Hebrews Lesson 118 March 13, 2008
NKJ Jeremiah 17:9 " The heart is deceitful
above all things, And desperately
wicked; Who can know it?
There are three big issues that face
the board (of Chafer Seminary). One is the transition to Albuquerque. Another
one is that the board is still trying to divest ourselves of some of the
hangover from this whole issue that got splattered on us from Grace Evangelical
Society and their split over the understanding of the gospel which is unfortunate;
but sadly it continues. Ever since John Nimela who at the time was a professor
for Chafer Seminary (was here two years ago) inappropriately suggested we ought
to change our doctrinal statement because of his understanding of the
gospel…that is just telling people that you can have eternal life by believing
in Jesus without any mention of the cross. Where they have gone with this (if
you’re not aware of this) is that you don’t even have to tell people about the
cross. Some of their people have been quoted as saying that there will be
people in heaven who trusted Jesus for eternal life and they won’t find out
that Jesus died for their sins until they get to heaven because they just
accepted the gift of eternal life.
This is the major problem
(theological problem) that is plaguing the whole free grace movement right now.
I think that at the very core is a problem in hermeneutics or interpretation
because what they’re saying is that the Gospel of John is the only book in the
New Testament that tells us what the gospel is. Paul tells us how salvation
works – justification, regeneration, redemption, all these things. But,
John tells us that belief is in Christ for eternal life. And they approach this
thing (and this is a great example for those of you who come on Monday night
for the History of Doctrine class) this is a great example of what happens in
church history when people start asking perhaps the wrong questions. Sometimes
you don’t know you are asking the wrong questions when you ask it. But
sometimes you can get to where you are asking the wrong question and it leads
to a screwball answer.
Their question was, if you get down
to the very core of the gospel - what’s the least a person has to believe in
order to be saved? Now think about that. Now you may not be tracking with me
yet, but do you have to believe that Jesus is fully God in order to be saved? Is
that part of the gospel? Do you
have to believe in the trinity in order to be saved? If you give somebody a
tract that says Jesus died for your sins and you can have forgiveness –
it doesn’t mention eternal life. Jesus died for your sins. You can have full
complete forgiveness if you trust in Him. Is that enough to get you saved? I
think that is. But, where do you stop? What is sort of extra explanation and
what is the minimalist approach?
Reality is that none of us give a
minimalist gospel. I think by even addressing the question... I think it might
be something for academic pinheads in some theological ivory tower somewhere,
but the reality is that when any of us (even the people who are on the other
side of the issue from me) give the gospel, they’re trying to explain as much
as they can about how salvation works and not just giving the least.
See that’s where you can start down
a wrong road by asking the wrong question and you can really end up in a
theological cul-de-sac. Of course you see that in church history and the
history of doctrine; but, this had some terrible ramifications because people
actually think that it was Chafer’s position and it’s not. That’s not the
position of pastors who founded the seminary and it’s not the view of the
seminary today. It’s not the position of most of the board members. There’s one
exception; but, he doesn’t push it. It’s more of an academic thing so it’s not
really an issue. This is the kind
of thing that gets people very, very upset and very confused. So that is about
the second thing we are dealing with.
Then the third thing that we’re
dealing with is just planning for the future and trying to develop a future and
communicate a vision for the future to people.
So you can pray for Chafer Seminary
on those areas – that we can get this transition out of California
accomplished, that we can have a clear articulation of what we believe about
the gospel. Then the third thing is that we can communicate the vision of the
future to people because as we go through our culture today what we have to
offer is less and less palatable to fewer and fewer people or more and more
people. It’s less palatable to more people. They don’t want to think. They just
want to feel good. I have been amazed at how many people feel that way. One the
one side in the area of Christianity we’ve got people. We’ve got people in
Houston. We’ve got people in other parts of the city. You turn on Channel 14
and you can see all kinds of people who have these mega churches of ten,
fifteen, twenty thousand people and they don’t ever say anything. People are
just as happy as they can be. Then you look at some of the political candidates
and they are the political counterpart. They are out there making everybody
feel good and no content. It’s like America has rejected content.
The result – it’s not new in
history. This has happened again and again and again. It happened in the Old
Testament with Israel. That is why God took the Northern Kingdom out in discipline
in 722 and why He took the Southern Kingdom out in 586. It all boils down to
the fact that what we emphasized earlier in the two presentations by Martin
Bobkin that the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things. That even
applies to believers. The heart –we’re not given a new heart at salvation
as a believer in the way that the Jews are given a new heart with a new
covenant which is what we looking at tonight. We still have a sin nature and
“the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things. Who can know it?”
