142. Murdering Jews and Fiery Trials (PART 1)

The Dangerous Reality Facing the First Disciples

Following Jesus, loving Christ, was gonna be a very dangerous reality for them in the immediate years ahead. They were gonna be crushed by Jewish persecutions. They were gonna be pressed in on every side.

And if it were not for the grace of God, the bloodthirsty Jews would have murdered and martyred every single one of them. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

Matthew 24 as the Prequel to Revelation

This is episode 142, The Murdering Jews and the Fiery Tribulation. Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. We are in a series on the book of Revelation and to make sure that everyone understands what Revelation is all about, we've decided to begin our series with a very short prequel on Matthew 24.

Because in that great chapter, it says everything that Revelation says, but in a much more straightforward way. And so far, we've learned the critical context that's gonna help us in our study of Revelation and what biblical eschatology actually looks like.

Now, if you're new to the show and it's your first time tuning in or maybe you haven't been here very long, I just wanna say thank you so much for being here with us. And I would encourage you to go back and to watch the first couple of episodes in this series because there is so much context that's gonna be essential for understanding what's going on in Matthew 24 and what eventually is gonna be going on in Revelation.

So if you have a chance, go back and listen to those episodes. I promise you it will be worth your while. Also, thank you so much to every single person who's been watching and tuning in. The comments were amazing last week.

Thank you so much for your encouragement and for continuing to enjoy this show and love this show. And thank you for everyone who told me that a series on Josephus would be great. I have to decide when I'm going to do it because I'm currently in a very long series on Revelation and we're just getting started.

But I was so encouraged to see that people would want that and eventually we are going to do that. So, as a little bit of context for where we've been in Matthew 24, we've been talking about things like Jesus's parables that he spoke in Matthew 21, 33 through 43, where he said that God was gonna rip the kingdom away from the Pharisees because they were not bearing him any fruit.

We saw how Jesus promised in a third parable in that triad in Matthew 22, one through 14, where God was gonna send his armies in order to set on fire the rebel city of Jerusalem and to crush it because of their violence against his people because they killed his prophets, they killed his disciples, they killed his messengers and they refused to come to the wedding feast of his son.

We've looked at how the Jews didn't take kindly to that message in Matthew 22 and they did everything in their power to humiliate Jesus in front of the own looking crowds who were standing right there in Jerusalem, Matthew 22, 15 through 46, which did not ultimately work because after their great attempt to embarrass the son of God, Jesus Christ went on a final blistering string of judgment woes where he evoked seven covenantal curses to be poured out from Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 16 in the form of seven woes that would be poured out on that city, Matthew 23, 13 through 36, which meant that all of God's covenant fury was gonna be poured out on them.

And Jesus says that it's gonna happen to that generation, not some distant generation and somewhere off in the distant future, but to that generation, the one who killed him and killed his disciples. Now, we also looked at how Jesus and his disciples after this, they walked out of the city and you can imagine how awkward it must have been when Jesus just pronounced covenant woe on the city, he said that the city was gonna be left desolate, the temple was gonna be left desolate and he and his disciples walk out of the city, sort of a mic drop moment, and they walk up the Mount of Olives where Jesus took the waning hours that he had left with his disciples before his death to make sure that they understood exactly what he was saying.

Because Jesus didn't mind if he left the Pharisees in confusion, he says multiple times that seeing they will not see and hearing they will not hear, so Jesus is telling them parables, he's telling them different kinds of teachings that will purposely confuse them to keep them in their confusion, which is what Isaiah says, but he wanted his disciples to understand what he was talking about so that they would be prepared for what is coming.

He wasn't preparing them for a long period of time before these things would occur, he wasn't telling them about things that were gonna happen millennia into the future, no, he was telling them things that they were going to face, that they were gonna walk through in their generation, which was 40 years.

