138. False Messiahs and Antichrists

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These are not Answers that concern our future. What we're gonna see is

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Jesus gives them answers to their questions about What it's gonna happen in their time

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Hello everyone and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 138 false messiahs and antichrists

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Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the broadcast where we're in a new series on the book of Revelation And as we've said over the last two weeks, you cannot even begin to understand this most confusing work until you've understood

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Matthew 24 which serves as the prequel to Revelation the answer key if you will for all of the symbols and the signs that proliferate this apocalyptic text

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So as an introduction to the book of Revelation, we're gonna be camping out in Matthew 24 for a few weeks

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So that whenever we open up John's Apocalypse Everything is going to make so much more sense now last week

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We laid a detailed foundation and a context for Matthew 24 where we examined three particular

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Threads to see how each of them pointed to the doom that was soon gonna befall

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Jerusalem the first thread that we examined was the Eschatological statements of John the

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Baptist and how he was the end time prophet who was coming in the spirit of Elijah He was there to prepare the people for the coming day of the

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Lord that great and terrifying day that Malachi prophesied about and he says that that day is coming the axe is already at the root of the tree one more swing and it's

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Going to be unleashed upon the Judeans. That's the first thread the second thread we talked about last week was

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Jesus's teachings and his miracles and his sermons and his parables and the showdown that he had with the

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Pharisees in Jerusalem in the final week of his life all of which is pointing to the sudden and calamitous ending that is soon going to be coming upon the city that Jesus indicted for killing the prophets and for Murdering God's only

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Son According to Jesus God was gonna uproot that city like the withered fig tree

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Matthew 21 19 He was gonna take the kingdom away from them because they weren't bearing any fruit

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Matthew 21 43 and he was gonna give it to a new people who would bear its fruit

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Matthew 21 41 and As a result of their fruitlessness just like the fig tree

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He was gonna send his armies to set that city on fire Matthew 22 7 leaving their temple abandoned

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Matthew 23 38 and Matthew 24 2 now alongside of those two themes which are

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Proof enough. We also get this motif of curse language that comes out of Deuteronomy 28

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Leviticus 26 And that's our third theme Jesus evokes this

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Covenantal language showing how God's covenantal wrath was gonna be poured out on that Particular generation of covenant breakers

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He even says that all of the wrath that had been stored up since Cain killed Abel Was was being held up by the dam of God's grace but that generation by killing

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Jesus Swung the hammer and broke the dam and all of God's fury came crashing down on them, that's what

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Jesus is arguing for in Matthew 23 and he's using Deuteronomy 28

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Leviticus 26 and all of the Covenantal woes that are contained therein to describe the near coming doom on the city of Jerusalem That's what we talked about last week and because of that none of what we've seen so far even

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Remotely has to do with far -off Distant events that are gonna happen sometime in the uncertain future

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Jesus is not speaking about our future. He's speaking about clear events that have already happened in the past Events that happened in the lifetime of his disciples of the people who are listening to him

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Give these covenantal woes in the city of Jerusalem and because of that Jesus is now today

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We're gonna look at even more evidence where he's gonna give his Apostles clear and unmistakable signs

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That they could be on the lookout for so that they could know when all of this doom was about to happen

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These signs are not for us to view in our world We're not supposed to look and say Oh wars and rumors of wars

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Oh false messiahs and oh, look at this and look that's not for us Jesus gave those signs to them so that they could be on the lookout for something that was going to happen in their generation

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Remember these men were going to be living during the time where Jesus Described the downfall of the temple the destruction of Jerusalem They were gonna be spending the next 40 years pouring out their life preaching urgently

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Calling men and women to repent like deck men on the Titanic pleading men and women to get into the lifeboat before the ship

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Collapsed for this reason those men would need to understand what those next 40 years were gonna look like When was the final disaster finally gonna overtake the city?

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And what are some? Evidences that they could be looking for to show them that it was time for them to leave that it was time for them to flee the city and Abandon it to destruction.

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If somebody told you that your city was about to collapse. You'd want to know well, give me some pointers

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Give me some ideas. What's gonna happen? What are gonna be some signs that the city is getting ready to fall?

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That's exactly what Jesus is going to be giving our Disciples today and that's what we're gonna see in the book of our in the chapter of Matthew 24

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So with that let us turn to that great chapter and let us begin our time in Matthew 24 by talking about two things.

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The first thing we're going to be talking about today is the interaction that Jesus has with his disciples where they're confused and they ask him three very reasonable questions and The second thing we're going to try to accomplish today is

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We're gonna be looking at the first sign that Jesus gives the very first sign that Jesus gives is

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False messiahs and Antichrist are gonna be rising up in Judea, so we're gonna look at those two things number one a little conversation

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Jesus has with his disciples and number two, we're gonna be looking at the first sign he gives false messiahs, so with that part one a

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Confusing March to all of that Now the weight of everything that they had seen and heard in the city was clinging to them as they were walking out of Jerusalem It was as if time itself had slowed down when

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Jesus cursed the fig tree The disciples had watched in horror as life drained from the tree right before their very eyes its leaves withered

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Instantly as if cursed by death itself But it wasn't just a tree.

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They knew that now they were Understanding what Jesus was actually getting at when Jesus turned and he pointed to the city of Jerusalem after cursing the tree the message was

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Undeniably clear the city that was just like this fruitless tree

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Was now under the doom of God Their hearts beat heavily in their chest as they followed

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Jesus through the streets walking towards the temple where he would deliver Deliver scathing parables that sent shivers down their spines.

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He his words weren't just teachings They were declarations of war Each parable cut through the tension in the air like a blade condemning the city and its leaders promising judgment

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Promising fire promising that armies are gonna be coming promising that the king is gonna burn the city to the ground

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The disciples must have been exchanging nervous glances between each other each one of them

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Wrestling with their own fear and their disbelief and their horror knowing that this beloved city of Jerusalem the city of God One of the great architectural

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Wonders of the world was was going to fall was going to be ruined was gonna be left in a pile of rubble as Jesus went toe -to -toe with the

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Sanhedrin and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes and the Aristocracy in the city they stood the disciples did nearby anxious

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Feeling the danger pulsing through the crowd their minds were racing trying to reconcile the

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Messiah who had spoken of peace But now was pronouncing woes upon the city and its leaders.

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The tension had to have been unbearable and then When he said that God was gonna abandon the temple

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It probably felt like the ground had just shifted beneath their feet like an earthquake had just happened in their expectations

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The very heart of their faith the temple Being reduced to rubble was reducing them

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They struggled to grasp it They felt like a knot was tightening inside of them and there was no way to untangle it every word that was being uttered on Jesus's lips seemed like a nail in the coffin of their expectations sealing the fate of the city that they had grown up Revering and when he finally said that it was time for them to go.

