143. The Curse Upon The Jews

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Jesus was announcing in open court that the paternity results had come in and the

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Jews of that first century were not children of God, but they were instead the bastard children of hell.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 143, the curse upon the

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Jews. Everyone and welcome back to the podcast.

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We are now in our seventh episode of this new revelation series.

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And our goal has been to simply understand the most complicated book in the Bible.

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But to do that, we wanna do it in a way where you don't need charts or decoder rings or eschatological shamans that proliferate on TBN in order to understand these things.

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No, our goal has been for us to understand this without bringing a theological system of doom and gloom upon the text and trying to pound it in like a child trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

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Instead, we wanna derive meaning from the text. We wanna let the text tell us what it means and what the original author was attempting to communicate to the original audience and then submit our lives under that inspired meaning.

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Because that is, as Peter said in John six, the words of life and where else should we ever go but to them.

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That's been our posture so far in this series. And because of that, our attitude has been that we are going to totally and completely reject the tabloid style end time hysteria that's being peddled by the modern day disbees, which has led to a defeatist mindset in the church of the living

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God. Lie after lie after lie, whether it was intentional or unwitting has been foisted upon the modern church, telling her that we are always losing and that the world is ever going from bad to worse and that the kingdom of God is shrinking and that the most significant spiritual exercise that we could all be doing is planning our escape from the world instead of trying to build the world and bring it into conformity with Jesus's vision.

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This Houdini like mentality, waiting for the right moment to disappear has caused the church to fail.

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It's caused the saints of God to be fearful and depressed. And it's caused the world around us to fall into deeper levels of repugnancy as the church has all but wasted away into complete irrelevancy.

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Now with that, it is clear to me that dispensationalism is the problem.

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It is a doctrine created in the salt mines of hell because wherever it is sprinkled on the church, she becomes fat, sick, and nearly dead.

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She becomes depressed and dejected, which are not attributes that arise out of a relationship with God.

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They are certainly not fruits of the Holy Spirit, but they are carefully gift -wrapped poisons from an enemy that wants to render

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God's elect immobile in panic, fear, and dread. And I'm not saying that dispensationalists are not

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Christian. I would never make that claim. I am saying they're deceived. And I want us to think about these things in a very obvious way.

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How could such a corrosive theology honor Jesus when it so perfectly devastates his royal bride?

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Instead of robust exegesis, dispensationalists have employed what I like to call exit

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Jesus, looking for their exit everywhere in scripture, but as we've pointed out, it's not there.

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Instead of joyfully working to see the world conform to his image, they've been looking for their off -ramp or their escape, and that is not good biblical theology.

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So because of that, and I don't really care how many dispensationalists drop into the comments section like a prowling chester lurking on a playground.

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I'm trying to call it what it is, that it's false teaching, that it's heresy, not a damnable heresy, but it is heresy.

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And I'm trying to teach what the Bible actually says, even if it ruffles a few little rapture feathers.

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I'm gonna keep teaching what the Bible says because that's what's gonna heal the church, not dispensationalism.

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Dispensationalism is corrosive as battery acid to the church. And for the last hundred years, the only hundred years in all of human history that dispensationalism has been the dominant view, it has destroyed the church.

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The once vigorous Church of Jesus Christ that had built cathedrals and Christendom is now been reduced to the metaphorical equivalent of a jittery, toothless meth addict from Chicago rather than the warrior that she was supposed to be.

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If dispensationalism were a pill, you would stop taking it when your hair fell out. You would stop taking it because it's poison.

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Now, that's what we the church have gotta do. We've gotta bury this destructive doctrine in the pages of history, put it back on the shelf where it belongs and move on into faithfulness.

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And that's why I've been doing this series to show how these things that the dispies have twisted have already occurred.

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And because they've already occurred, we can have great confidence that Christ is leading his church onto and unto victory.

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Now, I know this is not what today's episode is about, a railing against the dispensationalist, but I am tired of seeing the church living out a loser mentality and retreating from the world, living like cowards and refusing to live for Christ and refusing to live like Christ today because we're too busy trying to catch our rapture tomorrow, this has got to stop.

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And it's one of the reasons, like I said, that I'm doing this series. Now, if this is the first time that you're watching this show,

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I would give you a hearty welcome, tell you thank you for being here. And I would also give you a recommendation that you push the pause button on this episode and go back and listen to the six prior episodes that we've been doing in this series.

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Because in those episodes, we've been providing the critical context that you're going to need in order to navigate what we're talking about today.

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And what are we talking about today? We're talking about the curses that have come upon Judah.

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We're continuing along with the same topic that we had last week, showing how the tribulation has already happened.

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And before we get into all of that new evidence, I want to remind us of where we have been.

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So for just a moment, just to set the context just a little bit, last week on the broadcast, we ignited a few claymore minds in the direction of dispensationalism.

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And hopefully we woke them up to the reality that the word tribulation does not mean a long into the future seven year period of unfathomable suffering at the hands of a

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European Antichrist. What the word actually means, it's the ellipsis and it's

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Greek. It's a general word that applies to any period of time where people are suffering.

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It's a word that means pressure. It's a word that means crushing. It's a word that means something is painful.

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It doesn't mean a future period of apocalyptic suffering.

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It's not a proper noun. It's a general noun that occurs in any time of human suffering.

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For instance, if you have a dog or a cat that dies, you're going through a tribulation, a thalipsis. You can have a thalipsis when, for instance, grandma got ran over by a reindeer or any other number of things that cause a person to have heartache and grief and feel pressure.

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As we pointed out, this word occurs hundreds of times in the Bible and it never points to a specific future apocalyptic super cycle of terror.

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It just doesn't. Now, along with that, last week we proved how Jesus wasn't talking about events that happen in the book,

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The Late Great Planet Earth or The Left Behind series, but instead he was talking about a tribulation that was gonna happen in the first century and it was gonna be poured out on his beloved bride, the church.

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It was gonna be poured out at the hands of the bloodthirsty Jews who hated and crucified Jesus and abhorred his followers to the point of murder.

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That's the tribulation that the Jews were murdering Christians. That's what the tribulation is.

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That's what Jesus means by it. And we saw that that's the only faithful reading of the text by the context of Matthew 24 and the linguistic case that we proved from the scriptures.

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Now, after looking at the language, we then turned to two examples of the word, the ellipsis in the Greek Old Testament, which we call the

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Septuagint, and from those two examples alone, one of them in Exodus and one of them in Deuteronomy, we were able to draw some very important biblical and theological parallels for what

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Jesus was predicting in Matthew 24. And what we saw was how Jesus was intentionally comparing the people of God in the book of Exodus to the first century church.

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And we saw how Jesus, a few verses later, would compare the first century Jews to the Egyptians of old.

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And by doing this, Jesus was showing how his disciples, just as Pharaoh was oppressing

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Israel back then with relentless cruelty, his disciples are going to be oppressed and go through a thellipsis, a tribulation in the first century at the hands of the

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Jews. And what he was also showing was that the Jews of Jesus's day had become like Egypt, oppressing the church, infuriating and causing the rage of Yahweh to be poured out on them, leading to their devastation and their disaster.

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Like the children of Israel in Exodus, the church was gonna go through a momentary thellipsis and like the

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Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, the first century Jews were gonna go through a great thellipsis, which is gonna signify their doom.

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Now, once we established that Exodus motif, then we turn to the second example of thellipsis in the

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Septuagint and we learned how the Levitical and Deuteronomic curse language from the

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Mosaic covenant, which comes out of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, were gonna be poured out on the

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Jews. By doing this, we prove that Israel's 1500 years of covenant infidelity had finally warranted the sniper's laser to center upon her chest and the trigger to be pulled.

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From Mount Sinai to Mount Calvary, the Jews were a stiff -necked people who killed the prophets, sacrificed their children in the fires of Moloch and Baal, and they played the whore with every idol, under every tree, with every nation, and even thought that they were gonna get away with murdering

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God's one and only son. By Jesus marching into the city of Jerusalem, the city that was plotting to kill him, and announcing seven woes upon them in Matthew 23, he was telling everybody that they were not gonna get away with it.

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God had not forgotten her crimes. He was not blind to the injustices and the inequities that she had piled up high as heaven, and by announcing these seven perfect woes upon her,

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Jesus was starting the countdown. He was pulling the covenant curse lever that within a single generation would render

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Jerusalem and Judea no more. And then finally, in last week's episode, we tied all of it together in the book of Revelation, where we saw how the early church endured fierce persecutions and tribulations, like in Revelation 2, nine through 10.

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We saw how the great tribulation was reserved for the Jewish oppressors, Revelation 6, 12 through 17, and we saw how the very ones who cried out, his blood be on us and our children, were the very ones who were crushed under the weight of God's covenantal wrath, like sheep being led to the slaughter in Revelation 19, marching towards their doom until they were eradicated.

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That has led us to a consistent conclusion that Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation are not about a future sci -fi pandemonium, but a faithful accounting of how old covenant

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Judaism and its custodians, the lawless Jews, were crushed by God and sent away from him like a newly discovered adulteress receiving her freshly printed certificate of divorce,

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Revelation 17, one through eight, Jeremiah 3, eight. Now, that is where I'd like for us to continue today by jumping right back in to this narrative of Philipsis and tribulation, and I want us to examine the rest of the material that we weren't able to cover last week.

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Today, we're gonna look at how the Jews came under a curse of God, and that curse is what led them to perpetrate tribulations.

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We're gonna see how there's three dramatic curses that are poured out upon them in the

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New Testament, and we're gonna see how those curses fueled them towards violence, madness, jealousy, and a hardening of heart where they could not be saved.

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What we're gonna look at is how the covenant curses defined the

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Jews of the first century, and we're also gonna look at how those same curses define her as a people today.

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Last week, I said that this is gonna be one of my most ambitious episodes, and talking about such a controversial topic this week as the cursing that has come upon the

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Jews is clearly right in the same vein as that, so I covet your prayers that I would do this biblically, faithfully, and in a godly way, and with that, let us jump into part one, the

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Jews and the threat of curse. Now, to understand how the

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Jews actually became cursed, how did a curse fall upon them, we have to first understand and immerse ourself in covenant thinking.

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Not taking covenant theology seriously is one of the most significant reasons that dispensationalists and modern

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Christians misunderstand the Bible, because covenant theology is the backbone of biblical theology.

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Covenants are how a thrice -holy God stoops down in order to establish a relationship with sinful man.

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They are agreements that are cut in blood, sealed with the promises of God, and their stipulations are binding upon the people who've chosen to enter into that relationship with their creator.

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Through covenants, God extends his hand to his people, drawing them into fellowship, promising blessings for their fidelity, but also warning them of paralyzing curses if they persist in their rebellion.

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Deuteronomy 28 is a great example. In this way, covenants in the

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Bible are relationships that God and man enter into and become forever binding upon both parties when they agree to the terms, which opens up humans to unimaginable blessings if they're faithful, and curses if they are not, depending on which direction of faithfulness they end up on.

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And as you study these covenants, you're soon gonna realize that all of them follows a very similar pattern in their constitution.

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So first, let me give you a little bit of the pattern of covenants so that you'll understand what I mean and you'll understand what covenant curses are.

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It's very, very important. First, the first pattern is that God is always the one who initiates the relationship with sinful man.

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Whether it be Noah, Abraham, Adam, or Israel and Mount Sinai, it is always God who takes the first step, and it's always

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God who calls people to himself, not people who call God unto them.

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There's many examples of this, Genesis 9, 8 through 9, Genesis 12, 1, Genesis 19, or Exodus 19, 4 through 6, just to name a few.

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Now, the second aspect of covenant is that after God has pursued the person, the relationship now comes with stipulations.

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God doesn't make relationships with no rules. There are terms that God lays out that must be followed in order for him to share his holy presence with sinful men.

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And for the covenants to remain intact, those stipulations must be upheld. An example of this is

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Genesis 17, 1 through 2, or Exodus 20, 1 through 7. Now, these covenant stipulations are not on the level of suggestions.

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They are not opinions by God. They are not what he hopes is gonna happen.

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These are mandates. They are divine ordinances that must be obeyed if you're gonna be in relationship with God.

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Because if you don't, then you forfeit the same grace that is protecting you from his holy wrath.

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If you're gonna be in relationship with a holy God, you need his protection because his holiness is so furious and so beautiful and so perfect that it would rip you apart.

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To disobey the covenant is to forfeit the grace that keeps you standing in his presence without being harmed.

