Hebrews Lesson 117 February 28, 2008
NKJ Acts 4:12 "Nor is there salvation in any other, for there
is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."
The Texas Revolution in 1836 was a
mirror of the American War for Independence that had occurred just a couple of
generations earlier - some 60 years earlier had witnessed the birth of our
nation and in assertion of liberty on this continent in a unique form of
government liberty that was defined as freedom from government interference. That
liberty is the same kind of liberty that the settlers in Texas wanted although
they were fighting - many of them
not just for independence from Mexico initially but as they flew the flag. (Tom
Wright made available a replica of the 1824 Mexican flag that hung over the
Alamo that is in the study in the conference room – library in there and
if you haven’t seen that you ought to take a look at it.) But, they were fighting for liberty. What
had happened as I’ve said the other night is that the Mexican government had
become quite fearful of the influx of illegal aliens and as a result of that
they had tightened down controls and they were removing freedoms and they were
increasing the presence of Mexican troops in Texas and they were confiscating weapons
and all of this was going on and there was of course a reaction from those very
genetically calm people known as the Scotch-Irish. They were of course ready to
draw and quarter anybody who represented the government.
William Barret Travis was just one
of many who were very much in favor of independence and completely throwing off
the Mexican government. So he was
dispatched by the head of the Texas government at that time. He showed up in
San Antonio with 30 men and there was a little bit of a power struggle because
Bowie was already at the Alamo with a group of volunteers. Then Davy Crockett
showed up as he brought some Tennessee volunteers with him. So you had these
three men who allegedly could fight one another just to see who was in
control.
I always liked Crockett’s parting
speech to the Congress of the United States. When he failed to get reelected as
he left Congress he addressed the United States Congress and he eloquently
said, “Y’all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.”
He was quite a legend in his own
time as was Bowie. Travis (known as Buck Travis) was also a young man and he
really hadn’t made his reputation yet, but he was developing one in Texas when
he went to the Alamo. They were taking stand at the Alamo as I pointed out on
Tuesday night because earlier in the fall of 1835 Santa Ana had sent up his
brother-in-law General (?) to hold the fort as it were in Texas and San Antonio
and he was basically surrounded and was forced to surrender the Alamo to the
Texans. He had to retreat to Mexico in disgrace. So that’s how they came to
hold San Antonio and came to hold the Alamo which was a former Franciscan
mission.
It needed a lot of work to make it
into a fortification. Some of the
walls were crumbling and some of the walls weren’t completely intact all the
way around so they were having to do a lot of work to fix it up. They didn’t
really expect Santa Ana to arrive until late March or early April.
Suddenly they received word that he
was crossing the Rio Grande. But they dismissed that, but then they heard on
February the 22nd that he was only 8 miles outside of San Antonio. So
they were scrambling to get as much as they could into the Alamo – as
much food, as much supplies, as much powder, ammunition, all the things that
they needed in order to withstand the siege.
So on February the 23rd I
pointed out that Santa Ana arrived. He issued an order that no quarter would be
taken and they were not going to take prisoners. They were angry and he had
issued that order to all of his commanding generals who were spreading out
different directions in south Texas. They were not to take any prisoners. So beginning on the 23rd of
February they were basically shut up in the Alamo. Now we went through some of
the events on the 23rd, 24th, and 25th the
other day. I’m trying to sort of follow the calendar. We are up to the 28th
so I’ll catch us up tonight.
On February the 26th, the
Mexicans began to move their troops around to the north side of the Alamo. The
men in the Alamo, the Texicans, began to dig more earthworks again to begin to
continuing to reinforce their defenses. General Sesma’s cavalry (He was one of
Santa Ana’s generals.) arrived that morning in all of their glory. As they
pulled in their artillery they began to organize them around the south, the
southeast, southwest side of the Alamo and began to fire at the Texans who were
working to strengthen their defenses. So they had to watch out for that. But
the Mexicans weren’t that accurate and they couldn’t get close enough. But the
ammunition and powder inside the Alamo was so low that they men held their
fire. There was little that they could do. One man John McGregor had brought
his bagpipes with him like a good Scot-Irishman does and he would play his
bagpipes and then Davy Crocket would get his fiddle and he would fiddle. Then
the two of them would have a contest with each other to entertain the men and
keep their minds off of what was going on outside of the walls.
