Continued Study - The God Who is There

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This guy got angry.
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This guy got angry.
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This guy was very angry.
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What did he do to the Sodom? What was the reason for destroying Sodom? Not the actual sin, but what? Why? What was it? It was wickedness.
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Same thing as here.
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Now there's obviously sexual immorality and all the...we can get into specific sins.
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Here this was very generalized.
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Here, this was specific, it was their immorality, it was homosexuality and sexual immorality.
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Now in the book, we didn't really get into, he didn't get into these, but after Sodom you have two major events heading towards the cross that were a demonstration of that.
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Now, this was in 722 BC, anybody remember what happened here? The fall of the Northern Kingdom.
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In 722, the fall of the Northern Kingdom fell to the Assyrians, and what was the reason for the fall of the Northern Kingdom? It was a witness? Specifically, what was it? Idolatry.
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Idolatry.
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And ultimately, we follow all of that sin back to the wickedness.
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Every sin is rooted in idolatry.
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Every one of them is rooted in idolatry.
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So this was the fall to Assyria, then got prophesied through Isaiah and Hosea, the fall, and then about 100 years later, 586, you had another event.
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What was that? Southern Kingdom.
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We're running out of space.
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This was not the fall of the Southern, it was actually the captivity, and the reason why we're going to be specific is because they came out of that captivity.
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God's destruction in 722 because of his anger, they never came back.
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God destroyed them.
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And when they were carried off, this would have been Assyria, put that back here, this would have been Babylon.
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The Babylonian Empire hauled them off into captivity, and do you remember what the specific sin, wickedness, but specifically, you better remember what it was.
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It had to do with the Sabbath.
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Yes, ma'am.
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It had to do with the Sabbath of the land, it had to do with the Sabbath, there was sevens as a totality, but yes, ma'am, it had to do with the violation of the Sabbath.
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So, in this line up to the cross, you had God doing major events that demonstrated his anger, so I would say, was that billboard correct, that God's not angry? I think if they read their Bible, just a cursor reading would say that God was very angry.
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Unless they're just going to look at the point of reference of the New Testament.
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Right.
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And I'm going to get to that.
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I know you are.
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Yeah.
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And I'm going to get to that because even at that, that's very skewed.
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Yeah, and Hebrews is the book that says that.
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So, we have this.
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Well, we get to here.
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Is this a demonstration of God's anger? The cross? You better believe it is.
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That is a demonstration of God's righteous justice and fury towards all the wicked to every person that would ever believe.
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So, here, God demonstrated it.
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He demonstrated it on all the wicked.
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Here, he satisfies that justice and he satisfies his anger completely.
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Look, here, this never really satisfied God's anger.
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It just, God got all he could take.
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Boom.
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He does an act of judgment.
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Drowns them, slays them.
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In these two cases, both of them, God says, I'm going to leave you trampled down like mud in the street.
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You're going to eat.
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Mothers are going to wind up boiling their children.
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There's going to be all kinds of craziness going on.
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So, each one of these, demonstration of God's anger, this is the ultimate demonstration of the satisfaction of God's anger.
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Any questions? Comments? Righteous demonstration so far? All right.
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Wait, we didn't get to write that down.
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Can you put that down? Now, his, D.A.
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Carson, I'm not sure where Andy lands on this, so I'm speaking for myself only.
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I hold an early date of the writing of the book of Revelation.
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So, he holds it took place somewhere around 90.
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I say all of the New Testament.
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I'm with you, brother.
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On 65? Yes, I call him brother.
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You're 65? It's brother.
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Brother.
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So, you're 65 too? Before your early date.
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We might differ on here.
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I'm just going to make, ultimately, when you have an early date or a late date, there's some details in there.
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Okay? But ultimately, both of these, and I'll talk about this in just a second, but both of them end up with this.
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Triumph of the Lamb.
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Ultimately, that's it.
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Okay? But, it's a, the book of Revelation, if you hold a late date, you have some problems dealing with this date.
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What happened in 70 A.D.? Yeah, the actual leveling of it.
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So, if you hold a late date, you have a problem dealing with this as being the judgment of God on Jerusalem for rejecting its Messiah.
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If all the New Testament is written before 65 A.D., you can say this is actually a fulfillment of what Jesus said, not only when he was in the Olivet Discourse where he says, hey, they came out there and the guy says, hey, do you see? Look at all this.