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That is the second element of every covenant is that it comes with stipulations. Third, it also comes with future blessings and future curses as a reward for the obedience or the dire consequences for violating covenant with God.

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And we're gonna get into a few of those in a moment. Now fourth, after the covenant curses and covenant blessings, every covenant is sealed with blood which demonstrates its life and death commitment.

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Genesis 15, nine through 10 is a great example. And then fifth, God gives a sign that he is going to be permanently and perpetually faithful like a rainbow to the covenant of Noah or circumcision to the covenant of Abraham or it's the

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Sabbath to the covenant of Moses. These signs are to remind his people that he is the faithful one, that he is the one who reminds us of his fidelity and he is the one that we can trust who will never break covenant with us.

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Genesis 9, 13 is an example. Genesis 17, 11, Exodus 31, 16 through 17, there's many examples.

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And then finally, the sixth aspect of a covenant is that covenants are generational.

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They are made with individuals but they have effects that last for generations.

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They extend beyond the original recipient to their children and to their children's children, making the stipulations, the blessings and the curses binding on all future generations who are downstream of this covenant.

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Now, because all covenants follow this pattern, we should be able to demonstrate that these elements show up in every one of the five

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Old Testament covenants with not very much effort and indeed we can. I'm not gonna do that with all five of them but I will give you

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Abraham's covenant as an example because it's a unique covenant. God initiates a covenant with Abram.

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He calls him out of his paganism and into the good land where God is going to relate with him in Genesis 12, 1.

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That's the first step, God initiates the relationship. Then in this covenant, God commands

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Abraham with some stipulations because Abraham's gonna be in relationship with God, he needs to know the terms.

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Genesis 17, 1 says that Abraham is to walk blamelessly before God, which is the terms of the

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Abrahamic covenant and terms that Abraham himself could not fulfill.

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And because God decides to require this of Abraham, knowing that Abraham cannot do this, this is where Abraham's covenant is unique.

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It has curses in it and it has blessings in it. The blessings are Genesis 12, 2 through 3 and they describe how the entire world is gonna come under the blessings of the covenant of Abraham, so long as Abraham is faithful.

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But what God does in the Abraham's covenant is because Abraham cannot walk perfectly before God, God himself is the one who walks through the severed animal parts in Genesis 15, 9 through 17, which is a demonstration that God is saying, may the curses be on me if I am not faithful to the covenant.

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God does not invite Abraham to walk through the severed animal pieces with him. God is saying,

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Abraham, I know you're not gonna be faithful to this, but I am still going to give you the blessings of the covenant because I am binding myself to this by walking through these severed parts.

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God is saying, may I be ripped apart just like these animals if I fail to bring the entire world under the blessings of God through the seed of Abraham, which

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Paul tells us is Christ. God is saying to Abraham, even if you don't live up to the conditions,

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I'm gonna make sure that I send my son who's gonna walk blamelessly before me and he's gonna be the one who's ripped apart so that the blessings of God would come to all the nations.

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Now, in the meantime, while all of this was playing out in space and time, God reminded

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Abraham of those blessings by giving him a covenant sign, which is the fourth element. And that sign is circumcision,

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Genesis 17, 10 through 11, so that he would never forget the loving kindness of the

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Lord. And sometimes the loving kindness of the Lord cuts you, if you know, you know.

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Then the Lord gives Abraham offspring so that the covenant will have a legacy and that it will attach itself to all future generations so that they also will inherit his blessings.

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His covenant is not just with Abraham, it's with Isaac, it's with Jacob, it's with his 12 sons, and eventually it'll work itself out through Jesus to the entire world.

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That is the covenant with Abraham in a nutshell. Now, unlike the

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Abrahamic covenant where God took all of the potential curses upon himself, if that covenant were ever violated, the covenant with Moses does not do the same thing.

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In that covenant, the covenant curses very much apply to the people of God if they do not obey the terms of the covenant.

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If the Jews who God ransomed out of Egypt and entered into a covenant with at the base of that great mountain called

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Sinai, if they obeyed the terms that God laid out in the covenant, then God was going to bless them.

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He was gonna rain down extraordinary blessings upon them like abundant harvest, victory over their enemies, peace in the land, and the very presence of God dwelling upon them in this beautiful relationship where they are blessed.

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Leviticus 16, two through 13, number six, 24 through 26, Deuteronomy 28, one through 14, you get to read about the blessings.

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But, but if the people of Israel disobeyed the stipulations and the ordinances that Yahweh set up in the covenant of Moses, there would be horrifying, extraordinary curses that are poured out upon them.

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In Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, God warns his people in the most vivid language imaginable.

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What's gonna happen to them if they break covenant with him? He tells them that their disobedience was going to bring famine so severe that people resorted to cannibalism, which we've talked about last week.

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Their cities were going to be reduced to rubble. Their enemies were going to crush them and their survivors were going to be scattered to the very ends of the earth,

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Leviticus 26, 31 through 33. Their land, Yahweh promises, will become a desolation that's overran by wild animals.

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Their bodies will lie unburied, rotting and exposed upon the ground. Food for the flying fowl who will peck away at them until there's nothing left,

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Leviticus 26, 22. In Deuteronomy, God warns that these plagues are going to cling to them and madness is gonna overtake them and that their lives are gonna hang in such deep abiding psychological dread that they never have peace,

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Deuteronomy 28, 20 through 22. Their enemies are gonna besiege their cities until the people are reduced to cannibalism,

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Deuteronomy 28, 52 through 53. Even their sons and daughters are gonna be taken from them, sold into slavery while they stand by powerless to stop it,

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Deuteronomy 28, 32 and 41. Among all the covenants in Scripture, obeying and disobeying this one comes with the most specific list of blessings, but also the most dire and biting curses if they disobey.

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And for their part, Israel knew the terms. God clearly communicated it to the first generation in Leviticus 26 and to the new generation in Deuteronomy 28.

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They heard all of it with their own ears and they said to God, all of that, that you have spoken, we will do,

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Exodus 24, 7. They accepted the terms of the covenant and they committed themselves to the stipulations, even if those bitter cursing should be poured out upon them by God.

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This is the active covenant, which ensured that that entire generation died in the wilderness for their faithlessness.

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And it was the covenant that the younger generation renewed in the plains of Moab before they entered the promised land, pledging undying loyalty once more to God, Deuteronomy 29, 1 and Deuteronomy 29, 10 through 15.

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And they didn't just pledge that they were gonna be obedient to the stipulations, they pledged that the consequences of the covenant would be poured out on them and on their children's children if they were disobedient.

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When the blood of that covenant was sprinkled upon all of the people of Mount Sinai, it was a life and death symbol of the gravity of this agreement.

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It was a solemn binding covenant between them and God, making the blessings and the cursings real and inescapable.

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Exodus 24, 8. If you're a Jew in the ancient world, this covenant was your life.

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This covenant was your oxygen. More than the covenant with Abraham, Noah and Adam, which applied to everyone on earth, this covenant was peculiar to the

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Jewish people and it became entwined in their identity as a nation, but not in the way that it should have, which would have led them to obedience.

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Because as we're going to see in this episode, all throughout their history, they broke the covenant again and again and again.

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They chased after idols. They despised God's law. They hardened their hearts against the prophets that he sent to call them back.

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And for many centuries, God chose to be patient with them, not giving them the curses that their behavior wholeheartedly deserved.

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And that leads to our second section, which is part two.

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They provoked God to curse them. Now, I need to give a warning here.

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And I don't really like to do this because the Bible is what

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I'm gonna be quoting, but the passages that I'm gonna be quoting can be a little bit graphic in nature when it's talking about Israel's whoring and her adulteries, especially those with Judah and Ezekiel, particularly.

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So I am giving a little bit of a disclaimer here that if you're a parent and if you're listening to this with a child, listen to it beforehand and determine whether or not this section is appropriate for little ears.

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I totally understand. If not, I do wanna give you that disclaimer because the evidence against Judah and Israel is disturbing and gross, but it's what the

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Bible says. And I wanna be faithful to tell you what the Bible says. So with that.

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Section one, the Northern Kingdom. Israel's history reads like a daytime soap opera where immorality and raunchy scandals and infidelity are occurring in almost every frame.

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Yet by the sheer grace of God, Israel and Judah were spared from quickly tasting the bitter pill of cursing that their behavior so desperately deserved.

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While being extremely patient with them, God allowed Israel and Judah to go decades and centuries before pouring out his fury upon her.

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This kindness from God, which should have led her to repentance, seemed to embolden her to even more brazen and lurid crimes against her maker and her husband.

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The prophets, with tongues that ablaze from the word of God, described her actions.

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I'm talking about Israel, the Northern 10 tribes, as nothing less than spiritual prostitution, a whoring after foreign gods and alliances that provoke the fury of God, Ezekiel 16, 15 through 34 and Hosea 4, 12 through 13.

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Like a faithless spouse, Israel turned her back on the God who rescued her from Egypt and betrothed her at Mount Sinai, defiling herself with ongoing displays of grotesque infidelity.

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The Northern 10 tribes that are collectively called Ephraim or Israel and the prophets were the first to feel the crushing weight of the

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Mosaic curses being poured out upon them. Their idolatry and their flagrant rebellion caused

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God's patience to expire, causing him to enact the total weight of the curses that we read about in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.

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They were poured out upon the 10 Northern tribes in 722 BC. It was the

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Assyrian empire that was used like an instrument of God's wrath, like a loaded

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Colt 45 that put all 10 of the Northern tribes beneath the ground, 2

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Kings 17, 6 through 23. It was the curses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that came to brutal fulfillment in the fall of Samaria.

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Their cities were burned and their walls were laid in ruins, their women were raped, their children were clubbed to death or enslaved and families that survived were broken apart, husbands separated from their wives and moved to different parts of the empire so that they would have to remarry and so that they would have to have children with other races so that the 10

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Northern tribes were genetically genocided. This once blessed people who drew their biological lineage from Abraham was now ethnically eliminated from the face of the earth, bearing the full shame of the covenant divorce that was issued to her for covenant infidelity.

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That's the covenant curse. It was poured out in 722 by God who used

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Assyria as his hammer. Section two, the

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Southern kingdom. Now Judah, the Southern kingdom, which was Judah and Benjamin, observed the fate of her sister from the next nation over and should have been left trembling with fear and repenting to God so that the same thing did not happen to her.

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But instead of repenting, she went down the same path of wickedness. She doubled down her rebellion like her older sister

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Israel had done before, but her crimes did not go unnoticed.

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The prophets called her out with graphic and shocking imagery, depicting her sins in terms that deeply offend our modern sensibility.

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And parents, by the way, this is the section. Ezekiel 16 records one of the most devastating and grotesque indictments against Judah that's recorded in the

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Bible. In this passage, God metaphorically recounts how he adorned her with beauty, he lavished her with gold and jewels, and silver, and elevated her to a place of absolute royalty,

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Ezekiel 16, 10 through 14. Yet, the passage describes that she took the gifts of God and she prostituted herself with them in the most inexcusable ways,

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Ezekiel 16, 15 through 19. God even says, and this of course is metaphorical, this is not actual, this is metaphor, but God says this, that Judah took the gold and silver that God made and she melted it down and she fashioned it in the shape of a penis -like

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God and then she violated herself with it shamelessly. That's what

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God said about Judah, showing that she demonstrated a level of sadistic, demonic depravity that was horrifying,

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Ezekiel 16, 17. God accuses her of lusting after foreign peoples and their gods because God says they were hung like mules and horses.

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That's Ezekiel 23, 20, saying that they have biological parts, anatomy, that's as big as horses, which was a symbol of her carnality, and her lewdness, and her spiritual harlotries,

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Ezekiel 16, 17 through 25. Now, I get that these words and phrases are shocking and I also get that you're probably not gonna hear a sermon on Sunday about these passages, but they are part of the revelation that God gave to us and the reason that they're so shocking is to show us how shocking it was that Judah, who was in covenant with God, was playing the whore and betraying a pure love for Yahweh with the fertility cults of the ancient nations, such as Baal and Asherah.

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The language is intentionally provocative, as if to say that Judah used the blessings that God gave her to create objects for her own spiritual self -destruction.

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As the title of this section suggests, she was provoking God. She was like a child walking up to a bear, a sleeping grizzly bear, slapping it in the face and thinking that it was not gonna wake up.

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She was begging for God to put her under the curse and her depravity deepens throughout the prophets.

