Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 3

Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 3

Selected Scriptures

Code: 90-336

We are in the middle of a study of eschatology, focusing on Israel.  We are at the beginning of the bigger study of eschatology, but kind of in the middle of studying the role that Israel plays in eschatology.  If you wonder what eschatology is, that is a long word, it basically means the study of last things, from the Greek word eschatonwhich means last things.  What does the Bible say about the end of the world?  What does the Bible say about the end of history? What has God planned for the end? 

And what I've been saying to you is that it matters greatly to God how redemptive history ends because the whole purpose of it is bound up in how it ends.  The reason there is a created universe, the reason there is humanity, the reason there is a purpose unfolding in redeeming sinners, they're all focused in one direction and that is toward the great consummation, the great end in which God will be glorified.  God is moving everything sovereignly to His own purposed, glorious end.  And what is wonderful for us is that He has revealed so much about it in the Bible. There is so much that we can know about the end. 

The book of Revelation, as we mentioned this morning, tells us the most.  That's why we wanted you to pick up a free copy of the book, Because The Time is Near, so that you would have your own copy, it would help you to understand the wonderful truths of the end laid out in the book of Revelation.  And we're going to go through those elements of the end that are revealed in Scripture as the weeks go by.

But Scripture is very clear about one thing.  Foundational to any accurate understanding of the end is an accurate understanding of the future of Israel.  This is the cornerstone of biblicaleschatology .  What I've been saying is pretty simple.  If you get Israel right, you're going to get eschatology right.  If you don't get Israel right, you will never get  eschatology right.  It is impossible to fully understand biblical teaching about the end times apart from understanding the future of Israel, the future of ethnic Jews in God's plan.  And if you don't get Israel right, then your eschatology is confused and you cannot be blessed and you cannot give God appropriate glory and you cannot have a full hope for what lies ahead so that His glory is diminished, your joy and blessing are diminished as well.  Getting Israel right means understanding what God has promised to do with Israel for Israel in the future.  That all goes back to the Old Testament where God made irrevokable, unconditional, unilateral promises and covenants to Israel to be fulfilled in the future.  And within those covenants, He promised that the nation would one day be saved, a generation of ethnic Jews would be saved, that they would inherit their originally promised land which God pledged to Abraham, that they would become a blessing to the whole world, that they would enjoy a Kingdom over which God's anointed King, the Messiah, would rule from Jerusalem with justice and righteousness and peace for a thousand years, that He would rule the whole world from Jerusalem, Israel being given a special place of blessing.  This must come to pass because God has chosen Israel for this purpose in the end.  It is then a matter of election.  Israel is God's elect.  The Bible calls Christ, "My Elect."  The Bible calls the church, "God's Elect." And the Bible calls Israel, "My Elect."  And thus it is strange, very strange, that it is the very historic theology of sovereign election whose advocates have denied this to Israel. 

In the theological world where people believe in the doctrine of election more strongly than anywhere else, they are more prone to deny Israel's election than anywhere else.  In fact, they have come up with the idea that the church, God's new and present elect, receives all the promises once given to Israel, all those promises and covenants having been cancelled to Israel because of Israel's apostasy, Israel's unbelief, and Israel's rejection of Christ, they then being permanently set aside, all the promises come to the church. 

Where did this come from?  And I want to answer that a little bit tonight because you are very careful in how you consider the things I teach you and I know the question will come up because it's already come up, how could they ever arise at such an idea?  Where did it come from?  There is no verse in the Bible anywhere that says the promises of God to Israel have been cancelled and the church is the new Israel.  You can't find that in the Bible.  The question then is, where did it come from?

Well it started historically with a man named Augustine in the fifth century.  And because he is such a formidable and shaping theologian who really was the main influence in the lives of people like John Calvin and Martin Luther and John Owen and many other formidable students of Scripture, it has the power of these great names behind it.  The idea then, which really began in a formal sense with Augustine, flowed down through these great Reformers and found honor among those who rightly honor the Reformers and so it has long survived. 

However, reformed theology, as such, is hard pressed to prove the point.  And, in fact, Reformed exegesis, that is the discipline of interpreting the Scripture, works very hard, I think, to manipulate the Scripture to avoid the obvious.  They have come up with a view called amillennialism which says there is no Kingdom for Israel, and for that matter there is no earthly Kingdom period.  It denies then certainly a future earthly Kingdom for a generation of ethnic Jews in which Christ reigns on earth and fulfills all the Old Covenant promises.  Rather it is called replacement theology.  The church replaces Israel and the blessings are spiritual.  The Kingdom then becomes only a spiritual Kingdom and a heavenly Kingdom and not an earthly one at all.  In order to make this work, as I said, they have to work really hard at moving their theological points around and they have to do some very manipulative exegesis to avoid what is clearly in the Bible.  Scripture then has to be removed from its normal sense and placed in a category of interpretation so that it doesn't mean what it appears to mean, as basic as Israel doesn't mean Israel.

So to say it simply, to hold the view of amillennialists, called replacement theology, that the church replaces Israel in the promises of God, Israel as God's Elect is no longer God's Elect, cancelled out, to come up with this idea that there therefore is no real earthly Kingdom to fulfill those promises and that they are fulfilled in the spiritual life of the church both now and in heaven, you have to deny the nature of divine sovereign election.  You have to basically say that when God called Israel His Elect, and when God gave them unconditional, unilateral, irrevokable promises, He didn't keep them, or He doesn't keep them, so that election doesn't mean permanent election, it might be temporary as in the case of Israel.

I don't know anybody who believes in the doctrine of election who thinks its temporary with the elect angels, or temporary with the elect Son or temporary with the elect church, so this has to be a category invented to accommodate replacement theology.  The second thing that has to happen is, you cannot interpret Scripture in the normal meaning, the normal sense in which it is written both in the Old Testament and the New Testament because clearly in both testaments promises are made to Israel.  Therefore Israel doesn't mean Israel, a thousand years doesn't mean a thousand years, reigning in Jerusalem doesn't mean reigning in Jerusalem, it means something else...something not apparent in any normal interpretation of the language.  So you can see there are some extremes here in trying to make this work theologically when you have to reinvent the doctrine of election which is so sacred to us and when you have to change the normal meaning of the language.

Now, I want to having said that, say this, that throughout history there have been some in Reformed circles of great note who didn't buy this.  I am particularly, as you probably known, drawn more to Scottish Reformed theology than I am to Dutch Reformed theology.  And one of my favorite Scots in the area of theology is Horatius Bonar.  He's a nineteenth century preacher, Scottish preacher and theological writer.  In 1847 he wrote prophetic landmarks and he took a position very different from his Reformed friends, very different.  He was always a strong advocate of the doctrines of sovereign grace.  He was always a strong advocate of the doctrine of election.  He affirmed as well that election was forever and therefore affirmed the primacy of the destiny of the Jews in the scheme of .  eschatologySo he was going against the grain of his day and his compatriots.  This is what Bonar wrote in 1847:  "The prophecies concerning Israel are the key to all the rest.  True principles of interpretation in regard to them will aid us in disentangling and illustrating all prophecy.  False principles as to them...that is Israel...will most thoroughly perplex and overcloud the whole Word of God,"eschatology end quote.  And that's right back to what I said and when I said it I hadn't yet found Bonar's comment.  He says you can't get  right if you don't get Israel right.

He further wrote of his conviction as to biblical clarity on this matter.  And his language is so magnificent that it needs to be thoughtfully repeated.  So let me read to you what Bonar wrote in 1847.  "I am one of those who believe in Israel's restoration and conversion, who receive it as a future certainty, that all Israel shall be gathered and that all Israel shall be saved.  As I believe in Israel's present degradation, so do I believe in Israel's coming glory and preeminence.  I believe that God's purpose regarding our world can only be understood by understanding God's purpose as to Israel."  Now remember, this is a time long before they had ever been gathered back into their land.

He went on to say, "I believe that all human calculations as to the earth's future, whether political or scientific, or philosophical, or religious, must be failures if not taking for their data or basis God's great purpose regarding the latter day standing of Israel.  I believe that it is not possible to enter God's mind regarding the destiny of man without taking as our key or our guide His mind regarding that ancient nation, that nation whose history so far from being ended or nearly ended is only about to begin."  He went on to say this, "He only to whom the future belongs can reveal it.  He only can announce the principles on which that future is to be developed.  And if He set Israel as the great nation of the future and Jerusalem as the great metropolis of earth, who are we that without philosophy of science we should set aside the divine arrangements and substitute for them a theory of man?  Human guesses concerning the future are the most uncertain of all uncertainties and human hopes built upon these guesses are sure to turn out the most disappointing if not the most disastrous of all failures.  I believe that the sons of Abraham are to re-inherit Palestine and that the forfeited fertility will yet return to that land, that the wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad for them, and the desert will rejoice and blossom as the rose.  I believe that meanwhile Israel shall not only be wanderers, but that everywhere only a remnant, a small remnant shall be saved.  And that it is for the gathering in of this remnant that our missionaries go forth.  I believe that these times of ours are the times of the Gentiles and that Jerusalem and Israel shall be trodden down of the Gentiles till the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.  I believe that the completion of what the Apostle calls the fullness of the Gentiles will be the signal for the judgments which are to usher in the crisis of earth's history and the salvation of Israel and the long-expected Kingdom."

Why did he believe that?  Because that's exactly what the Bible says.  I love the comment of Barry Horner who has written a new book called Future Israel, it won't be out until July.  It is the end of the argument, it's that good.  I got a pre-publication copy, 450 pages.  I couldn't put it down, I read right through it in two days.  And I thought, "This guy's been reading my mind."  And then I got a letter from him saying, "I heard your message that you gave at the Shepherds Conference, on this subject and I find myself tripping over my 'amens.'"