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And there was three questions that Jesus specifically answered.
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And it was, he said, do you see all this? It's all, not one stone's going to be left on another.
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He said, when will this take place? Will it be the sign of your coming? Will it be the end of the age? Oh, is that too fast? Yeah, a little bit.
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Okay.
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When will this take place? What will be the sign of your coming? Will it be the end of the age? Those are the three questions that his disciples specifically asked him.
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And when they asked him that question, what was it dealing with? They asked him just three specific questions with the judgment of Jerusalem.
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That's what he answered.
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Now, if you remember, when Jesus goes on trial, all those fake ones, you had him go, first he goes to Annas, Caiaphas, Herod, back to, I think it was back to Caiaphas, then he goes to Pilate.
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So you had all those.
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So when he stands before Caiaphas, he says a specific thing.
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He says, the next time you see me, he said, you see me, it'll be in my glory and it'll be in judgment.
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That's what Jesus said.
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So, you know who was alive at 70 AD? Or was that the fall of Jerusalem? Caiaphas.
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You know who was killed when they came into the temple in 67 AD? Caiaphas.
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Caiaphas.
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So, late date, just says this is a historical event and really didn't have anything to do, correct me, Amy, if you have a different nuance, but most 90 guys would see this as a historical date that Jesus was just predicting.
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But 70 AD is the wrath of God being poured out on the Jewish people for a specific reason.
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One, they rejected their Messiah.
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And Jesus said, remember, he comes in, he says, look, if you would just recognize the day of my coming.
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And Jesus is weeping as he's coming, if you read in Luke, he's coming into the city on the triumphal entry and he's weeping, if you would have just known that I'm the guy.
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He says, but because you have rejected that, he says, there's going to be encampments that are going to come around the city and they're going to block you off and they're going to trample you.
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So Jesus, once again, coming into the city on the horse of a burrow, on the back of a burrow, what is he predicting? The destruction and the wrath of God being poured out because they rejected their Messiah.
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So 70 AD shut the door on Judaism completely.
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And it was a demonstration of God's wrath towards idolatry.
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A lot of people, well, what made the temple need to be destroyed in that manner? So we have the temple.
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What was taking place in the temple before Jesus died? What took place there? Money changing.
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Ma'am? Money changing.
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Okay.
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Yeah, we could say, yeah, that would have taken place at feast times.
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We could say money changers.
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But as a whole, what was the place of the temple? What was it considered? Worshiping God.
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Okay.
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The worship place of God.
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I'm going to put this here because this is...
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Where did the Jews see God dwelling? Did he dwell in Samaria? Did he dwell at the Jordan River? Was he down there dwelling with John the Baptist when he was baptized at the Jordan River? Did he dwell in Haifa? That's right.
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He was in a specific cube inside the temple.
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So the temple demonstrated the only place, the dwelling place of God at that time, and it was the place of sacrifice which placated, and I know we talked about this before, where it placated the wrath of God temporarily.
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Once Jesus came, this certainly didn't take place.
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Once it came, Jesus came, was the temple the dwelling place of God anymore? Was it? After the giving of the Holy Spirit.
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That's right.
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This goes.
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After Jesus comes and he dies, his death, burial, and resurrection, was God's wrath placated at the Holy of Holies anymore? No.
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This was satisfied.
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So every time somebody went to the temple to worship Judaism, what were they doing? What's that? Sinning.
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Sinning.
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Greatly.
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Because this now becomes idolatry.
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That becomes idolatry.
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They bring lamb, turtle, dove, goat, bull, whatever they were bringing, and they sacrifice.
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What did that do? That angered the wrath of God because of idolatry.
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So you see that the temple now, instead of becoming the dwelling place of God, under the old covenant, the new covenant comes in.
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What does the temple become now? What's that? Certainly it didn't appease, but specifically it becomes a place of idolatry.
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Hey, and what makes this temple, after Jesus comes, and He says, I'm the one that's come, and I am the dwelling place of God, you'll destroy this temple, speaking of Himself in three days, and in three days I'll raise it up again.
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Once Jesus fulfills all the types and shadows and all the things that this pointed to, once that happened, what makes this temple any different than the temple of Diana? Does it? Nope.
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This just seems more of a sanitized, a sanitized idolatry.