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She builds shrines on every hill, under every green tree. She transforms these places into brothels of false worship,

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Jeremiah 2, 20. Ezekiel doesn't mince words either. He describes Judah as spreading her legs open to every passing nation and every idol, seeking alliances and pleasure in her idolatry, that she's desecrating the covenant between her and God with these lewd licentious acts,

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Ezekiel 16, 25. Ezekiel even tells us that she wasn't acting in desperation.

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She wasn't acting like a woman who was bereaved that her husband wasn't giving her any affection.

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No, she was acting as a whore who had an insatiable lust for sin and an open rebellion against her husband,

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God, who had been faithful to her all along. Ezekiel even tells us that the surrounding pagan nations were so disgusted by her that they were taken to the point of vomit,

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Ezekiel 16, 27. And it's important to remember that it was these nations who invented the demonic sex religions.

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They were the ones who were horrified at the zenith of her depravity.

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And it gets even worse. At the apex of Judah's downfall, she was sacrificing the fruit of her own womb, her children,

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God's children, on the altar of her demonic lovers.

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Ezekiel's words seethe with a righteous kind of anger when he cries out, you, Judah, have slaughtered my children and you have offered them up to idols by making them pass through the fire,

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Ezekiel 16, 21. The grotesque act of child sacrifice was born out of a frenzied devotion to demons, revealed the depths of Judah's spiritual adultery.

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She had gone to the point to where you can barely understand how God was gracious to her.

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To say that God had every reason to destroy her would have been an understatement of understatements.

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The behavior that we're seeing was not met by an eminent, well -aimed meteorite from Yahweh, even though she deserved it.

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God kept loving her patiently and faithfully, even as she continued in her adulteries.

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Prophet after prophet was sent to her by God. Men like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the 12 minor prophets and countless unnamed heralds who were sent thundering

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God's case against her, but she remained unmoved. And here's something critical that you need to understand.

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The prophets were not just fiery street preachers or moody messengers. They were

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God's covenant lawyers. They were his divine prosecutors and attorneys.

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They were bringing the case against Judah. They were suing her based off the terms of the covenant of Moses and showing her where she was breaking covenant.

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They are basically coming to her with a lawsuit and saying, if you don't make this right, then the terms and the conditions of curses are gonna be poured out on you.

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Like courtroom heralds, they laid out the damning case and they pointed directly at the covenant terms that their ancestors had solemnly sworn to upheld and they didn't mince any words about the consequences of Israel's rebellion.

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And yet Judah, like her wayward sister Israel, hardened her heart.

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She plugged her ears and she turned from the prophet's warning with contempt.

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She silenced them with swords. She sent them away in chains. And those prophets that survived were left to weep bitterly over her hatred of God.

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Isaiah mourns with piercing clarity when he says, how the faithful city has become a harlot.

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She who is full of justice. Isaiah 121, Jeremiah, you can imagine with tears streaming down his face, said this, you have played the harlot with many lovers and yet you turned to me as if Judah could mask her covenant infidelity with hollow repentance.

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Jeremiah 3, 1. The prophet's lament weren't just sorrowful, they were cries, they were tears from almighty

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God who's pleading with her to return before it was too late. And yet, after centuries of prophetic lawsuits and warnings, after an exile, where they were ripped out of their home and everything was taken away from them, after all of that,

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Judah's sin continued and it reached a boiling point and God's patience finally ran out.

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God sent one final prophet in the Old Testament whose name is Malachi. And his name means my messenger, which means he's bringing the message of God.

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And he announced that because of her lack of repentance, the great and terrible day of the

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Lord was coming upon her. Malachi 4, 1 through 6. This is gonna be a day of darkness and not light, of doom and deep darkness.

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This day wasn't gonna be a distant event at the end of human history, as some suggest. This is gonna be a day where God himself comes and visits his temple, burning the rebels like chaff, purifying his people with a flame like gold, which is exactly what

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Jesus does. Jesus is the one who comes to his temple and sets it on fire because of its crimes.

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But in that fire, he purifies his people, which is what Malachi was prophesying. But before that occurred,

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John the Baptist, who was the prophesied Elijah from the book of Malachi, John the Baptist had to come.

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He was the final covenant lawyer. He was the final one who was gonna bring a lawsuit against the people for their failure to repent and for their hatred of God.

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And he is the one who echoed all the former prophecies of old.

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He's the one who said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, Matthew. Matthew 3, 2, but just like their forefathers and foremothers, the

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Jews rejected him. They dismissed his warnings. They despised his call for repentance and their rejection sealed their fate because after the final covenant lawyer had come, now it was time for the judge to appear.

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The long suffering and patient judge was now coming just like Malachi predicted, not as a gentle shepherd, but as a judge who was bringing a fiery pronouncement of condemnation.

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The covenant curses were now going to fall upon them with full and terrifying clarity. The city was gonna burn.

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The temple was gonna crumble. The people who had shouted his blood be on us and our children were gonna taste the ferocity of God's wrath.

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They were gonna drink it down to the bitter dregs. And what we've seen is that Israel and Judah had provoked

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God repeatedly. She had spat in his face. She had dared him to enact the covenant curses that he sanctioned upon her.

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He sent her one prophet after another, after another to call her to repentance. And as the

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Old Testament drew to a close, God sent one final prophet, Malachi, to his apathetic people.

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They still didn't listen. And Malachi tells them that an Elijah figure is coming who's gonna prepare the way for the

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Lord and the Lord who is coming is going to bring them to bitter and unavoidable judgment.

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Like a hurricane that was ready to make landfall, her judge, the second member of the

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Trinity, had come to enact the covenant curses against her, which means that God was going to bring the

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Jews of that first century under the torrent of covenant curses.

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And in this sense, the coming of Christ should be seen as both salvation for the people of God and as judgment upon the rebels, which leads us to our next section, which is part three,

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Jesus came to curse her. In the modern evangelical church, we like to think of Jesus's coming as this joyful event.

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And in one sense, it absolutely is. He came to this world to save sinners for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

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And he came to bring that life, that hope and that redemption and praise God for that, because that's the faith and the life in which we now stand.

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But there's a part of this story that we often miss. There's another side of the story that we sometimes will hopscotch through the gospels, skipping ahead to the cross and imagining that the only reason that Jesus did that, the only reason that awful gory symbol of brutality stands aloft of Calvary's Hill is that Jesus came to save sinners, save his friends.

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And it's true, but that's not the only reason that he hung upon that cross.

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He didn't just come to save his friends. He also came as a judge to bring his enemies into condemnation.

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He came not just to bring peace, but also to bring the sword. The fire that Malachi spoke of, the fire that had a twofold purpose, it was going to burn the chaff like a furnace and it was gonna reduce the arrogant and evildoers to nothing but smoldering ash.

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That fire came to both purify God's people and set on fire his enemies.

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Jesus' coming had a twofold purpose. The fire was for his people to purify them and the fire was for the pagans.

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And guess what? It wasn't for the pagan Romans. It wasn't for the pagan

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Mongols. That fire that was prophesied in the book of Malachi was for the pagan

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Jews. I want you to think about that. John tells us that he came to his own, the

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Jews. He came to those who were his, but they did not receive him,

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John 1 11. The people who had every advantage, they had the prophets, the promises, the covenants, the writings of scripture.

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They're the ones that rejected him. It was Jesus who performed miracles in their midst.

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You remember when he performed miracles in Chorazin and Bethsaida and Capernaum. These were

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Jewish cities, but what did they do? Nothing. They didn't repent.

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They didn't turn. They watched him healing people, rising people from the dead, and they did nothing.

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That is precisely why he rebukes them by saying that it's gonna be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon and Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for you,

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Matthew 11, 20 -24. Jesus is saying that when judgment comes, hell's gonna be a little hotter for you than Tyre and Sidon.

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Now, I want you to notice something here, that the Jews did not want to kill

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Jesus until he started talking about God's blessings flowing to the Gentiles.

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Luke 4, 16 -30. That's why they tried to kill him. That's what got their blood boiling so violently.

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It was the thought that a dirty Gentile was going to inherit the blessings of the covenant of Moses and the covenant of Abraham, which they believed only belonged to the

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Jews. See, in the Jewish mind, they were the superior race.

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They were biding their time under the thumb of Rome until God elevated them up as master over all the nations so that everyone else on earth would be in slavery to them.

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That was the vision of Jewish eschatological supremacy that they were waiting for a

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Messiah to come and enact. We know that the Jews of the first century were desperately racist.

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They hated the Samaritans, so much so that they would not even walk through their territory. They would walk hours out of their way to go around Samaria.

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They hated the Gentiles. There was signs that were up in the temple courtyard that the Gentiles could not come past a certain point or they would be executed because they were not like the

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Jews. You remember that by the time Jesus shows up at the temple, that the court of the

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Gentiles, the one place on earth, the one place in Jerusalem where the Gentiles could come and worship

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God, they filled it with barnyard animals that defecated all over the streets because that's what they thought about the

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Gentiles worshiping God. They were as dirty and as gross as the animals that were defecating on the sidewalk.

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That is the Jewish view in the first century of the nations.

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This great people that was supposed to be a light to the nations, a people whose covenant blessings was supposed to go out to the nations, a people whose

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King Solomon entertained the nations had become a people who hated the nations.

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So when Jesus told them to repent, they yawned at him. When he called them to come and enter into the kingdom, they barely batted an eye.

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But when he announced to them that the covenant blessings of God were coming to the

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Gentiles, they were ready to murder him. This deep seated pride and a sense of racial superiority blinded them to the very heart of the scriptures that were so fiercely for the orphan and the sojourner and the widow.

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The covenant that they white knuckled and guarded as being their roadmap to blessings.

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They forgot that in the Abrahamic covenant, it was that God is gonna bless all the nations through Abraham's seed, not just them.

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But instead of humbling themselves, instead of getting down on their knees and saying that they're sorry to God for their crimes, they turned in anger against him who came to save the world.

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Their rejection of Jesus was not ignorance. It was an active hatred for everything

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Christ stood for. He critiqued them and yet he saved a

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Samaritan village. That provoked their fury and their ire.

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And it exposed their hypocrisy when they claim to have this sort of allegiance and a devotion to Moses.

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Jesus said, if you believed Moses, then you would believe me because he wrote about me, John 5 46.

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They didn't just reject him, they hated him. And Jesus warned them, unless you believe that I am he, then you will die in your sins,

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John 8 24. Jesus did not come to plead with them or negotiate terms for their peaceful surrender.

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He came as their covenant judge, prosecuting their rebellion with the full evidence of their covenant betrayal before him.

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The prophets over hundreds of years had been prosecuting this case. Jesus now had the terms in front of him.

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And as judge, he cited their prophets against them. And he cited how it was time for their judgment.

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For instance, he quoted Isaiah saying, you hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah say about you that this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,

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Matthew 15 17 through nine. This was exhibit A. Then he evoked Jeremiah to condemn the corruption of the worship saying that, is it not written that my house is called a house of prayer for all the nations?

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And yet you've made it a den of robbers, Mark 11 17, referencing

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Jeremiah 7 11, which is exhibit B. The most damning indictment in the trial came when the judge himself,

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Jesus declared that you are of your father, the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.

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He was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, John 8 44.

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Jesus was announcing an open court that the paternity results had come in and the

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Jews of that first century were not children of God, but they were instead the bastard children of hell.

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And even more than that, because of their covenant rebellion, God was intentionally blinding them, deliberately confusing them and keeping them from repentance.

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God was holding them from repentance. They had reached a point of no return. They had gone too far and they no longer could turn back.

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They had arrived at a place where God would not even allow that hellish generation to turn from their wicked ways and be saved, which is an astounding thing to think about as a

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Christian, because we think everybody has hope, not this generation.

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John 12 40, as he's quoting Isaiah 6 9 through 10 says this, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart so that they would not see and would not perceive with their heart and be converted and I heal them.

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This is covenant cursing language. God was actively hardening their heart, just like he hardened the heart of the

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Egyptian Pharaoh of old, so that in the same way that that slimy tyrant had no ability to soften his own heart and to let the people of Israel go and that kind of madness and jealousy propelled him towards his demise in the same way this generation of Jews were being hardened actively by God so that they were on an inevitable collision course with Rome in AD 70.

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Jesus tells us that he spoke to them in parables, not to reveal the truth to them and not to break concepts down for them into such simple stories that they'd make sure that they understood it.

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No, he says that he tells them parables to hide the truth from them, so that they could not repent, so that they would not turn and so that they would not be saved.

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Matthew 13, 13 through 15. To you, he told his disciples, it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to them, it has not been granted.