In between stints Crocket (and we
have records of this in some of the diaries of the Mexican soldiers)… Crockett
would go and stand in plain view on the parapet up on the wall and he would
take his flintlock rifle (his Kentucky rifle) and he would look for a Mexican
who would show himself. See, initially they thought that they were outside of
range at 200 yards. They would be out working and he would pick them off. This
was standard marksmanship for any frontiersman of that day because most of the
settlers out on the frontier didn’t have a lot of lead. They couldn’t waste a
shot. They would have maybe one or two shots to go out and get dinner. So it
was either kill it or die. So they learned to be excellent marksmen. So he
would do that on a regular basis and pretty soon the Mexicans learned that they
had keep undercover most of the time because their muskets could only fire 70
yards. So we did a little better than they did in that department. They just
had us outnumbered about 4,000 to 182.
Well, on the 25th a
“norther” had come into Texas and it was blowing – cold and windy. The
wind was blustery. It was blowing 20 to 30 miles an hour and the skies were low
and gray. You know what that’s like in Texas in February so it must have been
pretty miserable for those men inside of the Alamo.
On the 27th of February
which was a Saturday, Mexicans tried to move in closer. The men in the Alamo
were getting water from an irrigation ditch that flowed into the mission. The
Mexicans tried to block it so Travis ordered a squad to dig an interior well
which solved that problem.
On the night of the 26th
he had sent a letter to Fannin one more time to request aid. But little did he know that on the 27th
Fannin had already tried and decided to go back. Fannin was down in Goliad with
about 400 men and he had attempted to leave with 320 men; but it was a
combination of things - just discouraged him and his officers so they turned
back. The weather was bad and every time they would go about a couple of
hundred yards another oxcart pulling artillery would break. The wheel would
fall off and they would have to rebuild that. The roads were muddy so they held
a council and decided it was wiser to stay behind in Goliad. So there was
really no aid coming
By the 28th the wind had
died down. The weather was beginning to warm up a little bit and the men still
stayed huddled as they watched more and more Mexicans come to reinforce Santa
Ana.
On the 29th the men were
increasingly worn down. They were exhausted. Santa Ana was using psychological
warfare. He was having his buglers get up and sound various calls at all hours
of the night which would cause the Texans to have to get out of bed and run to
the walls expecting some kind of attack and something would happen. The
Mexicans were also doing anything they could to create noise. They were firing
artillery into the Alamo all through the night to keep everybody awake. But
that not only kept the Texans awake, it kept the Mexicans awake as well. So
they were beginning to show signs of stress from sleeplessness as well. Still
there was no sign of help, no indication, no letters. Nothing came. The men continued to strengthen their
earthworks, reinforce the walls that they had.
Then on the 29th, Santa
Ana sent out a battalion of infantry. They could watch them late in the
afternoon. They saw this battalion move out to circle around to the south. They
didn’t know what was up or what they were trying to do, but Santa Ana had heard
that Fannin was coming with reinforcements. Now Fannin had already turned back,
but he didn’t know that. So, he was sending out this battalion to ambush Fannin
on his way in from Goliad. So there were a number of Mexican soldiers out that
night looking for reinforcements from Goliad and there was a group coming.
There was a group of 32 volunteers
that had gathered together in Goliad. They were feeling their way in the dark
trying to get passed the Mexican troops and into the Alamo. As they approached
somebody stepped on a branch and made some noise and alerted the sentries in
the Alamo. One of the sentries
took a shot and hit one of the Texas volunteers in the heel. He yelled out a
typical American curse and that alerted the men in the Alamo that those were
American out there and not Mexicans. So, they opened the gates and they made
their way in. So that’s how things ended at 3 am on March 1st. We
have March 1st coming on Saturday and then March 2nd is
Texas Independence Day. That is Sunday so we’ll have to figure out some sort of
appropriate way to recognize the independence of Texas on Sunday.
Now the reason I’m doing this is not
just because it’s good history and every Texan ought to know this. In Texas I
think every school child is still expected to learn Texas history. But we have
to appreciate our freedoms and we don’t talk about this enough in this country
any more - what it cost to get our freedoms. And, it’s not talked about enough
at the university level. It’s not talked about enough all the way through
school. People forget this. It’s not politically correct, but we have our
freedom because men and women were willing to sacrifice their lives because
they had a vision for a nation where people could live free without
interference of the federal government.
What’s happened since Abraham
Lincoln is that there has been an increasing strength given to the federal government
- increasing power given to the federal government. That’s one of the things
that was lost when the South lost the War of Northern Aggression was that it… I
firmly believe that it was about state’s rights. Slavery is just sort of the straw that broke the camel’s
back, but there were other issues that were involved as well. That’s another history
lesson for another time. But what came out of the Civil War (what came out of
Lincoln’s presidency), was a totally different vision of the federal government
than what the Founding Fathers had. My opinion is that Lincoln was probably the
worst president this country ever had because what he did to freedom. That has
increased from him through Wilson through Roosevelt and on up into the present
time.