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Because what was going on in the temple of Diana, it might be sexual immorality and all that other stuff.
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Although, if you read the works of Josephus, how many of y'all read any of the, you read Josephus? Yeah, some of the apocryphal books.
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Actually, the apocryphal books deal more with the pre-new covenant, between 187 and the New Testament, B.C.
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New Testament deal with most of the Antiochus Epiphanies and all that.
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But if you read Josephus' writings, inside the temple from 67 to 70 A.D., there was prostitution, there was homosexuality, there was all this stuff going on inside the temple which really made it no different than any other place.
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A lot of people don't know that.
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Josephus wound up being the historian for the Roman Empire.
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I don't know if anybody knows that.
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There was a civil war going on.
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Dispassion went in, captured him at the city of, I think it was Giscola, where he was fighting with John Giscola.
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And he took him as a prisoner.
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He adopted him, quote, and made him a Jewish historian.
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So we know what happened and took place in the event from 67 to 70 A.D.
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because we had an eyewitness.
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You know who the liaison was to go in there and talk to Simon Eleazar and John Giscola? It was Josephus.
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So he was the one that went into the temple trying to make an arrangement to quit the fighting between the two, between the Jewish and the Romans.
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So he would record exactly what was taking place.
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So that's how we know exactly what happened.
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Ultimately, God said, I'll have it no more, and he leveled and poured out his wrath in 70 A.D.
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So if you have an early date, which is what I hold, primarily the book of Revelation is dealing with the destruction of Jerusalem.
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And I'll be more than glad to answer any question.
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If somebody disagrees with me, I'm fine with that.
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It's not in its totality handling all of that.
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I believe that the vast majority of the book of Revelation is dealing with the destruction of Jerusalem.
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Does it point and make a trajectory to the end of the age? Well, most certainly.
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You have your seals, your trumpets, and your bowls in the book of Revelation, which in chapter 14, that's what I think he's addressing.
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Well, you'd not think he is addressing some of that, but you understand that these are a pair.
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If you were going to take the book and you were going to outline it, these are parallel to one another, not this way.
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They didn't take successive after one another.
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They actually are the same event that he is describing, but in a different perspective.
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It's called recapitulation.
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I don't particularly care for that word, but that's a theological word.
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I like parallelism because that's actually what it is.
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It's a parallel.
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And it's God's wrath being poured out on what? Idolatry.
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Idolatry.
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In the book of Revelation, there's so many contrasts.
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You have the true and the false.
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You have false doctrine, true doctrine.
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You have the letters to the churches are to a compromising church and to a persecuted church.
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So you see the contrast that's there.
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Well, as the book unfolds, it all ends to this day.
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It's here.
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The final day.
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What will take place on that day? I guess I could have moved it over a little bit, couldn't I? What's going to take place on this day? He certainly will return, and he will return with power and glory, and he will judge the living and the dead.
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But on this day, there's always been the day of the Lord.
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Even in the Old Testament, in Types and Shadows, in the book of Zephaniah and Haggai, it has always been the day of the Lord is going to be a day of wrath.
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On this day, when Jesus comes, he will make all wrongs right.
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Everything that's been done in secret will be made for all to see.
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Everything that's been done backwards that we don't know about, extortion, rape, murder, I mean, all that stuff, Jesus is going to make it right.
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Nobody gets away with anything.
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Nobody.
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Hey, understand, on that day, you and I are going to stand there too.
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We're going to be there as well.
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And over the last couple of weeks, and I almost said this, two weeks ago, when we were reading through 1 John chapter 4, and it says that perfect love casts out all fear.
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We were just talking about this last night, weren't we? Because somebody brought it up again.
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Perfect love casts out all fear.
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Hey, don't use that about sicknesses and disease and all that.
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Don't do that.
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That's not what that's talking about.
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Best rule of interpretation, read further.
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It says this.
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Perfect love casts out all fear because with fear is the fear of punishment.
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Punishment.
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Now, on this day, are you and I fearing the wrath of God? No.
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That is a correct answer.
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No.
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No.
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Why? Why? Because the day of judgment, the day of wrath on God's people's behalf was taken care of where? At the cross.
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At the cross.
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But will we give an account for everything that we have done? Yep.
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Will it be a shameful day? You better believe it will.
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There's a reason why He's got to wipe away our tears too.