I hope you appreciate what Martin
had to say. I think there were some – there was a little area where he
didn’t make one thing really clear. A lot of people asked this question a lot
and aren’t clear on this. That is that there is a difference between
psychotherapy and psychiatry - psychotherapy and psychiatry. Psychiatry deals
with physical problems that relate to chemical imbalances. It can relate to any
number of causes - chemical causes, organic causes, a number of things that can
cause different problems, a range of different things. Those need to be treated
with medication and that helps stabilize people in those particular areas. But
then there is a whole host of problems that we get into ourselves emotionally
and spiritually because of sin and things that we face because of the trend of
our own sin nature. Some people have a trend to their old sin nature that as
soon as something happens they go to the negative and they’re despondent and
they are depressed. That is just a trend of their sin nature. Other people
worry all the time. That’s just a trend of their sin nature. Worry is not a
disorder; it is a sin. You have to address it as a sin.
Say, “Stop it.”
Don’t laugh. Come on. Weren’t you
here for George’s talk?
“Stop it.”
If you weren’t here, you have to
watch it. He showed this clip of an old Bob Newhart – the original Bob
Newhart show where he is a psychiatrist.
This lady comes in and she talks about she is scared to death of being
buried alive in a box. So, she doesn’t like to be in a house or elevator or
anything that’s boxy.
He says, “Well, I’ve got two words
that’ll cure you.”
“What are they?”
“Stop it.”
We laugh. It was great, but that’s
the issue with sin. George did a great job in that whole presentation. The
reason that we have so many of the problems in life is just because we let our
sin nature run amuck. We start letting that happen from the moment we take that
first breath. That sin nature is
activated. A lot of times by the time we’re really cognizant of a lot of the
decisions - let me put it this way. When we are volitionally conscious of a lot
of decisions we’re making, we’ve already established habit patterns from our
sin nature and how we deal with things and it isn’t until we become –
after we’re saved and we become adults that we then begin to think about the fact
that I’ve got bad habits. That’s what we do. We have bad sin nature habits in responding to negative
situations in life. So we come under certain pressures and we lose our tempers.
Why? Well, that’s the habit
patterns we started when we were two weeks old. We figured out…
“If I can scratch out my face and
get it all red and scream loud enough, then I will get attention and the
problem would get solved.”
So we developed this habit pattern
that that’s how we’re going to deal with problems. Now that we’re 20, that’s
not the way to do it. But, I have to deal with my sin nature.
That’s what he’s addressing - that
in terms of how we talk to people and the problems that they have in life, the
communication aspect that as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we have the
truth. This is the Word of God.
We don’t have to send them to talk
to somebody who is going to approach from a different model of human behavior. He
talked about the fact that there’s over – I think now there may be over
500 different models of human behavior in the whole psychological
community.
Anybody you talk to they think,
“Well, I think this is how man is.”
Now they don’t even believe there is
a soul. It’s all biological. Everything is biological. There’s no soul. There’s no volition. Everything is
biochemical. That’s why you have the over medication on the psychiatric side. It’s
because fundamentally what’s happening is with the rejection of God and with
the rejection of the idea that man is created in the image of God; there is no
immaterial part of man. Everything is material. So if everything is material,
then the way to cure any problem is always going to be through drugs. That’s
why it is so hard today to work through some of this stuff.
As a pastor, as much as I have read
about it, there are areas that just aren’t clear. But the bottom line is that
when it comes to telling people whether they need to be on medication or not
and giving them the information that they need on how to live their life, it
comes down to the basic principles of Scripture – to apply the Word of
God in fellowship, walk by the Spirit. It is summed up in the hymn Trust and Obey. If we would do that
consistently, then we would be able to resolve all of these things. But what we
do is - the crisis hits, we hit adversity, and we go to that default position
which is the sin nature.
Then we go, “Wait a minute. I’m not
really supposed to do that. I had better confess my sin and start applying the
Word.”
It’s developing those habits to
correct the bad habits. So that was the thrust of what Bobkin is saying. The
Word of God really is sufficient to give us what we need to help people. As a
pastor this is one of the reasons I had him come and speak at the pastor’s
conference. We have to have the confidence that we can truly help people with
all the problems in their lives. I remember when I came out of Dallas Seminary
having had pastoral psychology and counseling with Paul Meyer and Frank
Minnereth. I don’t know how many
of you know who Paul Meyer and Frank Minnereth are. They have the
Meyer-Minnereth clinics. These clinics popped up all over. There’s one here in
Houston. It’s down in Bellaire. They have one up in Little Rock. I know of one
in Dallas. They have them all over the country.