They were gonna see the temple left desolate, they were gonna see the city destroyed, they were gonna see the Roman armies coming, they were gonna see Jerusalem facing the consequences for killing the prophets and murdering God's son and butchering his disciples all over the Roman world.

And to make sure the disciples were not gonna get the timing of all of these events confused, he gave them detailed signs for them to be on the lookout for so that they would know when these things were going to happen.

He told them that there would be a notable rise in false messiahs, false teachers, and antichrist, Matthew 24, five, verse 11 and verse 24. He told them that even though they lived under this famed system called the Pax Romana, that they were gonna be hearing about wars and rumors of wars, as well as famines and earthquakes that were gonna rob the land and the empire of its peace, Matthew 24, six through seven.

Now today, we're gonna be looking at another sign that Jesus gives, which is that the first century disciples were going to go through all kinds of painful and very toilsome tribulations at the hands of the Jews.

And as we'll see, Jesus and the rest of the New Testament reveal the story of a ferocious Jewish hatred of Jesus and his church, which is gonna spill out in violent persecutions, martyrdom, and oppression for 40 paralyzing years between the resurrection of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem.

For their part, the Jewish people are going to go on an all-out terror campaign to murder every Christian that they can possibly get their hands on. And that's what we're gonna be talking about, not only today, but also next week, because this is part one of a two-part series called The Murdering Jews and the Fiery Tribulations.

Today is just part one. Today, we're just gonna lay the groundwork and the foundation. We're gonna try to understand what the word tribulation actually means and how the majority of Christendom today has not only misunderstood the word tribulation, but they've punted it somewhere into the esoteric eschatological future.

Now, to combat that error, we're gonna look at the totality of what the word means, what the Bible says about this word, what extra biblical sources are gonna say about this word, and how this concept relates to the covenant redemptive status of the Jewish people.

And we're gonna do that over two weeks. This week, in this episode, we're only gonna cover half of that goal by focusing on three key areas. Number one, we're gonna focus on the meaning of the word tribulation in the original Greek language, what it means in the context of Matthew 24.

Then, we're gonna look at two striking examples of the word tribulation in the Septuagint, which is gonna help us understand what the tribulation is and what the great tribulation is, which are two distinct events that must be understood within their first century context.

Then, we're gonna talk about how Revelation, the book, connects to Matthew 24 because this is a prequel to where we're going, so I wanna give you a little glimpse of where we're heading. And after that, by the end of today's episode and with the help of next week's episode, which is gonna be even deeper and even more in-depth, and next week's episode's probably gonna be like two hours long, with the help of these two episodes, I'm hoping that you'll see beyond the shadow of doubt that the tribulation has already occurred, that the great tribulation has already occurred.

It was a Jewish-inspired campaign of terrorism against the early church, and they perpetuated violent tribulations upon Jesus's bride, for which they were destroyed in AD 70. Now, again, next week, we're gonna expand on this foundation.

We're gonna look at the entire New Testament case for this Jewish-led campaign of terror, and we're also gonna look at extra-biblical sources that are confirmed that the Jews ferociously persecuted the early church, more so than any other group.

It wasn't the Romans who were the greatest persecutor of the church, it was the Jews. And then we're gonna end next week by looking at the current state of the Jewish people and what hope, if any, remains for them for the monstrous crimes that they committed and for the absolute covenant rebellion that they did when they crucified God's one and only Son.

And just as a spoiler alert, there's always hope in Christ, which we're gonna see next week. Now, this could be the most ambitious episode that I've ever undertaken on the podcast, and I hope that all of the information that I'm providing brings clarity to the topic, that it encourages you, and that it helps you live more ardently for Jesus in our world.

So with that, thank you for all your support. Thank you for everyone who's joined this channel as a member. And now, let us dive in and look at first the linguistic case that the tribulation has already occurred, and it occurred in the first century.