We see a continued deterioration of
that and as believers we have to recognize that this is the cycle of world
history. We live in the devil’s world and we’re never going to have the kind of
true freedom for long that gives a foundation for the proclamation of the
gospel and the proclamation of truth because the one thing that Satan wants to
destroy is any platform for the proclamation of truth. He has worked in
numerous ways throughout history and in the last 2 or 3 hundred years to
completely subvert all of the gains that were made in the 1500’s and 1600’s in
terms of solid biblical theology.
We live in a world today where those
who go by the name of conservative Christians are so abysmally illiterate about
the Bible and about theology. We live in a world today where the average person
does not think that religion is something that you should fight and die for. By
religion I mean that if you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for
your sins as a substitute and somebody believes that he was just a man that he
was not God. Those were fighting words up until the 1600’s. With the
Enlightenment (as we studied in our history of doctrine class) - with the
Enlightenment man becomes enlightened so that religious beliefs are no longer
something worth fighting for. Political freedom is something worth fighting
for. See before 1600 Western Europeans would not have thought that political
values were something to fight for. Jesus Christ is something you fight for,
but you don’t fight for political values. So we see that things have really
shifted as a result of the Enlightenment.
What happens fundamentally in the
Enlightenment is that God is written out of the whole picture of how do we know
truth? It introduces this whole concept that there are two books of truth. There
is the book of revelation (or religion) and then there’s the book of reason.
You can arrive at truth by either way. They’re equal. Of course what happens as
soon as you get two books that are true authorities that are equal, one has to
circumvent the other. One has to destroy the other. So reason eats up
revelation. That’s what happened in the last 200 years. So reason becomes the
ultimate determiner. By reason I mean autonomous independent reason becomes the
ultimate determiner of what is right. When you follow that out to its logical
conclusion it ends up being everybody’s individual reason. So your opinion is
just as right as anybody else’s opinion. That’s just as right as the Muslim’s
opinion or the Buddhist opinion or the Shintoist opinion or the animist or the
secular humanist’s opinion. Nobody can really say that one is right or one is
wrong because that’s just going to offend somebody and that’s the worst thing
we can do is to offend somebody or possibly be offensive by saying that there’s
only one truth. This is where we are today.
I don’t have it up here with me, but
Skone gave me an article the other day from the New York Times. It’s reporting
on the fact that last month three men (Walid Shoebat and two of these men that
he frequently speaks with) were invited to speak at the United States Air Force
Academy on terrorism and on Islamic terrorism. So they did. Of course these men
were formerly terrorists. These men are now Christians. That’s just a terrible
thing according to this article. They received a lot of opposition both from CARE which is nothing more that a jihadist support group that’s protected by
our Constitution. That’s Center for Arab-Islamic relations. They’re promoting
all of their policies so they’re attacking. Then there is some group within the
military and one of their spokesmen said that we have to do everything we can
to stop this terrible incursion of evangelicalism in the military.
“How horrible to have men coming to
a military academy and mentioning the name of Jesus Christ and spreading the
gospel. This is just horrible.”
“If we’re going to learn about
terrorism why in the world (This is the gist of this article)…if we are going
to have our military men learn the truth about Islamic terrorism, why should
they learn it from men who were formerly terrorists. They need to learn from
the real experts which is the State Department.”
Yeah, the anti-Semitic,
divorced-from-reality, liberal United States State Department…like they have a
clue what the real issues are.
So this is where we’ve come in our
country. The more we suppress the truth in unrighteousness, the more we live in
a fantasy world and the more we’re unable to identify who the enemy is, what
the enemy is and what the problems are. See that’s nothing new in history. The
same thing happened in Israel in the ancient world. It happened in the Northern
Kingdom as they separated themselves from God and got involved first in
idolatry worshipping the golden calf that they identified as Yahweh who delivered them from Egypt
following in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nabat and then that escalated
under Ahab and Jezebel to the worship of Baal and the Ashera and the whole
fertility religion. That eventually lead to divine discipline and they were
destroyed by the Assyrians in 722.