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I Was Ohh But when he said that God had spoken to the city screams burst from their ears

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This man turned up the lid and said Lord are we. Oh, is the water. So sad And they did not even think of what their master would say towered over them, its gleaming stones were reflecting in the late afternoon sun, and it was too much for them to bear.

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One of the disciples, his voice shaking, pointed to the temple in desperation, and he said, look, teacher, look at the buildings now.

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This wasn't because Jesus had never seen them. Of course he'd seen them. He was just standing right in front of them. He had been to the temple every year of his life as faithful Jew.

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So this disciples not telling him to look as if he'd never seen them before.

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This was different. This was a plea. This was a last attempt at understanding.

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Could this Jesus, could this, could this thing be destroyed? Look at it.

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Go beautiful. It is little glorious. It is. Could God really allow his own house to be torn down and desecrated?

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Jesus's reply that he gave to them really didn't offer any comfort. When they said, do you see all of these buildings?

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He said to them, not one stone, not one stone will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.

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Matthew 24 one, these words would have lanced through them.

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It would have caused them to be heavy in their hearts, even immovable. The disciples were finally starting to come to grips.

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Now they were starting to understand now that they had heard him correctly. The confusion that had been swirling in their minds was not a misunderstanding at all.

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It was a bitter pill that they now were tasting and they were swallowing that God really was going to destroy his own house.

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And so they marched in silence once more from the valley below the city of Jerusalem.

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They marched up the Olivet Hill, the weight of all of these things pressing down on them as they climbed up to the

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Mount of Olives, the city now as they grew higher and higher in elevation, the city was now below them and the temple still gleaming somehow less majestic than it was before.

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And finally, when they reached the top of the hill, when they could bear their confusion no longer, a few of them approached

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Jesus as he sat on the Mount of Olives and in the weight of everything that had just happened, they needed answers.

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So with their minds reeling, they asked him three questions and they wanted clarity and they wanted understanding and they wanted something that they could cling to in the midst of the chaos.

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So this is what they say to him, tell us Jesus, when these things are going to happen and what's going to be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age.

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Their questions probably hung in the air just a moment as they waited for Jesus to respond and they were desperate for something to calm the storm that was going on inside of their hearts.

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But the questions that they were asking would not receive the kind of answers that would calm the storm, but only reveal a greater storm that was soon going to be coming upon Jerusalem.

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Now they did ask three very reasonable questions. This disciples were still in shock over Jesus's prophecy about the temple and these questions were reasonable for them to ask.

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The idea that the temple was going to be left desolate and destroyed was unimaginable to a first century

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Jew. So as they're now with Jesus on the Mount of Olives, they needed clarity. So they asked him three very reasonable questions and each of these questions are the absolute key for you and I understanding what is going on in Matthew 24.

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So we're going to unpack each of these and we're going to look at each of these questions one at a time and what we're going to see is that the only consistent hermeneutical method for understanding these questions and the answers that Jesus gives is not through a dispensational preterist or futuristic lens, but it's through a preterist lens.

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Preterist means that it happened in the past. These are not answers that concern our future.

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What we're going to see is Jesus gives them answers to their questions about what is going to happen in their time, which means that preterism is the only hermeneutic that can actually interpret and help us understand

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Matthew 24. Understanding that these events were fulfilled in the first century past, not in the distant future.

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So the disciples asked us, tell us when these things are going to happen. What's going to be the sign of your coming and what about the end of the age?

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That's the three questions. We need to break down each question and demonstrate how the answers are going to lead us to a preterist understanding.

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So the first question, when will these things happen? That's the question that the disciples led off with, and it directly ties to Jesus's shocking declaration that the temple is going to be destroyed.

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When's this going to happen? They're asking about the timing of the destruction of the temple. When is the temple going to be destroyed,

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Jesus? When is this great symbol of God dwelling among his people going to be torn down?

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They weren't thinking of some far future cataclysmic thing that is going to happen in our lifetime.

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They're thinking about their temple, the building that is standing right in front of them. This building that represented the center of their religious life and their thought and their identity as a person.

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We understand, looking at this from a preterist perspective, that this question actually refers to the events that are going to happen in their lifetime, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem.

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They want to know, Jesus, when is that going to happen? And that's what

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Jesus's prophecy is aiming at as he describes what's going to happen when the Roman armies that are going to be led by Titus are going to come and besiege the city of Jerusalem and destroy it.

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That is the only interpretation that makes sense in light of this particular question.

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When is it going to happen? Not thousands of years in the future, but in their lifetime.

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That's the first question. The second question that they ask is, what's going to be the sign of your coming?

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And this question is often misunderstood. Many people assume that when the disciples are asking

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Jesus about coming, they're referring to his final coming at the end of human history, but that is not at all what the disciples had in mind.

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In fact, that couldn't have been further from what they were actually thinking. Far from pausing their urgent discussion on the life -changing catastrophe that was about to happen in their city in order to sequester a little teaching on eschatology, they continued their line of reasoning, asking

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Jesus, give us a sign. Listen, they had just left the city. Now they're listening to Jesus talk about that all these things are going to happen in their lifetime, and they want a sign that's going to help them understand when the armies are coming, when the destruction is coming.

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They want evidence. And while it's likely that the disciples envisioned a physical return of Jesus, they probably envisioned that Jesus was going to ride a war horse into the city.

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He was going to besiege the city with his loyal soldiers that they were going to, as they were leaving Jerusalem and that they were on the

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Mount of Olives, maybe they were thinking that Jesus was going to start building an army there and that he was going to attack the city and he himself was going to lead them in the destruction of the city.

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But that's not what Jesus was talking about. But they at least were understanding that the physical city was going to be destroyed.

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Now they're looking for evidence of when it's going to happen, signs of when it's going to happen. But scripture, and this is what

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Jesus is going to give them later in this chapter, scripture tells us exactly the kind of signs that they needed to be looking for.

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And some of those signs we're going to see allow for not a physical coming of Jesus, but an invisible judgment coming of Jesus.

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And we have to take a moment here just to help anyone who's listening out.

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When you read Matthew 24 and you think that Jesus is coming back, which that's what the disciples are asking, give us the sign of your coming.

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Jesus is not talking about the end of human history, bodily coming, where he comes at the final moment of history to win the world back to himself or whatever, to fight against the

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Antichrist or go into battle of Armageddon, whatever theory that you feel like that you have, that's not happening here.