But in this amazing book, researched better than anything I've ever seen on the subject, scholarly and yet warm-hearted and readable, Horner comments on some of these men who were going against the grain of amillennialism, like Bonar.  In fact, he comments on Bonar's writing and says, "How refreshingly different is the attitude here from that of Augustine and Calvin.  Undergirding this teaching is not the eschatological blending of national Israel into mere shadowy insignificance and obscurity, but rather the acknowledgment that while grace has blessed the Gentiles in a grand manner, so too will the same grace of God according to the same sovereign purpose ultimately bless the Jewish people in a most climactic and triumphant sense," end quote.

Another writer, William VanGemerin(?), writing in the West Minister Theological Journal, 1983, said, "Israel is the hermeneutical crux in the interpretation of prophecy."  I love it when it comes out of Westminster Theological Seminary, which, of course, is a seed bed of amillennial thinking, but there are men and there always have been who take the Word at its face value.  The key to eschatology then is Judeo centrism, if you want to coin a phrase.  The key to  eschatology is Judeo centrism which alone provides the cohesive base to integrate the various features of biblical prophecy.  Still for centuries, right up until now, and I want to talk to you a little bit about this, there is a strong...let's use Barry Horner's term "Anti-Judaism."  There is a strong anti-Judaism, not Semitism...not anti-Semitism as though it were a racial thing, but anti-Judaism as though it is a religious thing.  There is a strong anti-Judaism in Reformed Theology saying Israel had lost its election, lost the right to all its covenants and promises.

For example, George Murray writing in Millennial Studies says, "To be sure the nation was sovereignly chosen by God, but God no longer deals with them as a chosen nation."  I don't want to put words in their mouths so there are their own words.  They were chosen, they aren't chosen anymore.  They were elect, they're not elect anymore.  Some contemporary anti-Judaism replacement theology, Anglicans, are so derogatory as to be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.  In fact, some of them, according to Horner, would be delighted if the Arabs pushed Israel right into the Mediterranean Sea.  This comes very clear in the book Future Israelwhich Horner writes is, quote, "Dedicated to the elucidation of the pre-mil perspective, especially as it focuses on national Israel that has been ignored, belittled, and distorted in Calvinistic Reformed and Sovereign Grace circles," end quote.  Pretty direct, but true.

Horner goes on to say, "The wrong perception of Israel and the Jews by so-called Christians has produced consequences of horrific proportions during the history of the church.  Such a shameful legacy perpetrated during the illustrious Reformation and onwards remains undiminished, largely unconfessed and still prevalent in substantial degrees up to the present within a Calvinistic Reformed and Sovereign Grace environment," end quote.  What he is saying is that while we're being told we ought to apologize as a nation for the early attitude in America manifest in slavery toward African/American people, we ought to start apologizing to the Jews for the way the American church has treated them with its replacement theology.

Based on chapter 12 of Genesis, if a Christian'eschatology s produces indifference toward the children of Abraham, or detachment from the children of Abraham, or antagonism toward the children of Abraham, you're in trouble because the Abrahamic Covenant says you bless them and God will bless you, you curse them and God will curse you.  The issue then is...does Israel have a future as a nation?  Scripture says it does.  Many in the Reformed tradition deny that.  Typical of this are the words say of a Dutch Calvinist, Herman Riterbosse(?)  in his book, Paul: An Outline of His Theology., I quote him, "The church then as the people of the New Covenant has taken the place of Israel and national Israel is nothing other than the empty shell from which the pearl has been removed and which has lost its function in the history of redemption."  It's over for them as a nation. 

Now you have to ignore the clear words of Zechariah 12 to 14, Ezekiel 36 to 39, Romans 9 to 11, particularly.  And you also have to do damage to your own understanding of sovereign grace because you are saying that Israel failed to believe, Israel failed to embrace Christ, and so Israel on its own failed to do what it was supposed to do.  By saying that, you would have to also say that Israel would have guaranteed its own place in the future purposes of God if on its own it had done what was right.  The problem is, nobody can believe except by the sovereign grace of God.  Israel has failed but that has not altered God's plan because the generation that is elect has not yet come.  To believe that the church somehow has earned the promises given to Israel because we pulled it off on our own and Israel didn't, that kind of thinking is foreign to our thinking of sovereign grace.  Do we fail to grasp that we as a church exist only by divine sovereign grace and that we are no more able to believe than the Jews were able on their own to believe?  Do we think that somehow we've inherited the promise because we were able to do what they were not able to do?  The truth of the matter is, we were enabled to do what they were not enabled to do because that generation has not yet come.  And if Romans 9 through 11, and we'll get to that, teaches anything, it teaches that salvation is by sovereign grace and election alone for the church now and many Jews that are brought into the church and for Israel in the future.  To make a human contingency or human achievement the factor in prophetic fulfillment is not true to the doctrine of sovereign grace.

So you're asking the question...How in the world did this idea get such momentum?  Well, as I said, it was Augustine, North African church father came up with this idea, established this idea that the church was the new Israel.  Thirteenth century, the church establishes Replacement as canonical law.  It becomes the official dogma of the church.

Let me give you a little bit of the history written by Robert Wistrick(?).  "Augustine even likened the Jewish people to Cain, the first criminal recorded in biblical history who had murdered his own brother and merited death but instead had been condemned to wander unhappily ever after." Augustine saw the Jewish people like Cain, alive but dispossessed, a perpetual wanderer.  "The Jews," Augustine said, "might deserve to be eradicated for their crime, rejecting Christ, but Augustine preferred that they would be preserved as wandering witnesses until the end time."  Witnesses to what happens when you reject the truth.  Augustine did suggest, however, that they would turn to Christ at the last judgment.  The canonical legislation of the church in the thirteenth century fully institutionalized the reprobate status of the Jew and the doctrine which the church called Servitus Judae Oram(???), the perpetual servitude of the Jews.  The Jews then had to be subordinate to Christians.  They could exercise no position of authority and Christian society had to be originally protected from contamination through living, eating, or engaging in any sexual relationship with a Jew.  That was church law.

The Lateran Council, thirteenth century, the year 1215, codified this to segregate the Jews.  And in the thirteenth century, the Lateran Council segregated the Jews by requiring them to wear distinguishing dress.  In Germanic lands they wore a conical hat and what they called a Jew-badge, usually a yellow disc sewn into their clothing whose color symbolized Judas betraying Christ for gold coins.  That's what was done to them in Latin countries.  The effects of the badge required to be worn and the conical hat were to make the Jews more visible and vulnerable to attack which reduced their ability to travel.  And so they formed ghettos, twelve hundreds.  The German Reformation a few hundred years later under Luther's guidance led to a very unfavorable direction for the Jews, seeded hatred sewn deep, Luther did nothing to remove it.  It eventually found its full flower in the Third Reich with Hitler.  And the German Protestants showed themselves amazingly receptive to Nazi anti-Semitism, it was so ingrained for so many centuries.  You can go back to the Council of Nicaea in 325, a council which was debating the nature of Christ, came up with the right understanding of the nature of Christ.  But in the documents of the Council of Nicaea, Jews are called "that odious people."

This attitude stuck and it stuck throughout the Middle Ages.  They were mostly resented, hated and often killed.  In the fourteenth century, Jewish books were burned.  At the end of the thirteenth century they were expelled from England by Edward I and allowed to come back 350 years later under Cromwell.  In 1144 in Norwich, England, the Jews were charged with killing their babies to drain the blood to use in the Matsos, the unleavened bread of Passover.  Of course in the sixteenth century, the time of the Reformation pervasive anti-Jewish attitudes pervaded in Europe.  Hikel(?)  Overman writing in a book, The Roots of Anti-Semitismsays, "Hatred of the Jews was not an invention of the sixteenth century, it was an inherited assumption."  And sad to say, the Reformation didn't change it.  Sixteen forty-eight, the Ukranian Jews were butchered and it is a strange and sad thing to say that in the last sermon that Luther preached before he died, he called for all Jews to be driven out of Germany.  He was fighting on another front, never really got around to dealing with that issue which was so ingrained in the culture.  This...this led to this Amillennial Replacement Theology and it became so ingrained.  Interesting further study that Barry Horner points out, the CRC, which is the Christian Reformed Church, Dutch Reformed Calvinism, squelched all pre-millennialism.  And interestingly enough, they...they would not tolerate anybody believing in a future kingdom for Israel.  Anybody who did was placed under investigation.  You could find that in their own history.  They actually went so far as to forbid preaching or discussing premillennialism.

Wystricks(??)says in his book, Anti-Semitism, The Longest Hatred, "The Augustinian theology reinforced the notion of the Jews as a wandering, homeless, rejected and accursed people who were incurably cardinal, blind to spiritual meaning, perfidious, faithless, and apostate, their crime being one of cosmic proportions merited permanent exile and subordination to Christianity."  One writer, W.J. Greer writing in the most...in the momentous event, said, "The power of Augustine is best seen in the fact that he removed the ghost of premillennialism so effectively that for centuries the subject was practically ignored." 

Now this actually continues to be an issue today.  In our modern world, our tolerant world, a world that embraces everybody and everything, there is still this subjective sort of impositional pre-suppositional anti-Judaism, if not anti-Semitism, not necessarily racist but this anti-Judaism mentality.  Melanie Philips, a Jewish columnist for The London Daily Mail, wrote a really amazing article about the Anglican Church hostility toward Israel.  This is some of which she said, "The church's hostility has nothing to do with Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians." And she wrote this after she went to a conference of the Anglicans discussing Israel and the Palestinians, the current situation.  This is what she wrote, "The church's hostility has nothing to do with Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians, this was merely an excuse.  The real reason for the growing antipathy was the ancient hatred of Jews rooted deep in Christian theology and now widespread once again, a doctrine," she wrote, "going back to the early church fathers, suppressed after the Holocaust, has been revised under the influence of the Middle Eastern conflict.  This doctrine is called...this is a Jewish writer...Replacement Theology.  In essence it says that the Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God's favor and so all God's promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity."  That is Replacement theology.