Sometime after that I said, “Why in
the world if I’m going into pastoral psychology do they have two psychiatrists
in here teaching this?”
They kept talking to us. I wasn’t up
on a lot of this stuff as a student that I am now. I am thinking. I keep
hearing them say that somebody comes in and they are depressed. There is this
chemical imbalance and they don’t have enough epanephrin or whatever it was. See
they really need to get this and they need to get that.
I am thinking, “I’m a pastor. I’m
not giving people shots or giving them blood tests. I guess I can’t help people
if I don’t know all of this stuff.
Wait a minute. I thought that the Bible helped people.”
See that’s the issue. Do we have
what it takes to help people on the volitional, rational, decision making side
of the whole equation? Yes, we do.
The Word of God is sufficient. You go through Scripture and you see the men
of God and the women of God in the Scriptures dealing with anxiety and
depression and all of these…fear and all of these different things that today
are classified DSM3 as mental disorders. The Bible classifies them as
sin.
I remember when I was growing up
hearing the pastor say that alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a sin. The Bible
classifies it as a sin, not as a disease. You start classifying it as a
disease, you remove volitional responsibility. It’s just like…if I catch the
flu. I have a disease. I’m not responsible for that. Now there may be genetic
tendencies that make one person more susceptible to one thing than another and
that’s related to the sin nature. I can’t tell you how many pastors I’ve talked
to who…somebody comes in and they’ve got a problem or their kids have a problem
with drugs or addiction or any of this. The first thing they want to do is send
them to a 12 step program. I
remember...I guess it was maybe 9 years ago. I was sitting there watching that
source of great medical knowledge known in America as Good Morning America. They had a representative on from AA, from
Alcoholics Anonymous. Now most people don’t realize it, but there is a
religious or metaphysical background to AA. You study the founder and you study
those beliefs. They believe in a higher being; but the higher being isn’t the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It’s just an amorphous higher being. You can plug into that whatever you
want to.
They asked this guy, “What’s your
cure rate?”
Anybody want to guess? What is the
cure rate of AA? Anybody want to guess? No, it’s higher than zero. It’s bigger
than a bread box, okay. Anybody
want to say that it’s more than … higher than 50% or less than 50%. Less than
50%. Higher than 25% or lower than 25%? Lower than 25%. Higher than 15% or
lower than 15%. No, it’s 17%. 17%.
That’s not very good. That’s not very good. That means that if you were taking
a test and this is a final whether or not you would graduate from high school
or not and you made a 17; you’re not graduating. That’s considered failure. That’s
an (I’m not good at math as y’all know, but that’s an) 83% failure rate. Think
about that. And the first thing that people come up with somebody has a problem
with alcohol or chemical dependency or drugs or something - let’s send them to
a 12 step program. There are a lot of churches that host these things. So, we want to have something with an
83% failure rate.
Well, the Bible has a 100% success
rate when you apply it. So I think he has a good message and a sound message
that calls us back to the sufficiency of the Word of God. We live in a fallen
world with fallen bodies with fallen natures. It is a struggle. It may be a
struggle with some things in our lives, all of our lives. I think as Americans
we get the idea that if we are doing….and sometimes in superficial
evangelicalism we get the idea that if we’re doing it right, that it’s going to
be easy. That if I am walking by the Spirit somehow the Spirit sort of takes
over for me and makes those decisions for me. I know I had that idea when I was
a teenager.
“You know, if I’m really filled with
the Spirit; then why is it still so hard to make a decision to do the right
thing?”
That’s because the Holy Spirit
doesn’t take over my volition. He doesn’t start making those decisions. People
get that idea that if I’m walking with the Spirit, I’m right with God that
somehow God is going to make making the right decisions easier. It’s not. I
think as a Christian sometimes it’s harder because now we are in the middle of
the angelic conflict. There is that struggle between the flesh and the Spirit. The
flesh wars against the Spirit. Galatian 5:17. Now a war is not arm wrestling. The
Spirit wars against the flesh. That’s going on inside of us. This isn’t
something that is easy, but God’s power is more than sufficient. The Word is
more than sufficient. But it’s not always easy to “stop it.” And we all know
that. So I just wanted to kind of
add that clarification because I’ve received several questions from folks since
Martin’s talk.