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Matthew 13, 11. The kingdom of God and its mysteries were not granted to them.

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What Jesus is saying is clear. Even if it strikes against our evangelical sensibilities, he is not saying,

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I came to save everyone. He is saying that I most certainly did not. He's saying,

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I came as a righteous judge to ensure that my people would be delivered and that my enemies would be condemned.

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And Jesus wasn't just the stumbling block to that generation of Jews or the stone that they rejected.

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He was both of those things, but he was the righteous judge who came out of his heavenly chambers where he had been deliberating for 400 years since Malachi.

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And he stepped into the courtroom of Judah to read off the list of her indictments, which were a mile long.

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And here are just a few of them. Jesus indicted them for giving God lip service instead of covenant faithfulness.

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Matthew 15, seven through nine. He indicted them for giving outward appearances of religion while internally they were whitewashed tombs.

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Matthew 23, 25 through 27. He condemned them for being blind guides. Matthew 23, 16.

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And he told them that their blindness was why he was gonna be delivering them over to a guilty verdict.

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John 9, 39. He not only called them sons of Lucifer, but in open court, he said that their disciples were becoming twice the sons of hell as they are.

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Matthew 23, 15. Which meant that their cursed condition was infectious and that it was spreading to another generation.

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For their crimes, he promised that they were gonna die in their sins. John 8, 24. Because they were a wicked and adulterous generation.

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Matthew 16, four. And that they were going to not be able to follow him where he goes, which is to heaven.

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John 8, 21. Jesus further indicted them for their rejection of the prophets saying, woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets and it was your fathers who killed them.

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Luke 11, 47. He charged them with bearing the guilt of their ancestors' bloodshed, saying that upon you is gonna fall all of the guilt of righteous blood that was shed on earth.

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From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the columns of the temple.

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Matthew 23, 35. He condemned their corruption of worship.

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He accused them of turning his house into a den of robbers instead of a house of prayer.

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Mark 11, 17. He rebuked their greed that was masked as piety, saying that they were lovers of money.

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Luke 16, 14 through 15. And that they were the ones who devoured widows' houses in their insatiable greed.

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Matthew 23, 14. To the Pharisees who knew the heart of God for the widow and for the orphan and for the sojourner,

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Jesus promised that they were gonna receive a terrifying condemnation.

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He also exposed their unfaithfulness to the covenant. He said, why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your traditions?

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He's saying that their traditions, they elevated above covenant faithfulness, and because of that, they were gonna inherit the curses.

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He cursed their fruitlessness, saying the kingdom of God is gonna be ripped away from you and given to a people who produce its fruit.

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Matthew 21, 43. He reenacted their curse the morning before Matthew 23 when he cursed this fig tree.

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That was a symbol of what was gonna happen to Jerusalem. The fig tree that offered him no fruit withered and died, just like the city that offered him no fruit was going to wither and die.

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And he mocked them in Jerusalem in Matthew 22 as already being and already belonging to Caesar.

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Matthew 22, 22. Did you catch what I just said there? You see, they wanted to argue with Jesus about the efficacy of paying taxes to a pagan empire.

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And Jesus reminded them that whatever belongs into Caesar, whatever has

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Caesar's imprint upon it should be rendered back to him. Well, ironically, the city was rendered back to Caesar in just a single generation, showing that it was the

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Jews who did not belong to their covenant God, but had Caesar's imprint all over them.

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And they were given back to him with terrifying ferocity. Perhaps the most damning indictment was

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Jesus warning them about a sin that could not be forgiven. What we call today as the blasphemy of the

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Holy Spirit, Matthew 12, 31, it was the Jews that committed that sin. According to Jesus's own definition of blasphemy against the

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Holy Spirit is when you attribute the work of God to the work of devils. That's what blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is.

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It's not something that you or I have done. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is attributing the good work of Jesus to the power of Beelzebub.

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And in their spiritual blindness, they did this. They attributed the beauty and the purity of the

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Holy Spirit's power that was being manifested in the miracles of Christ to the work of unclean demons.

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And for that, Jesus declared to the Jews that were standing in front of him that they had committed an action that was so heinous and so vile that they would never be forgiven.

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They were the ones who were the walking damned, and they had no hope of rescue.

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And if that sin shivers down your spine, then thank God right now for his grace that is holding you and is keeping you from this kind of madness and blindness and hardness of heart that we are seeing in the first century

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Jews. God had removed his grace from them, and they became monsters.

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The same is true for us if God ever removed his grace from us. Now, as a part of that blindness that had overtaken them,

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Jesus confirmed that they could not understand his message. He said, to you, to the disciples, it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them, it has not been granted, so that while seeing, they do not see, and while hearing, they do not understand.

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Matthew 13, 11 through 13. Jesus references to Isaiah here as showing how

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God is actively keeping the Jews from repentance. He is stopping them from being able to repent.

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Jesus is using words that is condemning that generation and telling them that they have no hope of salvation.

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Jesus says that he has blinded their eyes, he has hardened their heart so that they would not see with their eyes, would not perceive with their heart, would not be converted so that I will not heal them.

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John 12, 40. The picture of what was happening in that first century is starting to gain 8K resolution.

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Jesus did not come to save those Jews. Let me just be clear here. He did, as a matter of historical fact, save many

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Jews. He saved many priests, many Levites, many scribes, many Pharisees like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and many in the population of Jerusalem, just like those who were saved at Pentecost and beyond, which constituted a great revival in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the

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Jewish diaspora. There was a lot of people who got saved. But what I'm saying is that the majority of the

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Jews did not turn, did not repent, and they came under the weight of the covenant curses of old that held them underwater like rip currents, pulling them down to their suffocation.

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In his final act as covenant judge, on the last moments of his life,

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Jesus chided them for touting Moses as their father and as their covenant leader.

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That same Moses, Jesus said, had become their greatest accuser. And he doesn't mean that Moses was gonna show up in the flesh and wag his finger at them.

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No, he meant that the covenant, that Moses was an administrative head over the

01:05:11

Mosaic covenant, that covenant, that entire covenant was standing in judgment against them, standing in condemnation against them because they violated it, they disobeyed it, they were unfaithful to its terms.

01:05:29

And because of that, in Matthew 23, the judge finally, completely, and fully pronounces the verdict.

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You are guilty. These are the final words that Jesus speaks to the

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Jews of Jerusalem. This is what he says. Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes.

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Some of them you will kill and crucify. And some of them you're gonna scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of righteous

01:06:05

Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.

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Truly, I say to you, all these things will come on this generation.

01:06:16

Matthew 23, 34 through 36. As the high holy judge of heaven,

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Jesus announced to the entire city of Jerusalem that all of God's covenant fury and his covenant woes were gonna fall on them.

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He told them directly that they were gonna rebel against this indictment.

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They were gonna persecute, they were gonna maim, and they were gonna murder his church for 40 years while they were attempting some sort of half -hearted, half -baked, self -righteous appeal program to reverse the judgment that the judge had already rendered.

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But the execution date was already set. Jesus set the lynching.

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He set the guillotine that was gonna gobble up their heads on a fixed date of AD 70, 40 years after he spoke those words in Matthew 23.

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And with paralyzing accuracy, that is precisely what occurred. 40 years after these events, the

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Jews killed and persecuted the church. They ran them out of city to city.

01:07:21

They brought them into their synagogues and tortured them. And just like Jesus said, that after that 40 -year period of jealousy and madness, that Jerusalem was gonna be reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble and ash,

01:07:34

Matthew 24, 34. He didn't come to negotiate terms. He came as judge.

01:07:41

And in the destruction of Jerusalem, the judgment was rendered in full. Part four, the curse and its trifold state.

01:07:52

Now, before we continue, we need to talk about the nature of this curse, because like most things in biblical theology, when something is repeated three times, which we see of the curse in the

01:08:01

New Testament, well, then it moves outside of the realm of speculation and into the realm of certainty.

01:08:07

For centuries, Judah had lived on a knife's edge of God's patience. Prophets warned her, her covenants bound her, her exile disciplined her, and yet with every mercy, her defiance grew sharper, her rebellion grew bolder, and her harlotries grew more disgusting.

01:08:23

And as we've already noticed, God's patience was worn thin and finally exhausted.

01:08:29

Judah's sins, like Sodom, like Gomorrah, like Tyre, like Sidon, had put her in the crosshairs of God.

01:08:37

Their sins had wafted their way up to heaven, and now the destroyer had come.

01:08:44

So for just a few moments, I wanna talk about what kind of curses fell upon Judah.

01:08:51

And what we're going to see here is that there were three. Two of them have already been poured out in full, and one of them remains, so that the

01:09:01

Jews today are under a curse. But let me get to that in just a moment. To start, we're gonna go with curse, the

01:09:08

Deuteronomic woe. Now, the first curse that Judah came under is the one that we've already spent the most time on.

01:09:15

She was under the law of Moses, under the covenant of Sinai, and for 1 ,500 years of infidelity, she was provoking

01:09:23

God to pour out the covenant curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. So that when the people of old said, all that the

01:09:29

Lord has said, we will do, Exodus 24, 7, they were binding themselves and all of their future descendants to those blessings and to those curses, which is why when

01:09:37

Jesus says that all of God's wrath and his fury is gonna be poured out on that generation in Matthew 23, he is saying that the long overdue curses for breaking the covenant of Moses were gonna be poured out on that generation.

01:09:51

That generation was gonna be left holding the covenant hot potato and they were going to be eradicated.

01:09:58

And within a single generation, those curses were poured out on Jerusalem, just like Jesus said.

01:10:04

So that's the first curse that we've talked about more than any. So I'm gonna move on now to curse two, a self -imposed malediction.

01:10:14

Now, the second curse that Judah came under was the self -inflicted woe. It was like turning the gun of God's covenant fury on herself and shooting herself in the face.

01:10:25

This was a curse that was spoken by the Jewish leaders at the crucifixion of Jesus, calling down curses upon herself.

01:10:34

You remember, as Pilate was washing his hands of the blood of Jesus saying,

01:10:39

I'm not culpable, which is rich in covenant imagery, the Jewish leaders and the mob that was standing there cried out foolishly to Pilate, his blood is gonna be on us and our children,

01:10:53

Matthew 27, 25. With these words, they evoked a devastating maledictory curse upon themselves that echoes in the covenant language of Sinai.

01:11:07

Like their ancestors in Egypt who said that we want God's, we want this blood, we want this sacrificial blood on us and our children,

01:11:15

Exodus 24, eight. The children of Israel said, we want that blood on us because we wanna be covered for our sins.

01:11:20

But this is similar to what the Jews said in the first century. But instead of saying we want this sacrificial blood to be on us and our children, they said we want his murdered blood to be on us and our children, which takes this outside of sacrificial efficacy and brings it into the realm of awful curse.

01:11:44

As Christians, we want the blood of Jesus to be on us and our children because Jesus's blood is what cleanses us from our sins.

01:11:53

But these Jews, what they meant when they said his blood be on us and our children is that they wanted to kill him so badly that they wanted the guilt of his blood.

01:12:05

To fall on them and their children, which is exactly what happened. The same judge who just pronounced covenant curses from Deuteronomy on them in Matthew 23 was now standing there watching them calling curses down upon themselves in Matthew 27.

01:12:23

They were confirming his righteous judgment and they were sealing their own fate.

01:12:29

Listen, as God in the flesh, Jesus could have stopped this. We have to remember he's

01:12:35

God. He could have exerted divine power. He could have kept them from cursing themselves.

01:12:40

He could have called upon the Holy Spirit to soften their hearts and to keep them from doing this. But he doesn't.

01:12:47

He doesn't stop them in their fit of madness. At this moment, the triune

01:12:53

God, the second member of that Trinity is standing there right in front of them, watching them curse themselves.

01:13:03

And he is purposefully withdrawing his grace, a grace that could have spared them, a grace that could have prompted them to repent.

01:13:14

But now as Jesus is quiet and silent, he is allowing them to go down the road of curses.

01:13:22

His job was to bring them under the covenant curses of Yahweh and that is what he did.

01:13:28

In their frenzy and in their stupor, they sealed their fate.

01:13:34

The curses that they invoked upon themselves were poured out on them and in their children in the destruction of everything they held dear, leaving no doubt that this is exactly what

01:13:46

Jesus intended. That's the second curse. Curse three, the curse of partial hardness and jealousy.

