Hebrews Lesson 118 March
13, 2008
NKJ Jeremiah 17:9 " The heart is deceitful
above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
There are three big issues
that face the board (of Chafer Seminary).
One is the transition to
This is the major problem (theological
problem) that is plaguing the whole free grace movement right now. I think that at the very core is a problem in
hermeneutics or interpretation because what they’re saying is that the Gospel
of John is the only book in the New Testament that tells us what the gospel is. Paul tells us how salvation works –
justification, regeneration, redemption, all these things. But, John tells us that belief is in Christ
for eternal life. And they approach this
thing (and this is a great example for those of you who come on Monday night
for the History of Doctrine class) this is a great example of what happens in
church history when people start asking perhaps the wrong questions. Sometimes you don’t know you are asking the
wrong questions when you ask it. But
sometimes you can get to where you are asking the wrong question and it leads
to a screwball answer.
Their question was, if you
get down to the very core of the gospel - what’s the least a person has to
believe in order to be saved? Now think
about that. Now you may not be tracking
with me yet, but do you have to believe that Jesus is fully God in order to be
saved? Is that part of the gospel? Do you have to believe in the trinity in
order to be saved? If you give somebody
a tract that says Jesus died for your sins and you can have forgiveness – it
doesn’t mention eternal life. Jesus died
for your sins. You can have full
complete forgiveness if you trust in Him.
Is that enough to get you saved?
I think that is. But, where do
you stop? What is sort of extra explanation
and what is the minimalist approach?
Reality is that none of us
give a minimalist gospel. I think by
even addressing the question... I think it might be something for academic
pinheads in some theological ivory tower somewhere, but the reality is that when
any of us (even the people who are on the other side of the issue from me) give
the gospel, they’re trying to explain as much as they can about how salvation
works and not just giving the least.
See that’s where you can
start down a wrong road by asking the wrong question and you can really end up
in a theological cul-de-sac. Of course you see that in church history and the
history of doctrine; but, this had some terrible ramifications because people actually
think that it was Chafer’s position and it’s not. That’s not the position of pastors who
founded the seminary and it’s not the view of the seminary today. It’s not the position of most of the board
members. There’s one exception; but, he
doesn’t push it. It’s more of an
academic thing so it’s not really an issue. This is the kind of thing that gets people
very, very upset and very confused. So that is about the second thing we are
dealing with.
Then the third thing that
we’re dealing with is just planning for the future and trying to develop a
future and communicate a vision for the future to people.
So you can pray for Chafer
Seminary on those areas – that we can get this transition out of
The result – it’s not new in
history. This has happened again and
again and again. It happened in the Old
Testament with
I hope you appreciate what
Martin had to say. I think there were
some – there was a little area where he didn’t make one thing really
clear. A lot of people asked this
question a lot and aren’t clear on this.
That is that there is a difference between psychotherapy and psychiatry
- psychotherapy and psychiatry.
Psychiatry deals with physical problems that relate to chemical
imbalances. It can relate to any number
of causes - chemical causes, organic causes, a number of things that can cause
different problems, a range of different things. Those need to be treated with medication and
that helps stabilize people in those particular areas. But then there is a whole host of problems
that we get into ourselves emotionally and spiritually because of sin and
things that we face because of the trend of our own sin nature. Some people
have a trend to their old sin nature that as soon as something happens they go
to the negative and they’re despondent and they are depressed. That is just a
trend of their sin nature. Other people
worry all the time. That’s just a trend
of their sin nature. Worry is not a
disorder; it is a sin. You have to
address it as a sin.
Say, “Stop it.”
Don’t laugh. Come on.
Weren’t you here for George’s talk?
“Stop it.”
If you weren’t here, you have
to watch it. He showed this clip of an
old Bob Newhart – the original Bob Newhart show where he is a
psychiatrist. This lady comes in and she
talks about she is scared to death of being buried alive in a box. So, she doesn’t like to be in a house or
elevator or anything that’s boxy.
He says, “Well, I’ve got two
words that’ll cure you.”
“What are they?”
“Stop it.”