People were, “Well, what’s the
association here between psychiatry and psychology?”
I hope that clarifies it a little
bit.
Here is our chart on the covenants. We
have the Abrahamic Covenant as the ground of the 5 covenants that God has made
with Israel. The Abrahamic Covenant has 3 elements – land, seed and
blessing. The real estate covenant gets fulfilled at the Second Coming, the
Davidic Covenant at the Second Coming, and the New Covenant at the Second
Coming. All of these 4 are the permanent or eternal covenants that God makes
with Israel. It’s not until Israel turns to God corporately in the tribulation
that prepares them for the fulfillment of these particular covenants. That’s
the essence of what I’ve been teaching on the New Covenant. In the last few
lessons what I was focusing on was the fact that some of the things that are
said in some of these verses are very close and it’s easy to see why some
people interpret them as regeneration.
Then what happens is people say,
“Well, this is when Israel becomes regenerated.”
Regeneration is a term that
indicates that at this point (when the regeneration occurs)…5 minutes before
that those people weren’t regenerate which means they weren’t saved. And we’re getting ready to get into a
passage tonight where this does seem to be fuzzy and you can see where it’s
fuzzy. But, it’s important to just think this through a little bit.
So let’s go back and just review
about 5 points that I’ve covered already I think. No, I’ve got more than that
– about 9 points. I’m just going to run through them to summarize them. I’m
not even going to state them as points. I’m just going to run it as a summary
so we’re up to where we’ve been the last few lessons. In Jeremiah 31:31-32 the New Covenant is contrasted with the
old covenant or the Mosaic Covenant. In Jeremiah we read:
NKJ Jeremiah 31:31 " Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of
Judah --
Days are coming. It’s all future. This
New Covenant is future to Jeremiah’s time and he’s writing about 595 BC at the time when the Southern Kingdom is getting ready to be defeated
militarily. They’re going to be wiped out and the people are going to lose
their homes, their livelihoods and their savings. Everything is going to become
obliterated when Nebuchadnezzar comes in 586 and completely defeats them and
destroys them and wipes out the temple. But God is faithful. (You think there
were some depressed people then.) But God is faithful to provide the answer and
the solution.
It may not be the plan that they
had. That’s usually why we get angry. People have problems with being angry. It’s
because they don’t get their way and they get mad at God because they thought
they had a right for things to go one way and God had a different plan and now
they’re mad at God. You can just imagine that there were a lot of Jews who were
really angry with God because they lost everything. That’s because their
thinking wasn’t oriented to God’s plan to begin with.
Proverbs 3 has this tremendous
section there talking about the importance of acquiring wisdom. When the time
to use wisdom comes, it’s too late.
When you acquire wisdom and you practice the spiritual skills
consistently through all the various adversities that we have that are less
catastrophic, then when we get to the ones that are catastrophic we have
already set a precedent in our behavior patterns so that we know to go to the
Word and we can trust God and see a sufficiency in those big battles.
So they’re facing that problem and
Jeremiah’s message of hope is that you failed and you blew it and you couldn’t
obey the conditions of the old covenant. But, God is not going to forget about
you. He will give you a new covenant and in this new covenant He is going to
solve the problem for you and give you a new heart because you couldn’t be
obedient and love Him with a full heart under the old law. Does that mean they
weren’t saved? No. It just means they couldn’t be fully obedient because of the
presence of the sin nature.
So the New Covenant is contrasted
with the old covenant. The old covenant is temporary. The New Covenant is
permanent. It’s a future covenant and it’s only made with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah. It’s not made with the church. In the New Covenant God
is going to give every Jew a new heart. Every single Jew is going to get a new
heart. This means an internal transformation that is more than simply getting
saved or simple regeneration.
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 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.
Then we saw that this would give a
completely renewed relationship between God and His covenant people Israel. A
new heart allows them to fulfill all of the mandates and conditions of the
covenants so that they can fully enjoy the land and glorify God.
Further we saw that in Jeremiah
31:34 in a passage that is difficult for us to understand or conceive how it
will work, shows that there won’t be any need for a teacher.
NKJ Jeremiah 31:34 "No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and
every man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they all shall know Me,
from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will
forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."
Now when I was in seminary (even at
Dallas Seminary with professors who were committed to dispensationalism, there
are some that have tried to make the establishment of the New Covenant occur at
the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes down. They say that giving of
the Holy Spirit is the giving of the Holy Spirit just like the law here.