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He said He wipes away all tears.
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Everything that we've done in secret, you're going to see.
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You're going to see every thought I ever had, every motive I ever had, be projected for all to see.
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I mean, it's not like you're going into a sterilized room with a judge and you're going to stand up there and he's just going to...
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No, it says all will be there, small and great.
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Read the book of Revelation.
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It's a scary thought.
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Myriads upon myriads upon myriads upon myriads of lost and saved standing there before the judgment bar of God for all to see everything that ever happened.
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But we don't have no fear of God.
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We don't have the judgment of God as far as wrath.
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But what are we going to be judged by on that day? Our works.
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Yeah, our works.
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Our works.
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Some's going to get burned up and some ain't.
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I do believe the vast majority will be burned up.
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I do believe the vast majority will be burned up.
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Will God's wrath stop at the culmination of the end of the age? We like this part about God, don't we? Does this ever cease with God? Nope.
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Does this ever cease with God? Does that ever cease with God? What about this? We like all these lasting forever, but what about this guy? What's the one? Forever.
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So is God's wrath everlasting? You better believe it.
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And he's more of a Puritan guy than I am, but if I remember correctly, Jeremiah Burroughs wrote that the evil is so evil to God that if he ceased to stop hating evil as much as he does, he would cease to be God.
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That's a pretty bold statement.
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So if God ever stops punishing evil or if he ever stops hating evil the slightest bit, then he ceases to be God.
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And he goes back to one thing, because he is what? He's holy, holy, holy.
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That's why God will pour out His wrath and His judgment forever and ever and ever on all who do not obey the gospel.
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Now, Andy tried to throw a wrench in my plan early on about the New Covenant.
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So, under the New Covenant, is God angry? Under the New Covenant, is God now how the Marcian heresy was? Well, he was angry in the Old Testament, and now he's loving the New.
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How many of us have heard that? I mean, we all heard that.
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Because do we see, as we have that graph up to the cross, do we see huge marks in history from the cross of where God has poured out His judgment? We don't really see that in redemptive history because the canon of the Bible is closed at that point.
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But, let me ask you this.
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Do you think it's the judgment of God when He sends a tsunami from an earthquake and He kills 200,000 people, that 90% of them were idolaters? Yeah, you remember that? Yeah, who did that? Who do you think said, pop the bottom of the crust of the ocean? Who did that? God said it.
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And why did He do that? He poured out His judgment on them.
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No, we don't want to hear that.
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I remember, and Keith said this a couple weeks ago, we were at another church at that time, and somebody says, well, man, what about those poor people? What do you say to those people that are over there surviving? And I say, exactly what you tell them.
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If you don't repent, God's lie, you too likewise will perish.
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That is what you say because, hey, that was not a mistake by man.
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Okay, let's say a nuclear reactor gets mismanaged and it blows up.
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We can say, oh, that man made that mistake.
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Hey, when the bottom of the ocean pops and a 500-wall foot of water collapses on nations on end, who did that? There's no doubt.
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God did that.
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Yes, sir? Huh? Climate change.
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Yeah, the Green New Deal would have fixed that.
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So they go, well, God doesn't act that way anymore.
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Well, it's in Hebrews chapter 10, and it is one of my favorite passages.
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When I open air preach, this is one of the ones that I preach, and I preach this actual passage in front of places where like Benny Hinn or the false teachers, Joel Osteen, because people would hold that view that God's not angry anymore.
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And I'm going to start.
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It's chapter 10, verse 26.
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It says, For if we go on sinning willfully, after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there remains no longer a sacrifice for sin.
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Let me stop right there for a second.
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It does not mean if you continue sinning that you're going to die and go to hell, okay? It's dealing with a specific sin here, and that sin is apostasy.
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They were continually going, the book of Hebrews, the arguments that were going back to Judaism.
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And he's saying, hey, if you continue to go on back to Judaism, there's only been one sacrifice made for you, and if you go to another sacrifice, it's it.
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You have rejected the once for all sacrifice.
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He says, So there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of the judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.
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Anyone who set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
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All right.
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Under the law of Moses, how did that person die? If somebody violated the law of Moses, we'll just go back to numbers, guys picking up sticks.
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You go, wow, man, that dude was just picking up sticks.
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And what did they say, what did Moses tell them to do? Stone them.