You can go to websites like Christian Zionism.org, and other websites and find many Anglican leaders that are pro-Palestinian, think Israel has absolutely no right to the land.  Christian anti-Judaism is strong in the U.K., very strong, much to the delight of the two million Muslims that now live there.  It's interesting to find the quote/unquote Anglican church taking their view of Israel.  One writer, Colin Chapman, an Anglican who wrote Whose Promised Land?, question mark, says, "Israel is responsible for Hamas and Islamic Jihad."  He is supported, by the way, by such notable scholars as N.T. Wright who says, "Israel doesn't mean an ethnic people, but it means a worldwide family."  To support his own view, Chapman says, "The Old Testament is not the inerrant Word of God, it is simply a very ethno-centric interpretation of Israelitish history."

Well all of that, and that's probably more than you wanted to hear, but the things I say here go far and wide.  Do you understand that?  It's time for Bible-believing Reformed Sovereign Grace Christians who affirm scriptural inerrancy and legitimate interpretation to drop this tragic error and get Israel in the right place or we're never going to understand God's unfolding purpose, to say nothing of having some bad attitude toward these people...absolutely unacceptable.  That is not to say that the Israel of today in the land of Israel is God's people.  The race is chosen, a future generation will be saved, but present-day Israel lives in apostasy and unbelief and the rejection of Jesus Christ and can claim no protection from God now.  God will preserve them as a race.  God is not obligated to protect them currently as a people.  They are under divine judgment, as are all people who reject Christ.  But they do have a future.

Now that being said, I have very little time left.  But we need to look at the Bible for a moment.  I said I wanted to go through some questions to answer this dilemma.  Is the Old Testament amillennial?  Were the Jews of Jesus' day amillennial?  Was Jesus amillennial?  Were the Apostles who wrote the New Testament and those associates of the Apostles amillennial?  Were the early church fathers amillennial?  We're going to answer those questions and then give you some very important conclusions.

First question...Is the Old Testament amillennial?  We started, didn't we, last time with the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis 12 and following chapters and we said that obviously God promised Abraham a seed, a nation, a land, blessing and through them blessing to the world.  Specifically, a nation...a nation that would grow like the sands of the sea and the stars of the heaven, a nation that would have a land and possess the land and be blessed and be a blessing to the world, and through that nation a seed, not just seeds, but a seed, as the Apostle Paul describes it in Galatians, meaning a ruler, a Messiah which assumes a Kingdom.  It's all in the Abrahamic Covenant, we saw that last time.

The second great covenant in the Old Testament is the Davidic Covenant.  Now I just want to show you that briefly.  Turn to 2 Samuel chapter 7...2 Samuel chapter 7.  Our intention is not to cover every aspect of this passage, but to draw out those things which are pertinent to answering the question...Is the Old Testament amillennial?  The Davidic Covenant, this is a covenant made with David.  It really is an expansion and an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant.  It's not something disconnected, it's something very, very connected.  Second Samuel chapter 7, verse 12, "When your days are complete," God tells David, "you will lie down with your fathers.  I'll raise up your descendant after you who will come forth from you and I will establish His Kingdom."  Now in verse 13, "He shall build a house for My name, I will establish a throne of His Kingdom forever."  So we know He's not talking about Solomon.  He's talking about a forever Kingdom.  He does speak of Solomon, the one who will be a son and commit iniquity and be corrected, but down in verse 16 He moves again beyond Solomon to the forever King and the forever Kingdom, "Your house, and Your kingdom shall endure before Me forever, Your throne shall be established forever."  God is saying to David, "Out of your loins, out of your line is going to come a King with an everlasting Kingdom."

Over in 2 Samuel chapter 23 we come to the last words of David as he comes to the end of his life.  And his last words are recorded for us here.  And if you'll drop down in to verse 5, this is what David knew to be true and what he said at the end of his life, "Truly it's not my house, so with God." In other words, to be blessed by the God of Israel, the rock of Israel, the one who rules is not my house so blessed for He has made an everlasting covenant with Me, ordered in all things and...what's the next word?...secured.  For all My salvation and all My desire will He not indeed make it happen?"  Will He not indeed...a better way to translate...do it?  It is an everlasting covenant.

What is promised to David?  A house, that is a progeny, a seed, a Kingdom.  And again, it sounds...go back to chapter 7...so much like the Abrahamic Covenant.  Verse 12, "I will raise up your descendant.  I will establish His Kingdom."  Verse 13, "I will establish the throne of His Kingdom forever."  Verse 16, "Your house, Your Kingdom shall endure before Me forever.  Your throne shall be established forever.  I will...I will...I will."  This extends the Abrahamic Covenant.  Yes a Kingdom, yes a King, and the King through the line of David, an eternal Kingdom that will not only bless the people who are the sons of Abraham, but a Kingdom that will bless the world.

Psalm 72, just quickly, Psalm 72 speaks of the reign of the great King who will come and establish His Kingdom and bring peace to the people, and verse 3, the hills in righteousness, and so forth, it goes on to describe this wonderful, glorious Kingdom.  This is a Psalm that speaks of an enduring name, verse 17, an increasing name that all the nations will call blessed.  Verse 18, "Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel who alone works wonders.  Blessed be His glorious name forever.  May the whole earth be filled with His glory, Amen, Amen."  David is celebrating here the wonderful promise of the King.  He will rule, according to verse 8, from sea to sea, from river to the ends of the earth, etc.  You can read it for yourselves.  Psalm 89 is another of these great Psalms of the King that celebrate the covenant that God made with David, and again Psalm 89 has those same magnificent characteristics of the Kingdom.  It ends with the same approach, verse 52, "Blessed be the Lord forever, amen and amen."  And Psalm 89 is directed right at the covenant God made with David.  Look at verse 35, "Once I have sworn by My holiness, I will not lie to David, his descendants shall endure forever and his throne as the Son before Me.  It will be established forever like the moon and the witness in the sky is faithful."  God is here binding Himself to this great covenant.  It is unilateral, I will...I will.  It is unconditional, God says I will do it, there are no human contingencies.  It is irrevokable, the language of Romans 11, the gifts and callings of God are without repentance, they are irrevokable.  It is a grant that can never be taken away.  There is no other way to interpret these covenants. 

But both the Abrahamic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant depend on one other covenant.  Let me show it to you.  Jeremiah 31...Jeremiah 31, this is all we will do for tonight.  Jeremiah 31, the Abrahamic Covenant expands in to the Davidic Covenant which expands in to the New Covenant which is the only way that the promises of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenant can come to pass.  This is the only means of fulfillment and it is the New Covenant.  Jeremiah 31 verse 31, also made with Israel, verse 31, "Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the hand of Egypt.  Not like the Mosaic or Sinaitic Covenant, the Covenant of Law, not like that.  "y Covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord."

See here's the dilemma.  You have the Abrahamic Covenant with all its promises.  You have the Davidic promises with all its promises.  And how to do you get to the fulfillment of those?  You have then the Mosaic Covenant which only proves that they can't qualify for the blessings of the Abrahamic and the Davidic, because they can't keep the Mosaic.  So the Mosaic Covenant only curses them.  You've got to come to the New Covenant.  And the New Covenant isn't like the Mosaic Covenant.  "his is a covenant...verse 33...which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord."   And this is the kind of Covenant this is, "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." That's the New Covenant.  It is that covenant which God promises one day He will change their hearts and write the Law inside of them.  And then He will be their God and they shall be His people.  And again would you please notice, this is the covenant I will make, I will put My Law on their heart, I will write it, I will be their God.  There are the "I wills" again, it is an unconditional, unilateral, sovereign, gracious, irrevokable covenant. 

How irrevokable is it?  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," this is reminiscent of the Psalm we just read, "who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, the Lord of hosts is His name, the Creator God, the upholder of His creation, 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 forever."

Wow, as far as I can tell, everything is still going the way it's supposed to, right?  The sun's doing what it's supposed to do.  The stars are doing what they're supposed to do.  The moons are doing what they're supposed to do.  And therefore God hasn't changed His mind.  "Thus says the Lord...verse 37...if the heavens above can be measured...and they can't...and the foundation of the earth searched out below...and it can't...then I will also cast off all the offspring of Israel for all that they have done, declares the Lord."  There is in one passage the answer to Replacement Theology.  God is not going to cast off Israel even for what they have done.  And listen to this, the New Covenant was given through Jeremiah at a time when Israel's disobedience was so severe, they were punished by God.  They were under divine punishment, under divine judgment at the very time this covenant was given to them.  Jeremiah is what kind of prophet?  He is a weeping prophet...weeping over Israel's judgment, the captivity.  The New Covenant is not a reward for their faithfulness, it is given in spite of their unfaithfulness.  God says there will be a day when I will change their hearts sovereignly and I will be their God and they shall be My people.  "And they shall not teach again...verse 34...each man his neighbor and each man his brother saying, 'Know the Lord, for they shall all know Me'...the whole nation....from the least of them to the greatest of them,' declares the Lord, 'or I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more.'" There is a word for that..salvation.  This is the promise of salvation to Israel.  Promise them a seed, promise them land, promise them a Kingdom, promise them a King, but they can't have any of it unless God saves them.  And He will...and He will not change His plan anymore than He will allow the fixed order of His creation to be altered.  And when that Covenant comes, He'll write His Law on the inside.

We as Gentiles, how do we fit in?  Hey, we're going to be in the Kingdom.  We are the beneficiaries of all the promises to Abraham.  We have been blessed to Abraham, right?  Messiah is the Son of Abraham, we by faith are children of Abraham.  We will possess all those promises.  We'll be there in the Kingdom. 