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However, what Jesus is talking about is not a physical return, but an invisible return where Jesus himself comes in judgment upon a nation.

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That's the second coming. Actually, if you want to call this the second coming, the second coming is a judgment coming.

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It's a coming on the clouds. It's a coming against, it's a, it's a coming against a particular nation, which we see in the

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Bible is, is deeply rooted in the prophetic literature. And God uses these ways of describing his coming in judgment.

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That's what Jesus is doing. He's saying, I'm coming in judgment and he's using old Testament language to kind of prove that.

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So for instance, let me give you a couple of examples. In Isaiah 19 one, we read, behold, the

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Lord is riding on a swift cloud and is about to come to Egypt.

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The idols of Egypt will tremble at his presence. Isaiah 19 one here,

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God is coming, but God doesn't show up in bodily form in history. We know that God did come against Egypt and he used physical armies from other nations as his chosen weapon of judgment to destroy them.

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So in that sense, he came, he came in judgment and he used, he borrowed pagan armies to do it.

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This is not a physical coming of God to earth. That's not the point. The point is that God is coming and he's coming in judgment and that's the exact same thing

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Jesus is saying that he's going to do in Jerusalem. So he's using that Isaiah language of coming to talk about not a physical bodily return, but a spiritual destruction judgment coming where he's going to borrow the armies of Rome as his weapon to exact judgment on Jerusalem.

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That's exactly what he's saying. And Isaiah gives us the hermeneutical key, but there's more

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Michael one, three, the prophet declares against Samaria and Jerusalem for behold, the

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Lord is coming. Behold the Lord is coming, coming forth from his place and he will come down and tread on the high places of the land.

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And this language may seem to indicate to you that that God is going to be coming in the flesh in order to dole out judgment against Samaria and Judah.

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But that's again, not what God is talking about. God is talking about his war like presence coming in judgment against his people, defamed his name, and he's going to raise up an army to execute his will upon the people who have broken his covenant throughout the old

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Testament. This is how God speaks about coming. He uses the word coming, not to describe a physical phenomenon, but to describe his actions of judgment, his, his actions of retribution against nations who defy his holy law.

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In Jeremiah four, for instance, God says he's coming against Judah riding on a cloud of destruction by raising up what a pagan army called

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Babylon to do his bidding. So God really did come and yet it wasn't physical.

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It was physical in the sense that he raised up Babylon to be his sword, but God himself didn't come in bodily form.

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Here's another example. Ezekiel chapter 30 describes God coming against Egypt where the same imagery of clouds and wrath are employed.

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But the only physical manifestation of the coming was the fact that God raised up a

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Syria and use them to be his weapon against Egypt. Here's another example in the judgment of Tyre and side on God uses the language of visitation.

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He's going to visit these people and he's going to rain down his wrath upon these people by raising up and foreign army to crush them.

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Whether it was against Babylon and Isaiah 13, Edom and Isaiah 34, Egypt and Ezekiel 30, or every other example that you can, there's, there's at least 10 of these where God is coming and he's going to come in wrath and he's going to bring his wrath against a real tangible people with a real tangible army.

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But he himself is not coming in bodily form. He's coming in the form of his judgment.

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So in the case of Matthew 24, I've just quoted probably five or six examples from the old Testament of God coming in judgment.

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This is exactly what Jesus is describing when his disciples say, give us the sign of your coming.

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They're asking him, what's going to be the sign of your judgment? They're not asking for what is going to be the sign of your bodily coming that that category doesn't exist for the

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Jew because they're looking back at Isaiah 13 and Ezekiel 30 and all of these other passages.

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They understand that the coming of God in this sense is the coming of judgment.

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And we'll get into that more in the weeks ahead. Now, the coming of Jesus is describing the day where he's going to unleash his wrath upon Jerusalem using the armies of Rome and they're going to execute his judgment upon that godless city.

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This is not a visible return of Jesus in the flesh, but it is an old Testament like invisible coming of God's wrath upon covenant breaking nations.

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The signs that the disciples were asking about are the indicators in the evidence that Rome was coming, that Rome was drawing near and that Rome was going to be at their gates.

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And over the course of the Olivet discourse, Jesus is going to lay out one sign after another, after another.

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That's going to give his people a roadmap for when the armies of Rome would come.

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That is what Jesus is talking about. That's the second question that they ask. The third question that they ask, what about the end of the age is perhaps the most misunderstood question of them all.

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Many people, when they read that question today, they interpret it as if Jesus was speaking about the end of the world. They say that age equals world.

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So Jesus, what about the end of the world? That's the way they interpret it. But that would have been nonsensical to the disciples.

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Imagine putting yourself in their situation. If someone told you that your beloved city was about to be destroyed, and let's just say that someone came to you today and said, hey, a meteor is going to hit your city in the next three years, sometime in the next three years, you're going to have a lot of questions on how you're going to make sense of that event.

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And they're going to be reasonable questions. You're going to say things like, okay, when is this going to happen? Is there any sign in the sky that I'm going to see that's going to alert me that it's coming?

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What do I need to do? When do I need to put my house on the market? You're going to ask very practical questions and you're going to ask relevant questions that are going to affect your life and your experience.

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But what would be an absolute complete waste of your time would be asking about things that aren't going to happen for another 2000 years.

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It would be like saying, okay, I understand that there's a meteor coming and I know that this is going to happen and it's going to happen to my house and I need to prepare for it.

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But hey, wait a minute, just for a moment while we're at it, could you tell me about things that are going to happen to a people that I will never know at a time that I will never live on a side of the world that I may not even know exists yet concerning times and cultures that I can't even comprehend about events that you're personally not even talking about.

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Can you tell me about that? That wouldn't make any sense. You are dealing with the destruction of everything that you know personally and you want to stop and you want to talk about things that are happening 2000 years into the future.

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Nobody would have ever done that. That would have been so utterly inconceivable and it would have exposed the disciples as if they were raving lunatics or had the intellect of a poached egg as C .S.

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Lewis once famously retorted. The disciples were not asking about the end of human history.

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They were asking about the end of the Jewish history, the end of their nation, the end of their temple, the end of their world as they knew it, not the end of the entire world.

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They were asking about the end of the Jewish age. When they asked Jesus about tell us about the end of the age, they're talking about the end of the old covenant era, the era that was symbolized by temples and priesthood and sacrifices and prophets and feast and festivals and all of those things.

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They wanted to know when that era of God's redemptive history where God had dealt with the world through one nation called

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Israel. When is that going to be over? When is God going to no longer dwell in his house that sat on top of Jerusalem's hill and instead, where's he going to dwell now?