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You know who picked up the first stones to stone that dude? The ones that caught him.
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So we just do the mechanics here.
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Andy and Mike find me doing something I wasn't supposed to do.
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We're Old Testament Israelites.
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I'm picking up sticks.
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They go tell Moses, hey, I think he violated the, that Collier violated the Mosaic law, and what do we do? And Moses says, bring him before the congregation and stone him.
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So Andy gets a big old boulder.
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He can hold it in his hand.
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So does Mike.
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And you know what they do? They're the first one.
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Just look at the mechanics of that.
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Think about how many people then stood around and watched that person be executed under the Mosaic law, and what does it say that they did? It says they died without mercy under the testimony of those two or three witnesses.
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And it goes on to say this.
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That seems pretty brutal, doesn't it? Listen to what he says here in verse 29.
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How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve for those who trample under the foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant which he has sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know that he has said, vengeance is mine and I will repay, and again, the Lord will judge his people.
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But it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God.
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So under the law of Moses, it was a terrifying thing to fall under the hands of Moses to be stoned to death, wasn't it? I mean, think of Achan.
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When Andy was teaching through Joshua, I mean, what did they do to Achan? They burned him.
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Yeah, killed his family.
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People forget about that.
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They go, why did they kill his family? Well, that's exactly it.
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They were complicit.
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Bad as we hate to say it, we don't want to do it.
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What should he have done to his daddy? Should have told on him.
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Oh, we go, man, he should have told on his dad.
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No, no, no, no.
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Under the Mosaic law, his wife and his kids saw him come in there, pull back the rug, and throw the gold bars or whatever it was in the aisle he threw in there, and then he covered it back up.
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They were complicit.
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And what did God do for those who were complicit? He joined them in their destruction.
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When Korah's rebellion happened and God opened up the ground and swallowed the 250 Korah prophets with him, what should they have done? They should have departed when he says, hey, in the morning, Moses says, you know what? In the morning, we're going to have a showdown.
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We're going to come out here and we're going to see which one God chooses.
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They should have known at that point that Moses was the mouthpiece of God.
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He's the only one that could talk face-to-face to God, and they should have known that, you know what? In the morning, this probably is going to be bad.
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But they didn't, and they were swallowed up.
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And then you go on, and I think it was those that were part of that rebellion, it wound up being, I think another 17,000 died in the plague because of that.
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Not just the ground opening up and gobbling them up, but the plague that went out because of it.
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So we look at those things under the Old Covenant and go, man, that's pretty terrible.
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Well, it says here, under the New Covenant, that punishment's going to be much severe.
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Well, what's that punishment? Is it being stolen to death? Is it being set on fire between your flesh? Is it the ground opening up and gobbling you up? No, it's on that day of judgment when we stand before God and those who have not placed faith and turned from their sin and turned to the once and all sacrificed Christ for that, what's going to happen? God's going to give them a body fitted for destruction forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
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Look, the believers, we're going to be raised to life.
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And this old body that's got a broke back, messed up eyes and all that, it's going to be gone.
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We're going to have a new body fitted to worship the Lord Jesus forever and ever and ever.
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But those who are raised to destruction, they will have a body as well.
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And it's going to be fitted to endure God's wrath forever and ever and ever.
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The book of Revelation is the triumph of the Lamb.
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But it is the white hot fury of a wrath who will consume his adversary.
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And you cannot forget that.
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It's not this sensational stuff of thieves in the night and all that ridiculous stuff.
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It's ridiculous.
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It's about the wrath of God being poured out on the unrepentant.
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And if you read, man, y'all, if you stayed off Facebook, you could read the book of Revelation in a night.
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Look all the time we spend texting looking at stuff on Google and Googling this, Googling that.
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Man, you could read Revelation in an hour and a half.
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Read it through.
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Read it through.
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And see, man, God ain't playing.
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God ain't playing.
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He's going to pour out His judgment.
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And His justice is going to be poured out on all idolatry.
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You know, the beast and all this stuff.
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One of the guys that I know very well, he's a man, he loves the Lord.
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He does a lot in South America.
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He sets up schools and stuff.
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But he's like, oh man, my favorite book in the Bible is Revelation.
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I'm like, oh yeah, why? Oh man, there's dragons and horns.
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Dude, you've missed it.
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It ain't about that.
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It's about the beginning of it.