What about the promises to David about a Kingdom and a King?  He's our King, too.  It's not exclusively Israel's.  It is the fulfillment of promises made to them, they are the witnessed people through whom God fulfills His promises, but they embrace the world.  The world is blessed as even before that, we are blessed in the tents of Shem because it was Shem who produced Abraham.  We'll be there in the Kingdom, we'll receive all the blessings of the glorious reign of Christ on earth whether we've been glorified before, or whether saints enter into the Kingdom who are alive at the time, we'll be there, all who believe.  We'll all receive the benefits of the reign of Jesus Christ on His throne.  And we all are saved on the terms of the New Covenant which is ratified in the blood of Christ on the cross and by the ratification of that blood He makes the New Covenant valid.  And we all enter in to salvation through the New Covenant, and He's written His Law in our hearts as well.  We all get in on all of it.  We're not denying that.  I'm not saying that we are not going to be the recipients of the promises to Abraham, promises to David and promises of the New Covenant given here to Jeremiah, we are all the recipients of those things as well, but not replacing Israel.  The New Testament includes the...the New Covenant, I should say, or the New Testament in His blood, the New Covenant includes the elements of the Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic Covenant.  If you go back to the early part of Jeremiah 31, even earlier in that chapter, just start reading the chapter, read all the way up to verse 30 and you're going to see some very physical blessings.  They're going to come in Jeremiah 31 to all of us, to the wider world.  We're either...we're even going to come under the great reign of the great King.  We're all going to serve the great King, all the nations of the world are going to come under His sovereign, righteous, glorious rule.  You find indications of that back in chapter 30.

If you want further details on the New Covenant, turn to Ezekiel 36, let me just very quickly have you look at Ezekiel 36 just so you have a little bit of familiarity with it.  This rehearses again the same terms, the same realities of the New Covenant.  Verse 34, "I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands, bring you into your own land.  Then I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean.  I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols...here we go again...I will take you, I will sprinkle, I will cleanse.  Moreover, verse 26, I will give you a new heart, put a new Spirit within you.  I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, give you a heart of flesh.  I will put My Spirit within you, cause you to walk in My statutes.  You will be careful to observe My ordinances.  You'll live in the land that I gave to your forefathers so that you will be My people, I will be your God.  Moreover I will save you from all your uncleanness."  Magnificent...magnificent language.

Verse 33, "On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited in the waste places to be rebuilt."  Now...He says, "Once I've cleansed you, the Kingdom comes and the desolate land will be cultivated, instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passed by, and they will say this desolate land has become like the Garden of Eden, and the waste desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited and the nations that are left round about you will know that I the Lord have rebuilt the ruined places and planted that which was desolate.  I the Lord have spoken and will do it.  Thus says the Lord God.  This also, I will let the house of Israel ask Me to do for them, I will increase their men like a flock, like a flock for sacrifices, like the flock of Jerusalem during her appointed feasts, so will the waste cities be filled with flocks of men and then they will know that I am the Lord."  I will...I will...I will...this is all sovereign work on God's part, there's no human contingencies.  God will do it.  In the language of chapter 37, "He will gather the dry bones of Israel."

Is the Old Testament amillennial?  Not hardly.  When God gave unilateral unconditional sovereign gracious promises to Israel, they will be fulfilled by an elect people in the future whom God will enable to repent and believe.  These promises are guaranteed by divine faithfulness and to be fulfilled like all His salvation work by divine power in divine time.  And when God says those promises are irrevokable, they are irrevokable and you cannot without impunity for any seemingly convenient idea or assumption say they are voided.

You say, "What about Israel's apostasy?"  Doesn't cancel the promises.  As I said, when He gave them the New Covenant, they were under judgment.  Furthermore, Jesus reiterates the New Covenant, ratifies the New Covenant in His blood at the very hands of the apostate Jews.  The New Covenant is reiterated to Israel through their own Messiah at a time when they were under apostasy and on the brink of judgment which came a few years later in 70 A.D.  But Israel will exist through these judgments until the covenants are fulfilled.

I just have to show you one other text so I don't have to go back over this.  Zechariah 12, quickly, verse 10...I did an entire study on Zechariah, it's available on tape, I did it many years ago, it's still just a riveting study.  Zechariah 12:10, just follow quickly, "I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem...this is more New Covenant language...the spirit of grace and supplication...here it is...I will, I will, and they will look on Me whom they have pierced."  Wow.  In the future, God is going to pour out on the house of David, on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and supplication.  They will look on Me whom they've pierced.  They will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only son.  They're going to mourn for the Messiah that they crucified and they're going to weep bitterly over Him, like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.  "In that day there will be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the plain of Megiddo, and the land will mourn every family by itself."  And it goes to listing all the family.  "In the day that they mourn, in the day that they look on the one they pierced, in that day...verse 1 of chapter 13...in that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for impurity."  And what is the fountain going to do?  "Wash them and cleanse them.  And in that day, declares the Lord, here come the I wills...I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, they will no longer be remembered, I will also remove the prophets of the unclean spirit from the land," and so forth and so on.

Verse 8, "It will come about in all the land, declares the Lord, two parts in it will be cut off and perish."  Two thirds of the Jews will perish, one third will be left, that will be that final Israel that is saved.  "I'll bring the third part through the fire, refine them as silver is refined.  Test them as gold is tested.  They will call on My name, I will answer them.  I will say they are My people.  They will say the Lord is my God."  Finally this is how it ends.  And when that happens, verse 9 of 14, "The Lord will be King over all the earth, the Lord will be King over all the earth.  In that day the Lord will be the only one," there will only be one religion in the Kingdom, "and His name the only one.  All the land will be changed into a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem; Jerusalem will rise and remain on its site from Benjamin's Gate as far as the place of the First Gate to the Corner Gate and the Tower of Hananel for the king's wine presses.  People will live in it, there will be no more curse, Jerusalem will dwell in security."  Boy, that's good news, huh?  (Amen)  A secure Jerusalem.

Verse 16, "Then it will come about that any who are left of all the nations that went against Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to celebrate the Feast of Booths.  It will be that whichever of the families of the earth doesn't go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, there will be no rain on them.  And if the family of Egypt doesn't go up or enter, there will be no rain falling on them; it will be the plague with which the Lord smites the nations who do not go up to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.  This will be the punishment of Egypt, the punishment of all the nations who don't go up to celebrate."  This is when the Lord reigns and He's going to call for the restoration of ancient feasts because now they will have new meaning.  And the whole world better come and worship.  Verse 20, "In that day there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, 'HOLY TO THE LORD.'  And the cooking pots in the Lord's house will be like bowls before the altar."  Everything will become sacred, even the bells hanging on the animals. 

That's the Kingdom.  Clearly the Old Testament sees a Kingdom after a future salvation of Israel.

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Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 2

Why Every Calvinist Should Be a Premillennialist, Part 2

Selected Scriptures

Code: 90-335

Tonight we want to go back to our study of sovereign election Israel and eschatology . That's a rather technical title but that really is what I'm trying to convey to you. A bit of a theological lecture more than anything else. So take you to school a little bit, not in the normal preaching style but maybe a little bit more like the classroom.

Certainly the nation Israel is at the center stage of history in the world. It has been for a long, long time, particularly since it was reestablished as a nation last century. But even before that, Israel was always a preoccupation for the world. That little country tucked there in the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea on the western border of the Middle East has been a focal point for world history in many, many ways since it was chosen by God to be the land of promise for His people and since it is the very place where He sent His Son to do His mighty work of redemption and salvation. Israel is still center stage in the world. They are in the newspaper every day, on the news every night. Their...their particular place in history is by all human reckoning a very tenuous one, a very fragile one. They look like at any moment they could be completely engulfed and swept into oblivion by the surrounding enemies, the massive Islamic world. But that will not happen..that will not happen. They are not now under the protection of God because they're apostate and they've rejected their Messiah, but they will be preserved as an ethnic people because God does have a future plan to save a generation of them to give them the promises that He made in the Old Testament. So the history of Israel will continue to be at the center of world history, going forward, and it will even become a bigger point at the very end when the Lord returns to the earth and places His feet in Israel, in Jerusalem on the Mount and sets up His Millennial Kingdom. And from that place, rules the entire world.

So when you think about Israel, you have to understand that currently they are under divine chastening for rejection of the true and living God and the Lord Jesus Christ but they will be preserved to the fulfillment of God's promises to them. This, as I told you last time, is one of the great defenses of the truth of the Scripture, that Israel exists, that Jews exist, that that ethnic people who came out of the loins of Abraham is still here in the world. This has been, I suppose you could say, a racial anomaly throughout all of human history and even in the Middle Ages people were wondering why while no other ancient people could be found, you could always find the Jews. It is evidence visible, tangible that God wrote the Bible and that He is protecting His people for His future purposes.

Now talking about  eschatology is an important thing because the end of the story matters. Every story is written really because of an ending. Every story is written for an ending. And God's redemptive history is written so that it might be brought to pass and so that we might understand how it's going to end. We have the beginning in the book of Genesis. We have the early years of God's redemptive history in the pages of the Old Testament, the subsequent years in the pages of the New Testament and God continues to write His history since the close of the New Testament up until now and we await the final chapters in the end. And much of that has been written down in Scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that we can know exactly what the future holds insofar as God has revealed it.

This also assumes that God is in control of everything. God could not write the end of human history unless He was in absolute control of it. He could not pre-write it. He could not prophesy it, He could not predict it down to minute details unless He was in control of everything. And He is, in fact, control of everything. History is controlled by God as to culminate in the accomplishment of His purpose for His own glory. It will end with the same perfect precision and power with which it began and by which it is being continually sustained.

There are some people who think, however, that the end of the story is very vague, that the end of the story is somewhat obscure and oblique, and almost any view will do, almost any idea will do because it's so unclear. That is not the case. The end of the story is not vague. It is not unclear, nor is it unimportant. I was talking to another pastor recently and I asked him about his view regarding the coming of Christ's earthly Kingdom and the future fulfillment of God's promises to the Jews, to which he said, "I really don't care about any of that." That was a rather surprising answer to me, you really don't care about that but that is something God cares greatly about and that is something God has written very clearly about. And we are accountable to give the whole counsel of God, and that's part of it. Or to put it another way, God doesn't waste words, God doesn't say what doesn't matter. If He said it, it's very important. And the end of the story, in one sense, is more important than any other part of the story. In any book, in any story, the end is the purpose, the reason, the motive for the story in the first place, therefore it's the most crucial, compelling and important element. And so it is with the Bible. Everything has been predicted and planned and is being executed by a sovereign all-powerful, all-knowing God to bring it to a glorious end which He planned before anything ever began. And He wants us to enjoy the anticipation of this along with Him. He wants us to be able to enjoy now something of the foretaste of the glories that are to come. He tells us about heaven. Why? So that we can enjoy the anticipation of it now. He tells us about the future glorious return of Christ. Why? So we can live in the anticipation of that glorious hope now. And we saw last week how many benefits come from that. We are blessed and we are purified and we are comforted and we are encouraged in knowing what is to come.