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Where's he going to go? He's left his temple. They want to know those questions. They're not, they don't care a nick about you.

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They're not even thinking about you, you riding around in your fancy car and scrolling your 401k on your mobile device.

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They have no category for you. They're thinking about their time when men are no longer going to travel to Jerusalem to hand their sacrificial animal off to the priest, but they're now going to be represented by Jesus directly before the father.

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They're thinking about the time when they no longer have to pilgrimage to the temple because Jesus is their true temple.

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They're thinking about all of the end of everything that they've ever known and their dad and their granddad and their ancestors had ever known all the way back to Mount Sinai.

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Every aspect of what it meant to be a Jew was ending. So the question that they're asking when they say, tell us about the end of the age has nothing to do with you.

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It wouldn't have made any sense if it did. They weren't thinking about the end of your world or the destruction of your things.

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They were thinking about their things, the temple. They wanted to know when the mosaic era of temples and priests and sacrifice was coming to an end.

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When's the old way of relating to God going to die and what's going to replace it. Those were reasonable, practical, very earthy questions that they were asking that futurist and dispensationalist have distorted to their own liking, injecting abject lunacy into the text.

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That's just simply not warranted. It is the preterist interpretation of Matthew 24 alone that fits the context of what

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Jesus is saying and what the disciples are asking. Now, I want us to look now that we've looked at the three questions that they've asked,

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I want us to look at how Jesus begins answering their question. It would be really weird if they, if in tears, they come to him and they say, tell us,

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Jesus, when is the temple going to be destroyed? Give us a sign about, about when you're coming in judgment and, and help us understand when the whole mosaic period is going to come to an end.

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Jesus, tell us. And Jesus looks at them and says, that might be important to you, but I need to speak right now to the

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American, the American Christians. And I need to tell them about the world economic forum.

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And I need to tell them about the antichrist. And I need to tell them about their rapture. And I need to tell like the disciples have been like, what the heck is

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Jesus talking about? Does he even care that we're panicking right now?

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And he wants to talk about some people we've never met and we'll never know. And we'll never see. No, Jesus doesn't answer the question like that.

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Instead of telling them about things that were going to happen in the end of our age, he begins by telling them what's going to, things that are going to happen to them, because he loves them.

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And he's answering their question. And he begins with the very first sign that is going to show them that these things are happening, that Jerusalem is decaying and, and, and getting ready to be destroyed.

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And the first sign that he gives them is that there's going to be a uptick and a rise in false teachers, false messiahs and antichrist.

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And that leads us to our second section, which is part two, the rise of false messiahs and antichrist.

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Now, the first evidence that Jesus gives to his disciples who are looking and trying to understand when this judgment is going to happen is the sign that false teachers, false messiahs and antichrist are going to be coming and they're going to be misleading many people and drawing them away from Jesus.

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Now, this is not a general warning that every Christian and every generation is supposed to be on the lookout for false teachers, which of course we should do that.

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That's a good warning. And we should take that seriously today, but that's not what Jesus is getting at. He's not giving a general admonition to the church of all eras to make sure that you're looking out for, uh, for false teachers.

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I mean, Jesus is not here referring to the seeker sensitive movement or the new apostolic reformation.

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And he's not certainly condemning modern day charlatans like T .D. Jakes and Bill Johnson and Steven Furtick and others.

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Although you can find passages that are talking about those fools in other places, but here he's speaking about first century false teachers, a rise and uptick in false messiah movements that were going to characterize this era.

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And it was going to lead many people astray. This is what Jesus says. See to it that no one misleads you for many will come in my name saying,

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I am the Christ and will mislead many. Matthew 24, four through five.

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Now remember, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's saying that meant that these false teachers are going to come and deceive many of you, many of your generation.

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Now, the word that Jesus uses here is very important. It's the Greek word, which means to watch carefully or to be on guard.

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It's the kind of word that you would use if you were a guard on top of a wall and you were looking out across the horizon and you were scanning and you were trying to make sure that no one, no threat was coming upon the horizon.

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This word tells us that Jesus expected his disciples to pay attention in a concentrated way, in a dedicated way.

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He was expecting his disciples to pay attention to their world and their time because the false messiahs and antichrist would be coming against them.

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Not us. They weren't coming to mislead you and me. They were coming to mislead them and to mislead them against Christ.

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This is not about something that's going to happen thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not giving them passive instructions, but he's calling them to active spiritual awareness, continual focus, because these things are going to be happening right in front of them.

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The fact that Jesus used the phrase or the word, but a pet say shows that he expected his disciples to be on guard, to be alive and to be alert and to be engaged in the events of their space and time and their circumstances, because they needed to be able to warn other people not to follow these false messiahs in their day.

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Now, we need to talk about a little bit about what the word messiah means and what messiah actually is, because we need to understand this rightly.

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This is so important. If you're going to understand what antichrist is, if you're going to understand what the

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Bible is talking about when it calls someone an antichrist, you have to understand what messiah means.

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If you don't, you're going to botch it and you're going to think that, oh, well, the antichrist is going to come and he's going to lead the world into into this great tribulation.

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And then none of that is what the Bible is talking about. That's what left behind is talking about.

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That's what late great planet Earth is talking about. And that's what people who are confused about their theology think that the

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Bible is talking about. But that is not what the Bible is talking about when it uses the word messiah.

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So we have to understand this correctly. So before we open up the rest of the

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New Testament, before we look at the extra biblical evidence that everything Jesus said was true, that there really was a proliferation of false messiahs that did occur in the first century.

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Before we give the history of that, the biblical evidence for that, we have to talk about the word messiah.

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We have to talk about what it means, what expectation the word brings, what the historical consequence of that word is, and how

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Jesus is coming created a messianic vacuum that is going to lead us to this rise in false messiahs that we see in Matthew 24 that came true with shocking accuracy.

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So first, what is the meaning of the word messiah? The word for messiah originally comes from the

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Greek word Christos and the Hebrew word Mashiach.

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Instead of those words meaning a single person, they actually meant an office.

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The word messiah is not a word that means a particular individual person, but it is an office.

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It is a messianic office. Both Christos and Mashiach, both were words that originally meant a person who had been anointed for public service in a particular office.

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That's what the word means, anointed one. Now, in the Old Testament, there were three offices that you would have to be anointed in order to be called

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Mashiach or messiah. There was the anointed priest who was called messiah.

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Aaron was called messiah. We have to understand that the word messiah is not just applied to Jesus.

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The word Christ is not just Jesus's middle name. It was the word

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Mashiach, which applied to the anointed high priest who oversaw the worship of God at the temple.