The Linguistic Meaning of Tribulation

Part one, the linguistic case of tribulations. Section one, the transing of words. Now, we live in an era where words have the fluidity of a cold glass of water. Not only are good terms redefined every time someone has a case of the feels, but coherent terms are being stretched like Gumby or Stretch Armstrong, even, to fix whatever grotesque ideal our confused culture is currently propagating.

Take, for instance, a word like gay that was turned from an innocent form of merriment and joy to a kind of lurid sexual deviance that caused God to obliterate Sodom. By hijacking the term and by disfiguring it in the style of Pablo Picasso, those who are guilty of real abominations have assuaged their conscience and seared their own hearts so that they no longer feel the guilt that they should feel.

By changing the term, they are assuaging their conscience. Now, this along with a host of other words or phrases like calling a woman a birthing person or calling abortion healthcare, there is evidence of a large-scale, industrialized transing of terms that is going on in the modern world.

And while it may seem like a bit of a leap for me to say this, there's a similar disfigurement of terms that has taken place in the church, especially with dispensationalists who've mangled words like antichrist and tribulation to mean something entirely different than what they originally meant.

Now, in the same way that a very handsome and healthy young boy under the pressure of a woke mother and a degenerate healthcare system can be hacked up and morphed into a pitiful-looking eunuch with man boobs, the society that a society calls a real girl, so too the term tribulation has been mutilated, hacked, and stretched and transfigured until its original meaning has been all but lost.

In the words of Enigio Montoya, to the dispensationals I would say, you keep using that word, but I do not think you know what it means.

Inconceivable.

Which begs the obvious question, what does it mean? Section two, the transing of tribulation. If dispensationals are to be believed, the word tribulation refers to a singular event in the future that is so nasty, it engenders anxiety and panic for all who miss the heavenly tractor beam to the sky, which is affectionately known as the rapture.

For those who are the left behind and miss the short yellow bus to heaven, an antichrist-led dystopia is gonna be unleashed upon the earth for seven hellish years of unparalleled tribulation that'll be coupled with computer chips getting shoved in the back of our heads, probably by men like Elon Musk or one of his robots.

Hailstones the size of basketballs are gonna land on top of your grandma and helicopters that appear like locusts upon the horizon are gonna do the bidding of this calculating man of lawlessness, plunging the world into unspeakable horrors and misery.

Now, instead of careful exegesis, which is what we should have been doing all along, we've been spoon-fed this crap that doesn't actually grapple with what the word tribulation means, and it reads more like a subpar knockoff of the Hunger Games rather than actually presenting what scripture says.

And I do hate to be rude here, but as you will see from everything that I will be presenting today and next week, for many people in the church to peg tribulation to a future end of the world.

Is ridiculous.

And it's one of the great lies that I think that Satan has foisted upon the church, who has become content living in an easily disprovable error. It's hard to imagine. Now, tragically, the church has suffered mightily for the error of dispensationalism.

After a century and a half of mutilating and frankensteining the word tribulation, ripping it out of its biblical context and from the context of the Olivet Discourse, well, the church has become an eschatological hypochondriac, expecting disaster around every single turn.

And because behavior is always downstream of our beliefs, this soiled take on tribulation has led the church to hysteria, panic, despair, and doom and wetting her pants every time that something goes wrong in America.

This has settled down into the soul of America like syphilis had on Al Capone. It's bad. By adopting such a flawed eschatology and such bogus definition of terms, a once militant and active church, the ones that built Christendom, the ones that stormed the gates of hell and built institutions like hospitals and education, that church has been reduced to a clique of world-escaping heaven-gazers who have lost our culture.

As the church has retreated from the world and waited for our ticket out of here, we took the salt and we took the light with us, abandoning our society to the darkness and to the decay, which is why they are now dark and decayed.

All of this points to the unmistakable fact that while the church has been complaining about the sorry state of the world for the last 100 years, much of the blame for its devolution lies squarely at her feet.

We've become the church who has buried her talents in the sand while waiting for our master to return so that when he does return to this generation, we would be called wicked and lazy and unfaithful, and that is what our generation has been.