Now when you think about  eschatology, there's a little sequence of events that are relatively simple for you to think about, and this is the way the Bible lays it out. If we wanted to use technical theological terms we'd call it the ordo(?) eschaton, that is the order of last things, the ordo eschaton.And it kind of goes like this. In the end, everything is begun by the Rapture of the church, the collection of the church, the gathering of the church into the presence of the Lord. That is followed by a period called the Tribulation.

So Rapture, Tribulation. Tribulation is a period in which God brings horrific judgment on the world, the details of which are described in Revelation, starting in chapter 6 and running through chapter 19. Rapture, followed by Tribulation...Tribulation ends with the Second Coming of Christ, when He comes to earth bringing His church, those of us who have already been with Him, having been raptured before the Tribulation, we come back with Him to earth, He returns, He destroys the ungodly and sets up His Kingdom...Rapture-Tribulation-Second Coming-Kingdom.

At the end of the Kingdom you have the Great White Throne Judgment which is the final judgment of all the ungodly who are raised from the dead and brought before the Great White Throne, the tribunal of God, where the final sentence is rendered and they are sent forever into the Lake of Fire. Rapture-Tribulation-Second Coming-Kingdom-Final Judgment...after the final Judgment the universe as we know it is uncreated and God creates a new heaven and a new earth, the eternal state in which we live forever.

That's it. Rapture-Tribulation-Second Coming-Kingdom-Final Judgment-New Heaven and New Earth...that's the chronology, that's the ordo eschaton.And if you follow the book of Revelation, that's exactly the way it's laid out. It is precisely how it flows. You see the church on earth in chapters 2 and 3, which describes the present church age, immediately you come to chapter 4 and you see the church in heaven which is indicative of the fact they were on earth, they're now in heaven though it doesn't describe the Rapture, it's described in other places, it's clear that that is what happened. And after looking at the church worshiping in heaven in chapters 4 and 5, in chapter 6 the judgments on the earth begin as the Tribulation takes place. At the end of that, the Lord Jesus comes in chapter 19, sets up His Kingdom after His return in chapter 20, then calls all sinners to the final Great White Throne Judgment. Then in chapter 21, sets up the New Heaven and the New Earth. It really isn't that difficult, just take it at face value.

All history then is headed toward this final sequence of events. And the first of these events, the Rapture, is what we call imminent...imminent meaning it is next. And its exact timing is unknown to us. It could happen at any time. People say to me, "Well, what needs to happen prophetically before the Rapture of the church?" Answer: absolutely nothing. All the prophetic elements of  eschatology really are triggered by the Rapture of the church. It can happen at any time. Even the Apostle Paul lived in the light of the reality that the Rapture could have happened in his lifetime. It can happen at any time.

So all history is headed toward the eternal reign of the Lord Jesus Christ as King of kings and Lord of lords in His earthly Kingdom, first of all, for a thousand years, then in His eternal Kingdom forever and forever. It is not that complex. That is the point of the book of Revelation. And as you read it, you'll see that sequence unfolding.

Now the major...the major focus for us in this initial study as we look at those events of the end time, is to look at the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. This Millennial Kingdom described in Revelation 20 which lasts for a thousand years. Six times in the opening verses of Revelation 20 it says it will last for a thousand years. It's not a mistake. It's not a symbolic number. It means a thousand years. So we read there about the Kingdom that will exist in the earth over which Christ Himself will rule as King of kings and Lord of lords for a thousand years, followed then by His eternal reign, so that really His Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom.

Associated with that Kingdom will be the Rapture of the church, the Tribulation, the Second Coming, the Final Judgment. And then after that, the establishment of the new heavens and the new earth. And the Old Testament says a lot about the things that are going to take place in the Kingdom. It talks about the salvation of Israel. It talks about salvation of Gentiles prior to the Kingdom during the Tribulation as well as in the Kingdom. It talks about the renewal of the earth, the restoration of the earth, paradise regained. It talks about the removal of the curse that has been upon the earth. It talks about the bodily resurrection of the saints who are going to rise from the dead and come to dwell on the earth with the saints that are still alive on the earth, both together in the time of the Kingdom. It describes the Kingdom as a time of righteousness, peace and joy.

The New Testament also describes these events very clearly, as I pointed out. Not just in the book of Revelation but in the book of Revelation you have the sequence and the chronology, but the New Testament talks about the Rapture, about the fact the Lord's going to come and take us. There's going to be a trumpet, the voice of the archangel, we're going to be taken up into heaven...that's the Rapture. The New Testament also talks about the Tribulation time. Jesus talked about it in the sermon called the Olivet Discourse which in Matthew 24...or...yes, in that part of Matthew is basically 24 and 25, His own sermon on His own Second Coming, and He talks about certain events that are going to take place in the Tribulation, including the abomination of desolation when the sacred place, the holy place in the rebuilt temple is desecrated, for example, and persecution breaks out against the Jews during that Tribulation. So the New Testament adds to our understanding. The New Testament talks about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus talked about it, how He comes in the clouds with great glory, accompanied by angels who gather His elect from the four corners of the earth. And He comes to establish the glory of His rule. The New Testament talks about the fact that the twelve tribes of Israel will be identified. Over each of the tribes will rule in the behalf of Christ, one of the twelve Apostles and we as believers having been glorified coming back to earth will even under the leadership of Jesus Christ rule over the earth and over the living people of Israel as well.

The book of Revelation says Satan will be bound for that thousand years, released at the end because during the Tribulation...I should say, during the Millennial Kingdom Satan is bound during that thousand-year Millennium, at the end he's released because people will be born during that time and they will not all believe. And so there will be a rebellion at the end of the thousand years, Satan will come back, lead the rebellion which will be the final rebellion in history, crushed by the Lord. All those who are in that rebellion sent into hell, in the Lake of Fire with all the rest of the ungodly of all the ages and then the New Heaven and the New Earth. All that is given in detail in the New Testament, as well as in the Old Testament which also talks about the New Heaven and the New Earth, especially in the book of Isaiah.

Now if you would like to get a better handle on that, take your MacArthur Study Bible, not now but some other time, and look at the back and you will find a doctrinal statement in the back. If you have one of the newer editions, or one of the older ones, the doctrinal statement is in each one. You can read the section and last things and you'll have a detailed understanding of what I've just said to you with the related passages that you can look up. If you have one of the new MacArthur Study Bibles done on the NAS, or one of the new New King James versions that has a concordance, you will also find a topical index which has a whole section on matters related to  eschatology or last things. So you can look in the back of the Study Bible, you can look at the Index, you can also look at the doctrinal statement and get a lot more detail.

Now, what we're going to do in the future, and I gave you, that's the sweep. In the future, we're going to kind of pick that all up one thing at a time, one element at a time, one component at a time and survey that so we have a better understanding.

Through the years I have taught on all of these things many, many times. In teaching through the entire book of Daniel, and teaching through the entire book of Zechariah, in teaching selected portions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, in teaching through Matthew and Luke and teaching through 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 2 Peter, Revelation twice, all of that material has been covered in those messages and the commentaries that have been written on the passages that relate to  eschatology. So they have a lot of material if you want to pursue. There's also a book on the Second Coming and we'll be giving you, coming up pretty soon, the new condensed, compressed commentary on the book of Revelation so you'll have tools to dig a little bit deeper.

Now, remember that this is a particularly great fascination for people to know about the future. Everybody wants to know about the future. It is a massive industry resting on people's interests in what is coming, the science fiction industry with books and movies and videos, horoscopes, palm readers, tarot cards, all kinds of false prophets and false prognosticators even in the name of God and Jesus Christ abound and they make a fortune because there's such an immense interest in this.

Now they all guarantee, and I will also guarantee you, one thing, I will guarantee you one thing about the future if you follow them...you will have less money. And that is all I will guarantee. You will not know anything about the future but you will have less money. However, God who alone knows the future has revealed much of it to us, all that He does want us to know and what He has revealed is absolutely the truth. So for the next number of weeks, oh there are obviously some misses as we go for the next few weeks anyway, we won't be doing this on Sunday night, but as we get going and gather some momentum in this, you can tell your friends and acquaintances to come and hear the real truth about the future. So I'm giving you kind of fair warning, this is a great opportunity for you to captivate these people who are already preoccupied and interest with the future so that they can know the truth about the future.

All right, that's all kind of introductory and what we have begun with is this important linch pin that holds everything together, God's purpose for Israel, God's purpose for Israel. If we get this right, then we get the Kingdom right and everything moves or works around the Kingdom. So we have to get God's promises to Israel right and the Kingdom right and then basically everything else works around that. Simply put, God made covenants and promises to a people, a people that came out of the loins of Abraham, that came through the patriarchs, became known as the people called Israel. God made promises with them. God made covenants with them that define the nature and the character largely of the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ which is the final, great, glorious end of human history on this earth so that the future is centered on this Kingdom which while including all the redeemed of all the ages, we'll all be there in glorified form or in still living form, is still uniquely designed to fulfill promises to Israel. We will enter in to the blessing of the Kingdom, just as we enter in to the New Covenant promised to Israel, just as we enter in to the promises given to Abraham, we are in a sense spiritual children of Abraham by faith. So we participate in all the good things that God promised to Israel, but not to their exclusion but in company with His promises being fulfilled to them.