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Then there was another anointed office. It was the anointed king who made sure that the enemies of God didn't triumph over the people of God in the land.

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He was anointed. David was called messiah, Mashiach. And then that's the second office.

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Then there was the third anointed office, which was the office of the prophet, where they were anointed with oil.

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They were anointed with a horn of oil and they were anointed to serve and to call the people of God to repentance and to preach the truth of God to the people who broke covenant with God.

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Those are the three anointed Mashiach offices. Now, as you can already tell the word

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Christ, the word Christos, the word Messiah, the word Mashiach, those words were not invented to talk about Jesus.

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Again, those words are not his middle name. Instead, Christos in the

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Greek, which where we get the word Christ in English, Mashiach in the Hebrew, which where we get the word Messiah, they are talking.

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Those are very old words that are talking about people who were anointed for prophet, priest, and king.

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These are words that were applied to Moses, words that were applied to David, words that were applied to Elijah and Samuel and others to show that they were anointed with oil in order to serve in the kingdom of Israel for a specific

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God ordained duty. All of them were called Mashiach, Messiah.

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However, unlike all of these Old Testament men who faithfully served in one or maybe even two of these roles, you think about men like Moses, who was both anointed as prophet to declare the word of God to the people and also as a king because he was the one who led them out of Egypt.

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You think about Melchizedek in Genesis 14, 18, who was called the king of Salem and also priest of God, most high right there in the same sentence.

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In the same way, Samuel served as both a prophet and a priest. He offered sacrifices to God like a priest, 1

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Samuel 7, 9 -10, but he also was explicitly called a prophet, 1

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Samuel 3, 20. Though he never served as a king, he did hold those two offices and Jesus is often compared to the true and greater

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Samuel because he's the one who unites the prophetic and the priestly office together. Here's another example,

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David. While he's most known for being an anointed king, anointed by Samuel to reign as king, he also acted as a prophet because he wrote prophetic scripture.

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He wrote the Psalms, many of them, that pointed to the eventual coming of the Messiah and Jesus is intentionally talked about in very

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Davidic terms because like David, he united the kingly office and the prophetic office perfectly together.

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But what Jesus did greater than all of these men is that he united all three of the offices together perfectly under his lordship as the true and perfect prophet, priest, and king.

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And in that sense, Jesus is the true, the better, and the perfect Mashiach because he fulfills everything that the office of the prophet was meant for.

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He fulfills everything that the office of priest was designed for, and he fulfills everything that the reign of the king was meant for.

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Despite all the examples, there's no one in the Old Testament who held all three offices at once. The separation of the roles, prophet who spoke for God, priest who offered sacrifices, king who governed, highlighted the limitation of the office of Mashiach.

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And it wasn't until the ultimate Messiah, Jesus came, who united all three of these roles together perfectly that we see the true fulfillment of Mashiach has come.

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And he's the only one now who ever holds any of those offices because in Christ, those offices have been fulfilled.

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As prophet, he's the one who reveals the word of God to his people. And he tells us the truth perfectly.

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John 1 18. As a priest, he's the one who's going to offer him. He's the one who did offer himself up as the final sacrifice that fulfilled all sacrifices.

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He's the one who intercedes between us and God and heaven's perfect temple as our true and perfect priest,

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Hebrews 7 25 through 27. And as king, he's the one who's going to reign over all creation with justice and righteousness until all of his enemies are put under his feet.

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So all of his people have been made citizens of his kingdom. First Corinthians 15 25, Revelation 19 16.

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This was what the Messiah was supposed to be. The unification of all three offices.

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And this is the kind of Messiah that the first century Jews were supposed to be looking for.

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They were not supposed to be looking for an anointed prophet only. And they weren't supposed to be looking for an anointed king only or an anointed priest only.

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They were supposed to be looking for the man who would hold all three of them together.

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And yet that's not who they were looking for. But I'll give them credit for this.

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While they completely misunderstood who the Messiah was going to be, what the Messiah was going to be, where the

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Messiah was going to be, why the Messiah was going to be, or how the Messiah was going to be. They did actually understand.

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They seem to comprehend very clearly when the Messiah was going to come.

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They knew that it was going to happen in the first century. That's why it's so fascinating to me about modern day

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Jews. The Orthodox ones or whichever sect it is that are still looking for a Messiah, because everyone in the first century knew that it was happening in the first century.

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Everyone knew that it was going to happen in their day. And the reason that they understood this is they read their

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Bible. Daniel 9, 24 through 27, which is known as a 70 weeks prophecy, tells us that they, the first century

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Jews were expecting the Messiah to arrive at any point urgently in the first century.

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And the reason that they thought this was simple, Daniel's prophecy lays out a clear roadmap and a timeline pointing to when the anointed one was going to come, the

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Messiah. He was going to come after 69 weeks of years, which is 483 years.

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And that 483 years would need to be counted from the decree of Cyrus to rebuild

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Jerusalem. And since every good Jew knew when

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Cyrus made that decree, simple math got them to the conclusion that the

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Messiah was going to come in the first century. When we open up the pages to Matthew, you have to understand that in every marketplace in the city, that in every country by way, that in every synagogue, people were talking, where is the

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Messiah? Has he come yet? Is he here? They knew that Daniel was showing them that the

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Messiah was coming in their lifetime. And this produced an unhinged fever pitch level of messianic expectation and excitement.

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And it led to a great fervor among the people. So by the time Jesus burst upon the scene, many were trying to guess the identity and the role of the coming

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Messiah. Many were wondering if the Messiah was going to be an anointed King who would throw off the tyranny of Rome and would lead the people into a golden age of autonomy and nationalism.

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And you can see glimpses of this in the New Testament where they grab Jesus one day, they seize him and they try to make him their

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Mashiach King. John 6, 15, when they shouted Hosanna in the highest, when he rode into the city of Jerusalem on the back of the donkey in John 12, 13, they were saying, here's our

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Messiah. Here's our King only who's going to lead us in freedom against Rome.

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He's going to overthrow the shackles of Roman oppression so that we, the Jews can now be the great empire that we were destined to be.

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In the same way, other people were looking for an anointed prophet who was going to lead the people of God into a revival of religion.

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Perhaps you will remember the Pharisees who were questioning John the Baptist. They were trying to ascertain if John was the prophet that Moses told them about.

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John 1, 21. They said, are you the prophet or do we need to look for someone else? You'll remember the woman at the well in John chapter four, who was looking forward to the coming of this prophetic figure from Deuteronomy 18.

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And you read that in John 4, 25, where she asks Jesus, are you the one who's coming or are we to look for someone else?