We laugh. It was great, but that’s the issue with
sin. George did a great job in that
whole presentation. The reason that we
have so many of the problems in life is just because we let our sin nature run
amuck. We start letting that happen from
the moment we take that first breath.
That sin nature is activated. A
lot of times by the time we’re really cognizant of a lot of the decisions - let
me put it this way. When we are volitionally conscious of a lot of decisions we’re
making, we’ve already established habit patterns from our sin nature and how we
deal with things and it isn’t until we become – after we’re saved and we become
adults that we then begin to think about the fact that I’ve got bad
habits. That’s what we do. We have bad sin nature habits in responding
to negative situations in life. So we come
under certain pressures and we lose our tempers. Why?
Well, that’s the habit patterns we started when we were two weeks
old. We figured out…
“If I can scratch out my face
and get it all red and scream loud enough, then I will get attention and the
problem would get solved.”
So we developed this habit
pattern that that’s how we’re going to deal with problems. Now that we’re 20, that’s not the way to do
it. But, I have to deal with my sin nature.
That’s what he’s addressing -
that in terms of how we talk to people and the problems that they have in life,
the communication aspect that as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we have the
truth. This is the Word of God.
We don’t have to send them to
talk to somebody who is going to approach from a different model of human behavior. He talked about the fact that there’s over –
I think now there may be over 500 different models of human behavior in the
whole psychological community.
Anybody you talk to they
think, “Well, I think this is how man is.”
Now they don’t even believe
there is a soul. It’s all
biological. Everything is
biological. There’s no soul. There’s no volition. Everything is biochemical. That’s why you have the over medication on
the psychiatric side. It’s because
fundamentally what’s happening is with the rejection of God and with the
rejection of the idea that man is created in the image of God; there is no
immaterial part of man. Everything is
material. So if everything is material,
then the way to cure any problem is always going to be through drugs. That’s why it is so hard today to work
through some of this stuff.
As a pastor, as much as I
have read about it, there are areas that just aren’t clear. But the bottom line is that when it comes to
telling people whether they need to be on medication or not and giving them the
information that they need on how to live their life, it comes down to the
basic principles of Scripture – to apply the Word of God in fellowship, walk by
the Spirit. It is summed up in the hymn Trust and Obey. If we would do that consistently, then we
would be able to resolve all of these things.
But what we do is - the crisis hits, we hit adversity, and we go to that
default position which is the sin nature.
Then we go, “Wait a
minute. I’m not really supposed to do
that. I had better confess my sin and
start applying the Word.”
It’s developing those habits
to correct the bad habits. So that was
the thrust of what Bobkin is saying. The Word of God really is sufficient to give
us what we need to help people. As a
pastor this is one of the reasons I had him come and speak at the pastor’s
conference. We have to have the confidence that we can truly help people with
all the problems in their lives. I
remember when I came out of Dallas Seminary having had pastoral psychology and counseling
with Paul Meyer and Frank Minnereth. I don’t know how many of you know who Paul
Meyer and Frank Minnereth are. They have the Meyer-Minnereth
clinics. These clinics popped up all
over. There’s one here in
Sometime after that I said, “Why
in the world if I’m going into pastoral psychology do they have two
psychiatrists in here teaching this?”
They kept talking to us. I wasn’t up on a lot of this stuff as a
student that I am now. I am thinking. I keep hearing them say that somebody comes
in and they are depressed. There is this
chemical imbalance and they don’t have enough epanephrin
or whatever it was. See they really need
to get this and they need to get that.
I am thinking, “I’m a
pastor. I’m not giving people shots or giving
them blood tests. I guess I can’t help
people if I don’t know all of this stuff.
Wait a minute. I thought that the
Bible helped people.”
See that’s the issue. Do we have what it takes to help people on
the volitional, rational, decision making side of the whole equation? Yes, we do.
The Word of God is sufficient. You
go through Scripture and you see the men of God and the women of God in the
Scriptures dealing with anxiety and depression and all of these…fear and all of
these different things that today are classified DSM3 as mental disorders. The Bible classifies them as sin.