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And what does it say? It says the revelation of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, the Lamb.
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All right, we got five minutes for outbursts of anger.
34:38
Andy? I was just thinking, when you just mentioned, I was thinking like the books, like The Late Great Planet Earth.
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Yeah.
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It was all the sensationalism of it.
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It wasn't the reality of what was behind all that supposed sensationalism.
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When you think about it, I mean, as you kind of laid it out, it's just a fearful thing.
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The thought of it, I think, for me, I think about it and then like I blow a fuse and my mind will go to, what do I eat? Or something like that.
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I just can't, I can only take it so far and then I'm almost like tired and bewildered.
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Yeah, yeah.
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The whole sensational part of Revelation is to make people intrigued by it.
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This is just Friday.
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I'm doing a big house out on the intercoastal and the superintendent, project manager, whatever came out there, he's talking and he's like, hey man, you know the rapture's going to happen at any minute.
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Hey man, let me tell you something.
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That's what I said.
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When the lost and the unregenerate embrace a theology of the coming of Christ, dude, you know it's wrong.
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The lost are looking for an escape hatch called the secret rapture.
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Now we could talk about that another time and I think technically speaking, if you don't believe that a rapture takes place, you're a heretic.
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But where that takes place in time and what that word actually means is vastly different than what the church fathers and what I would say the majority of the people at this church believe.
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If you're thinking that a thief in the night theology is coming, it's not.
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It's not.
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Every homeschool mom's dream to wake up and find their kid's clothes folded up neatly and put in a sack.
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They just want to wake up and find their kid's clothes folded.
36:31
Yeah.
36:33
Yeah, so when the lost world and those books end up on New York's bestseller as being great books, I mean, that should tell you something.
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You know? And then to make it a marketing scheme to do it, it's probably billions of dollars for those books.
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I mean, how many sequels of that book can you have? You can just keep going.
36:59
You know? But we can talk about it another time if y'all want to.
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We can talk about, you know, the four perspectives of that.
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You have, you know, the historical view, the idealist view, you have the preterist view, and then you have the spiritual.
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And we can talk about all that.
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And there are some strengths to part of those.
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They're not all wrong, but you have to take them of how they were developed over time.
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You know? It's easier for us to learn why they're there.
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Yeah, and you have men that were making interpretations in the historical view that were looking at it unfold in time.
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And they saw, you know, the whore of Revelation as being the papacy.
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And under what they saw, yes.
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My perspective of the whore is the distinction between the whore and the bride in Revelation is Jerusalem.
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Jerusalem's the whore of Babylon.
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Babylon was always idolatry.
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And if you go back to 70 AD and you look at the colors and all of that, this is just my perspective, all right? Don't stone me over it.
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If you look at the colors that are on the whore in Babylon, it's the same colors that are on the priesthood in Revelation.
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It's like, wow.
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And then you go on to read, and it says that, it says the spiritual Sodom and spiritual Egypt.
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And then if you stopped right there, you'd go, man, you know what? We're not really sure what they're talking about.
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But under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, there's a comma there, and it says, this is the city where our Lord was crucified.
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So what does it tell you? What city they're talking about? They're talking about the idolatry within Jerusalem.
38:47
So, all right, Mike.
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You'll pray for us, and I'll shut up.
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Heavenly Father, we pray, Lord, that as we consider what our brother has brought before us today, that we take him to understanding that you're a God that is immutable.
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You do not change.
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We should not look to the Old Testament and think that you were one way, and now you have somehow become a happy old grandpa up in heaven, just rocking back and forth and taking care of his little kids and just kind of turning a blind eye to sin, but that you are a righteous God, as you have always been, and that your wrath will continue for eternity in a place where the worm never dies and the fire is not quenched.
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We pray, Lord, that as we consider that, that we would redouble our efforts to share the gospel with those who you have placed around us.
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We'd like to love on those who are lovely.
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We pray, Lord, that we would love on those who are not, because we certainly were not being faithful to share the gospel.
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We pray that you'd be with our brother Keith as he brings forth your word today.
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We pray that you'd use it to strengthen us as your people, and that you'd use it to draw the lost to yourself.
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In the name of Christ, amen.
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Amen.
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Hey, and don't miss next week.
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Andy gets to deal with the most controversial part of Revelation next week.
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He says, no I don't.
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Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.