“See with the Holy Spirit we have a
sensitive conscious that they didn’t have before the Law.”
But see that’s minimized and
diminished with the impact of what this is saying. This is saying that there is
not going to be a need for a teacher anymore.
Maybe that’s what there doing in
these churches where everybody sits around in Sunday school class and says,
“Now what do you think this means?”
They don’t have a teacher anymore. They
just all share their opinions. I am just being facetious.
Okay, there is going to be this new
relationship and nobody is going to need to teach because there is this
complete full, sufficient, internal direct knowledge of God and His Word that’s
in everybody that comes with this new heart.
Another dimension of this is that
the sin of Israel will be completely removed. It will be completely forgiven. That’s
a national sin. That’s not their individual sins. That is their national sin
which relates to the idolatry from the Old Testament that they never fully
repented of because they shifted from a physical idolatry, which is why they
were taken out of the land before 586, to a legalistic idolatry. It’s more sophisticated.
It’s less obvious. It’s abstract. That’s what legalism is. They had this abstract
idolatrous relationship with the law and with their own traditions. So because
of that they reject the Messiah.
And when John the Baptist came
along, he said what? “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And Jesus came along and He said, “Repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Why did He ask them to repent? That
goes right back to Deuteronomy 28 to 30 that “when you disobey Me, if you turn
and come back to Me with a whole heart then I will bring you back to the
land.”
So to understand this whole concept
of repentance and the message of Jesus, they must be grounded in the warning
passages and the cursing and blessing passages in Deuteronomy and Leviticus 26
- the five cycles of discipline
that when you are out of the land, when you turn to Me. That’s the Hebrew word shubh…and do shavah which is the Hebrew term that when you do shavah then that means you are turning
back to God and away from the idols. And because they failed to do that as a
nation, they’re taken out under divine discipline in 70 AD.
And so God says, “But I will return
you to the land from all the nations that I will send you to.”
And that’s never happened yet. This
is also connected to the New Covenant as we saw in Jeremiah 32:36-39. God says
that He is going to return them to the land.
In Jeremiah 32:36 He says:
NKJ Jeremiah 32:36 " Now therefore, thus says the LORD, the God of
Israel, concerning this city of which you say,
The city being Jerusalem.
'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 in My anger, in My fury, and in great wrath; I will
bring them back to this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely.
That’s never happened before. It
didn’t happen in 538, 536. It didn’t happen at anytime in the intertestamental
period. They came back from Babylon but not from all the land. You didn’t have
this mass return from Egypt and from Asia Minor or from Rome or all these other
places – only from Babylon. So this is an indication Jeremiah 32:37 that
God is going to bring them back, this future promise just as He promised in
Deuteronomy 30, Leviticus 18 and 19. At some point when they turn as a nation
back to God, then He will restore them to the land.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:38 'They shall be My people, and I will be their God;
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.
Then we also have seen that this New
Covenant is instituted by a Davidic descendent who’s on the throne. That’s the
return of Jesus. Since that hasn’t happened yet (since none of these things
have happened), the New Covenant has not been enacted yet. The legal basis for
the covenant was established on the cross.
It’s because it’s future. Because
it’s not enacted until the future we think, “Well, what does it have to do with
us in the Church Age today?”
But it is because it’s future, in
the mind of God it’s just as real so He can bless Gentiles in the church today
because Jesus established the basis for the covenant on the cross. Even though
it’s not enacted with Israel until the future because of what the cross has
done, blessing can be applied to Gentiles today.
So we ought to ask the question can
God do something at one time based on the potential fulfillment of something in
the future? Did I say that clearly? Is there a historical precedent for God
doing something at a particular point of time in history that was based on a
work that wouldn’t be accomplished for maybe thousands of years in the future? Sure!
He saved all those Old Testament saints. But the blood of bulls and goats could
not take away sins, the writer of Hebrews says. But they were saved
provisionally because God knew that ultimately Jesus Christ would die on the
cross and pay the penalty in the future. So their salvation was secured in the
Old Testament based on an act that would occur in the future. So in that same way because in the mind
of God if it’s established and if it’s going to happen in the future it’s
determined in His plan and it’s real.
So the church gets that blessing from the future.
So now let’s go to our next key passage,
key section in Ezekiel. We’re out of the Jeremiah passages and now in the
Ezekiel passages. In Ezekiel 36:25-26 God is speaking.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean;
I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.