I remember when I was growing
up hearing the pastor say that alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a sin.
The Bible classifies it as a sin, not as a disease. You start classifying it as a disease, you remove
volitional responsibility. It’s just
like…if I catch the flu. I have a
disease. I’m not responsible for
that. Now there may be genetic
tendencies that make one person more susceptible to one thing than another and
that’s related to the sin nature. I
can’t tell you how many pastors I’ve talked to who…somebody comes in and they’ve
got a problem or their kids have a problem with drugs or addiction or any of
this. The first thing they want to do is
send them to a 12 step program. I
remember...I guess it was maybe 9 years ago.
I was sitting there watching that source of great medical knowledge
known in
They asked this guy, “What’s
your cure rate?”
Anybody want to guess? What is the cure rate of AA? Anybody want to guess? No, it’s higher than zero. It’s bigger than a bread box, okay. Anybody want to say that it’s more than …
higher than 50% or less than 50%. Less
than 50%. Higher than 25% or lower than
25%? Lower than 25%. Higher than 15% or lower than 15%. No, it’s 17%.
17%. That’s not very good. That’s not very good. That means that if you were taking a test and
this is a final whether or not you would graduate from high school or not and
you made a 17; you’re not graduating.
That’s considered failure. That’s
an (I’m not good at math as y’all know, but that’s an) 83% failure rate. Think about that. And the first thing that people come up with
somebody has a problem with alcohol or chemical dependency or drugs or
something - let’s send them to a 12 step program. There are a lot of churches that host these
things. So, we want to have something
with an 83% failure rate.
Well, the Bible has a 100%
success rate when you apply it. So I
think he has a good message and a sound message that calls us back to the sufficiency
of the Word of God. We live in a fallen
world with fallen bodies with fallen natures.
It is a struggle. It may be a
struggle with some things in our lives, all of our lives. I think as Americans we get the idea that if
we are doing….and sometimes in superficial evangelicalism we get the idea that if
we’re doing it right, that it’s going to be easy. That if I am walking by the Spirit somehow
the Spirit sort of takes over for me and makes those decisions for me. I know I had that idea when I was a
teenager.
“You know, if I’m really
filled with the Spirit; then why is it still so hard to make a decision to do
the right thing?”
That’s because the Holy
Spirit doesn’t take over my volition. He
doesn’t start making those decisions.
People get that idea that if I’m walking with the Spirit, I’m right with
God that somehow God is going to make making the right decisions easier. It’s not.
I think as a Christian sometimes it’s harder because now we are in the
middle of the angelic conflict. There is
that struggle between the flesh and the Spirit.
The flesh wars against the Spirit.
Galatian
People were, “Well, what’s
the association here between psychiatry and psychology?”
I hope that clarifies it a
little bit.
Here is our chart on the
covenants. We have the Abrahamic
Covenant as the ground of the 5 covenants that God has made with
Then what happens is people
say, “Well, this is when
Regeneration is a term that
indicates that at this point (when the regeneration occurs)…5 minutes before
that those people weren’t regenerate which means they weren’t saved. And we’re getting ready to get into a passage
tonight where this does seem to be fuzzy and you can see where it’s fuzzy. But, it’s important to just think this
through a little bit.
So let’s go back and just
review about 5 points that I’ve covered already I think. No, I’ve got more than that – about 9
points. I’m just going to run through
them to summarize them. I’m not even
going to state them as points. I’m just
going to run it as a summary so we’re up to where we’ve been the last few
lessons. In Jeremiah 31:31-32 the New
Covenant is contrasted with the old covenant or the Mosaic Covenant. In Jeremiah we read:
NKJ Jeremiah 31:31 " Behold, the days are coming,
says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of
Days are coming. It’s all future. This New Covenant is future to Jeremiah’s
time and he’s writing about 595 BC at the time when the Southern Kingdom is
getting ready to be defeated militarily.
They’re going to be wiped out and the people are going to lose their
homes, their livelihoods and their savings.
Everything is going to become obliterated when Nebuchadnezzar comes in
586 and completely defeats them and destroys them and wipes out the
temple. But God is faithful. (You think
there were some depressed people then.)