The bottom line in the future, there will be a generation of Jews who will come to faith in Jesus Christ collectively as a people. And when that happens, Jesus will return to give them His promised Kingdom, it awaits their salvation...it awaits their salvation. Now again the Bible is clear on this, the Bible speaks of this with frequency, unmistakably. These are divine promises, I told you last time, they are unilateral, that is they are made by God alone, they are irrevokable, God promises that He will not rescind them, and still there are some among us, that is among evangelicals, who deny the future Kingdom established by Christ on earth. They deny the Kingdom and they deny the Jewishness of the Kingdom. Some deny both, some deny one. Some will say, "Well yes there will be a Kingdom, but it will not be a Kingdom with Jewish characteristics fulfilling Old Testament promises to the Jews. That is called historical premillennialism, Christ will come, set up the Kingdom but it won't have the Jewish character that we anticipate from Old Testament promises it would have because those promises were cancelled to Israel and given to the church. So there will be a Kingdom but it will be a church Kingdom. Saved Jews will be there but it will not be uniquely and particularly for Israel. That's called historic premillennialism, to differ it only from what we believe called futuristic premillennialism which simply is to say there will be a Kingdom on earth and it will bring to pass all the promises that God ever made to Israel. And that is not to be rescinded and those promises are not to be given instead to the church.

This is not a minor matter because if you don't get it right, then it disrupts completely  eschatology. And I will tell you this, the only people who work with prophetic texts with precision and care and specificity are those who interpret the Bible literally and end up as premillennialists. Once you say it doesn't mean what it says, then all precision is gone. So all those who work with prophetic texts with precision and specificity are premillennialists. The folks who deny the reality of these things, let's call them amillennial, or postmillennial, or whatever, they can't deal with prophetic texts with specificity because if in fact they don't refer to Israel, then we really don't know what they refer to and that's why there's a certain indifference to these matters among those.

Now we call this amillennialism and I told you about that last week, so I won't do that again. A-mill means a-alpha privative in the Greek, negates something, no millennium, no millennium. This is the view that there is no Millennial Kingdom, that there is no Kingdom in one sense or another. Oh yes, there's a spiritual kingdom, there's a heavenly kingdom, they would affirm that, but no earthly Kingdom, a-millennial, no earthly Kingdom. Or this is the earthly Kingdom, that would be called postmillennialism, we're sort of in it now, they might say, or we bring it and at the end of it Jesus comes, but there is no Second Coming in which Christ establishes an earthly Kingdom fulfilling all His promises to Israel as well as embracing all the redeemed of all the ages in the glory of the reign of Christ in the world. The irony of this is that a-millennialism is most popular among Reformed people that is reformed in their theological sense, meaning they are believers in divine, sovereign election, divine, sovereign election. They believe in the doctrine of election, that's basically what it means to be reformed. You believe that God chooses who will be saved, God makes promises and then God by His sovereign power keeps those promises. This is very strange that they would believe in sovereign election, they would believe in the doctrine of election and not believe that God will keep His promise to elect Israel, "Israel Mine elect," He says repeatedly in the book of Isaiah, "Israel Mine elect." This is an election by God and in Romans 11, the election or the callings of God are not revokable, but strangely these people who believe in divine election and believe that God does what He determines and fulfills His promises and whoever He elects He will bring to salvation, strangely while believing that think that the promises God made to elect Israel have been forfeited by Israel's unbelief cancelled and now given to the church and there is no future for Israel.

That's called replacement theology. That's a theological term for it, it's called replacement theology and it is the idea that the church replaces Israel...the church replaces Israel. Very popular that some theologians call it supersessionism, you don't need to worry about that word, it's just the technical word I say for some of you technical people in case you see it and wonder what it means, another term for replacement theology. The church replaces Israel. Why? Because Israel disobeyed God. Because Israel became apostate religiously. Because Israel rejected Christ, because Israel said no to the Messiah, rejected the Messiah. They therefore went so far as to crucify the Messiah and in so doing they forfeited permanently all the Old Testament promises of God which therefore are transferred to the church. We then receive all the promises. The Jews get nothing but the curses. And this is an assumption, by the way, because nothing in the Scripture says this. There's no where in the Bible you're going to go and say or find that the Bible says the promises given to Israel originally are now transferred to the church. You will not find that anywhere in the Bible. It's not there. You will not find a statement about Israel's disobedience, apostasy, rejection of Christ, bringing about the forfeiture of their future salvation and the Kingdom of Christ. And even the rebuilding of the temple and the restoration of temple worship is prophesied by Israel. That will happen. Nothing is said in the Scripture that revokes it. It is an assumption and it is a huge assumption.

Now I want to help you understand this a little further, so I kind of laid out a series of questions that we're going to try to answer. And we'll do it in a negative sense. I want to approach this subject of premillennialism and the coming Kingdom and the future of Israel from the negative side, I want to approach it from the a-mill side, if I may, because that, I think, is both instructive and destructive. It is instructive of the truth and destructive of the error at the same time. So here are the questions I want to ask. Is the Old Testament amillennial? Second question, were the Jews of Jesus' day amillennial? Third question, was Jesus amillennial? Fourth question, were the prophets amillennial? Fifth question, were the early theologians amillennial? And then we'll draw some critical conclusions. That's a fair question, isn't it? If we're going to buy into amillennialism, that there is no future Kingdom on earth and there is no future Kingdom in which the promises to God to Israel are going to come to pass because they're now coming to pass spiritually in the life of the church either on earth in the church age, or in heaven, if that is our view, then we would expect that somewhere in the Bible somebody would affirm that...like Old Testament writers, the Jews of Jesus' day, Jesus Himself, the prophets and Apostles of the New Testament and even the early church theologians. Somebody has got to come up with this in and around Scripture.

So let's ask the first question. Is the Old Testament amillennial?

Now I've got to stop here for a minute, take you off on a little bit of a detour, may I? A caution here...a caution here. To say that the writers of the Old Testament were amillennial when they were writing about a Kingdom is a strange thing to say, right? To say that they were writing about a Kingdom that they knew was not going to come, it's a very strange thing. And one would have to ask, how could they be inspired to writing details about a coming Kingdom promised to Israel and through Israel to the Gentiles as well, a great glorious Messianic Kingdom, you can't imagine that they were receiving this revelation from God, writing it down and at the same time they were writing it down they knew it wasn't so. That's absurd. Of course they would believe it was true.

Take that a little further. If the only way they could know that it wasn't true was if they had the New Testament, which is what amillennialists have to do, and they knew that Judaism became apostate and Judaism rejected Jesus and crucified Him, if then the only way they could have a true interpretation of what they wrote was to have the New Testament, then what they wrote had no meaning to them. It is not legitimate to interpret the Old Testament only by the New Testament. It is not legitimate to say that the Old Testament is this oblique, mysterious, hidden book with all kinds of things that you can't know about apart from the New Testament, that is to give the primacy of interpretation to the New Testament. This is what Walter Kaiser(?), great scholar, says is having a canon within a canon, having a rule within a rule. This then means that the Old Testament can't be interpreted on its own, that people who are writing it and reading it can't have any idea what it is that they're writing and reading. If Old Testament promises were actually for the church and not for ethnic Jews, ethnic Israel, then those Old Testament promises are meaningless, they are utterly unintelligible and they are irrelevant to the Old Testament reader. But this is essentially what you're left with if you take an amillennial view. The New Testament is the starting point for understanding the Old Testament. And what you've just done is damage any meaningful interpretation of the Old Testament on its own.

And this is basically what leads to what we call spiritualizing the Scripture...spiritualizing the Scripture. That is, taking texts out of their literal sense, spiritualizing them into some other than literal sense. I'll give you an illustration. Many years ago there's a book out called If I Perish, I Perish, it was a book on the book of Esther. And the whole idea of the book was a study of the believer, the believer's nature and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. That's not in the book of Esther, none of it is in the book of Esther anywhere in the book of Esther. It was simply imposed upon the book of Esther. The book of Esther is about God protecting His people Israel providentially. That's what it's about. It's a great book. It is not about the Spirit-filled life.

I listened to a series of tapes on the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is about people of Israel going back, rebuilding, building a wall, reconstituting their nation, the city of Jerusalem, reestablishing worship. Again it's the story of God preserving, protecting, restoring His people. I listened to, I think, eight tapes and it went like this. "Nehemiah is the Holy Spirit, the fallen walls are the fallen walls of human personality. What God wants to do is send the Holy Spirit into your life to rebuild the fallen walls of your personality. And the middle of the city where they were building the wall, there was...you remember...a fountain. The series said the fountain is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit wants to baptize you, wants to come into your life, rebuild the fallen walls of your personality and the mortar between the bricks was speaking in tongues. So the Holy Spirit wants to come, baptize you, teach you to speak in tongues so you can rebuild the walls of your fallen personality." That's the book of Nehemiah. I want to grab for a skyhook and go to heaven when I hear that kind of stuff. Get me out of here! That is horrific. And people are sitting there saying, "This is deep...this is deep stuff, I never saw that...I never saw that. Wow, what insight." That's not insight.

I had a...I heard a preacher speak...Patricia and I were at a conference with our kids, he preached on the Rapture of the church from John 11, the resurrection of Lazarus. That's right, the Rapture of the church from John 11, the resurrection of Lazarus. "Lazarus, come forth," Jesus said, and he launched off into the Rapture of the church. And, you know, he was manipulating that thing, it was really clever. And afterwards he came to me and he said, "Have you ever seen that in that text?" I said, "No, sir, and neither has anybody else, because frankly it is not in that text." This is very, very, very common stuff. Many of you have grown up in churches where people did that to the Old Testament all the time.

So, when you take the New Testament concepts, theology, ideas, teaching, instruction, revelation, impose it upon the Old Testament, twist and turn the Old Testament like a piece of clay into whatever shape you want it to, you really have adulterated the authorial intent of the Old Testament which can stand on its own. But, you see, replacement theology demands the Old Testament be viewed through the lens of the New Testament. It demands that the Old Testament be viewed through the apostasy of Israel which they could never have known about.