Now there is a plural “you” here
which indicates He is talking to the nation as a corporate entity, not as
individuals.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart and put a new
spirit within you;
Now that sounds like regeneration
doesn’t it? It is of the kind of regeneration that occurs in connection with
the New Covenant.
I will take the
heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Now I want to connect something to
this. When John the Baptist first appeared, he said, “Repent for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand.” He is addressing the Jews. The message comes right out of
the Mosaic Law. The kingdom was about to be established and they need to do shuva. They need to come back.
Jesus comes along and says, “Repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
He sends out His disciples
two-by-two to the villages in Judea and in Galilee.
He says, “Don’t go to the
Gentiles.”
What’s the message? Repent for the
kingdom of heaven is at hand. Now this is in what part of His ministry? The
first part of His ministry or the end of His ministry? It’s in the first part
of his ministry.
Now in John 3 Nicodemus comes to
Jesus at night. Is this in the first part of His ministry or the ministry? The
first part of His ministry, right? It is right after the first Passover where
He does signs, and wonders. At the end of John 2 He performs various miracles
and many people believed on His name. Right after that Nicodemus comes to
Him.
He says to Nicodemus, “How can you
being a teacher of Israel not know that you have to be born again to enter into
the kingdom of God?”
What did He say? Jesus is saying the
same thing to Nicodemus in John 3:1 that John the Baptist is saying and that
Jesus is saying in the first part of His ministry that if you want to get into
the kingdom there has to be a regeneration which is related to that repentance.
Then in John 3 (I’m going to turn there. I want to make sure I articulate
because you’ve heard different things on this and I’ve taught different things
on this.) There’s a lot going on in the background of this that comes out of
Jewish background and other things that Arnold talked about - different ways a
person could be born again in rabbinical thought - things like that which I
think are good and helpful for understanding the passage. What I’m saying here
isn’t contradictory to that. In John 3 Jesus says:
NKJ John 3:3 Jesus
answered and said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
Then in verse 4 Nicodemus says:
NKJ John 3:4 Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can
he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"
Nicodemus is around 40. He is
saying, “I’m 40 years old. How can I go back and get reborn?” He is thinking
literally – going back into the womb and Jesus answers him in verse 5.
NKJ John 3:5 Jesus answered, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born
of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is the
Millennium. So what Jesus is saying is there is a certain kind of
transformation that has to occur before you can enter into the kingdom.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean;
I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.
Where is Nicodemus? Jesus says, “You
should know this Nicodemus.”
We need to ask ourselves, if
Nicodemus is hearing Jesus talk about being born of water and being born of
flesh, what is the Old Testament reference that Jesus is alluding to here that
Nicodemus should be familiar with? Right here, Ezekiel 36.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean;
I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart and put a new
spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give
you a heart of flesh.
What are the key elements here?
NKJ John 3:5 Jesus answered, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born
of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
Is that making sense? The message
that Jesus is giving Nicodemus is related to the establishment of the New
Covenant which is at the beginning of the kingdom. The same thing that he is
saying to Nicodemus about entering the kingdom is the same message John said
about repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And Jesus said, “Repent for the
kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And, the disciples said, “Repent for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” So the allusion goes back to Ezekiel
36:25-28.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:27 "I will put My Spirit within you and cause you
to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.
So the message to Nicodemus which we
often go to as a great example of the importance of regeneration is really a
passage that must be understood within the context of the early pronouncement
of Jesus’ kingdom message to Israel to repent and that it is connected to the
fulfillment of the New Covenant.
So now let me take you some place
else. Are we having fun yet? We looked at this last time as we finished up our
study. Deuteronomy 29 and 30 is the land covenant. But, even within the land
covenant there is a foreshadowing of the New Covenant. You read in Deuteronomy
30:5. Let’s just pick up in verse 4.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:4 "If any of
you are driven out to the farthest parts under
heaven,
Not just Babylon, but
everywhere.
from there the
LORD your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you.
That’s when they repent – shubah. They come back.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:5 "Then the LORD your God will bring you to the
land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it.
That’s when He is going to fulfill
the land covenant.
He will prosper
you and multiply you more than your fathers.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:6 "And the LORD your God will circumcise your
heart
That’s the same terminology for
cleansing the 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.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:7 "Also the LORD your God will put all these
curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted you.