But God is faithful to provide the answer and the solution.
It may not be the plan that they
had. That’s usually why we get
angry. People have problems with being
angry. It’s because they don’t get their
way and they get mad at God because they thought they had a right for things to
go one way and God had a different plan and now they’re mad at God. You can just imagine that there were a lot of
Jews who were really angry with God because they lost everything. That’s because their thinking wasn’t oriented
to God’s plan to begin with.
Proverbs 3 has this
tremendous section there talking about the importance of acquiring wisdom. When the time to use wisdom comes, it’s too
late. When you acquire wisdom and you
practice the spiritual skills consistently through all the various adversities
that we have that are less catastrophic, then when we get to the ones that are
catastrophic we have already set a precedent in our behavior patterns so that
we know to go to the Word and we can trust God and see a sufficiency in those
big battles.
So they’re facing that
problem and Jeremiah’s message of hope is that you failed and you blew it and
you couldn’t obey the conditions of the old covenant. But, God is not going to forget about
you. He will give you a new covenant and
in this new covenant He is going to solve the problem for you and give you a
new heart because you couldn’t be obedient and love Him with a full heart under
the old law. Does that mean they weren’t
saved? No. It just means they couldn’t be fully obedient
because of the presence of the sin nature.
So the New Covenant is
contrasted with the old covenant. The
old covenant is temporary. The New
Covenant is permanent. It’s a future
covenant and it’s only made with the house of
NKJ Jeremiah 32:39 'then I will give them one heart and
one way, that they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their children
after them.
NKJ Jeremiah 32:40 'And I will make an everlasting
covenant with them, that I will not turn away from doing them good; but I will
put My fear in their hearts so that they will not depart from Me.
Then we saw that this would
give a completely renewed relationship between God and His covenant people
Further we saw that in Jeremiah
31:34 in a passage that is difficult for us to understand or conceive how it will
work, shows that there won’t be any need for a teacher.
NKJ Jeremiah 31:34 "No more shall every man teach
his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they all
shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD.
For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."
Now when I was in seminary (even
at Dallas Seminary with professors who were committed to dispensationalism0,
there are some that have tried to make the establishment of the New Covenant
occur at the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes down. They say that giving of the Holy Spirit is the
giving of the Holy Spirit just like the law here.
“See with the Holy Spirit we
have a sensitive conscious that they didn’t have before the Law.”
But see that’s minimized and
diminished with the impact of what this is saying. This is saying that there is not going to be
a need for a teacher anymore.
Maybe that’s what there doing
in these churches where everybody sits around in Sunday school class and says,
“Now what do you think this means?”
They don’t have a teacher
anymore. They just all share their
opinions. I am just being
facetious.
Okay, there is going to be
this new relationship and nobody is going to need to teach because there is
this complete full, sufficient, internal direct knowledge of God and His Word
that’s in everybody that comes with this new heart.
Another dimension of this is
that the sin of
And when John the Baptist
came along, he said what? “Repent for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And Jesus came along and He
said, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Why did He ask them to
repent? That goes right back to
Deuteronomy 28 to 30 that “when you disobey Me, if you turn and come back to Me
with a whole heart then I will bring you back to the land.”
So to understand this whole
concept of repentance and the message of Jesus, they must be grounded in the warning
passages and the cursing and blessing passages in Deuteronomy and Leviticus 26 - the five cycles of discipline that when you
are out of the land, when you turn to Me.
That’s the Hebrew word shubh…and do shavah which is the Hebrew term that when you do shavah then that means you are turning back to God and
away from the idols. And because they
failed to do that as a nation, they’re taken out under divine discipline in 70
AD.
And so God says, “But I will
return you to the land from all the nations that I will send you to.”
And that’s never happened
yet. This is also connected to the New
Covenant as we saw in Jeremiah 32:36-39.
God says that He is going to return them to the land.
In Jeremiah 32:36 He
says:
NKJ Jeremiah 32:36 " Now therefore, thus says the
LORD, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say,
The city being
'It shall
be delivered into the hand of the king of
NKJ Jeremiah 32:37 'Behold, I will gather them out of
all countries where I have driven them in My anger, in My fury, and in great
wrath; I will bring them back to this place, and I will cause them to dwell
safely.