It also strikes a very strange dichotomy because all the curses pronounced on Israel in the Old Testament have been fulfilled literally to Israel. And in the passages which pronounce cursing and blessing, cursing and blessing, back and forth, you obey, you get blessed, you disobey, get cursed. We know the history of the cursing. There was Israel cursed. It is Israel who disobeyed. It is Israel who then feels the weight of the punishment of God. All of the curses we could say were fulfilled literally on Israel, why would we say all the blessings will be fulfilled literally on the church? You can't split. You can't create that dichotomy in a given passage because you have convoluted the intent of the passages. If it is literally Israel that gets curses, it will be literally Israel who will get the blessings. There is no biblical support for such a split hermeneutic. Hermeneutics comes from a Greek verb hermeneuowhich means to interpret, to explain.

Another way to look at it is all the prophecies regarding Jesus' first coming were fulfilled literally, right? Bethlehem, the donkey, the colt, the foal of an ass, betrayed by a friend, detail after detail after detail after detail. Even in the Psalms it said that He would say, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" That He would be thirsty and want something to drink. That He would be pierced. That His legs would not be broken. All of that is in the Old Testament, detail, detail, detail, detail. If all of the prophecies regarding His first coming were fulfilled literally, then that establishes the precedent that all of the prophecies related to His Second Coming will also be fulfilled literally. Then there's no place for any artificial divisions and arbitrary arbitration of the hermeneutics.

So, we ask the question again...is the Old Testament amillennial? Using normal language, normal interpretation, understanding the clarity of the Old Testament, understanding that it stands on its own, we simply need to see what it says. The Old Testament must be interpreted, preached and taught and believed as clear revelation from God that is to be understood. And we're held responsible for it.

Now, let's get it right out of the Scripture. Turn to Genesis 12...Genesis 12. The promises of God that relate to Israel's future basically are bound up in three covenants...three covenants. The promises of God that relate to Israel's future are basically bound up in three covenants. The first one is called the Abrahamic Covenant. And we'll do well even to work our way even a little bit into this. Chapter 12 verse 1, Genesis, "The Lord said to Abram, 'Go forth from your country, from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great and so you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'" That is what is known as the Abrahamic Covenant. What strikes you, first of all, is the little verbal phrase, "I will" five times, five times. I will show you, I will make you, I will bless you, I will bless, I will curse...I will, I will, I will, I will, I will. This isn't some kind of agreement between God and Abram, this is unilateral and unconditional and sovereign. God is simply saying this is what I will do...I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, make your name great, you will then become a blessing, I will bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. There are no ifs, ands, or buts, right? There's no caveats, that's why we call it an unconditional covenant. It is an unconditional promise. It is unilateral. It is given by a sovereign who has all authority and all power.

From there it really does expand. Go to chapter 13, in further conversation with Abram who lived up in Ur of the Chaldees. "The Lord said to Abram...after Lot had separated from him, verse 14... 'Now lift up your eyes, look from the place where you are northward, southward, eastward and westward. For all the land which you see I will give it to you and your descendants permanently.'" So, I promise you a nation, I promise you blessing, I promise you to be the blessed to bless the world, and I promise you land toward the north and the south and the east and the west, for all the land which you see I will give it to you and your descendants permanently. I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered. Arise, walk about the land through its length and breadth, I will give it to you. Again, "I will, I will, I will, I will," over and over again. This is what I will do. This is not an agreement between two parties, this is simply a promise from one to the other.

Now look at the fifteenth chapter of Genesis...the fifteenth chapter of Genesis. This is a very, very important portion. Verse 8...in verse 7 He says, "I will give you this land." And he said, "O Lord God, how may I know that I shall possess it?" This is one guy saying, "You're going to give me what? You're going to give me all this land all the way from the coast to the Euphrates River, Mesopotamia Valley north to south, You're going to give me this massive land which at the time is occupied by all kinds of people, all kinds of tribes, all kinds of nations, all kinds of ethnic groups, You're going to give this to me, right? How may I know that I shall possess it? How...how would I ever come to believe that that could happen? How am I going to know that?"

And in effect, God says, "I'm going to make a promise called a covenant." This is what He says to him, "Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, three-year-old female goat, a cow and a goat, three-year-old ram, turtledove and a young pigeon. Collect a little menagerie for Me." This is God telling Abram. Brought all these to Him. "Cut them in two, cut them in half." He knew what was going on. The Old Testament word for making a covenant is to cut a covenant because when people made a covenant, when people made a promise, they sealed it in blood. And the way they did that was they cut animals in half, split the animal on two sides, together they walked through the pieces. And what they were doing by that gesture was sealing the promise by blood. They call it cutting a covenant. And so, Abram knew exactly what was going on here. God was making a promise and there was going to be a covenant. There was going to be a visible, symbolic ceremony to affirm the covenant. Typically both parties in a covenant would walk through the pieces and that would be a way by blood to seal your vow. So he brought all these to Him, cut them in two and laid each half opposite the other, didn't cut the birds, you cut a bird, you just get a pile of features and bones, so you leave the bird in tact, put one dead bird on one side, one dead bird on the other side and the birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, of course. All that dead flesh and Abram is there chasing away all the vultures, while the bloody pieces lie on the ground. And he's there waiting for something to happen in the midst of this bloody, butchered mass and the birds that are trying to eat it.

"When the sun was going down...verse 12...a deep sleep fell upon Abram." This is divine anesthesia, God knocks him out, God puts him to sleep. "And behold, terror and great darkness and fell upon him." Even in the midst of sleep, there was a terrifying dark foreboding reality in his sleep consciousness, like a nightmare of sorts. Why? Because God had moved in and God is fearful and frightening and terrifying and God said to Abram, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in the land that is not there, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years...precisely 430 years...and I will also judge the nation whom they will serve. And afterward they will come out with many possessions." Talking about the Exodus, all prophesied. "As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, you shall be buried at a good old age. Then the fourth generation they shall return here for the iniquity of the Amorite or the Canaanite is not yet complete. When the iniquity of the Amorites was complete, then God would bring Israel into the land and take over the land."

Then verse 17, "it came about when the sun had set, it was very dark, behold there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch," that's God, "which passed between the pieces." God, there's this dark foreboding sense of His presence and then a flaming torch, smoking lamp, moves in space between these pieces. This is God moving between the pieces. "On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, 'To your descendants I have given this land from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, the Kenite, the Kenizzite, Kadmonite, Hittite, Perizzite, Rephaim, Amorite, Canaanite, Girgashite, Jebusite, I give you all of it.'" But notice this, Abraham...Abram never passed between the pieces because this is not a conditional covenant, this is not dependent on Abram, this is a unilateral, irrevokable, divine promise by God. God goes through alone, binding Himself to His own promise. He anesthetizes Abraham, Abraham is not a part of this, it doesn't involve him. This is God's will...I will, I will, I will, I will, I will, this is what I will do, it is set, it is fixed, I will give you that land. Footnote, they have never had it yet. They've never had it yet...never yet. But God has bound Himself.

How are we to understand that? There's no way to understand that other...in that context...than to understand that God was giving him that land. He describes the rivers, He describes the people who live there. He knew exactly what He was talking about. He was not talking about spiritual blessings to the church. There's no ambiguity in this whatsoever.

If you move a little further in to chapter 17 when Abram was 99 years old, "The Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, 'I am God Almighty. Walk before Me, be blameless, I'll establish My covenant between Me and you.'" He repeats it to him a number of times. "I'll establish My covenant between Me and you, I will, I will, I will, I will multiply you exceedingly." The "I wills" are ubiquitous in every one of these declarations by God. "Abram fell on his face and God talked with him. As for me, behold, My covenant is with you. You will be the father of a multitude of nations, no longer shall be named Abram, your name shall be Abraham, meaning father of a multitude." Abram means a noble father, Abraham means a father of a multitude. "I'll make you a father of a multitude of nations, I'll make you exceedingly fruitful, make nations of you. Kings will come forth from you. I'll establish My covenant between Me and you, your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you. And I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for your everlasting possession, permanent possession, I will be your God." Verse 13 He adds at the end, "My covenant for you is an everlasting covenant." Verse 19, the end of the verse, "My covenant is an everlasting covenant." God seriously binds Himself.

It continues this way in chapter 22 and verse 15, "The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven saying, 'By Myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you've done this thing...that's the incident with Isaac...have not withheld your son, your only son. Indeed I'll greatly bless you, I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven, the sand of the sea which is on the seashore. Your seed shall possess the gate of their enemies and your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you obeyed My voice. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed," that is not seeds, that is seed and in Galatians Paul says that refers to whom? Messiah. So what was in the Abrahamic Covenant? Land...first a nation, a people, land, influence, blessing to the world and even the Messianic promise. And through the Messianic promise salvation would come to Israel and to the Gentiles.

It doesn't even end there. It is repeated again and we don't have time to read it all. But just know how it's reiterated. For example, in chapter 26, we now move to Isaac. And the Lord appears to Isaac in Genesis 26:24, and the Lord says, "I am the God of your father, Abraham. Do not fear, I am with you, I will bless you," there the "I wills" again, "And I will multiply your descendants for the sake of My servant Abraham." Again God reiterates His promise to the subsequent patriarch who is Isaac. If you go to chapter 28, Jacob, the next one, whose name is changed to Israel, "Behold the Lord stood there...verse 13...above it and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give it to you and your descendants. Your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, spread out to the west, the east, the north, the south and in you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed.'"

God kept making promises to...are you ready for this?...sinful patriarchs. Abraham was sinful, Isaac was sinful, Jacob was sinful. God kept making these promises because that is His intention, to give to this people that came out of the loins of Abraham a future and a Kingdom and blessing and salvation, and a seed, a Messiah. And this has never been abrogated. It has never been canceled. In Exodus 19 verse 5, "Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My Covenant," this is the covenant of law, the Mosaic Covenant on Mount Sinai, the law, "If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My Covenant, you will be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine and you will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the sons of Israel. So Moses came, called the elders of the people, set before them all these words which the Lord had commanded him and all the people together answered and said, 'All the Lord has spoken we will do.' Moses brought back the words of the people to the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, 'Behold I have come to you in a thick cloud in order that the people may hear when I speak to you and you also believe ??? so believe in you forever. Then Moses told the words of the people to the Lord.'" Hey, Lord, the people, they want to obey You, they want to follow You, they want to do what You say.