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She's asking, are you the anointed prophet only the one that we've been told about in the

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Torah? Still yet, there were others at that time who were looking for an end time messianic priest, one who was going to cleanse the people of all of their sins and usher in an era of resurrection, religious revival for the people of Judah.

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And we pick up on those kinds of vibes when Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist prophesied that God is going to raise up a horn of salvation to give the people knowledge of their salvation through the forgiveness of their sins.

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Luke 1, 68 through 79. This language is priestly language. You may remember the

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Pharisees who were challenging Jesus's priestly authority and his credentials when he cleansed the temple in John chapter two.

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They said, show us a sign, Messiah, that you are the true priest who can revive the temple, who can build it anew.

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They were asking for proof that he was the messianic priest that he was claiming to be.

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Also, if you want to do some research on this, the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered at the caves of Qumran also demonstrate that there were many

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Jewish groups like the Essenes in the first century who were expecting an end time priest who would come and purify the people from their sin.

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The Essenes were a group of people almost like the Amish today who removed themselves from society because of all the sin and the wickedness that were going on.

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And they were praying for an end time, end of human history priest who was going to come and cause the people to repent and turn back to God and pure religion.

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All of these varied expectations were happening in the first century. People were looking at their neighbor and saying, are you the

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Messiah? People were looking at famous religious leaders and they were saying, are you the

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Messiah? It was thick in the air as the people around were waiting for the arrival of the anointed one.

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And they were wanting to know when is this anointed prophet, this anointed priest or this anointed king going to come.

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And sadly, they not only missed the fact that Jesus was the coming one that they were looking for, but they missed how he was the coming

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Messiah of Messiahs, the one who would be perfect prophet, perfect priest and perfect king.

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And as a result, the first century Jews were feverishly looking for a needle in a haystack.

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They were looking so fervently and feverishly for a Messiah in all the wrong places.

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When he came, they rejected him. They were looking for a carnal

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Messiah who would fit their agenda and who would fit their expectations and who would fit into their plans and their procedures and their dreams and hopes and aspirations who would, who would come and who would help them throw off their problems.

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And they became, as a people, they became adept at not only looking in the wrong places, but producing the wrong kind of men to fulfill this

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Messianic office. And what happened is, is when time started running out on Daniel's prophecy to be fulfilled, they started putting forward one

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Messiah candidate after another, after another, after another, which absolutely fulfilled

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Jesus's prophecy. And all of this certainly led to a vacuum, a

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Messianic vacuum that started increasing as soon as Jesus died. Because Jesus had

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Messianic claims or people who were claiming that he was the Messiah. So when he died, there were a lot of people who started now feverishly putting forward more candidates for this office.

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After the death of the true Messiah, the Jewish expectation for Messianic figures did not wane, but it wildly increased.

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According to prophecies in Daniel, the general sentiment was that the Messiah would show up in the first century, that he would lead the people to freedom against Rome.

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And that's why Jesus firmly warned the disciples not to follow these pseudo false

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Messianic figures, because he knew that they were going to be coming and that they were going to promise freedom from Rome and the people were going to eat that hook, line and sinker.

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And they were going to lead the people into utter ruin and death. This is why

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Jesus said, see to it that no one misleads you for many will come in my name and say,

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I am the Christ. I am the Messiah and will lead many astray.

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Matthew 24, four through five. He says just a few verses later that many false prophets are going to arise and mislead many.

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Matthew 24, 11. And again, in verse 23, he says, then if anyone says to you, behold, here is the

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Christ or there is the Christ, do not believe him for false Christ and false prophets will arise and they will show great signs and wonders so as to mislead if possible, even the elect behold,

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I have told you in advance. So if they say to you, behold, he is in the wilderness, do not go out or behold.

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He is in the inner room. Do not believe them. Matthew 24, 23 through 26.

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Jesus' words are unmistakably clear. He warned them that many false messiahs, many false prophets, many anti -Christ were coming.

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And let me just say a word really quickly about this, because you're maybe wondering like it doesn't say anti -Christ.

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The word for anti -Christ means a false Christ. Anti meaning against or opposed to Christ.

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The word for false Christ is false Christ. So anti -Christ, and we'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute.

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Anti -Christ is not a singular human figure. It is anyone who is against the true

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Christ and the true Christ is the true Messiah, Jesus. So a false prophet, a false messiah, and an anti -Christ biblically speaking are the same people.

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They are people who are going to lead God's people away from Jesus.

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And I'll prove this in a moment when we get to first John, but I wanted to make that clear that we're talking about the same people, false messiahs, false prophets and anti -Christ are the same group.

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These are just synonyms to describe them in different ways. This was a warning that Jesus was giving to his own disciples not to follow these people, not to follow the false messiahs and the anti -Christs with an

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S at the end. And all of this, he's telling them this because these are things that are going to happen in their lifetime.

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Things that are going to unfold in that generation. There is going to be a rise in the anti -Christ movement among the first century church.

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Do not follow that. Do not go down that road. Do not listen to them because it will lead to your destruction and your death.

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There's no ambiguity at all in what Jesus is saying. Jesus believed and said so much that numerous false

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Christ, false messiah movements were going to rise up during that time and you needed to avoid them.

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The question that we now need to answer is whether Jesus was right. We know that Jesus actually believed that's what was going to happen.

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Now, we need to understand from the Bible and from history, did this actually occur?

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Were there indeed false messiahs and anti -Christ that rose up in the first century and did the things that Jesus said or did

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Jesus get it wrong? Was Jesus a false prophet? Was Jesus a false messiah? Was Jesus an anti -Christ figure?

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We have to wrestle with this now so that we can understand the truth of what

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Jesus is saying. And to settle this, we're going to begin with history. And I'm going to give you some quotes from Josephus who lived and saw these things happen.

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And then after that, we're going to look at what the Bible says. And between those two things, you are going to see the truth clearly.

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And I think maybe you're going to see things today that you've never heard before that are going to be amazing to you.

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And they're going to make the Bible make so much more sense. And I'm so excited for that part. So let's begin.

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Part three, the extra biblical proof. Now, while it's often difficult to find proof for events that happen in the ancient world, described especially in the writings of their contemporaries, the rise of false messiahs in the nation of Judah in the first century is not one of those occasions.

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Case in point, a few years after Jesus ascended into heaven, a

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Jewish historian named Josephus described such an occasion. There was a revolt that broke out in the land of Samaria, which is a neighboring region next to Judea.

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And it was led by a self -proclaimed messianic upstart. And because the people at that time were already looking for a messianic figure to lead them out of bondage to Rome and out of all of their troubles and gripes and complaints and all that, this man easily gathered up an army of angry, youthful hopefuls.

