kingdom. So the
picture of this verse is when “the blessing” there’s Solomon, golden era, then
the kingdoms go into decline through the cursing, then we go into exile. When the blessing and the cursing has come
upon you, “and you call them to mind in all nations where the LORD your God has
banished you,” or moved you.
Verse 1 speaks of the fact that the people are now in exile and they’re
looking back on the days of the blessing and the days of the cursing. In fact many of the books of the prophets
were canonized during this time; this is why there was such a study of Jewish
history. The issue is what went wrong
with us. They didn’t have Kings written
when they were going through what we’ve gone through. We sit here, Monday morning quarterbacking
the whole thing, telling how every little play should have been made. They didn’t have all this great omniscience
when they were walking through this, and the Holy Spirit put it all together
for them, finally, and the books we casually read as 2 Kings are really post
mortal analysis of why did we fail.
That’s why they have to be read seriously. They are the pleas and analysis of a suffering
group of people who have seen their homeland destroyed, who have been moved
thousands of miles. These people were
literally moved thousands of miles, again look at the map. They moved, literally, by the tens of
thousands.
The Syrians and the Babylonians had a neat way of conquering people to
make sure they never had any more problems. They transported people from area A
and moved them to area B, C and D, then they took people from B, C and D and
moved them into the land. Guess how the
Samaritans arose that are despised in the New Testament. Do you know who the Samaritans are? They are imports. Those are people that were moved into the
land to occupy the land and they were not Jewish people. Therefore they were
always looked upon with disdain. When
Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman there’s a lot of history behind Jesus
little talk with this Samaritan woman at the well. The well happened to be the well of Jacob. It was perfectly picked by Jesus to have this
import, Gentile import, half Jew, probably by intermarriage, and He’s talking
to her about eternal life over the well of Jacob. There’s a lot of imaging that’s going on in
the New Testament.
We have this eretz Yisrael
and the perspective now is from the exile.
Verse 2, they’re in the exilic time, “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 the LORD your God has scattered you.” Right here we have the
summary of history. That has not
happened. It happened partially in the
restoration but the restoration is not, as Daniel found out, the fulfillment of
Deut. 30:2-3. Deut. 30:2-3 hasn’t yet
been fulfilled; it is a prophecy of things to come. It is talking about the future of the land of
Israel, and that Israel will be re-gathered.
This is literal Israel. Notice to
whom it is said. This is not addressed
to the church.
Again, what does it say? Who’s
in exile? It’s not the church in the
exile; it’s Jews in the exile. So all this prophecy so far, we’ll get the
church into it later, but right now let’s read the Old Testament the way the
Old Testament should be read. Covenant
theology and a lot of things that pass in Protestantism, we have these pastors
say well, that’s the church. It’s not
the church; the church isn’t there. This
is a contract made with Jewish people, with a written contract. They are
parties to the covenant; the church isn’t there when the covenant is made, so
the church is not included in that covenant in a direct way.
We have then, a future time, question mark, and the question mark
concerns the fact that Israel will do certain things. What did Jesus do on Palm Sunday that
week? What was the famous thing He said
when the nation rejected Him, He saw the nation was rejecting Him, after they
threw palms and welcomed Hosanna who comes, then they turned against Him. Jesus lamented this and He turned to the
people in the capital city, and He said, I will not come back until you say
“Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord.” [Luke 13:34-35] That was Jesus’ announcement, and that’s why
Israel is a key to world peace. Until
Israel repents and recognizes the person of Jesus Christ for who He is, the
Messiah, there cannot be world peace because this verse requires something to
happen. It says that “you return to the LORD
your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I
command you today,” and then verse 3, “then the LORD your God will restore you
from captivity, and …will gather you again from all nations where the LORD your
God has scattered you.” That means the
Jews are going to go back to eretz
Yisrael.
How are they going to go back?
They’re going to go back only on the condition that they submit to the
righteousness of God. Why were they
excluded from the nation? Because they
refused to submit to the righteousness of God.
How are they going to get back in the land? By submitting to the
righteousness of God. Who is the
righteousness of God? The New Testament,
the Lord Jesus Christ. So who are they
going to have to submit to? They have to
have a source of righteousness that doesn’t violate the integrity of God’s
holiness. And it can’t be on works, it
can’t be their works, it will not cut the mustard when it comes to fellowship
with God because of His holiness. So not
to compromise His holiness means somehow there has to be righteousness made
available, and they are going to return to it.