Now, I'm thankful that people are starting to see the dangerous demonic side of dispensationalism, but for a hundred years now, it's worked its way through the corpse of America like cancer, and I pray to God that it would be over.

That we would move on from it so that we could see eschatology rightly and biblically, but that we actually have a robust view of the world, of our country, of the direction that the world is heading through Christ and what Christendom actually looks like.

Now, that leads us to section three, the actual meaning of the word tribulation. Now, with all of the buffoonery that I could mention and that we already have mentioned, I think it's time for us to transition away from the linguistic failures of dispensationalism to begin building a case for what tribulation actually means.

And to that end, we need to begin with the word tribulation itself, which comes from the Greek word thelepsis. Now, according to the preeminent Greek lexicon of our day, which is known as the BDAG, thelepsis literally means pressing down or pressure.

But since the term is frequently used in a metaphorical sense, BDAG also gives the following secondary definition to the term, which means trouble that inflicts distress, oppression, and affliction, a Greek lexicon of the New Testament.

Now, but the BDAG is not alone in how it defines this word. The Launida lexicon, which is based upon semantical domains, defines the word this way. Thelepsis is trouble involving direct suffering, Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament.

And the Dictionary of Biblical Languages says roughly the same thing, defining the term like this, trouble, distress, oppression, or tribulation, Dictionary of Biblical Languages. Now, far from the word tribulation pointing to a specific window of increased peril just before the end of the world, listen to what I'm saying here.

Far from this word being a proper noun that points to a end-of-the-time scenario, the best linguistic scholars in our day all universally agree that this is not an end-time event. And notice, you didn't see anything about the end times in that word.

Instead, this is a general term that describes any period of intense pain or suffering. It is not a specific period of eschatological mayhem, it is a general period of suffering that all of us face. For instance, in the same way that English speakers use phrases like pressure and suffering and heavy and things like that to communicate times in their life when they're suffering because suffering is a shared human experience, well, Greek speakers did the same thing.

They would talk about the death of a loved one being crushing to them. And when they did that, they were using the same word that is used here called tribulation. When a man describes how a particular situation at his work was laying heavy upon him, he is talking about going through tribulation.

Again, this is not a special word that always applies to the end of human history. It's a very common word that shows up hundreds of times in the Bible to describe God's people suffering, which we're gonna get into in just a moment.

For the dispensationals to say this word means the end of human history, ipso facto, is just foolish, it's ignorant, and it's woefully ignorant of what the Greek language actually means. So we reject that conclusion.

Now, when Jesus looked his disciples right in the eye and he warned them of tribulation in Matthew 24, 9, he was not pointing to a novel period known cryptically as the tribulation. He was telling them that they were soon gonna be walking through troubling times, that they were gonna be persecuted, that they were gonna be maligned, that they were gonna be beaten, that being a Christian, following Jesus, loving Christ, was gonna be a very dangerous reality for them in the immediate years ahead.

They were gonna be crushed by Jewish persecutions. They were gonna be pressed in on every side. And if it were not for the grace of God, the bloodthirsty Jews would have murdered and martyred every single one of them because they were filled with a kind of demonic hatred for Jesus and his people.

This is why Jesus says, if they hated me, then they also will hate you because I am in you, John 15, 18 through 19. Jesus isn't talking about everyone on earth. If everyone on earth hates Jesus in a general sort of way because we're all haters of God before we become Christians, that's not what he's saying.

He's saying they, the Jews, hate you because they hate me and they hate you because I am in you. Jesus is saying that these Jews have a particular and a peculiar hatred about them for the things of God.

And just in case there's some who remain unconvinced that this is what tribulation means when Jesus looks at his disciples and said, you're gonna go through tribulations, just in case you're not convinced of that, Jesus said that everything in that he predicted in Matthew 24 was gonna happen in a single generation, Matthew 24, 34.