That’s never happened
before. It didn’t happen in 538,
536. It didn’t happen at anytime in the
intertestamental period. They came back
from
NKJ Jeremiah 32:38 'They shall be My people, and I
will be their God;
NKJ Jeremiah 32:39 'then I will give them one heart
and one way, that they may fear Me forever, for the good of them and their
children after them.
Then we also have seen that
this New Covenant is instituted by a Davidic descendent who’s on the
throne. That’s the return of Jesus. Since that hasn’t happened yet (since none of
these things have happened), the New Covenant has not been enacted yet. The legal basis for the covenant was
established on the cross.
It’s because it’s future. Even though it’s not enacted until the future…because
it’s not enacted until the future we think, “Well, what does it have to do with
us in the Church Age today?”
But it is because it’s
future, in the mind of God it’s just as real so He can bless Gentiles in the
church today because Jesus established the basis for the covenant on the cross. Even
though it’s not enacted with
So we ought to ask the
question can God do something at one time based on the potential fulfillment of
something in the future? Did I say that
clearly? Is there a historical precedent
for God doing something at a particular point of time in history that was based
on a work that wouldn’t be accomplished for maybe thousands of years in the
future? Sure! He saved all those Old
Testament saints. But the blood of bulls
and goats could not take away sins, the writer of Hebrews says. But they were saved provisionally because God
knew that ultimately Jesus Christ would die on the cross and pay the penalty in
the future. So their salvation was
secured in the Old Testament based on an act that would occur in the
future. So in that same way because in
the mind of God if it’s established and if it’s going to happen in the future
it’s determined in His plan and it’s real.
So the church gets that blessing from the future.
So now let’s go to our next
key passage, key section in Ezekiel.
We’re out of the Jeremiah passages and now in the Ezekiel passages. In Ezekiel 36:25-26 God is speaking.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
Now there is a plural “you”
here which indicates He is talking to the nation as a corporate entity, not as
individuals.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit within you;
Now that sounds like
regeneration doesn’t it? It is of the
kind of regeneration that occurs in connection with the New Covenant.
I will take
the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Now I want to connect
something to this. When John the Baptist
first appeared, he said, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He is addressing the Jews. The message comes right out of the Mosaic
Law. The kingdom was about to be
established and they need to do shuva. They need to come back.
Jesus comes along and says, “Repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
He sends out His disciples
two-by-two to the villages in
He says, “Don’t go to the
Gentiles.”
What’s the message? Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand. Now this is in what part of His
ministry? The first part of His ministry
or the end of His ministry? It’s in the first part of his ministry.
Now in John 3 Nicodemus comes
to Jesus at night. Is this in the first
part of His ministry or the ministry?
The first part of His ministry, right?
It is right after the first Passover where He does signs, and wonders. At
the end of John 2 He performs various miracles and many people believed on His
name. Right after that Nicodemus comes
to Him.
He says to Nicodemus, “How can
you being a teacher of
What did He say? Jesus is saying the same thing to Nicodemus
in John 3:1 that John the Baptist is saying and that Jesus is saying in the
first part of His ministry that if you want to get into the kingdom there has
to be a regeneration which is related to that repentance. Then in John 3 (I’m going to turn there. I want to make sure I articulate because
you’ve heard different things on this and I’ve taught different things on this.) There’s a lot going on in the background of
this that comes out of Jewish background and other things that
NKJ John 3:3 Jesus answered and said to him,
"Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the
Then in verse 4 Nicodemus
says:
NKJ John 3:4 Nicodemus said to Him, "How
can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's
womb and be born?"
Nicodemus is around 40. He is saying, “I’m 40 years old. How can I go back and get reborn?” He is thinking literally – going back into
the womb and Jesus answers him in verse 5.
NKJ John 3:5 Jesus answered, "Most
assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot
enter the
The
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
Where is Nicodemus? Jesus says, “You should know this Nicodemus.”