Then during that period of time as
God is warning the nation of their coming judgment (both the north and the
south), it’s in that period that you have the rise of these great prophets like
Isaiah and Micah; and then as thing deteriorated in the south after you have
the fall of the Northern Kingdom and you have the eventual rise of the
Neo-Chaldean or Babylonian Empire under Nabopolassar and his son
Nebuchadnezzar. Isaiah had warned back in the 700’s that Babylon was going to
come in and rise up. Babylon was going to come in and conquer Israel. This was
going to be divine judgment and so they could see it. They could see the
prophecy fulfilled and they turned their backs on it. They were so divorced
from reality by this time because that’s what carnality does. That’s what sin
does. It blocks your soul so that you can’t see truth for what it is. So by the
time you get to Jeremiah and Ezekiel who were prophets at the time that
Nebuchadnezzar has risen to power and the first invasion, he takes captives
back in 605, the second invasion in 597. The third invasion comes in 596 when
Nebuchadnezzar destroys the Temple, conquers Jerusalem. These are the operating
prophets at that time - Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Daniel goes with the first
captives and he is raised up in Nebuchadnezzar. He writes prophecy, but he does
not have the office of prophet. He has the gift of prophecy, but he doesn’t
have the office of prophet which was part of the theocratic structure. The
prophet as we’ve studied in the past was a man who challenged the king with
God’s truth and challenged the people with God’s truth and was basically a
prosecuting attorney bringing the claims of God and the Mosaic Law to the
people saying, “Because you have disobeyed the Law, God said he would bring
these judgments on you.”
But there is hope. That is a message
of hope with substance, not this kind of meaningless hope that is bantered
about by politicians today where hope is nothing more than emotional
enthusiasm. It was hope because the God of the universe, the faithful God of
the covenant said that there would be a time when Israel would turn back to Him
and when they did and when they turned back to Him with a whole heart that He
would bring them back to the land and fulfill all the promises that God had
made to them – the Abrahamic Covenant, the land covenant (the Davidic
Covenant), New Covenant would all come to fulfillment at that time.
That’s the backdrop to the prayer of
Solomon that we are studying in I Kings 8 and it’s the backdrop for God giving
the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31. These covenants are given at a time when
everything looks hopeless because God’s discipline is truly coming on the
nation. They are going to be destroyed as a national entity. They’re going
to…many of them are going to lose their homes. Many of them are going to lose
their lives. They’re going to lose their families. They’re going to lose
everything they have worked for. Thousands upon thousands are going to be
forcibly deported to a foreign country where they will die. They will never
again see the land God had given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – at least
not in this life.
God never leaves us without a
message of true hope. The true hope was a confident expectation that there
would be a future restoration to the land and in that future restoration to the
land there would be a spiritual dimension that would bring a restoration of the
spiritual life of the nation, a restoration of the heart of the nation as a
collective whole. That is the message of the New Covenant. We have been
studying this the last few weeks in Jeremiah 31:31 because this whole section
Jeremiah 31:31-34 is quoted in Hebrews 8. To understand what is happening and
why the writer of Hebrews is citing the New Covenant passage of Jeremiah 31
there in relation to Christ’s high priestly ministry we have to do an
investigation through the Old Testament of this.
You know, it’s a funny thing -
things that happen in the world and as things deteriorate. There is a
prevailing philosophy among homileticians and seminaries and Greek departments
and Hebrew departments that if you’re going to teach a passage like Hebrews 8,
then you can’t leave Hebrews 8. Isn’t that silly? It is the silliest thing that
I’ve ever heard of because how in the world can you understand what is going on
there? Those to whom the writer of Hebrews was writing understood all this. That
was their common frame of reference so that the writer of Hebrews didn’t have
to go back and spend the time on the Old Testament passages like I am because these
Levitical priests (former priests, now believers in the Lord Jesus Christ) were
fully aware of all these Old Testament passages unlike most of us today. We’re
not that familiar with them so we have to go back and work our way through the
Old Testament so that we can have the frame of reference to fully appreciate
what is happening, being explained in the doctrine that’s developed in Hebrews
8, 9 and 10. It’s the background for the coming chapters and dealing with the
whole issue of Christ’s high priestly ministry and His present session in
heaven. So we’ve gone through Jeremiah 31 and we’ve pointed out various facets
related to this covenant. I’m gong to skip through those and summarize this
quickly so we can move on.
Number 1, in this passage the New
Covenant is contrasted with the old covenant or the Mosaic Covenant. That’s
really the point of the quotation in Hebrews – that the word “new” in
Jeremiah 31:31 means that the old covenant (the Mosaic Covenant) was never
intended to be permanent.
But, the New Covenant will be everlasting. That’s the point we’ll see.
The second thing that we see in this
passage is it’s a future covenant. It’s not in effect at the time of Jeremiah
and it was seen as something that would come into effect in the future.