01:13:57

Now the third and final curse, in addition to the deuteronomic curses and the self -inflicted curses that the

01:14:02

Jews had called upon themselves, there was a third curse that was leveled upon the Jews that was maybe the most devastating.

01:14:10

Unlike the first two, which drove them to a kind of temporary madness that was going to ensure, like Pharaoh, they were gonna be destroyed, this final curse was different.

01:14:20

This curse would not have a terminus date like the other two. The other two were a 40 -year curse.

01:14:26

It was a curse on them and their children, that's it. This curse was going to affect all surviving

01:14:32

Jews who escaped the destruction of Jerusalem. That all the surviving Jews that lived in Diaspora throughout the

01:14:38

Roman world, this is going to affect all of the ones who survived the Jewish war and have made their way down through history, even unto us.

01:14:48

This group was placed under a permanent and an indefinite curse that has attached itself to the

01:14:55

Jewish people and has persisted upon their ranks now for 2 ,000 years.

01:15:01

And Paul describes this curse in Romans 11. He calls it a spirit of stupor, where the eyes of the

01:15:09

Jews, the spiritual eyes, have become incapable of seeing the truth of God and that their ears have become unable to hear the truth of God, Romans 11, eight.

01:15:19

Paul says that this is a partial hardening. Paul tells us that it's not arbitrary, that it's

01:15:24

God's judgment, that it's a persistent blindness that has come upon the Jews for rejecting

01:15:30

Christ and it's going to linger with them until God is ready to lift it, which is going to cause the

01:15:36

Jews to repent and turn to Jesus. How is all of this going to happen?

01:15:41

Well, Paul tells us exactly how the Jews are going to come to repentance. Paul tells us that the purpose of this curse, this lingering, lasting, 2 ,000 -year -old curse, the purpose of it is that they would be hardened and that they would be provoked to jealousy.

01:16:00

And that idea was not new at all. God announced in the Mosaic Covenant, one of the consequences for their rebellion was

01:16:08

He was going to provoke them to jealousy with the nations. In Deuteronomy 32, 31, God warned

01:16:14

Israel that if she disobeyed, that if she broke the covenant with Him, that He was going to make her jealous with the nations that He was going to save in spite of them.

01:16:26

He said, I will make them jealous with those who are naughty people. I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation, which if you remember when

01:16:36

Paul says in Romans 11, by their transgression, the breaking of the covenant, that salvation has come to the

01:16:44

Gentiles to make them jealous, what Paul is saying is that God is purposefully saving the world to make

01:16:53

Israel jealous. He is saving the world because of the disobedience of the

01:17:00

Jews has opened up the door for the Gentiles to enter into these covenant blessings of God. And until Israel has become jealous enough, until her jealousy has become so fierce and so tumultuous that she will actually turn and see her need for repentance, she will not come.

01:17:20

And here's what we as Christians need to understand about this. When Paul says that we are fools for Christ, 1

01:17:28

Corinthians 4, 10, he's saying that we are the foolish nation that God is saving to make the Jews jealous.

01:17:34

We are the foolish nation that was prophesied in the Torah that is chosen by God to provoke the jealousy of the

01:17:40

Jews. And for that reason, I want you to think about this as Christians, our mission is not just to spread the gospel to the

01:17:49

Gentiles. Yes, it is. And the whole world is gonna come under the kingdom of Christ. Amen. But another aspect of our ministry, according to Romans 11, is that we are called to live in such a way as we build

01:18:05

Jesus's kingdom, as we build up Christendom, we are to live in such a way that the

01:18:11

Jews would look at us and that they would see how we are prospering and blessed and that they would be provoked to a furious kind of jealousy that would lead to their repentance.

01:18:23

This is why the church was never called to play footsie with the Jews. This is why modern day dispensationalists who honor the

01:18:32

Jews as God's chosen people, they're not God's chosen people. They're covenantally cut out of the olive tree.

01:18:40

They're not as chosen people anymore. The chosen people of God is the Israel of God who've been chosen according to the grace of Christ and brought into the kingdom by his sacrifice and crucifixion on the cross.

01:18:51

The chosen people of God are the Christians, the Israel of God. By communicating that the

01:19:00

Jews are still in a place of honor, covenantally speaking, that they are still the chosen people, we are damning them to hell with cheers and smiles and pats on the back.

01:19:11

They are lost and they are under a curse. They need Jesus. The only thing that is gonna lift this partial hardening that God has placed upon them, that Paul tells us about in Romans 11, is to increase their jealousy and not to pat them on the back and say that they are the chosen people of God.

01:19:32

You give them over to hell and you give them no reason to repent when you say that. We are supposed to provoke the

01:19:40

Jews to jealousy, as Paul commands. We are to stop, like dispensationalists, staring at the clouds and lamenting the sorry state of the world and praying that a third temple will be rebuilt so that the

01:19:52

Jews can have their temple. We are supposed to be building a robust Christian Christendom that is marked by excellence, by Jesus's power, dominion, and his prosperity on earth as it is in heaven, to provoke the

01:20:06

Jews to bitter jealousy so that they will, instead of running after condemnation, they will run after Christ.

01:20:14

We're supposed to be building a kingdom that makes them want to repent, that makes them want to leave their sins and turn to Christ.

01:20:25

The Jews as a people carry a deep sense of pride that is rooted in their understanding of the prophets that they are the chosen superior race that's gonna be lifted above all other nations, that has propelled them into leadership across different sectors like banking and entertainment and government and every other sector of influence, their rabbis, their

01:20:49

Mishnah, their Talmud, all reinforce this identity that they are to take over the world, and they have done that.

01:20:56

They have acted out their eschatology. Like, they are a prodigious people. They are hardworking people.

01:21:02

There are people who find a way to scratch and claw their way to the top of almost every industry.

01:21:10

And there's something admirable in that. And there's something incredible that they are actually living out their own eschatology.

01:21:18

If they believe they're supposed to take over the world, they're trying. But what

01:21:23

Paul is saying is that all of that is fruitless and pointless if they don't have

01:21:28

Christ. If they don't have Christ, it doesn't matter if they're the CEO of a record company. It doesn't mean, it doesn't matter if they're a famous actor or a powerful politician.

01:21:38

It doesn't matter if they have lots of money from banks and lending and all.

01:21:44

It doesn't matter. What the Jews need more than anything is not success in the world.

01:21:50

What they need is Christ. And that's true for everybody. Until they're humbled to the point of misery, they're not gonna see their need for Jesus.

01:21:59

Until they're shown that they really are sick, they're gonna believe that they're well. The church has often adopted a kind of dispensational approach to kingdom building that shows that our kingdom is mediocre and irrelevant.

01:22:16

I mean, what are we actually offering to the nations and to the Jews specifically that would ever make them jealous?

01:22:24

Why haven't we taken Paul seriously here? The Jews are under a hardening that has provoked them to jealousy until God lifts it and they repent.

01:22:34

Why don't we give them something to be jealous about? Why don't we give them something wholly good and true and beautiful that shows them the efficacy and the power of who

01:22:46

Christ is? Instead of the pitiful state of the church and all of its division and brokenness that is laid right at the foot of dispensationalism, that, my friends, hardly inspires jealousy.

01:22:58

It inspires pity. Imagine if the church repented. Imagine if men took up their tools again and got to work.

01:23:06

Imagine if Christians started building businesses and building cathedrals and taking over parts of the government and then eventually the entire government or revitalizing healthcare or eliminating pornography or doing the kinds of things that would make the nations look at us like the

01:23:24

Queen of Sheba looked at the halls of Solomon and see that God is truly in this place.

01:23:30

That is a vision worthy of jealousy, a church that is embodying the mission of Christ to the world.

01:23:41

That, in my opinion, is how to truly love the Jews, not to placate them, not to give them alliances and rockets and everything else that we currently give to the modern -day state of Israel.

01:23:55

That's not how you love the Jews. You love the Jews by giving them a compelling vision of Jesus Christ so that in their hardness they will be broken and so that in their jealousy they will be provoked to true love.

01:24:10

That is how you love the Jews and pray that they will see that their

01:24:15

Messiah has already come. Now, after examining the threefold application of the curses, the question

01:24:23

I have is, is it any wonder that the first century Jews acted the way that they did?

01:24:29

They were under the curse of Deuteronomy, the curse of Leviticus, they were under the self -inflicted curse that they called upon themselves, and they were under this divine -initiated curse of jealousy.

01:24:39

Is it any wonder that they became the authors of persecution and tribulation?

01:24:45

Is it any wonder that they brought the Lipsus upon the earliest Christians as hard and as fast and as dedicated as they possibly could?

01:24:54

I don't think so at all. I don't think there's any wonder why they did that. The Deuteronomic plague of madness had overtaken them.

01:25:03

The self -maladictory curse had poisoned them. And as Paul said, they were being provoked to a kind of jealousy that fueled their persecutions all throughout the

01:25:13

Roman world. They were fueled to become the most brutal and violent persecutors of Christianity in all of human history.

01:25:23

For the amount of time and for the amount of people that they killed, on the scale that they killed, they were and still remain the greatest persecutors of Christianity per population, per capita, that has ever been.

01:25:36

And for a moment, I wanna prove this from the New Testament. I wanna prove that these three curses are playing out in the psyche of the

01:25:45

Jewish people, fueling them to anger, fueling them to madness, and fueling them to violence against the

01:25:51

Christian church, because it's everywhere. Part five, how the curses made her violent.

01:25:59

Section one, Jewish persecutions in Matthew. Now, Jesus didn't leave his disciples in the dark about the firestorm that was coming.

01:26:08

He warned them that they were gonna face rejection and hatred and violence at the hands of this cursed people.

01:26:15

These warnings don't just show up in Matthew 24, but they're littered, literally, all throughout the Gospels and through the entire

01:26:22

New Testament. For instance, take Matthew 5, 10 through 12, which is a familiar passage of Scripture that we know as the

01:26:28

Beatitudes, but there's something profound that Jesus says there, because he blesses those who are going to suffer for righteousness' sake.

01:26:36

This is what he says. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me, for in the same way, they persecuted the prophets who were before you,

01:26:50

Matthew 5, 10 through 12. Now, at first glance, this seems like a general encouragement to all

01:26:56

Christians who have ever lived, who suffer for the sake of the Gospel at the hands of irreligious jerks and moral meanies.

01:27:03

But I want you to notice who Jesus implicates here as the persecutors. He says they're the same group that killed the prophets, which means it wasn't

01:27:13

Rome, it wasn't the new atheist, it wasn't any modern group. Jesus is saying, blessed are you if you suffer at the hands of those who killed the prophets, which those who killed the prophets are the

01:27:25

Jews, the very ones who killed the prophets that Jesus accused them of in Matthew 23.

01:27:32

And it gets even more explicit than that in the book of Matthew. Matthew 10, 16 through 22 is a place where Jesus describes that he's sending his disciples out as sheep among the wolves.

01:27:42

He warns them this way, they, the Jews, will hand you over to the courts and they will flog you in their synagogues,

01:27:50

Matthew 10, 16 through 22. This isn't a warning for Christians at all times that they're gonna be persecuted in synagogues.

01:27:58

Jesus is envisioning leftist lunatics in New York City handing you over to the courts, or a weaponized

01:28:04

DOJ arresting a group of people for praying outside of an abortion mill. He's saying that they are gonna flog you, which is an ancient form of punishment that just so happened to be in Judah, and they're gonna flog you in their synagogues, which is a decisively

01:28:18

Jewish institution. Jesus is promising that his disciples were gonna face betrayal, public flogging, and trials that were orchestrated by their own people because they're, because Christians had loyalty to Christ instead of to the

01:28:35

Jews. Again, this is not primarily a warning to us. By application, anyone who suffers is blessed because of this verse, but specifically, the arrow was pointing at the first century and those who suffered at the hands of the

01:28:49

Jews. In Matthew 10, 33 through 34, Jesus also reveals that the Jewish -inspired tribulations and persecutions were not just gonna happen in the public square or in the synagogues.

01:29:01

He says that it's gonna also infiltrate your home. He says this, I didn't come to bring peace, but a sword.

01:29:09

For I came to turn a man against his Jewish father and a daughter against her Jewish mother. A person's enemy will be the member of his own household.

01:29:17

Matthew 10, 34 through 36, emphasis mine. Now, for Jewish Christians who are hearing this, this wasn't poetic musings.

01:29:25

When one family member converted to Jesus, it often led to tremendous relational strain and consequences that sometimes would go up and to the point of execution.

01:29:38

Fathers were turning their sons over to violent mobs in order that their sons would be stoned for believing in Jesus.