We need to ask ourselves, if
Nicodemus is hearing Jesus talk about being born of water and being born of
flesh, what is the Old Testament reference that Jesus is alluding to here that
Nicodemus should be familiar with? Right
here, Ezekiel 36.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your
flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
What are the key elements
here?
NKJ John 3:5 Jesus answered, "Most
assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot
enter the
Is that making sense? The message that Jesus is giving Nicodemus is
related to the establishment of the New Covenant which is at the beginning of
the kingdom. The same thing that he is
saying to Nicodemus about entering the kingdom is the same message John said
about repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And Jesus said, “Repent for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And, the disciples said, “Repent
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” So the allusion goes back to Ezekiel
36:25-28.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:27 "I will put My Spirit within
you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do
them.
So the message to Nicodemus
which we often go to as a great example of the importance of regeneration is
really a passage that must be understood within the context of the early
pronouncement of Jesus’ kingdom message to
So now let me take you some
place else. Are we having fun yet?
Go back in your Old Testament
to Deuteronomy 30. We looked at this
last time as we finished up our study. Deuteronomy
29 and 30 is the land covenant. But,
even within the land covenant there is a foreshadowing of the New
Covenant. You read in Deuteronomy
30:5. Let’s just pick up in verse 4.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:4 "If any of you are
driven out to the farthest parts under heaven,
Not just
from there
the LORD your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you.
That’s when they repent – shubah. They
come back.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:5 "Then the LORD your God will
bring you to the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it.
That’s when He is going to
fulfill the land covenant.
He will
prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:6 "And the LORD your God will
circumcise your heart
That’s the same terminology
for cleansing the heart.
and the
heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and
with all your soul, that you may live.
NKJ Deuteronomy 30:7 "Also the LORD your God will
put all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted
you.
So see Deuteronomy 30
connects the land covenant with the New Covenant, God giving them a new
heart. This occurs after they’re
saved. This occurs after they’re
saved. Now I can’t remember (If I can’t remember,
I know you don’t remember.) if I did this the last time we were here because
the last week we had the threat of bad weather, but turn with me to Revelation
11. We have fun going all over the
Bible. It’s sword drill time. Learn to
use your Bible.
Now Dr. Ice talked about this
on I guess it was Tuesday afternoon when he was talking about the earth
dwellers. He was working on this,
probably about a month ago. He was
working on his earth dweller paper and I had been talking to him about what I
was coming up with on regeneration and we were trying to just think our way
through this because nobody has tried to make these kinds of distinctions. They just talk it in general terms.
Let’s try this. Jesus comes back at the Second Coming at this
point. Here’s the rapture way back here.
We go up. Okay. This is the half-way point in the
tribulation, two 3 ½ year periods. The
New Covenant gets enacted after Jesus returns.
Okay, so the New Covenant gets enacted here. This is when they get a clean heart and this
is where He is going to circumcise their hearts. Isn’t it nice that CH can do double duty there? And they’re going to get a new spirit. That’s a new human spirit. It’s a transformation there. That’s why
people think they get regenerated. But there is a problem here. They’re also going to get an indwelling of
the Holy Spirit that’s different from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit today
because remember in the tribulation period the restrainer in II Thessalonians 2
is removed. The restrainer is the Holy Spirit so there is no indwelling Holy
Spirit in the tribulation period. So when
they get saved in the tribulation period, they’re not going to get the Holy
Spirit. But they get Him when the New Covenant is established.
Now if we take this to be “equals
personal regeneration” then that means that all these Jews who get saved - 100%
of them are going to get saved at that instant in time when Jesus comes
back. We’ve got a problem because in
Revelation 11:11f something happens before the midpoint. Right about here, right before the 3 ½ period
in Revelation
NKJ Revelation
NKJ Revelation
That’s
In the earthquake seven thousand
people were killed, and the rest were afraid and gave glory to the God of
heaven.
Now let’s look at this. I had
fun with this with a guy who believed in limited atonement the other day at a
Dallas Seminary alumni meeting.