He said, all these things are gonna happen in this generation. So the burden of proof now is on you if you believe that tribulation is a future event because Jesus said, everything I just said is gonna happen in a single generation.

And you have to twist and mutilate that word in order to make it thousands of years. And the twisting and the mutilating is not only anti-intellectual, but it's foolish and it doesn't actually make sense of the text.

Everything Jesus prophesied, Matthew 24, including Jewish-inspired persecutions of Christians had to happen within 40 years or Jesus would be a false prophet. And that he would have died justly for his blasphemies against God.

I want you to pay attention to what I'm saying here. If there had not been a rise in false prophets and antichrist in that generation, if the Pax Romana had not been broken by wars and rumors of wars, if the peace on earth were not shaken by earthquakes and seismic famines, and if the peace of the church were not violently disrupted by persecutions in that generation, then not only would Jesus have been a false prophet worthy of being stoned to death, but he could not be your savior.

His death would have been totally in vain and your salvation would have been meaningless. That's what's at stake here. That's why I'm going as far as I'm going to describe this to you because I'm not just quibbling over the meaning of words.

Well, you think tribulation is a future event that happens somewhere in the far distant future, and I think that it happened in 80, 70. I'm not just quibbling over words. Jesus said that everything is gonna happen that he said in that generation, and it either happened or it didn't.

And if it didn't happen, then he is a crook and a liar and a deceiver who cannot be trusted. But if it did happen, then you're the one who's manipulating the text. That is the linguistic case for how the word tribulation refers to the suffering that the first century church would undergo at the hands of the bloodthirsty Jews, because the word means suffering, the word means pressure, and Jesus said that they are gonna be the ones that deliver it to you.

And we're gonna look at that more next week because we're gonna look at hundreds of New Testament passages that prove that the Jews actually did this to the early church. But now, I wanna transition to part two of this episode, where we're gonna look at the word thalipsis in the Septuagint.

Now, the Septuagint has the word thalipsis show up 133 times, which is striking. That alone proves that this word is not a special word that talks about a special season of time. It's a common biblical word that talks about suffering for God's people.

But what I want you to see in this next section is I'm only gonna talk about two uses of the word thalipsis and the two uses that I'm going to use, not only I think are on the mind of Jesus in Matthew 24, but they also show up in the book of Revelation.

We're gonna look at two examples of thalipsis in the Septuagint that teach us about the unique sufferings that the people of God were gonna undergo in the first century, and we're gonna see how Jesus predicted it all before it even occurred.

Tribulation in the Exodus

Part two, the Septuagint's case for tribulations. Now, without getting into a full-blown case for what the word thalipsis means in the LXX, which is another word for the Septuagint, I'd like to show you two Old Testament examples that is gonna prove our point.

Of the 133 uses of the Greek word for tribulation, thalipsis, in the Septuagint, two of them are remarkably striking and they help us understand what Jesus means by the tribulation in Matthew 24, 9, and the great tribulation in Matthew 24, 21, which as we will see are two distinct events.

Now, the first use of the word to describe tribulations shows up in the book of Exodus, where the people of God suffered under Pharaoh, king of Egypt. And as we will see after examining this Exodus scene how these kinds of tribulations are exactly what Jesus is predicting that the early church is gonna go through in Matthew 24, but now at the hands of a new Egyptian-esque enemy, the Jews.

The second use of the term tribulation that we're gonna look at is even a greater kind of tribulation that Jesus himself calls a great tribulation that does not apply to the church, but it applies to the punishment that's gonna be poured out upon the Jews who are gonna suffer the same fate as Old Testament Egypt, coming under the fury of God's wrath.

And what we will see is how this tragic end to the Jewish covenant was predicted with uncanny accuracy 1 ,500 years before the Romans captured Jerusalem. So to start, I want us to look at the Exodus example of the word tribulation, which Jesus alludes to in Matthew 24 in order to see the kind of suffering that the early church would undergo.