So see Deuteronomy 30 connects the
land covenant with the New Covenant, God giving them a new heart. This occurs
after they’re saved. This occurs after they’re saved. Now I can’t remember (If
I can’t remember, I know you don’t remember) if I did this the last time we
were here because the last week we had the threat of bad weather, but turn with
me to Revelation 11. We have fun going all over the Bible. It’s sword drill
time. Learn to use your Bible.
Now Dr. Ice talked about this on I
guess it was Tuesday afternoon when he was talking about the earth dwellers. He
was working on this, probably about a month ago. He was working on his earth
dweller paper and I had been talking to him about what I was coming up with on
regeneration and we were trying to just think our way through this because
nobody has tried to make these kinds of distinctions. They just talk it in
general terms.
Let’s try this. Jesus comes back at
the Second Coming at this point. Here’s the rapture way back here. We go up. Okay.
This is the halfway point in the tribulation, two 3 ½ year periods. The New
Covenant gets enacted after Jesus returns. Okay, so the New Covenant gets
enacted here. This is when they get a clean heart and this is where He is going
to circumcise their hearts. And they’re going to get a new spirit. That’s a new
human spirit. It’s a transformation there. That’s why people think they get
regenerated. But there is a problem here. They’re also going to get an
indwelling of the Holy Spirit that’s different from the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit today because remember in the tribulation period the restrainer in II
Thessalonians 2 is removed. The restrainer is the Holy Spirit so there is no
indwelling Holy Spirit in the tribulation period. So when they get saved in the
tribulation period, they’re not going to get the Holy Spirit. But they get Him
when the New Covenant is established.
Now if we take this to be “equals
personal regeneration” then that means that all these Jews who get saved - 100%
of them are going to get saved at that instant in time when Jesus comes back. We’ve
got a problem because in Revelation 11:11ff something happens before the
midpoint. Right about here, right before the 3 ½ period in Revelation 11:11 the
two witness have been killed. Many people think they are Moses and Elijah. I’m
not committed yet because we haven’t gotten there on Sunday morning. When I get
there I’ll make a decision, but now I think that’s a working hypothesis. God is
going to raise them from the dead and in verse 12:
NKJ Revelation 11:12 And they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, "Come up
here." And they ascended to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies saw them.
NKJ Revelation 11:13 In the same hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city
fell.
That’s Jerusalem. A tenth of the
city is going to be wiped out in this huge earthquake.
In the earthquake seven thousand people were killed,
and the rest were afraid and gave glory to the God of heaven.
Now let’s look at this. I had fun
with this with a guy who believed in limited atonement the other day at a
Dallas Seminary alumni meeting.
I said, “Okay, look here’s all the
people. Let that circle describe all the people who live n Jerusalem at this time.
Now 7,000 of them are going to die. Now what part of the rest are afraid and
give glory to God? All of them.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” he
said. “It can’t be all of them.”
See there is that problem with
limited atonement people. “All” can’t be all. Jesus didn’t die for all; He just
died for most. That’s what all means – most or some. But the rest means
that everybody else in Jerusalem is afraid and gives glory to God.
Tommy calls me up at about 5 o’clock
on a Saturday afternoon and he says, “Robby, I found out when all those people
get saved. At least the bunch that’s in Jerusalem. It is this earthquake, the
rest who survive have been hearing the testimony of these two witnesses and
they respond to their message and they are indicating here that they’re
believers. They are either believing in Jesus as Messiah at this point or they
did in the two or three days preceding this. At this point the rest are giving
glory to the God of heaven.”
Now this occurs right before the 3 ½
year period. Now what happens (those of you who’ve been studying)… see this is
test night. I am asking rhetorical questions. What happens at the 3 ½ year
period in the middle of the tribulation? The abomination of desolation. So the
Antichrist is going to set up a statue of himself in the temple to be
worshipped.
In Matthew 24, Jesus said, “When you
see this happen,” - what are you supposed to do? Get out of Dodge. Leave. Go to the hills. Leave. Get as far
away as you can and woe unto those who are caught away from home or without the
proper clothes in the winter or whatever because this is going to come
suddenly. You need to drop everything and leave.
So what happens in the chronology
here is you get a bunch of people who get saved here and then the Antichrist
sets himself up to be worshipped here, and what do they do? They head south to
the wilderness in response to what Jesus told them to do in Matthew 24. Do you
think an observant Jew who rejected Jesus as Messiah is going to listen to
Jesus and get out of Dodge? No. He is only going to listen to what Jesus said
in Matthew 24 if he has already trusted Jesus as Messiah.