I said, “Okay, look here’s
all the people. Let that circle describe
all the people who live n
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
he said. “It can’t be all of them.”
See there is that problem
with limited atonement people. “All” can’t be all. Jesus didn’t die for all; He just died for
most. That’s what all means – most or
some. But the rest means that everybody
else in
Tommy calls me up at about
Now this occurs right before
the 3 ½ year period. Now what happens (those
of you who’ve been studying)… see this is test night. I am asking rhetorical questions. What happens at the 3 ½ year period in the
middle of the tribulation? The abomination
of desolation. So the antichrist is going
to set up a statue of himself in the temple to be worshipped.
In Matthew 24, Jesus said, “When
you see this happen,” - what are you supposed to do? Get out of Dodge. Leave.
Go to the hills. Leave. Get as far away as you can and woe unto those
who are caught away from home or without the proper clothes in the winter or
whatever because this is going to come suddenly. You need to drop everything and leave.
So what happens in the
chronology here is you get a bunch of people who get saved here and then the
antichrist sets himself up to be worshipped here, and what do they do? They head south to the wilderness in response
to what Jesus told them to do in Matthew 24.
Do you think an observant Jew who rejected Jesus as Messiah is going to
listen to Jesus and get out of Dodge?
No. He is only going to listen to
what Jesus said in Matthew 24 if he has already trusted Jesus as Messiah.
So turn over to Revelation 12. In Revelation 11, the rest were saved. Revelation 12 talks about the woman, the
child, and the dragon. This section of
Revelation is like the program at baseball games. It tells you who the players are and gives
you their stats. So you have various
players introduced here. The first one
is a woman clothed with the sun with a moon at her feet and on her head a
garland of 12 stars. That’s
NKJ Revelation 12:6 Then the woman fled into the
wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her
there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.
That’s 3 ½ years. That’s the second half of the tribulation
period. Now skip down to verse 17.
NKJ Revelation
That’s those that weren’t in
the land, but who are Jews in the rest of the world – saved Jews in the rest of
the world.
who keep
the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
See that tells you that the
reason they fled was because of the testimony of Jesus Christ. So the point that I am making here is that
these people who flee down and…here we have a map of
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your
flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
This is more than just
personal regeneration. It has to be
because when you put it all together and they’re already personal
regenerate.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:27 "I will put My Spirit within
you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do
them.
But when Jesus is talking to
Nicodemus in John 3 it’s in the context of that initial message “to repent for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand” because as the Messiah He is offering Israel
the kingdom, the same kingdom He is going to establish right here. It could have happened when He came the first
time, but they rejected it. So now it’s
going to happen here, but before they can go into it there has to be this
cleansing by the water and the Word.
Does that make sense? And all of
this ties together.
That’s what Charlie was
talking about the other night is that the Word of God… See this is when the kingdom comes in. Before they can get from being saved here to
being saved and living in the kingdom they’ve got to go through this national
cleansing and national regeneration process.
That’s what Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about. He was offering the kingdom to Nicodemus in
John 3. But when they rejected it, the
kingdom got postponed. People between
then and here still get regenerated, but it has different characteristics than
the regeneration that occurs there. That
helps us understand what’s going on in Ezekiel 36:27-8.
This is what Charlie was
talking about when you take Scripture and start connecting all these different
layers. It’s like a web of
doctrine. When you just go in and teach
John 3 in isolation and you don’t correlate it to Ezekiel, you don’t correlate
it to Jeremiah, you don’t correlate it to Revelation; then it’s like looking at
a jigsaw puzzle and you’ve got two pieces and you’re trying to understand the
whole. But, once you start putting all the
pieces together you see the big picture and you realize how tight all Scripture
is. Every part relates to every other
part and we have to learn all of this.
When we don’t do this, then you just get a sort of a fragmented
understanding of the different aspects of God’s plan. So it’s not always the easiest thing to work
your way through which is why you have to have a lot of repetition to hear it
over and over again and finally it begins to make sense.
We’ll come back and go
through the rest of the Ezekiel passages and deal with this whole aspect of
cleansing that is such a critical part of the New Covenant for the
establishment of the