Third, it was said to be made with
the house of Judah and the house of Israel. There is not a single…I know this
is something that some of you are still trying to work your way through here
because you heard that there’s a New Covenant for the church and New Covenant
for Israel. But, you can’t jump to theological covenants to somehow make
something make sense as dispensationalists any more than you can as a covenant
theologian. Remember those two covenants in convent theology – the
covenant of grace and the covenant of works. Where do you find those in the
Bible? You don’t. They’re theological extrapolations in order to make a
hermeneutical system work. Well, dispensationalism at least at the
interpretation level rejects that methodology. Every time we have those
involved with the New Covenant mentioned it’s always the New Covenant with the
house of Israel and the house of Jacob. Even Jesus Christ’s present high
priestly ministry – this is what’s so important. In Hebrews 8:1-6 His
present high priestly ministry is connected by that quotation there with a New
Covenant made with - not the church – the house of Israel and the house
of Judah.
So what we have to do is figure out
how a covenant with Israel impacts that. That’s what we’re going to get to
because everything that has happened since Abraham is the outworking of God’s
call of Abraham. It is that call of Abraham that changes and defines history
from 2000 BC to the time that God destroys the present heavens and
the present earth. That is how radical the Abrahamic Covenant is. Yet most
Christians you talk to can’t tell you anything about it.
Most of you are going to sleep saying,
“Land, seed and blessing. Land, seed and blessing. Land, seed, and blessing.”
About the fifth time you say it, you
go to sleep at night. So, you’ve got it down.
But the blessing aspect occurred in
the Old Testament. God commanded Abraham right there in Genesis 12.
NKJ Genesis 12:2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name
great; And you shall be a blessing.
“Go. Be a blessing”, is what it
says. It’s a command. As He was integral in providing blessing by association
with those around him, so the Jews provide blessing by association down through
history in light of a future covenant that hasn’t been realized yet. So, in
some sense that’s provisional.
Can you think of anything else that
was done early and the sacrifice didn’t occur until some thousand of years
later? Everybody that got saved in the Old Testament got saved in light of
something that was going to happen in the future. So just because the New
Covenant isn’t...I mean the basis is laid at the cross. But, it’s not
established; it’s not instigated until the Second Coming. But because that’s
what’s coming, in the mind of God it sees the end from the beginning. In the
mind of God that’s as real to Him even though it hasn’t come into our
experience yet. It’s as real to God now as it will be in the future. So, on the
basis of the reality of that future covenant instigated with Israel in the kingdom
He then in turn is blessing Gentiles and Jews today and bringing them into the
body of Christ, which immediately relates them to who? Christ. You’ve got two
sides of the covenant – Christ and the house of Israel and the house of
Judah. So if you’re in the body of Christ, which party are you related to in
the covenant? You’re related to Christ. We have a priesthood that is related
and serves under His high priesthood. His high priesthood is established by the
New Covenant. That’s where the connection comes in. So, just because there’s
not a contract with the church doesn’t minimize the church in any way. What it
does is it shows God’s whole plan…everything dovetails together in light of
that Abrahamic Covenant. We see that everything just falls out of the Abrahamic
Covenant all the way down through history until it’s all fulfilled. So the
third point was that it’s made with the house of Judah and the house of Israel.
The fourth point is…and this is
where it gets hard for us to understand because we come to this and say, “Well,
what about their volition?”
Well, in some sense there is going
to be a volitional override for the Jews – not for the Gentiles but for
the Jews in the kingdom because every one of them – and that’s one reason
I want to go through all of these passages. The first time I taught this that
all the Jews are going to be saved in the Millennial Kingdom, I caught
flack.
“How can you say that? What about
their volition?”
I don’t know. I can’t answer that. All
I know is what the text says again, again, again and again. Jeremiah says it.
Joel says it. Ezekiel says it.
Paul says it in Romans. I’m not going to argue with it. I can’t explain
what the dynamics are. But, what God is showing is ultimately man can’t do
anything unless God does it all including giving Him a totally new nature. This
is not regeneration as I have said the last few weeks. It’s not regeneration. If
you are going to use the term regeneration you must define it very carefully in
terms of corporate regeneration. We Americans just have a very difficult time
understanding this concept of God dealing with a corporate body on the basis of
corporate responses as opposed to dealing with individuals because we come out
of this Western European post-Enlightenment, pro-individual culture that it’s
about the individual. It’s not
about the group.
What God is saying is, “No, there is
a corporate reality also.”