Verse 5, “And the LORD our God will bring you into the land which your
fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will prosper you and
multiply you more than your fathers.” Notice verse 5 is not talking about
heaven, this is the kingdom of God, this is not heaven here. The kingdom of God is on earth, not in
heaven. And it is involved with the real
estate of the Middle East. He says He
“will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed,” what was the land
their father’s possessed? We saw it on
the map. That’s the land the fathers
possessed. I will bring you back into
the land and you will possess it, “and he will prosper you and multiply you
more than your fathers.” That means
Israel’s golden ear under Solomon is but a glimpse of what her glorious future
will be. That’s the promise here, an amazing promise. And there’s a whole future out here, and this
kingdom of God is where we get from the New Testament the word “the millennial
kingdom.” That is the kingdom of God
that is talked about here; Jesus Christ will bring the nation of Israel back
into the land and reign with them for a thousand years.
So we are starting to work our way into prophecy and it starts with
this Palestinian Covenant which I mentioned tonight because the Palestinian
Covenant sets up part of the answer to the dilemma, Lord, we have been thrown
out of our land, we have been thrown out of our blessings by disobedience, what
happens to the Abrahamic Covenant promised? Land, seed, worldwide
blessing? The land is going to be
Israel’s. The Palestinian Covenant or
the covenant of eretz Yisrael
answers that clause in the Abrahamic Covenant.
Will the Abrahamic Covenant come to pass? The land will be theirs. Yes!
Will it literally come to pass or is this just spiritualizing? It’s a literal interpretation; it literally
will come to pass. How will it come to
pass? We’re not given all the
details. All we know from this passage
is it will come to pass. The Jews
returning in unbelief to the land of Israel is not the fulfillment of this
prophecy. It may be a forward movement
to get ready for the return of Christ, but what you see today with the Jews
coming into Israel…, they’re not coming into Israel because they’re submitting
to Jesus Christ, that movement that we observe today is not the fulfillment of
the millennial kingdom.
On page 45 of the notes, we won’t have time to go through all the
verses. “The prophets repeatedly
reminded the nation of these truths which had been originally revealed to
Moses. Isaiah spoke of a future time
when Israel would be again settled ‘in their land’ and ‘in the land of Yahweh,
(Isaiah 14:2).” I gave you the reference, I urge you to read these references,
pick up the terminology so you get a feel for the flow of the prophets. “Ezekiel wrote that after” notice the word
“after,” “after a future judgment Israel would serve ‘Yahweh in the land’
(Ezek. 20:40).” You see, the idea that
there has to be a judgment prior to returning to the land, we know the judgment
is the return of Christ and that’s why we are premillennialists. “Pre” means the judgment comes before the
millennial kingdom: premillennialism.
Postmillenialism is the belief that the church brings in the kingdom;
silly! The church brings in the
kingdom? What does the church have to do
with the kingdom? Is this talking about
the church here? No. Jesus brings in the kingdom. That’s why all the prophets talk about a
judgment, and then the return to the land.
“Amos saw a time in Israel’s future when its ancient cities would be
rebuilt and the people would be planted by the Lord ‘on their land’ (Amos
9:15). Clearly these prophets were not
inventing a new message as Bible critics try to say to their students. Far from any new message, the prophets’
visions and teaching had to pass the truth test of Deuteronomy 13:1-5 which
required theological continuity with Moses.
From this foundation in the Torah, they were led by the Holy Spirit to
expand upon Moses and deal with their contemporary scene so each prophet is
slightly different in style and emphasis.”
We find out that Jehovah is going to establish the righteousness. In page 46 in the notes, we come to
Habakkuk. [blank spot; quote from notes,
“An excellent example of how clearly these Old Testament prophets saw the
necessity of faith in Yahweh to supply the righteousness is Habakkuk. He writes toward the end of the nation’s
decline that the proud or autonomous man is unrighteous but the one who ‘lives
by faith’ is righteous (Hab. 2:4)”] … Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, then you go
Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, then the HGHG, so turn to
Habakkuk 2:4.