01:29:47

Mothers were handing their daughters over to executioners to be murdered. The Jewish jealousy and hatred for Jesus was tearing family members apart.

01:29:58

It was creating battle lines inside of living rooms and it was creating things that should have been sacred spaces.

01:30:05

It was creating violence that was infiltrating even the most sacred places in your home. But that is just a few examples from the

01:30:14

Gospel of Matthew. I want us now to look at the other Gospels, which is Mark, Luke, and John, and what they say, which leads us to section two,

01:30:21

Jewish persecutions in the other Gospels. In Mark 10, 29 through 30,

01:30:27

Jesus says this, there is no one who has left house or brother or sister or mother or father or children or farm for my sake and for the

01:30:37

Gospel's sake, but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in the present age along with persecutions,

01:30:44

Mark 10, 29 through 30. That promise, while it rings true today that there are many who've left farms for Jesus, there's many who've left father and mother for Jesus, of course, yes and amen, but to that generation, that would have struck a chord in their heart because they were already beginning to lose family members, homes, lands, and legacy for following Jesus.

01:31:05

They were counting the cost of discipleship and it was causing them to suffer dramatic losses because their own countrymen, under the curse of jealousy and madness, were perpetrating countless injustices against them.

01:31:18

They were stealing their property. They were taking away their lands. They were seizing their assets because they believed in Jesus.

01:31:25

Brothers were turning against brother, fathers against their own children, all pointing to the evidence of this pernicious curse -like plague that was foretold in the prophets that Jesus enacted in Matthew 23, that they self -enacted in Matthew 27, and this general

01:31:41

Romans 11 curse, all of it is fueling the nation to persecute

01:31:46

Christians. It was fracturing families, unleashing chaos, and this is why Jesus says in Mark 13, 9 -13, that brother will betray brother to death and a father his own child, and you will be hated by everyone because of my name,

01:32:05

Mark 13, 9 -13. Even as these horrors were looming, the gospel was on the move.

01:32:11

The gospel of Jesus was advancing. Governors like Felix and Festus and King Agrippa were sitting across the table from men and women who were accused of heresy by believing in Jesus, and they were unwittingly playing their part in the story of Christ and his conquest of the world.

01:32:29

In spite of those pains and frustrations that would be leveled against the early church, Jesus reminded them in Luke 6, 22 that all of these things were the cause of great joy.

01:32:41

If they're suffering, they should be exceedingly grateful and joyful because they've been counted worthy to suffer the same way as Jesus.

01:32:48

This is what he says in Luke 6, 22. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and insult you.

01:32:55

Rejoice on that day and jump for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven,

01:33:01

Luke 6, 22 -23. That reality would include stones being hurled by the

01:33:07

Jews in the public square, the whips cracking against their back, and the cold sting of rejection from communities and family members that once called them family and friends.

01:33:17

Jesus encouraged his disciples to remember that the world in general, and their countrymen in particular, only hated them because they first hated

01:33:26

Christ, John 15, 18 -21. And they were slaying them because the thought of it, because the action of it they thought was pleasing to God, John 16, 2, which shows how cursed they had become.

01:33:41

But God was going to give all of those who were suffering great joy in their suffering, Luke 6, 23, because he promised it, because he's already overcome the world,

01:33:50

John 16, 33. And that, because of that reason, the early church had a great confidence and assurity that the spirit of God who was leading them was gonna give them the words to say even when they were dragged before kangaroo courts and sham trials,

01:34:05

Luke 21, 12 -19, that he was gonna lead them in all joy and all grace because Jesus promised.

01:34:12

That's why Jesus prepared his disciples for this Jewish persecution in the gospels before it even happened.

01:34:18

He warned them that the Jews who were under this curse were gonna perpetrate these very acts of hostility, and that is precisely what happened in the book of Acts, which is why we're now gonna turn in section three to the

01:34:31

Jewish persecutions in the book of Acts. Just after Pentecost, literally,

01:34:37

Peter and John are filled with the Holy Spirit, they go preaching boldly in the streets of Jerusalem, and thousands are turning to Christ.

01:34:44

But in the midst of all of this excitement, not everyone in the city is happy. The Jewish authorities, just like Jesus predicted, were furious at the apostles, and they arrested them, and they dragged them before the

01:34:57

Sanhedrin in Acts four, one through three, just like Jesus said. And then despite their hollow threats, the apostles refused to be silenced, and it ignited a fire and a passion that no prison or shackle was gonna be able to suppress.

01:35:13

The flames of persecution intensified from that point on, but it also caused the gospel to spread even more fully.

01:35:21

For instance, in Acts five, the high priest and the Sadducees and the Sanhedrin who were driven again by this curse of violence had the apostles arrested again because they could not snuff the movement out.

01:35:35

God intervened in that arrest, and an angel came and broke the prison doors open, and the apostles, the very same day, were back in the temple boldly proclaiming the gospel again in defiance of these murderous

01:35:47

Jews. Now, furious about this, the council brought them back in a third time, and then when threats against them didn't work, they actually flogged them.

01:35:58

That's a whip of nine tails striking them, ripping their body apart like Jesus when he went through flogging.

01:36:06

They flogged them. Their flesh was being torn off of their skeletons, and they were bleeding from their head to their toes, and yet even as the blood flowed down their ankles and they suffered this great disgrace at the hands of these bloodthirsty

01:36:22

Jews, they were praising God as they exited the temple, and they were saying thank you to Jesus that they were counted worthy to suffer for his great name,

01:36:31

Acts 5, 40 through 41. As the church grew in size, so did the Jewish hostility and jealousy.

01:36:39

Arrests and floggings were giving way to murder, beginning with Stephen, who became the church's first official martyr in Acts chapter seven.

01:36:47

Before his brutal death by stoning, Stephen provoked their jealousy by preaching one of the most powerful sermons in all of scripture, and near the end of it, as the

01:36:56

Jews were boiling with fury, Stephen indicted them by saying, you are always resisting the

01:37:01

Holy Spirit. You are doing just as your fathers did, Acts 7, 51, and that enraged them.

01:37:07

Now, he was being faithful, and he died for it, but it enraged them, and in their fury, the council dragged

01:37:13

Stephen outside of the city. They stoned him to death right there in the public square, which was an act that was technically illegal for them to do under Roman law, but blinded by their extreme hostility and hatred, they disregarded

01:37:26

Rome, and they took the risk, and they unleashed their wrath upon him. Stone by stone struck that man's body until he was lying dead in the streets at the foot of Saul of Tarsus, and it was from that moment forward that larger scale, more organized campaigns of death were waged upon the church, making

01:37:48

Stephen's death a critical turning point, and the persecutions were escalating because a man named

01:37:54

Saul, who later would become known as Paul of Tarsus, was at the head of this movement.

01:38:00

He was an opportunistic Jew. He was ready to climb the religious hierarchy and make a name for himself by bludgeoning defenseless

01:38:08

Christians. Like a wolf that was given full access to the sheep pen, Saul began tearing them apart in the markets, in the communities, and in their homes, dragging men and women into the streets for their execution, or off to prison where they would rot away in jail,

01:38:24

Acts 8, one through three. Now, his fury and his jealousy drove him beyond Jerusalem, outside of the walls of the city, to places like Damascus, where, on his way there to murder and arrest

01:38:38

Christians, one of the most unexpected things in the early church, and certainly in the life of Paul, happened.

01:38:45

On that very road, as he was riding to kill Christians, with the same kind of fury that the other

01:38:51

Jews had, on that very road, he met the risen Christ, who asked him,

01:38:57

Paul, why are you persecuting me? And it was in that moment that Saul was transformed from a persecutor to an apostle, which did nothing short of transforming the early church, but also fanning the

01:39:11

Jewish flames of jealousy even further because, from that moment forward, it seems like the

01:39:16

Jews had directed their ire at Paul, and they were gonna do everything they could to kill the Christian Paul.

01:39:23

He became a target of their hatred early on. For instance, in Acts 9, 23 through 25, they attempted to murder him, and after he escapes from the city, the

01:39:34

Jewish opposition, they pursued him relentlessly, and they pursued him from one city after another, all throughout the

01:39:39

Roman Empire, hoping to Epstein him whenever they could get their hands upon him.

01:39:46

In Sinion and Antioch, they incited the crowds to expel him out of the city, Acts 13 .50.

01:39:52

In Iconium, they stirred the Gentiles up to attempt to stone him, Acts 14 .5.

01:39:58

In Lystra, they actually succeeded in stoning him. They dragged him out of the city. They left him dead in the street,

01:40:04

Acts 14 .19, but God raised him up, Acts 14 .20, and then Paul went right back into the city and proclaimed the gospel again,

01:40:15

Acts 14 .21. Just like Jesus predicted, even though Paul and the early church was facing difficult philipsis, tribulations, they were fueled by a supernatural joy and an eagerness to name

01:40:30

Christ where Christ had not been named, even among those who hated him most ferociously.

01:40:35

In the years that followed, the Jewish leader's vendetta against Paul and against the early disciples only grew more desperate and more psychotic.

01:40:44

In Corinth, they dragged Paul before Galileo, accusing him of heresy before their charges finally fell apart,

01:40:51

Acts 18 .12 -17. In Jerusalem, their rage exploded into a violent mob, forcing

01:40:56

Roman soldiers to intervene by saving Paul by arresting him because the

01:41:01

Jews were going to murder him in the streets, Acts 21 .27 -36. Those same

01:41:07

Jews conspired to assassinate him later, vowing that they were not gonna eat or drink anything until Paul was dead, which by the way is not a great strategy if you need the energy to kill someone,

01:41:19

Acts 23 .12 -15. It's another sign that they were just mad and out of their mind with hatred.

01:41:27

Rather than the Jews behaving rationally, what these passages demonstrate to us is that they were fueled by the curse of madness and jealousy against Christ and against those who dared to proclaim his name.

01:41:40

Basically, from the time of Paul's conversion in Acts 9 all the way until the end of Acts, it's a

01:41:46

Pauline -focused book. It's following Paul and talking about what's happening to Paul, but I want you to remember that Jewish persecutions of other

01:41:54

Christians were still happening in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and all throughout the Roman Empire so that what's happening to Paul is microcosmic of what's happening to the early church and through all this,

01:42:05

Paul and the early church's resolve never wavered. His chains and their chains became their pulpits.

01:42:12

His scars and their scars became their trophies of grace and when he declared in Acts 28 -22 that this sect is spoken against everywhere, he wasn't lamenting the fact that the

01:42:24

Christians were being persecuted by Jews. He was testifying to the unstoppable advancement of the gospel that all enemies, foreign and domestic, could not stop the advance of Jesus's church, which fueled their hatred even more.

01:42:39

The hatred of the Jews only caused the church to grow, only caused the seeds of the church to spread more broadly and as Tertullian once noted, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

01:42:52

The persecutions recorded in Acts were only the beginning as the letters that the

01:42:57

New Testament writers also show a consistent pattern of Jewish opposition to the gospel.

01:43:03

It's persistent, it's organized and it's deeply entrenched in their synagogues and their communities. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna turn to the epistles and we're gonna look at what the apostles say, men like James, John, Peter and other

01:43:17

New Testament writers and we're gonna look at how they also admit that this persecution is happening in every town that the church of Christ is located.

01:43:27

So with that, let us go to our next section. Section four, Jewish persecutions in the epistles.

01:43:33

Now the epistles pick up right where Acts leaves off, plunging us deeper into the jealousy and the madness of the

01:43:39

Jews. Paul's heart aches as he reflects upon the tragedy of the

01:43:45

Jewish rejection of Christ. They hadn't stumped their toe on a minor obstacle, they had tripped over the very cornerstone of their salvation and if they did not repent, they would die in their sins,

01:43:56

Romans 9, 32 to 33. In their zeal for God, Paul laments in Romans 10, two through three, that they oppressed

01:44:03

Christianity with every fiber of their being, not knowing that this was a sign of their hardness of heart and of their blindness of eyes and of their sure coming destruction.

01:44:13

Instead of embracing the Messiah, they clung to their own hollow works in their hearts as hard as iron and as unbendable as steel, they pursued a law of self -righteousness as hard as they could and in their lack of ability to obey the law, they would be rejected.

01:44:35

They rejected the one who obeyed the law in order to try to obey the law in his stead and they could not.

01:44:41

Paul calls this a spirit of stupor that the Jews came under in Romans 11, eight. That would only be overcome as God lifts that curse and as they are exhausted by their jealousy of the church.