That was a nice gesture, wasn't it? Over in chapter 24...in chapter 24 they even had a ceremony, a blood ceremony, we won't read it, a blood ceremony in which they affirmed that commitment. We're going to obey the Law, we're going to obey the Law, we're going to obey the Law...what did they do? They didn't obey the Law. You say, "Well, that's it. Cancelled."

Turn to Galatians 3...Galatians 3:15, Paul, "Brethren, I speak in terms of human relations: even though it is only a man's covenant, yet when it has been ratified, no one sets it aside or adds conditions to it." Covenants are covenants, and they're irrevokable. "Now...he says...the promises were to Abraham and to his seed. And He does not say to his seeds, as referring to many, but rather to one, to your seed, that is Christ. What I am saying is this, the Law which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise."

First comes the Abrahamic Covenant, much later comes the Mosaic Covenant. They say they will obey, they don't obey. But even that does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God. Did...did God ratify the Abrahamic Covenant? Yes He did, by passing between the pieces and binding Himself. It does not nullify the promise. "For if the inheritance is based on Law," that is if the promises of God only come because you obey, it is no longer really a promise. But God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise."

Here Paul is simply saying disobedience to the Mosaic Law does not cancel the Abrahamic Covenant. You see that? That's the whole point. It doesn't abrogate it even when Israel proudly and eagerly and, I think, honestly said, "We will obey...we will obey," and went through a blood ceremony in which they were sloshed with blood to signify their commitment to obedience. Even when they made that public affirmation and did not follow through, blatantly violating the Law of God, still they continue to be the people of promise, for that promise is not based on their ability to keep the Law. You see it illustrated in the book of Hosea. Hosea marries a woman who is a prostitute. He marries her. She goes away. She goes and lives a dissolute life. She's so wretched as a prostitute that she is basically put up on a block stark naked and sold in the marketplace. Guess what? Hosea goes and buys her back to keep his covenant to her. And this is a symbol of God buying back the prostitute Israel because He made a covenant.

I want you to see one other text, Ezekiel 16...Ezekiel 16. And with this one, we'll have to close although we're really going slow. It's all your fault. (Laughter) Ezekiel 16, this obviously, you take one look at it and you say, "O brother, sixty-three verses." We're not going to cover a whole chapter, but...you need to read this chapter if you haven't ever read it. It is one of the most staggering chapters in all the Bible. It's about God's unconditional love for Israel. And it's in graphic terms. Verse 3, the Lord God speaks to Jerusalem. He says, "Your origin, your birth are from the land of the Canaanite. I rescued you out of the land of the Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite, your mother a Hittite." That's...you came from pagan origins, of course. "As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing; you were not rubbed with salt or even wrapped in cloths." You were like a...you were like a baby born, came out of the mother's womb and never cared for, never cleaned, cord never cut, bloody. You were taken without pity...verse 5, "No eye looked with pity on you," do any of these things for you, have compassion on you. "You were thrown into an open field." This would be a way to dump a child and this was common in ancient times, as it is even today when you find children in dumpsters. This is a baby born, the umbilical cord isn't cut, baby's not rubbed with salt, that's how they disinfected the child as it came into the world, just thrown out into a field in its blood. Nobody cared. "When I passed by...verse 6...I saw you squirming in your blood and I said to you while you were in your blood, 'Live!' I said to you while you were in your blood, 'Live! I gave you life.'" Abrahamic Covenant right there. "I made you a people. I made you like numerous like plants of the field. You grew up, you became tall, you reached the age of fine ornaments, your breasts were formed, your hair had grown. You were still naked and bare, I passed by you, I saw you. Behold, you were at the time for love. Spread My skirt over you and covered your nakedness to protect you from those who would rape you. And I swore to you and I entered into a covenant with you and you became Mine. And I bathed you with water and I washed off your blood from you and I anointed you with oil and I clothed you with embroidered cloth.'"

See, this is where figures of speech come into play in literal interpretation of Scripture. We all understand that the literal meaning here is that God establishing His covenant with Israel doing it in beautiful figures of speech could have put a necklace on your neck, ring in your nose, earrings in your ears, beautiful crown on your head, adorned you with gold and silver. I gave you everything...everything.

Well jump to verse 28, it goes on. It's just absolutely magnificent descriptive language. "You weren't satisfied with Me...middle of the verse, verse 28...you played the harlot with the Assyrians and a whole lot of others, the Egyptians. And you still weren't satisfied. You multiplied...verse 29...your harlotry with every merchant that showed up." Israel bedded down with every false god there was. It's a sad story....sad, sad story. And it goes on and on and on and on.

Go down to verse 53. "Nevertheless, I will restore their captivity...He says...regarding the captivity of Sodom, the captivity of Samaria." God has it in His heart to restore. Even Samaria, even Sodom.

But far more than that, go to verse 60. "Nevertheless, I will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you." There is no way that this covenant can be cancelled, no matter how wretched you become, no matter what a harlot you are, there is no way the covenant can ever be revoked. The time will come...I love this, verse 61..."You will remember your ways, you will be ashamed when you receive your sisters, both your older and your younger, I will give them to you as daughters, not because of your covenant, thus I will establish My covenant with you and you shall know that I am Lord." Again, I will, I will. "I will establish My covenant in order that you may remember and be ashamed and never open your mouth any more because of your humiliation when I have forgiven you for all that you have done, the Lord God declares." This is staggering stuff. At the end of the whole story of wretched unfaithfulness on the part of Israel, God says, "I will remember My covenant, I will establish an everlasting covenant, I will forgive you of all that you have done. You will know that I am the Lord. You will be ashamed...this is repentance. You will never open your mouth anymore because of your humiliation. You will be shamed into silent penitence when I forgive you". This again is the unconditional, irrevokable, divine promise of God.

God's decision to set His love on Israel is in no way determined by Israel's performance, no way is it determined by Israel's national worthiness. It is purely His own sovereign will. And some day in the future, all that was promised to Abram will come to pass.

Listen to Deuteronomy 7:6, "You are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set His love on you or choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, you were the fewest, but because the Lord loved you and the Lord kept the promise that He swore to your forefathers. Know therefore that the Lord your God, verse 9, He is God, the faithful God who keeps His covenant and His loving kindness to a thousand generations." God keeps His covenant. He keeps His promise.

Chapter 9 verse 4 in Deuteronomy, "Do not say in your heart when the Lord your God has driven them out before you because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess the land, but it is because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord is dispossessing them before you. It is not for your righteousness, or the uprightness of your heart that you're going to possess the land, it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God is driving them out in order to confirm the oath which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." God is doing what He's doing because He promised to do it, not because you deserve it. You don't get it because you deserve it. You don't forfeit it because you don't deserve it. And so does God promise to Israel the future land, Kingdom, Messiah, blessing and world salvation influence. And it's all based on God's own covenant.

Now our time is gone. But since I can't do this again for a little bit, I want to close with two Psalms, and I am going to close. Psalm 89...Psalm 89 and I need to do this in order to sum it up. Psalm 89, "I will sing of the loving kindness of the Lord forever, to all generations I will make known Thy faithfulness with my mouth, for I have said lovingkindness will be built up forever." Lovingkindness will be built up forever. "In the heavens Thou wilt establish Thy faithfulness. I have made a covenant with My chosen. I have sword to David, My servant. I will establish your seed forever and build up your throne to all generations."

Drop down to verse 30. "If his sons forsake My law and do not walk in My judgments, if they violate My statutes and do not keep My commandments, then I will visit their transgression with a rod and their iniquity with stripes. But I will not break off My lovingkindness from him, nor deal falsely in My faithfulness. My covenant I will not violate, nor will I alter the utterance of My lips. Once I have sworn by My holiness, I will not lie to David. His descendants shall endure forever. His throne as the sun before Me. It shall be established forever like the moon and the witness in the sky is faithful."

Verse 49 speaks of the lovingkindness again and the faithfulness of God. And in this case, of course, it makes reference to the promises to David which we'll look at next time which are an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant. The next covenant is the Davidic Covenant which is an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant. What God promises, He does.

Chapter...well 132 Psalm, verse 13, "The Lord has chosen Zion, He has desired it for His habitation. This is My resting place forever; here I will dwell, for I have desired it." God says, "That's My place, that's My home, and I'm going to dwell there, I'm going to be there." That's His promise.

So God unilaterally gives a covenant. He is the sole party responsible to fulfill its obligations. Obedience is not the condition. Listen to this final thought. Obedience is not the condition that determines fulfillment. Divine sovereign power is the condition that determines fulfillment because divine sovereign power is the condition that determines obedience. God has to turn their hearts. God Himself has to save them. God Himself has to transfor them...transform them so that they can obey, therefore it is all the work of God that will bring about the fulfillment. It will come because He said so. It will come when He wills it to come at a time of His own choosing. Only God can produce the faith, repentance and obedience that brings about the fulfillment. And in the future, in some future generation the sons of Abraham physically, ethnic Israel, will be saved and they will receive the Kingdom promised to them.

Now next time we'll look at the next phase of God's promise, the Davidic Kingdom to which we already saw references in Psalm 89.

Father, in a great day, a wonderful evening, we've covered a lot of ground, Your Word is so consistent, so powerful, so rich and You are a faithful God. We celebrate that faithfulness because how You treat Israel and how you fulfill the promises You made to them has tremendous implications for how much we can trust You to fulfill the promises You made to us in Christ. We know you'll be faithful to Your promises to us, not because we're worthy, just as You are faithful to Your promises to Israel because they are not worthy, but because You have chosen them. So the future depends on Your eternal choice. Bring it to pass, Lord, for Your own glory, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.

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