Habakkuk is complaining about the suffering of the people. If you want to see how Biblical believers in
the Old Testament prayed, how bold they were to bring their complaints to God,
they weren’t reticent to cry out to God, it’s phony piety to be really ticked
at God for doing something and then coming into His presence with all sweet little
religious words because He sees right through it. So the guys in the Old Testament, if you read
the Psalms, they come in with pretty heavy stuff. I can show you a Psalm where if you translate
it from the original Hebrew the guy is so mad at God for what’s happening in
the temple, he says You get your hands out of Your pockets and walk through
this mess; and that’s a prayer. Can you
imagine what would happen if somebody said that at prayer meeting, looked up at
God and said “get Your hands out of Your pockets and move it!” Is this kind of disrespectful of God? Well, yes in one sense, but what’s more
honest? If you feel that way, tell Him that.
Look at Hab. 1:13; see the complaint there, “…Why dost Thou look with
favor on those who deal treacherously?
Why art Thou silent when the wicked swallowed up those more righteous
than they? [14] Why hast Thou made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping
things without a ruler over them?” This guy is angry, and he’s got a
problem. Habakkuk, as a prophet, has
administered the rib. Remember the rib,
what does a rib say? The rib
says God is throwing the nation out; He’s had it, that’s it. Yet Habakkuk knows that God is righteous, and
it’s a struggle in this guy’s heart, what are you doing here Lord? There are believers in this country; there
are people that honor You, how come we’re getting swept away with all
this? Why are our families getting
killed and slaughtered, what is happening, why us? So he goes on, and at this point God
speaks.
In Hab. 2:2 the Lord intervenes and this little monologue suddenly
becomes a dialogue. “Then the LORD answered me and said, ‘Record the vision and
inscribe it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run.” In other words, put
it on a billboard, I don’t want any excuses for somebody who doesn’t read this
and understand it. [3] “For the vision
is yet for the appointed time;” this is a prophecy, “it hastens toward the
goal, and it will not fail.” God’s sovereign promise, what is that rooted in?
Sinaitic Covenant or Abrahamic Covenant?
The Abrahamic Covenant, it will not fail! “Though it tarries,” though it’s delayed, you
“wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay. [4] Behold,” now
this is the verse that opens up the entire book of Romans in the New Testament,
here it is, and it’s a great revelation through the prophet Habakkuk. Here it is: “Behold, as for the proud one,
his soul is not right within him, but the righteous will live by his faith.”
Paul didn’t invent justification by faith, it’s right here in Habakkuk.
Look at what’s going on here because this is a great discovery and if
you catch the glimpse of this, you’ll see that the New Testament is not new at
all. Very little in the New Testament is
new and what is new in the New Testament hasn’t anything to do with what we
think of as new; Jesus for example, Jesus prophesied; all the prophecies of
Jesus are in the Old Testament, so that’s not new.
What the prophets have done is they’ve lived from the time of Abraham,
they’ve seen the Exodus happen, the Exodus was the birth of the nation, and
then we have the destruction of the nation.
Here are all the prophets, and Habakkuk is one of these guys down
here. They’re watching the collapse of a
nation that entered into a covenant treaty with God. These guys, down at this point in history are
realizing something. They said, you
know, after all this, after our sin, after how much we’ve been disloyal to God,
we have to conclude that we can never ever please Him by obeying the law
through natural means. All this period
of history has shown one thing, it has shown that the flesh cannot obey the
Word of God. It is depraved; it cries
out in rebellion, it cannot consistently obey the Word of the Lord.
The failure of the nation weighed heavily on the hearts of these
men. They had to administer the funeral
of their own country. They didn’t do it
lightheartedly. It drove them to their
knees to cry out to God, why has this happened?
The answer to several of them, and Habakkuk has it right here, verse 4,
what he says, notice the word “right” it occurs twice, “Behold, as for the
proud one,” in context what do you suppose the “proud one” is? What has he said in verse 3? He said I have a promise, now you wait on it
and stop the gimmicks, because everybody in Habakkuk’s day had all kinds of
plans, they’re going to solve the problem, we’re going to do this, we’re going
have this program, and we’re going reform ourselves, and we’re going to pledge
to God we’ll never be bad boys and girls again.