01:44:55

That is what Paul says. Until then, they're gonna go on groping in the dark, lashing out in their rage against Jesus and his followers, which is exactly what we see in Thessalonica as Paul delivers an unflinching indictment of the

01:45:07

Jews in that book saying, the Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out, they are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, hindering us from speaking to the

01:45:20

Gentiles so that they may be saved. With the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins, but wrath has come upon them to the utmost.

01:45:31

Paul's not being coy. He's saying that the jealousy was provoking the Jews to thwart

01:45:36

Christian missionary efforts to the Gentiles. Their jealousy was causing them to drive the church out of particular cities and their jealousy was the very reason that God's wrath was overflowing onto them.

01:45:48

Second Corinthians four captures this brutal reality as well when Paul claims that we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not despairing, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed.

01:46:02

Second Corinthians four, eight through 10. Every word of that statement throbs with the pain of a battered church, a people who were pressed to the edge, yet miraculously unbroken.

01:46:13

Interestingly, the Greek word, the ellipsis, tribulation shows up in that very verse, rendered as crushing because the

01:46:21

Jews were crushing them, but not breaking them. Here, like in every other place where the word is used, it doesn't refer to a seven year calamitous period of sci -fi delusions.

01:46:33

It refers to the persecution upon the early church by the Jews. That's what the word means.

01:46:39

That's what it means everywhere that it shows up in the New Testament. And Paul likens them to wolves that are fattening themselves on the blood of the innocent.

01:46:50

Actually, that's James, James five, six. But the attack went further. The Jews infiltrated the church with false teachings.

01:46:57

So they said, if we can't destroy the church, then we're going to bewitch the church with this error that was led by a

01:47:03

Jewish group called the Judaizers who turned the gospel away from freedom in Christ to slavery back into the law,

01:47:12

Galatians three, one. In Philippians, Paul warns against these Jewish dogs, evil workers, and false circumcision party who are seeking to corrupt the pure faith of the church,

01:47:24

Philippians three, two. Jude uses vivid imagery to describe these infiltrators as hidden reefs, wild waves, doubly dead, unstable, like wild animals, eternal darkness.

01:47:39

This is the language that Jude is using against the Jews who are trying to infiltrate the early church with a false gospel called the

01:47:49

Judaizing heresy. Amid all of that chaos, the apostles were standing firm. They were urging the church to endure and to believe the truth of the true gospel.

01:47:58

Paul called believers to rejoice in hope, to persevere in tribulation, the ellipsis, and remain devoted to prayer, proclaiming that nothing can separate them from the love of Christ, not tribulation, not distress, famine, or sword.

01:48:16

Romans 8, 35. I want you to imagine this. Paul's saying that nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, even the seven -year period of the tribulation.

01:48:23

That's not what Paul is talking about. Paul's saying that nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, not pain, not persecutions, not even

01:48:32

Jewish -inspired terror campaigns of tribulation can separate you from your Savior.

01:48:39

Paul rejoiced in his trials for the church, Colossians 124. Peter called these fiery ordeals, the things that strengthen our faith and promise that our suffering is gonna actually lead us to glory, 1

01:48:51

Peter 4, 12, 13, and 5, 10. The story of persecution and the ellipsis and tribulation inspired by Jewish hatred of Christ and his church was predicted in the gospels.

01:49:02

It was poured out in the book of Acts. It was demonstrated in the epistles. And now I wanna show you how it culminates in the book of Revelation, where the martyr's cry is going to be answered and their blood is going to be avenged and their faith is going to be vindicated by the destruction of Jerusalem.

01:49:20

This is the vision of triumph to which we now turn. Section five,

01:49:26

Jewish persecutions in Revelation. The book of Revelation thunders with the fulfillment of these covenant curses.

01:49:34

It unmasks the Jewish leaders as agents of Satan from the synagogue of Satan who in their madness and their jealousy are waging war against Christ and his bride.

01:49:44

These events are not eschatological fantasies, but they're first century realities.

01:49:51

The book of Revelation is talking about the Jewish opposition to Jesus and his church and how

01:49:57

Jesus himself puts them down like a cow with mad cow disease.

01:50:04

When Jesus declared, they will deliver you over to tribulation and will kill you and you will be hated by all nations because of my name,

01:50:10

Matthew 24, nine, Revelation presents that case. It presents that tribulation as the direct outworking of Judah's covenant rebellion, her curse induced madness and her unholy alliance with Rome.

01:50:25

That's what Revelation is talking about. It says, behold, he is coming with the clouds and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him and all the tribes of the land will mourn over him,

01:50:38

Revelation 1, seven. In addition to Revelation 1, one and Revelation 1, three, saying that these events are soon to take place and behold,

01:50:47

Jesus is coming quickly. Here in verse seven, he talks about the people of Judah, the ones who pierced him are gonna be the ones who see him in his coming when he comes in judgment against all the tribes of the land.

01:51:02

In your version of the Bible, it might say all the people of the world or all the tribes of the world.

01:51:08

That word world there means land. The world's not divided by tribes. Judah is divided by tribes.

01:51:15

Israel is divided by tribes, 12 tribes in fact. So he's saying all the people who saw me, all the people who pierced me in my crucifixion and all the people of the land are gonna see my coming and my coming is going to be about the pouring out of the

01:51:32

Mosaic covenant curses upon sinful Judah. Their mourning is not gonna lead to repentance, but it's gonna be an anguish of a nation that is suffering under the full fury of the wrath of God, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and Revelation 19, when their temple is burned, where their people perish and their covenant was shattered.

01:51:52

That's what Revelation 1 opens with. Revelation 2, nine reveals the depth of their rebellion saying those who say that they are

01:52:00

Jews, but they're not. They're of the synagogue of Satan. These leaders were claiming covenant supremacy and covenant faithfulness were exposed as blasphemers who were aligned with the will of Satan instead of the will of God.

01:52:14

Their actions that were driven by a covenant induced curse of madness brought them into hostility towards Jesus and his church.

01:52:22

And Jesus promised that against that group, vindication was gonna come. Jesus says,

01:52:27

I will make them come and bow down at your feet and make them know that I have loved you,

01:52:33

Revelation 3, 9. He's saying that the synagogue of Satan, the Jews are gonna know that Christ has loved his church by making them bow down at the church's feet.

01:52:43

Judah is gonna be stripped of her pride, forced to acknowledge the triumph and the supremacy of Christ and his church that they sought so eagerly to destroy.

01:52:52

The harlot of Revelation 17, the one who's adorned in purple and scarlet and who's drunk on the blood of the saints is none other than apostate

01:53:01

Jerusalem. The one who thought that she was living in her luxurious attire, who was in a whoring relationship with Rome, who was wearing the high priestly garments and who was lusting after the blood of the saints of God.

01:53:17

That one, that whore is gonna be the one who is destroyed. The one who has brought into the

01:53:24

Deuteronomic curses. That whore Jerusalem, once the city of God became the harlot who was selling herself into the arms of Rome, trying to get political power and security and stability.

01:53:36

But that unholy partnership according to Revelation is what sealed her doom. The beast she rides, turns on her, devours her and she is burned with fire as Rome becomes the instrument of God's destruction against her.

01:53:52

In her, Revelation says, in her was found the blood of the prophets and the saints and all who had been slain on the earth,

01:54:00

Revelation 18, 24. This verse is telling us that that whore in Revelation 18 is

01:54:08

Jerusalem. She's the one who killed the prophets. She's the one who killed the Christ. She's the one who killed his followers.

01:54:13

And now the chickens have come home to roost. Jerusalem under the curse of madness and jealousy become a city of blood.

01:54:21

Her streets were flowing with blood. Her prophets were martyred there. Her destruction was prophesied, was going to happen there,

01:54:30

Matthew 24, 21. She is going to undergo the great tribulation, which would be unlike any other that had ever been poured out in the history of the world.

01:54:40

All of this apocalyptic imagery, like in Revelation 6, 12 through 17, where there's earthquakes and blackened suns and blood red moons are all depicting not future astrological perturbations, but covenant language that comes out of the prophets that showcase that Judah, her political and religious establishment is falling apart.

01:55:02

The sun's turned its back on her. The moon is refusing to even shine on her. She is so folded over into her darkness that the sun, moon, and stars have abandoned her, symbolizing her doom.

01:55:15

These signs are mirrored in the Mosaic covenant curses, which symbolize that her light has gone out.

01:55:21

The plagues of Egypt have overtaken her, Revelation 8, 6 through 13.

01:55:26

Hail, fire, poison waters, darkness, all tribulations that the

01:55:33

Egyptians underwent in Exodus are now directed at the new people, the

01:55:39

Israelites, the Jews, for covenant breaking. Revelation's story does not avoid these things.

01:55:48

It goes right after these things. And once you see what the symbols are actually pointing to, and we're gonna dive into this in way more detail in the weeks ahead when we actually get to the book of Revelation.

01:55:58

But when you see what the signs are pointing to, you will see that the crosshair of God's wrath is pointed right at Jerusalem in the book of Revelation.

01:56:10

And she is the one who is going to be killed for her crimes. We see that from Revelation 4 all the way to Revelation 19.

01:56:19

And in Revelation 20, we see that the church replaces her. The church becomes the bride who replaces the whore.

01:56:27

The church becomes the new Jerusalem that replaces the Babylon. This is the story of the putting away of Jerusalem and the rising up of the church, the new

01:56:37

Jerusalem of God. Now, Revelation's story, like I just hinted at, doesn't end in despair, it ends in hope.

01:56:45

The fall of the harlot city is eclipsed by the rise of the bride of Christ.

01:56:50

And as Jerusalem is burning, the lamb is standing victorious. His kingdom is advancing despite the fury of his enemies.

01:56:57

Revelation 19 .6 proclaims, hallelujah, for the Lord our God, the Almighty reigns.

01:57:04

The Jewish leaders' rebellion, their violence fueled by jealousy and madness, failed utterly.

01:57:13

Their uprising failed, their rebellion failed, their insurrection failed, their persecution of the church failed.

01:57:20

It only scattered the gospel even further. And the blood of the martyrs became the glue that held this unshakable kingdom together.

01:57:30

Summary. From the gospels to the book of Revelation, Judah's rebellion has unfolded in a tragic story of her downfall.

01:57:42

In the gospels, her leaders rejected Christ and even called down curses upon themselves.

01:57:49

In the book of Acts, their madness and their jealousy erupted into violent persecution against the church and against Paul.

01:57:55

The epistles reveal the depth of her curse and how blindness had actually infiltrated the

01:58:02

Jews so that they opposed God with relentless fury. And then we saw that Revelation brings all of these themes to a crescendo and a climax.

01:58:13

Judah becomes the harlot city. She's the one who rides on the back of Rome. And in her destruction in AD 70, she is put down.

01:58:22

Her temple burns, her streets flow with blood, and the covenant curses of Leviticus 16,

01:58:28

Deuteronomy 28, Matthew 23, Matthew 27 are all fulfilled.

01:58:35

Which is precisely what we see in the New Testament. It's precisely what we see by various first century writers who are also saying the same things.

01:58:46

So as we close this episode out, I would like to share with you some very interesting quotes from men who did not love

01:58:54

Jesus, from men who were not Christians and who were not mostly were not Jews, who describe the

01:59:01

Jewish madness, who describe the Jews' jealousy and describe how from their point of view, it was plain and obvious that the

01:59:11

Jews were under the curse of God. What we've shown so far from the

01:59:16

Old Testament, from covenant theology, from the New Testament, from the epistles, from Revelation, and now what we're gonna show you from these extra biblical sources is more than enough that's needed to prove the case.

01:59:32

We are not waiting on a future tribulation to happen. It happened and it happened because the

01:59:39

Jews came under a curse from God. And in that curse, they hated the church and persecuted the church and brought

01:59:46

Philipsis to the church. And now let's turn to part six, how the curse brought her to destruction.

01:59:57

The tale of first century Israel unfolds like a harrowing tragedy. Its verses are etched with blood and fire.

02:00:05

Imagine the streets of Jerusalem alive with the cries of the people calling for the death of their king.

02:00:13

And when they look at Pilate and they say his blood be on us and our children, they screamed that fact.

02:00:21

Their fists were raised like BLM rioters because of that fact. Their faces were flushed with fury,

02:00:27

Matthew 27, 25. And they did not know what they were asking for.

02:00:33

Those words that were sharp and reckless ricocheted through the heavens and through their soul.