In the First Advent there were
thousands of Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah; but the leadership (the
instituted leadership) rejected Him and the majority rejected Him. Even if 30%
of the Jews at the time of the First Advent had accepted Jesus as Messiah
because the authorities rejected Him and because the mass of the people (the
other 70%) reject Him, the nation went out under divine discipline. There were
believers at the first time God took them out. There were believers in the
Northern Kingdom in 722. There were believers in the Southern Kingdom in 586
who suffered along with all of the stupid unbelievers. The stupid unbelievers
caused the suffering because of their apostasy and because of their rejection
of God.
So believers often go through these
times of horrible national disaster. We go through discipline by association and
there is a reason for that. It’s so we can give the answer. We can give help to
people who are without hope so that we can help people understand that even though
things look dark today, there is still a light that’s coming and that Jesus
Christ still controls history even when things are at their darkest. Our
citizenship isn’t here. Our citizenship is in heaven. We are here as
ambassadors and we have a different mission.
We need to remember that in the heat
of all the political stuff that goes on this year. As believers sometimes you
almost feel like you’ve got a conflicted personality or multiple personalities
going on because at one level as a human being, as someone who was born in the
United States of America. I have responsibilities as a citizen. I have
responsibilities to use my freedom and the privileges that have been won for me
on the battlefield to be involved in the political process to whatever degree I
can - to be involved in precinct meetings, to be involved in electioneering, to
do whatever it is that we think that we can do without it becoming a
distraction to our own spiritual lives.
That is one reason next Tuesday
night we will not have Bible class. On Tuesday night in Texas after the
primaries you have your precinct meetings. I want to encourage people to be
involved in their precinct meetings. I think that we are at an important time
in this country. Believers have the right to have their voice heard and that’s
how you act as salt and light in your country. You take part and vote the way
that your mind tells you to vote in light of the doctrine that’s there. That is
part of the processes. So we are to be citizens to the glory of God. But we can’t forget that we also have a
higher citizenship. That higher citizenship has to do with a totally different
mission that comes into conflict with the mission of being a citizen of the
United States. Now that doesn’t come into conflict a whole lot right now. We’re
fortunate in that way. There were times in other nations in other countries
where Christians came into great conflict with the authorities that were over
them. They had to always stand their ground for the truth of God’s Word over
against the wishes and wills of tyrannical kings and dictators and tyrants. But
we need to recognize that the only thing that’s going to provide a solution to
man’s problems is Jesus Christ, not politics. The problem is a heart
problem. That’s why God has to
give Israel a new heart in the Millennial Kingdom.
NKJ Jeremiah 17:9 " The heart is deceitful
above all things, And desperately
wicked; Who can know it?
That’s really what according to
great insights by Thomas Sowell in his book Conflict
in Vision that when you boil it
all down that’s what makes the difference between a conservative and a liberal.
A conservative looks at the world through the realistic eyes of recognizing
that man is basically evil, basically bad, that he is fallen. It’s a position
that is consistent with biblical Christianity. Whereas liberalism looks at man
as improvable, perfectible. Society is perfectible. It leads to blind utopic
visions of perfection and of course it is a totally false view of reality. God
is going to teach man through all these dispensations that it’s only when we
are living in complete dependence on the creator letting the creator totally
overhaul the creature from the inside out. We’re not to be like whitewashed
sepulchers like the Pharisees, but we are to be changed from the inside out. The
only thing that does that is the Word of God plus the Spirit of God. Period – nothing else. That’s the
sufficiency and the grace of God and the sufficiency of the Word of God and the
sufficiency of the Spirit of God.
So God is going to give them a New
Covenant that’s going to have a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that is even
greater than the manifestation that we have in the Church Age today it seems. So
we look forward to a different dispensation with different characteristics. Now
the problem I’ve pointed out in the last few weeks is the problem is that a lot
of theologians (well-respected theologians men I have studied under, men I
respect, men I’ve spent a lot of time reading and studying because of their
grasp of the Scripture and their understanding of the Scripture; but they’ve
let this terminology slip in – lose terminology (fuzzy terminology) that
this speaks of the regeneration of Israel. The problem that we have is that
when we talk of regeneration most people normally think of moving from spiritual
death to spiritual life. If I say that it is when Israel calls upon Jesus
Christ to come and deliver them at the end of the tribulation period, that that
is when they are regenerated as a nation; then the question that ought to come
to your mind - well are these people
saved or not at this point? Are they individually regenerate or not? As we said
before they at the middle of the tribulation Jesus had warned them in Matthew
24 that when you see the abomination of desolation, drop what you’re doing and
head to the wilderness, head to the hills. Escape because the judgments that
are about to be poured out are horrendous. There are many who will not drop
what they’re doing and there are those that will. Those that will are responding
to the message of Jesus. That means that these Jews are already trusting in
Jesus.