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And he had them, guess what? Follow him into the wilderness, which is exactly what

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Jesus said was going to happen. If they tell you to follow them into the wilderness, don't do it. And that's exactly what he did.

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And it was in that wilderness where this messianic upstart prepared a mob to make an assault upon the

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Roman guards who were stationed at the top of Mount Gerizim. Now, Josephus tells us that no sooner did this would be insurrection began

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Pontius Pilate. Yes, the same Pontius Pilate who oversaw the crucifixion of Jesus. He squashed that pitiful rebellion and killed many thousands of people who participated it.

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And you can read about that in the Jewish antiquities by Josephus chapter 18, paragraph 85 through 87.

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Now, Jesus warned them that this prediction was going to come true. And it did. And it did now.

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But there's more. There's way more. A few years later, in 44 AD, a Jewish fraud convinced people or convinced a crowd of people that he was the

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Messiah. And he led them through the wilderness to the River Jordan, where they all met their untimely demise.

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This same Jewish historian named Josephus tells us this fact in this way is what he says.

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It came to pass while Faddis was procurator of Judah, that a certain charlatan whose name was

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Thutis persuaded a great part of the people to take their effort with them and follow him to the

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River Jordan. For he told them that he was a prophet and that he would, by his own command, divide the river and afford them an easy passage over it.

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And many were deluded by his words. However, Faddis did not pretend, did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt.

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But he sent a troop of horsemen out against them. And after falling upon them unexpectedly, they slew many of them and took many of them alive.

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And they also took Thutis alive and cut off his head and carried it to Jerusalem.

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That's Josephus Jewish antiquities, chapter 20, paragraph 97 through 98. Now, it's important to note that Josephus was not only an eyewitness to these false messianic uprisings, but he was also a

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Pharisee and he was a priest. He was not a sympathizer with Jesus or a lover of Christians, but he was instead hoping for the true

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Messiah to come. And he was watching this proliferation of false messiahs who were coming.

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And he admits that they were false messiahs. Now, to think that Josephus records the rise of a false prophet, the rise of false messiahs, the rise of this movement of antichrist, which clearly contributed to the downfall of Judah because it inflamed

01:00:06

Rome against them. He must have been especially bitter and he must have realized the great irony that all of this was happening, that it was their false messiahs that led to their downfall.

01:00:20

It's exactly what happened. He witnessed false messiahs bringing slavery and death and ruin upon the people who were following them to their death.

01:00:32

Now, as the days grew closer to the destruction of Jerusalem, Josephus records that there was another false messianic uprising.

01:00:40

He said there were many who deceived and deluded the people, which is exactly what

01:00:46

Jesus said was going to happen under the pretense of divine inspiration. But were in fact for the procuring of innovations and the changes of government, these men prevailed with the multitude to act like madmen and went before them into the wilderness, pretending that God would there show them the signs of liberty.

01:01:09

That's in the Jewish war, book two, paragraph 259. Now, as Jesus predicted, the pied piping false messiahs were leading many of the people away like rats to the slaughter.

01:01:21

And Josephus continues the story about this very example that happened in the year 58 AD, just 10 years before the

01:01:27

Jewish war. This is how he continues it. There was an Egyptian false prophet that did the

01:01:33

Jews more mischief than the former one, the one that he just talked about, for he was a cheat and pretended to be a prophet, which again is a messianic anointed office.

01:01:44

And he got together 30 ,000 men that were diluted by him.

01:01:50

And these, he led them round about from the wilderness. Again, exactly what

01:01:55

Jesus said to the Mount, which was called the Mount of olives. Surprise, surprise.

01:02:02

He was ready to break into Jerusalem by force from that place. And if he could, but once conquer the

01:02:08

Roman garrison and the people, he intended to rule them by the assistance of those who, uh, those guards of his that were to break into the city with him.

01:02:18

Josephus Jewish wars, book two, paragraph two 61 and two 62. Now in a separate work,

01:02:26

Josephus describes how that event transpired. How did it come to an end?

01:02:32

This Egyptian fella who led 30 ,000 people. And it's funny, he goes to the wilderness, just like Jesus said that he goes to the

01:02:39

Mount of olives, which is where Jesus delivered this prophecy. And then he tries to storm the city of Jerusalem.

01:02:45

All of it is a bit too comical to avoid or to overlook. Now, this is what

01:02:51

Josephus says. When Felix was informed of these things, he ordered his soldiers to take their weapons and he came against him with a great number of horsemen and footmen from Jerusalem.

01:03:00

And he attacked the gyp, the Egyptian and the people that were with him. And he slew 400 of them and took 200 of them alive.

01:03:08

The Egyptian himself escaped out of the fight, but did not appear anymore.

01:03:14

And again, the robbers stirred up the people to make war with the Romans and said that they ought not to obey them at all.

01:03:22

And when any person would not comply with them, then they would set fire to their villages and pondered them.

01:03:29

Josephus Jewish antiquities, book 20, paragraph 170 and 171. During this period of 40 years from Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection to the downfall of Jerusalem in 80, 70, which is a verifiable historical event between those years, between 30

01:03:49

AD and 70 AD, the Jewish people grew in their madness.

01:03:55

Instead of turning from their sins and learning the lessons that they faced and submitting to Rome and trying to keep their nation, that people kept producing more and more and more false messiahs that were leading them into rebellion against Rome, which was causing more suffering, more death.

01:04:13

And it was causing Rome to run low on their patience, because if they have to continue putting down these little uprisings, eventually big daddy

01:04:25

Rome is going to come and put down the entire thing. And that's exactly what happened. These false messianic movements were like going up and slapping a bear in the face and laughing about it, wondering when the bear is actually going to wake up.

01:04:38

And then when it does, you are toast. That's exactly what was going on. Now, about a year later from the

01:04:45

Egyptian fiasco, another would be Messiah figure arose in the land. He led people again into the wilderness and he promised freedom to the

01:04:54

Jews so that they could be free of Rome. And because of this, the Roman governor Festus had to violently put them down.

01:05:02

This is what Josephus tells us. Festus sent forces, both horsemen and footmen to fall upon those who had been seduced by a certain imposter who promised them deliverance and freedom from their miseries that they were under.

01:05:16

If they would but follow him as far as the wilderness, accordingly, those forces that were sent destroyed both him that had diluted them and those who were his followers.

01:05:28

That's in Jewish antiquities, book 20, paragraph 188. At this point, you're likely noticing a theme.