02:00:40

And it held them in a kind of curse that would echo for a generation.

02:00:48

In the years that followed, that curse began to tighten its grip like a noose around their neck.

02:00:53

Their rebellion began festering. It was fed by zealots who mistook their rage for righteousness.

02:01:00

And we're gonna cover this in a future episode. But what I'm going to show you, not today, but in a future episode, is how the

02:01:07

Jews descended into lawlessness. How violence overtook not just them in their response to the

02:01:15

Christian church, but they started killing each other. There were civil wars and all sorts of crazy tragedies that began happening as we get closer and closer to the downfall of Jerusalem.

02:01:28

It was as if, as Jesus said, the love of God ran cold in them and all they had left was hatred.

02:01:36

The holy city became a cauldron of violence and betrayal. Brother was turning against brother. The streets were running red.

02:01:43

Josephus, the Jewish historian, saw all of this happening. And he fought in the early part of the

02:01:50

Jewish war. And he tried in the latter part of the Jewish war after Rome had sort of confiscated him and made him their sort of virtual historian.

02:02:00

He fought with the Jews to try to get them to turn from their madness, but they would not relent.

02:02:08

He tells us a story that no one could have believed unless he was there to see it, and he did.

02:02:14

He was an eyewitness to these effects. And this is what he says for us. Josephus says,

02:02:20

I cannot but think that it was because God had doomed this city to destruction as a polluted city and was resolved to purge his sanctuary by fire that he cut off those who clung to them with such tender affection.

02:02:39

The siege of Jerusalem, according to Josephus, was not an ordinary battle. It was a divine cosmic pouring out of the wrath of God.

02:02:47

It was a cleansing of the wicked and of the rebellious with fire wielded by the hand of God.

02:02:53

The Jews mocked his warnings. They clung to their rebellion. They marched headlong into destruction.

02:03:00

And the Roman legions led by the ruthless Titus encircled the city like a noose.

02:03:06

The walls were very thick and very strong. The defenders were very fierce, motivated by all sorts of hate and self -preservation.

02:03:15

And yet, because of the weight of their own folly, their walls came tumbling down. Starvation then set in, turned mothers into cannibals, as we've talked about before.

02:03:25

The zealots who gained control of the city killed the priests. They started factional infighting and wars.

02:03:32

They burned each other's food supply and water supply. They proclaimed themselves the defenders of God's honor.

02:03:39

And yet they acted with madness and insanity. They spilled the blood of God's people and of even

02:03:47

Jews who were not willing to go as far as they were. They spilled their blood where the sacrifices should have been offered.

02:03:55

It said, Josephus even tells us that the blood was running down the streets from the temple thick enough to where it was on the ankles of the horses who were riding.

02:04:03

The most sacred place in the world, which was the temple, Josephus tells us, was polluted with murder.

02:04:11

It was as if the city had become a living embodiment of curse, and it had collapsed under the weight of its own sin.

02:04:20

Even the Romans could see it. Titus, the Roman general himself, marveled at the destruction of Jerusalem.

02:04:27

He said, we have certainly had God for our assistant in this war.

02:04:34

He said, what could the hands of men or any machines do towards overthrowing these towers?

02:04:40

But we have had God on our side. To Titus, it was clear the Jewish God had turned against the

02:04:47

Jewish people and he was helping Rome destroy the Jews. Titus, the Roman general, believed that.

02:04:55

Tacitus, the Roman historian, also sneered at the Jews' plight. He said that the Jews' loyalty is stubbornness and they show fierce passion for liberty, but they are prone only to riot and rebellion.

02:05:07

To the Romans, the Jews were an enigma, a people who were set apart by strange customs and unyielding pride, but this pride, their zeal, had now curdled into insanity.

02:05:17

Their refusal to bow to Rome and to their God had made them the architects of their own annihilation.

02:05:24

The early Christians who were watching from the sidelines saw the destruction of Jerusalem as the fulfillment of prophecy.

02:05:30

Jesus warned them not one stone was gonna be left upon another which will not be torn down, Matthew 24, 2, and they watched it happen.

02:05:39

The temple, which was the symbol of God's presence in the old covenant, was reduced to rubble.

02:05:45

The city, once the jewel of his covenant people, a smoldering mass, Josephus in his grief could only describe the devastation as the climax of Yahweh's divine anger.

02:05:58

He said, it was, I suppose, owing to the anger of God for their abominable crimes.

02:06:05

That is all that came upon them. He wrote that no other city, no other people at any point in human history had suffered as mightily as those

02:06:15

Jews did. He said, neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this generation was from the beginning of the world.

02:06:30

And yet, in the midst of all of this chaos, there's a interesting scene that I wanna end with today.

02:06:40

There's quotes that I could continue to keep quoting. We've proved our point, but I do wanna share with you one scene.

02:06:47

At the very end of the Jewish war, there was a man named Jesus, son of Annas.

02:06:53

It wasn't Jesus the Christ, but it was a man named Jesus. And it says that he was the son of Annas.

02:06:59

And he appeared in Jerusalem four years before the revolt and before the Jewish war. And every day he would wander around the city of Jerusalem and he would cry out the same thing day after day after day.

02:07:14

He would say, woe upon Jerusalem. Day after day, night after night, he would cry, woe upon Jerusalem.

02:07:25

He was arrested by the Jewish establishment because he was getting on their nerves. He was tortured by the authorities and yet he refused to stop saying, woe upon Jerusalem.

02:07:39

He was brought before the Roman governor. He endured beatings and ridicule, but still those words would not quit coming out of his mouth, woe upon Jerusalem.

02:07:51

For seven years and five months, Jesus, son of Annas, walked the streets of Jerusalem, crying out, woe, woe, woe upon Jerusalem.

02:08:05

And even as the city walls were burning down, his voice carried out above the chaos.

02:08:11

And then as the Roman siege works, as their engines launched those deadly stones, those huge, massive boulders into the city that looked like hailstones, which we'll talk about in Revelation.

02:08:25

One of those big, massive stones fell right down on top of this man and it struck him and killed him.

02:08:35

But before he died, as the stone was laying on top of his body, he said, woe upon Jerusalem, woe upon the people, woe upon the holy house, and woe upon myself.

02:08:53

And then he fell dead. Snuffed out like a candle in the middle of a hurricane. I tell you this story because at the end of the cursed generation, this man who everybody said was crazy was the one who actually made the most sense.

02:09:10

He knew the woes were coming. He knew the curses were coming. And as the stone struck him dead, so the

02:09:17

Romans struck down Jerusalem and finished the job that the

02:09:23

Messiah started in Matthew 23. The curses were poured out.

02:09:28

The end of Jerusalem fulfilled. It's all right there. And that leads us to our conclusion.

02:09:36

Conclusion. Today we looked at a story that is not just a story.

02:09:42

It is the real life events of what happened to the first century Jews who fell underneath a curse, who invoked the blood of the

02:09:50

Messiah upon their own heads and they reaped the whirlwind for rejecting him.

02:09:56

The destruction of Jerusalem was a tragedy, but it wasn't just a tragedy. It was a testimony to the fact that God's word never fails.

02:10:05

His prophecies never fail. His promises never fail. He warned them and they didn't listen.

02:10:12

And because of that, his words are as unshakable as the heavens, which as we saw today, came true with blistering clarity.

02:10:21

As we draw this episode to a close today, I want you to remember the errors of dispensationalism.

02:10:27

I know it's a funny thing to say, but dispensationals are the ones who misuse the word tribulation.

02:10:34

They're the ones who misunderstand this passage and they're the ones who failed to see the evidence that we've presented.

02:10:43

I want us to remember the errors of dispensationalism that have led so many people away and have caused so many people to misunderstand these challenging passages.

02:10:55

I want us to remember those errors and I want us not to be misled as well. I don't want us to have the mission of Christ, which is to advance in all the world undermined by these doctrines.

02:11:08

Christ's kingdom has come with power and with authority and with purpose and we must reject any theology that exalts the modern

02:11:18

Jewish people as being covenantally significant apart from Jesus Christ. The reality is, is that they are lost and they're lost just like every other nation who does not have

02:11:28

Jesus. They are under judgment. They're under a curse of having a hardened heart and a jealous mind.

02:11:34

And what they need more than our politics, our alliances or our promises of future temple is they need

02:11:41

Jesus. Our mission, as Paul outlines in Romans 11, is not to placate them like the dispensationals do and not to stroke their ego with hollow flattery or fake assurances that they are somehow in right standing with God.

02:11:55

We need to provoke them to jealousy and proclaim the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ to show them that his kingdom is expanding.

02:12:05

We're not being called to timid coexistence but to bold proclamation, to advance, to bring

02:12:12

God's kingdom and his dominion so evidently on this earth, so comprehensibly on this earth that it forces the

02:12:18

Jewish people and everyone else on earth to confront the reality that we are the ones who know the Messiah, that they must return, that they must repent, that they must join the church if there's any hope that they would be in right standing with God.

02:12:31

Our task is to build. Our task is to flourish. Our task is to declare the gospel with such power and beauty that it leaves no room for neutrality.

02:12:39

Our job is to start businesses. Our job is to raise children. Our job is to have godly marriages.

02:12:45

Our job is to have faithful, healthy churches with ministers who don't get into adulterous affairs and who shipwreck their faith.

02:12:54

You know what I'm talking about. There's plenty of pastors who've done that. One recently in our camp, in the reform movement, we're called as the covenant people of God to magnify

02:13:09

Jesus's name. To build godly homes, to build godly churches and to build godly neighborhoods that magnify the glory of Christ.

02:13:21

And as we are faithful, may the nations who believe in things that were damning them currently, may the nation's eyes be opened and may they see the glories of Christ.

02:13:33

May we not be silent. May we not be cowards. May we be builders and may we be proclaimers so that all the world will know the glory of Christ on the lips of his church.

02:13:48

And with that, I want us to pray fervently for the Jews. We don't hate the

02:13:54

Jews, but we also don't have an affection for the Jews with the kind of sentimental pietism that the dispensationals have.

02:14:04

We pray for them. We petition the Lord to break through their hearts of stone, to lift the curse of judicial hardening, to lift the curse of their jealousy so that they will repent and come to Jesus.

02:14:20

I wanna pray for their salvation. I wanna pray for their national great awakening.

02:14:28

And I wanna pray also for the church to rise up in obedience to Jesus, to stop gazing at the heavens, waiting for our rapture to take us out of here, but to actually build and work and be faithful while our prodigal brother, the

02:14:47

Jews, has not yet come home. I want us to build. I want us to declare.

02:14:53

I want us to subdue. I want us to spread. I want us to rise. I want us to raise godly children.

02:14:58

I want us to enter into holy marriages. I want us to do all of that all while praying that the prodigal son, the

02:15:04

Jews, would return back home to the halls of Christendom and that when they do, as Paul says in Romans 11, that it would spur on a revival that would take over the entire world.

02:15:20

Brothers and sisters, this episode was not made so that you can harbor hatred in your heart towards the

02:15:28

Jewish people. This episode was made so that you would pity them, so that you would pray for them, so that you would rightly understand

02:15:35

Matthew 24 and Revelation, and so that our lives, our churches, and our

02:15:40

Christian culture would be so transformative, they would be so transformed by the beauty and the glory of Christ that the

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Jews would be consumed with a kind of jealousy and holy envy that caused them to repent and abandon their rejection of Christ and to come back home to him.

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That is our task. Now, with that, I wanna say thank you so much for everybody who's been watching this episode.

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This was a long one, so I thank you for everybody who's been watching it. If you found this teaching valuable, I would ask you to share it, give it a like, drop me a comment, subscribe to the channel, and if you want, send me an email.

02:16:24

I've had multiple different email exchanges with people. It's been great. I've been able to jump on the phone with some who've been watching the show and talk about eschatology, which is really cool, so thank you for that.

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Also, if you are not aware, this show has memberships, and the members are what help pay the bills and help this show grow, help it get out to more people, so if you are so compelled, join this channel as a member.

02:16:48

Also, have a really cool announcement at the end of such a long episode that the Prodcast is gonna be opening up its own merch store very soon, just in time for Christmas.

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You're gonna get all of your prod gear and everything that you need to make this season a season of great cheer, salty

02:17:05

Christian prodding sheep and beating wolves kind of stuff, but that's coming soon, so get hyped about that.

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There'll be more about that in the weeks ahead, but with that, thank you for today.

02:17:18

Thank you for watching. Thank you for all you do. God bless you. We'll see you again next time.