If you have your Bible, I want you
to turn with me to Revelation - jump ahead in our study of Revelation. It’s
interesting how at time we study three different books and at times they always
intersect. You never… I’ve had times when I’ve almost needed to teach the same
Bible class three days in a row because all the studies came together on the
same doctrine. You are sort of scratching your head trying to figure out...how
can I add a new wrinkle on each night. Revelation 12 talks about the three
images here: the woman, the child and the dragon. Of course the dragon here is
Satan. There is debate over who the woman is – not among most
dispensationalists. But the woman is Israel. The child of course is the Lord
Jesus Christ.
In the first part of the chapter we
get an identification.
NKJ Revelation 12:1 Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed
with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve
stars.
Well, the last time you see that
kind of imagery in the Bible it’s in Joseph’s dream where he sees that his father
is the sun, his mother is the moon, and his 11 brothers are the 11 stars bowing
down to him. So this tells us…see the imagery that’s used in Revelation isn’t
just conjured up out of thin air. Revelation basically takes all of these loose
threads that you have from Genesis to Malachi and even some in Matthew and some
of the other gospels and starts bringing everything together. So you have to
understand all this other symbolism, everything else in the Bible to put this
together. So we see that the woman is Israel.
NKJ Revelation 12:2 Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in
pain to give birth.
NKJ Revelation 12:3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon
having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads.
These are the nations that he is
empowered and pulled together at the end time.
NKJ Revelation 12:4 His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw
them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give
birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born.
He wants to destroy the male child
who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.
NKJ Revelation 12:5 She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with
a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne.
That’s Psalm 2. That’s the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Then we get the imagery, the picture
of the heavenly warfare and his angels cast out of heaven. That’s described in
verses 7 through 9. Then in verse 10 John:
NKJ Revelation 12:10 Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, "Now
salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His
Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our
God day and night, has been cast down.
NKJ Revelation 12:11 "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the
death.
So this is a great praise. This is
right before the end. This section of Revelation is an interlude setting things
up for the final judgments.
Then I want you to skip down to
verse 17 now that you know who the players are.
NKJ Revelation 12:17 And the dragon was enraged with the woman,
Satan is enraged with Israel. Satan
is going to do everything he can to destroy the Jews in the Tribulation
period.
and he went to
make war with the rest of her offspring,
Incidentally the woman isn’t the
church. See that’s replacement theologians say: the woman is the church. They
try to make this the church and that’s absurd.
who keep the
commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Now are those regenerate or apostate
Jews who are keeping the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus
Christ? They’re believers. These
are tribulation regenerate believers - born again believers in the tribulation.
Have they fled to Basra yet? No. Have they come together as a corporate entity
to call upon Jesus Christ to return as their Messiah to deliver them? No. That’s
mentioned in Joel 2 and in Romans 10. We’ll get there as we study this.
But this is a key passage because
this passage tells us that they are already trusting in the testimony of God, the
testimony of Jesus Christ. They are believers before they flee – before
the instigation, the establishment of the New Covenant and the regeneration of
the nation.
Now I think we can use that term if
we carefully define it in the same way we talk about the apostasy of the nation
at the time of Christ. When we talk about the fact that the nation rejected
Jesus, we don’t mean every individual in the nation rejected Jesus. Maybe only
70% or 80% rejected Jesus. The disciples didn’t reject Jesus. The 5,000 saved
on the Day of Pentecost didn’t reject Jesus. The 4,000 men that were saved a
couple of days later didn’t reject Jesus. All of the Old Testament believers
that trusted in Jesus like the Samaritan woman in John 4 and the man born blind
from birth in John 9, they were all regenerate believers. Nicodemus, Joseph of
Arimathea – they were all regenerate born again believers before the
advent of the Church Age. So just because you speak corporately in terms of the
general position of the nation, you can say that because they are all
regenerate they are corporately call upon Jesus. In that, there is going to be
a corporate confession of sin just like when Daniel confessed sin of the
nation. Now there may have been tens of thousands of individual Jews who had
confessed their sin of idolatry after Nebuchadnezzar showed up in 586, but it
was too late.
The nation doesn’t corporately
confess their sin until Daniel does it in Daniel 9. When he asks God to forgive
the nation at that point, that is because he understands Leviticus 26 and 27
and Deuteronomy 29 and 30. That it is when the nation turns back to God that
God will then forgive them and restore them to the land. That is what Daniel
was praying in Daniel 9 when he had the vision of Daniel’s 70 weeks and that
final 490 year timetable for the nation Israel. So that’s what we’re talking
about here is this corporate aspect. So once Jesus returns to a regenerate
people individually who are saved individually and the nation then has
something new happen to them as a corporate nation.