We’re going to go through all this hoopla, and that will assuage God and
we’ll be right. That’s “the proud
one.” And God says the person who is
trying to manufacture works of the flesh, “His soul is not right within
him.” But the one who waits on it, the
soul that is righteous, the guy that really has righteousness is the guy that
you can tell because he’s going to walk by faith and what in context is
faith? It’s waiting for God’s solution
to the problem. In the Old Testament it
was all future.
In the New Testament the revelation of the righteousness of God is
past. This is why Paul picks up… by the
way, in Romans guess who the two men are that Paul quotes to build the doctrine
of justification by faith? Who are
they? Abraham at the beginning and Habakkuk at the end. Read Romans, watch the marginal references
and you see where Paul gets the doctrine of justification from. It’s from these two guys, the beginning and the
end of Old Testament history. Abraham,
justification by faith, God gave him righteousness or He couldn’t have entered
into a covenant with him, God can’t enter into a covenant with sinners. So Abraham was given or credited
righteousness. And Habakkuk concluded
that the only way anybody could ever live in the land or in Israel is by faith;
we have to wait on God’s provision.
This led to another idea that is now revealed in Old Testament history,
and this prepares us for the New Testament as to what the church is doing. Second paragraph, page 46 of the notes,
“Tightly bound to this realization of the necessity of faith to be counted as
righteous enough to enter Yahweh’s kingdom, was the perception that not all
Hebrews would so believe. Beginning with
the prophet Elijah we read more and more about the ‘faithful remnant.’” That’s a technical word, “‘…faithful
remnant.’ Yahweh Himself claimed in Elijah’s day that there were seven thousand
believers in the northern kingdom (1 Kings 19:18).” Remember Elijah was depressed; I’m the only
guy around, boo-hoo sniff sniff. And God
says never mind Elijah, there’s 6,999 other guys around besides you so just
relax, there are some other guys that have not bowed the knee to Baal, I have a
faithful remnant within the nation. Look
further, “Isaiah foresaw the” quote, and here’s a technical quote from the
text, “‘remnant of Israel’ who would ‘return’ (Isaiah 10:20-30) and whom the
Lord would surely deliver (46:3-4).”
Now the prophets begin to catch another theme, aha they say, we start
to see something here; the promises to Abraham are promises not to all the
physical seed of Abraham, but to the seed of Abraham who believed. So in the future, however this question mark
will be resolved, in the future when God offers His righteousness to the
nation, those who accept it are going to come into the land, and they
constitute the nation at that point because what happens to all the
unbelievers? They’re removed. Here you might have had 25% believers, 75%
unbelievers. What’s going to happen when the Lord Jesus Christ returns and He
applies the test, do you welcome Me in the name of the Lord? Those who do, obviously by definition are
believers, so what happens to the percent of physical Israel once Christ
returns? Answer: 100% believers. So at that point is all of Israel in the
land? Yes, all the living Israelites are
in the land. But the glitch on
understanding this is that there’s all during this time period of the centuries
of the Old Testament there has been a remnant, and the remnant are now seen by
the prophets to be those people who walked by faith.
That’s what was going on all during this Old Testament period. It doesn’t become clear to them until the end
of this process. This is why Paul in
Galatians mentions that thing that we all hear about, the law was a pedagogue,
a teacher. Why? How was the law a
teacher? To bring us to Christ. What has the law done here, what have we seen
as we’ve looked over this? We’ve seen the law given, we’ve seen the law disobeyed,
we’ve seen the law judged, and now we’ve seen at the end of Old Testament
history guys are starting to say ah, I think I get it, that the Lord, to get
that promised blessing He’s going to have to provide the righteousness to get
that blessing. We’ve tried David, we
tried the northern kingdom, we tried the southern kingdom, we tried this, we
tried that, we tried everything and we couldn’t get the blessing. We couldn’t
keep it secure because if we didn’t sin today we’d sin tomorrow. It was never secure. So to get security with peace and
righteousness, God has to do a work. Which
brings us to the momentous announcement in Jeremiah at the bottom of page
46.
Look at Jeremiah 31, this is one of the greatest announcements ever
made by any of the prophets. It was made by one of the last of the prophets,
the weeping prophet of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was chosen by God for the assignment of talking about yet
another covenant. So now we’ve had the
Mosaic Law Covenant, we’ve had the Abrahamic Covenant, we’ve had the Noahic
Covenant, we’ve had Eeretz Yisrael
Covenant and now we’ve got another covenant.