Section one, tribulation, the lepsus, and the exodus. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, the word the lepsus is translated as tribulation 133 times, and it occurs in every major section of the Old Testament, in every, in the law, in the prophets, in the histories, in the poetry.

It shows up, which demonstrates how common the word really is. The word isn't describing a period of novel eschatological suffering that's gonna happen at some point at the end of human history, but it's instead a very common descriptor of pain and pressure and suffering that is experienced by God's people throughout history.

Now, of those 133 usages, the plight of Israel in Egypt, serving as slaves under this tyrant king is one of the clearest examples of the lepsus that we have in the entire Old Testament, and the term is used explicitly in the book of Exodus chapter four, verse 31.

The text reads like this. And the people believed, and when they heard that the Lord was concerned about the sons of Israel, and that he had seen their affliction, the lepsus, they bowed low and worshiped, Exodus 4 .31.

Here, the lepsus describes the crushing weight of Pharaoh's oppressive regime, a burden that was growing increasingly unbearable as their deliverance was drawing near. Now, as you may recall, the more that Moses sought for their freedom, the more Pharaoh's cruelty actually escalated.

And he even went as far as to demand that the Israelites produce the same number of bricks without providing any additional straw, Exodus 5, 6 -19. Now, from this pivotal scene in redemptive history, a precedent kind of emerges where the lepsus tribulations often intensify for the people of God just before freedom and redemption arrives.

So, as the people are waiting on redemption to come, trials tend to increase until the moment that freedom comes. Furthermore, this pattern also highlights a striking contrast for the enemies of God. Those who are inflicting philipsus, those who are inflicting tribulation upon God's people often appear like they're escaping judgment for a time where nothing bad is happening to them.

And yet, this season of apparent immunity ends quite quickly. And suddenly, in Egypt's case, it culminated in God unleashing, after 400 years of slavery and wickedness, God unleashed 10 devastating, pulverizing plagues upon Pharaoh and upon the people of Egypt, ultimately leading to their destruction at the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula.

So, for one group, it looked like that their tribulations were increasing, but then all of a sudden, they experienced freedom. And for the other group, it looked like they were getting away scot-free, and then all of a sudden, a great tribulation falls down upon them.

This kind of pattern is set there in the Exodus, but it's also what Jesus is working with in Matthew 24. Because when Jesus warns his disciples of tribulation in Matthew 24, nine, he's intentionally evoking the same kind of Exodus pattern that's going on back in the book of Exodus.

Just as Pharaoh tightened his grip on the Israelites before their liberation, Jesus was predicting that the first century church was gonna have the noose of persecution tightened around their neck, and the ones holding the rope would be the Jewish leaders, who had become kind of like a pharaoh to the church and her oppression.

The Jews had become a kind of tyrant leader, like Pharaoh, to the people of Israel, and this is not a linguistic coincidence, but it reflects a deliberate way that Jesus is framing the tribulations of his people as a part of the pattern of Philipsis in the scripture, the Exodus pattern, for sure.

Now, this Exodus symmetry goes even deeper than the analogy that I've just worked out. It's a profound kind of theological statement about who Jesus is and what his mission entails. For instance, throughout the gospels, Jesus is acting like he's a new and greater Moses, and he's leading the people of Israel into a new kind of deliverance from a new kind of Pharaoh.

For instance, just as Moses was born under the threat of a tyrant king who sought to kill all the Hebrew baby boys, Exodus 1 .22, Jesus was also born under the threat of a homicidal king who was threatening to kill all the Hebrew boys, Matthew 2 .16, and similarly, just as Moses led God's people through the waters at the Gulf of Aqaba, Paul calls this a baptism, which symbolized their deliverance from their captors, Exodus 14 .21 through 22, Jesus started his ministry by passing through the waters of baptism, Matthew 3 .13 through 17, and then he ended his ministry by calling the entire world to follow him through the waters of baptism, Matthew 28 .19, which tells us that Jesus thought about his mission in an Exodus kind of way.