So turn over to Revelation 12. In
Revelation 11, the rest were saved. Revelation 12 talks about the woman, the
child, and the dragon. This section of Revelation is like the program at
baseball games. It tells you who the players are and gives you their stats. So
you have various players introduced here. The first one is a woman clothed with
the sun with a moon at her feet and on her head a garland of 12 stars. That’s
Israel. The symbolism comes out of Genesis 37. Then you have introduction of
the fiery red dragon who is later defined as the great dragon in verse 9 as the
serpent of old called the devil and Satan. So that’s our second player. And the
fiery red dragon verse 3 begins to persecute the woman. The woman has a male
child in verse 5 who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. Well,
that’s the Messiah, Psalm 2. So we know that the woman is Israel. The male
child is the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ who is caught up to God in His
throne. And then it says:
NKJ Revelation 12:6 Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared
by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty
days.
That’s 3 ½ years. That’s the second
half of the tribulation period. Now skip down to verse 17.
NKJ Revelation 12:17 And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he
went to make war with the rest of her offspring,
That’s those that weren’t in the
land, but who are Jews in the rest of the world – saved Jews in the rest
of the world.
who keep the
commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
See that tells you that the reason
they fled was because of the testimony of Jesus Christ. So the point that I am
making here is that these people who flee down and…here we have a map of
Israel. You have the Dead Sea and south of there over in this area is Petra
over in modern Jordan. They flee
here into the wilderness and all those people who flee to the wilderness are
already justified. They’re already saved. They’ve already accepted Jesus as the
Messiah individually. But as a corporate group, they haven’t called upon the
name of Jesus to be the Messiah and to come and deliver them. So individually
they are already regenerate, but they don’t have the New Covenant form of
regeneration yet because that comes only after Jesus arrives. If they died here
they would still go to heaven. It’s just like the difference between Peter and
James and John the day before Pentecost and they had Old Testament regeneration
which didn’t include the same dynamics as regeneration included two days later
after the Day of Pentecost when if you were saved you got the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit, the filling of the Spirit and you were baptized in the Spirit and
you got spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit and all those things. I’m just
trying to think this through very precisely and chronologically to understand
what the dynamics are so when we look at a passage like Ezekiel 36:27-8 we
understand that the result of the sprinkling of clean water on you as a nation
and national cleansing and being cleansed from all your filthiness and from all
your idols…
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and
you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all
your idols.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart and put a new
spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give
you a heart of flesh.
…that this is more than just
personal regeneration. It has to be because when you put it all together and
they’re already personal regenerate.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:27 "I will put My Spirit within you and cause you
to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.
But when Jesus is talking to
Nicodemus in John 3 it’s in the context of that initial message “to repent for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand” because as the Messiah He is offering Israel
the kingdom, the same kingdom He is going to establish right here. It could
have happened when He came the first time, but they rejected it. So now it’s
going to happen here, but before they can go into it there has to be this
cleansing by the water and the Word. Does that make sense? And all of this ties
together.
That’s what Charlie was talking
about the other night is that the Word of God… See this is when the kingdom comes in. Before they can get
from being saved here to being saved and living in the kingdom they’ve got to
go through this national cleansing and national regeneration process. That’s what Jesus is talking to
Nicodemus about. He was offering the kingdom to Nicodemus in John 3. But when
they rejected it, the kingdom got postponed. People between then and here still
get regenerated, but it has different characteristics than the regeneration
that occurs there. That helps us understand what’s going on in Ezekiel
36:27-8.
This is what Charlie was talking
about when you take Scripture and start connecting all these different layers.
It’s like a web of doctrine. When you just go in and teach John 3 in isolation
and you don’t correlate it to Ezekiel, you don’t correlate it to Jeremiah, you
don’t correlate it to Revelation; then it’s like looking at a jigsaw puzzle and
you’ve got two pieces and you’re trying to understand the whole. But, once you
start putting all the pieces together you see the big picture and you realize
how tight all Scripture is. Every part relates to every other part and we have
to learn all of this. When we don’t do this, then you just get a sort of a
fragmented understanding of the different aspects of God’s plan. So it’s not
always the easiest thing to work your way through, which is why you have to
have a lot of repetition to hear it over and over again and finally it begins
to make sense.
We’ll come back and go through the
rest of the Ezekiel passages and deal with this whole aspect of cleansing that
is such a critical part of the New Covenant for the establishment of the
Millennial Kingdom.