Does God operate history through contracts? You’d better believe
it. One contract after another. Why do
we have contracts? Contracts are written
so you can monitor the behavior of the parties to the contract.
Jeremiah 31:31, “‘Behold, the days are coming,’ declares the LORD,
‘when I will make a new covenant,” notice, not with the church, let’s not get
the church in here, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel,”
with whom? “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, [32] not like
the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although
I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD. [33] ‘But this is the covenant
which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’” talking about
the judgment, so when is this covenant going to be happening? After the days of
judgment, that means after Christ returns.
The New Covenant comes into effect with Israel, it will answer the
mystery of what Jesus was doing on the Passover when He said “this is the new
covenant in My blood” which we celebrate every communion. We can’t get to that
because we’re not talking New Testament now.
We’re reading the Old Testament through the eyes of Old Testament
believers, “…after those days,” after the days of judgment. So when they go
into the land after Christ returns, premillennial reign of Christ, then this
New Covenant comes into effect.
What does the New Covenant do?
Verse 33, “‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of
Israel after those days,’ declares the LORD, ‘I will put My law within them,
and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be
My people. [34] And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each
man his brother, saying ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know Me,” in other
words, no witnessing and no evangelism, so something is going to happen. How many believers in Israel? 100%, no
evangelism required. Verse 33 refers to
a circumcision of the heart that God asked for throughout. On page 46 I give you reference to Deut.
10:16, where God says Israel, “Circumcise your heart,” meaning that the remnant
of believers were regenerated back here, but only the remnant, not the nation
as a whole. In the future, when 100% are
believers, the entire nation is circumcised in their heart. Now regeneration is universal.
Continuing, he says, “…for they shall know Me, from the least of them
to the greatest of them,’ declares the LORD, ‘for I will forgive their
iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’” Total forgiveness. Something takes place at this future moment
in history, when the entire nation is restored to fellowship with God. That’s the hope of Israel in the Old
Testament, that’s the hope that is sort of half forgotten to day by the people
now dwelling in eretz Yisrael,
and when you start telling them about giving up the land they freak out,
because to them to give up the land somehow means wait a minute (I’m not saying
this is right thinking, I’m just saying this is how they think) if I give up
the land I’m giving up my future, and it’s not just my personal future, this is
the future of the meaning of our existence.
When people feel that strongly about real estate you’ve got to believe
they’re going to fight hammer tooth and nail for it.
It’s a failure of our analysts to understand you are never going to
introduce peace into the Middle East while you have two absolutely conflicting
religious beliefs. It’s cant happen,
never, never will happen! If the Lord
tarries it will go on for hundreds of years more, as long as we have this
theological collision.
Verse 35, “Thus says the LORD, who gives the sun for light by day, and
the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the
sea so that its waves roar; the LORD of hosts is His name.” He’s the God of creation. Verse 36, “‘If this fixed order departs from
before Me,’ declares the LORD, ‘Then the offspring of Israel also shall cease
from being a nation before Me for ever.’”
As I am the Creator of the universe and hold it together in My physics
and My chemistry laws, Israel shall always live. No one shall eliminate Israel, Arafat to
Hitler, no one will ever destroy the Jew from history; it can’t happen. The Jewish existence in history is a
physical reminder to the human race of God’s promises.
We’re going to conclude with a chart on page 47; if you’re interested
in chasing down these covenants I’ve tried to summarize the references to
it. Next week we’ll start on page 48,
the unresolved mystery left by the prophets.
In other words, as the Old Testament concludes this period of history
the prophets are left with a problem. I
said we’d get back to Deut. 29:29, what are “the secret things belong to the LORD
our God,” which He has not revealed?
That’s the dilemma of the Old Testament saint; he didn’t know how this
was going to come to pass. He only knew
that it would come to pass. But he
didn’t know the details. Paul refers to
this in Romans 3. In Romans 3 there’s a
mysterious statement made which now, if you know the Old Testament, will click
with you. As Paul is discussing
justification by faith he comes down and he makes this statement, “that God
might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” [Rom.