He's starting his ministry in a Red Sea kind of moment, and now he's calling all of the rest of humanity to follow him in crossing the Jordan. Moreover, Jesus reinforces this kind of theme by teaching the people that a new law on a new mountain, you'll remember the Sermon on the Mount, that's Jesus acting like a true and better Moses, that he's the one sitting down and giving them the law.

These parallels of Jesus and Moses are unmistakably clear in the Gospels, and it shows us that Jesus saw himself as a new, as a savior in the line of Moses who was gonna deliver his people from their chains and from their slavery and from their sin, and that he was the one, not Moses, he was the one who's gonna bring a better deliverance, a better redemption to the people of God.

Now, in Matthew 24, when Jesus, the greater Moses, predicts a coming Philipsis, a coming tribulation, he is intentionally pointing to a period like the Israelites went through in Egypt of intensified persecutions for his disciples, persecutions that would come not from the Egyptians, but shockingly, this time, it was gonna be coming from the Jews.

Just as Pharaoh increased the Philipsis, the tribulations on Israel before God set them free, now the descendants of Israel, the ones who should have known better, the ones who knew what it was like to be persecuted and tried and hated and killed, now they're the ones who are acting out Egyptian behavior by killing, murdering, and martyring the early church.

And just as it happened in the days of Moses, the church was gonna be the ones who, even though they went through tribulation, would be set free. And it was their oppressors who looked like they got away with it, who looked like they were getting out of these things scot-free, were gonna be the ones who drown under the fury of God's wrath at AD 70.

Just as the Pharaohs and all of his chariots were drowned in the waters of Aqaba, the unfaithful Jewish nation would face a tidal wave of God's wrath in the destruction, in the devastation of Jerusalem.

Now, this deliberate use of Exodus imagery assures Jesus' followers that Philipsis, tribulation, is not a sign of God's abandonment of them as a people, but it's a hallmark of how God accomplishes redemption.

He calls his church out of tribulation and into freedom instead of from freedom into tribulation, which is what happened to Egypt, and it's what happened to the first century Jews. The early church, like Israel, in Egypt, would endure great suffering, but it was within that suffering that God's power and his deliverance shone most clearly.

The true and better Moses was leading that first century church out of oppression and into freedom. But unlike Moses, who was kept out of the promised land because he sinned against God, he wasn't allowed to lead the people any longer, and he died even outside of the promised land before the promises of God for the people of Israel, he had seen them.

But unlike that Moses, Jesus, the true and better Moses, would not die outside of the land. He would rise and he would lead the people of God, not to ponder one nation, but to conquer every nation, to ponder the world, to conquer the world, to conquest the world, until every nation on earth was filled with the people who obey him.

The Jews came under a Egyptian-like curse, and they were thrown under the fury of God's wrath like the Egyptians of old. The church, like Israel, was not only led into the promised land by their deliverer, Jesus, but now they're being led into the entire world.

That's the first instance of the word thellipsis, and Jesus is definitely leaning into that in Matthew 24. Now, the second instance of the word is next. Section two, the great tribulation, thellipsis and covenant curses.

Now, the second use of the word thellipsis that I wanna explore, it has an even darker and more terrifying undertone, and it's found in Deuteronomy 28, 53 through 55. In that chapter, God outlines a long list of all of the blessings that his people are gonna receive if they obey God and they obey the terms of the covenant.

You should read it. Deuteronomy 28 is an astounding chapter, but if those same people refuse to obey God and they refuse to obey his covenant, they refuse to submit themselves to the terms, well, then God reveals a series of curses that are so chilling that they send shivers down grown men's spines.

This chapter paints a grotesque and a stomach-turning kind of picture that's going to happen to the people if they utterly abandon his covenant. It depicts unspeakable horrors, madness, depravity that defy imagination, that you can't even read about in novels because our imagination doesn't go that far.