Now this is described in Jeremiah
32:36 down through 40. We read:
NKJ Jeremiah 32:36 " Now therefore, thus says the LORD, the God of
Israel, concerning this city
Jerusalem
of which you say, 'It shall be delivered into the hand
of the king of Babylon by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence':
NKJ Jeremiah 32:37 'Behold, I will gather them out of all countries where
I have driven them
That’s the hope. Verse 36 is the
judgment. Verse 37 is the gracious promise of future restoration to the land. God
says:
in My anger, in My fury, and in great wrath;
Anger, wrath, and indignation are all terms expressing
the severity of God’s justice and God’s judgment for their sin.
I will bring
them back to this place,
That’s the promise.
and I will cause them to dwell safely.
That hasn’t ever happened. The Jews have never come
back to the land and dwelt in safety. This is a Second Coming prophecy, not a
537 prophecy.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:38 'They shall be My people, and I will be their God;
That terminology is heavy in New
Covenant passages.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:39 'then I will give them one heart and one way, that
they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their children after them.
See that’s this internal
transformation. The land covenant focused on the land. The Davidic Covenant
focused on the fact that if you’re going to have any kind of nation that is
going to glorify God, then it can’t be led by some man because sinful men do
sinful things. You’ve got to have a king whose heart is changed. So the Davidic
Covenant solves the problem of leadership and the New Covenant solves the
problem with the people. That was the whole issue in Judges. Judges isn’t about
how wonderful Othniel and Deborah and Gideon and Jephthah and Samson are
because they’re not. They get increasingly worse to show that sinful men can’t
provide perfect leadership. As long as we live in a fallen world, you can’t put
your hopes and dreams in politics and in leaders. Then you get into the
appendices in Judges and that shows that the priesthood gets corrupted and
people are corrupted. You got to change the heart of the leaders and the heart
of the religious leaders and the heart of the people or you’re never going to
have the problem solved. Until that happens we’re always going to be living out
the consequences of our sinful natures.
So God says:
NKJ Jeremiah 32:39 'then I will give them one heart and one way, that
they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their children after them.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:40 'And I will make an everlasting covenant with them,
That’s the New Covenant (an
everlasting covenant) because the Mosaic Covenant was a temporary covenant.
that I will not
turn away from doing them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts so that
they will not depart from Me.
They’re not going to have the
option. They will not turn away from Him again. Now that may come from their
own volition, but somehow God is saying there is going to be an inner
transformation here and “they’re not going to turn away from Me”. It’s a
different dispensation, a different dynamic. God is teaching different things.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:41 'Yes, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will assuredly
plant them in this land, with all My heart and with all My soul.'
See the fulfillment of the New
Covenant is connected to the fulfillment of the land covenant. Now as we close
in the last 30 seconds before next time I will start with Jeremiah 50. I want
to go back to Deuteronomy 30.
Deuteronomy 29 is where we normally
go for the land covenant. Deuteronomy 29 and 30 deal with the land covenant. Moses
writes:
NKJ Deuteronomy 29:1 These are the
words of the covenant which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children
of Israel in the land of Moab,
Moab, not Sinai.
besides the covenant
In addition to the covenant.
which He made
with them in Horeb.
This is not the Sinaitic covenant. Then
in chapter 30 verses 1 and following we read:
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:1 "Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you,
the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where
the LORD your God drives you,
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:2 "and you return to the LORD your God and obey His voice, according
to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and
with all your soul,
What did we just read? “I will
faithfully plant with all My heart and with all My soul,” God says.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:3 "that the LORD your God will bring you back from
captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the
nations where the LORD your God has scattered you.
Where is he bringing them? Back to
the land.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:4 "If any of you are driven
out to the farthest parts under
heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there He will
bring you.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:5 "Then the LORD your God will bring you to the
land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it. He will prosper
you and multiply you more than your fathers.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:6 "And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart
and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your
heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
That is the first indication of the
New Covenant, but it’s embedded within the land covenant. The issue in 29 and
30 is the land and there’s a hint that there’s going to be a spiritual change. When
you get into passages like Jeremiah 32, the issue is the internal spiritual
change and then at the end it connects it to the land. So it pulls these things
together.
We’ll come back next time and pick
up in Jeremiah 50 and make our way through Jeremiah and then the cleansing
passages in Ezekiel.