01:05:35

Jesus said that if they tell you the Messiah is in the wilderness, do not go. And every single one of these false messianic charlatans called people to join them in the wilderness.

01:05:46

Why did they do that? Because in Jewish thought, the wilderness is where you staged before you enter into the country and take over.

01:05:57

It's like Moses leading the people in the wilderness to get the law to get to get acclimated as a brand new people.

01:06:03

And then you go and you cross the Jordan River like Joshua led the people across the Jordan River.

01:06:09

And then it's time for the war to begin, like the book of Joshua, when they go and they conquest the

01:06:15

Canaanites. So in the Jewish way of thinking, if you're going to start an uprising, you start in the wilderness, like in the time of Moses.

01:06:23

And then you cross the Jordan River and then you take your swords and your war bows and you go to war and you conquest the pagans.

01:06:31

So they were reenacting the story of the Old Testament. Jesus told us that they were going to do that, and they did.

01:06:38

But this time, instead of conquesting the Canaanites, they were trying to conquest the

01:06:43

Romans, which God never told them to do. And just like the generation who died in the wilderness, and just like the generation who was chased out of the city of Ai screaming because they didn't follow the

01:06:58

Lord's commands, this generation was going to have their blood stain the sands of the arid wilderness like rubies, incapable of the success that they were seeking.

01:07:09

There can be no doubt based on what Josephus has said and what we've already seen in Jesus's prophecy, that the rise of false messiahs was dramatically fulfilled in the first century.

01:07:21

We've seen it. And now we've got like six examples from history that Josephus tells us to show that it actually with perfect picture clarity fulfilled what

01:07:31

Jesus said in every aspect of it. We can see how deadly it would have been for those who followed him.

01:07:36

We can see why exactly Jesus gave the warning, why they weren't. He was warning Christians not to follow in and join themselves in with this chaos and confusion.

01:07:45

And you can hardly even imagine how grateful that the disciples would have been after they watched one after another, after another of these movements get put down violently.

01:07:57

You can imagine them saying, I'm so thankful that Jesus told me not to do that because now

01:08:03

I'm not dead. And one should even wonder how absurd it is that futurists today pervert these passages and look forward to a future antichrist and a future false messiah.

01:08:17

When we're staring at the evidence right here in the first century, these signs apply not to us in our generation, but to them.

01:08:30

Now, with that, I don't believe anything additional is needed for us to validate our view of Matthew 24 as a past event.

01:08:38

We've seen it. But if you allow me, I want to take a moment since this topic is so interesting. And so, and because Jesus is so incredible,

01:08:45

I want to brag on Jesus. And I want to brag on the fact that his prophecy was undeniably proved true.

01:08:53

So we've seen it now in Josephus and for me, Josephus proved it.

01:08:58

But now I want to open up the new Testament and I want to show you how the new Testament itself proves that this is true.

01:09:06

So with that part for the new Testament proof. Now, I want to begin in the book of Acts, because once you get outside of the gospels, the first evidence that we have of what the church looked like and did and said, and what they went through is the book of Acts.

01:09:24

And I'm just going to look at a single chapter, which is Acts chapter five. Within the book of Acts, we see early signs that Jesus's prophecy in Matthew 24 is fulfilled.

01:09:35

And it happens right there in Acts chapter five, verse 36 through 37. Listen to what the respected

01:09:42

Jewish leader Gamaliel speaks about these false messianic figures who had arisen and misled many people.

01:09:50

This is what he says. For some time ago, Thutis, who we just heard about from Josephus for some time ago,

01:09:58

Thutis rose up claiming to be somebody and a group of about 400 men joined up with him, but he was killed and all who follow him were dispersed and came to nothing.

01:10:11

After this, Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the census and drew away some people after him, and he too perished and all those who followed him were scattered.

01:10:22

Acts 5, 36 through 37. Here, Gamaliel, as they're convening on what they're going to do with the disciples, are they going to beat them?

01:10:30

Are they going to kill them? Are they going to, what are they going to do? Here, Gamaliel is referencing two well -known instances of false messianic uprisings,

01:10:39

Thutis who claimed to be a prophet and Judas who led a tax rebellion against Rome kind of like in a kingly way.

01:10:47

Both fit the description of a messiah or of a false messiah. They claim to be anointed for the prophetic office or they claim to be anointed for the kingly office, and both of them deceived many, led many astray, and brought them into ruin, which perfectly fulfills

01:11:05

Matthew 24, 4 through 5. These men claim to be anointed by God, messiah, to deliver the people of Israel, leading the into the wilderness and away from the rule and the tyranny of Rome.

01:11:20

And Gamaliel is warning the Sanhedrin there that this rise of false messianic movements was already underway in the first century.

01:11:31

He's confirming what Jesus said, which is beautiful and unbelievable.

01:11:38

Now, let's look at the book of Revelation. We're using Matthew 24 as an introduction to the book of Revelation.

01:11:45

So Revelation must have some evidence, right? Some proof that an era of false messianic figures arose.

01:11:53

And I'm not even going to talk about the most famous example, which is the beast and the false prophet because I want to save that for later.

01:11:59

We're going to talk about that when we get there. But in the early chapters of the book of Revelation, which was written to the historic churches of Asia, which nobody really disputes.

01:12:09

Everybody says that those seven churches were actual churches in the first century in Asia minor.

01:12:16

And they were they were existing during a particular time and in a particular era.

01:12:22

And what revelation tells us is that there was a rise of false messiahs in those churches.

01:12:29

These churches were battling against false teachers, false prophets and antichrist figures who were claiming divine authority, but they were leading the people astray.

01:12:39

They were. This was precisely the kind of deception that Jesus was warning about. And John mentions it in Revelation one through three, for example, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, Jesus commends them and says that he praises them for resisting what false apostles, false messiahs.

01:12:59

He says this. I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance and that you cannot tolerate evil men and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles and they are not.

01:13:13

And you found them to be false. Revelation two to these false apostles were more than just errant teachers who were teaching bad theology.

01:13:23

They were individuals who claimed anointing and authority into the apostolic office, promoting themselves as spiritual leaders who and in a sense, they're functioning as false messianic figures within the church.

01:13:38

And thank God, the Christians in Ephesus remember Jesus's words and they resisted them.

01:13:46

They were presenting counterfeit forms of leadership, counterfeit forms of worship, counterfeit forms of theology that imitated a messianic role of Christ, but with false and errant theology.

01:13:58

And Jesus commends them for their discernment. But it shows us as we're looking at this, how the early church, not just in the book of Acts, but in the city of Ephesus was dealing with false messiahs, false teachers, false prophets, antichrist people.

01:14:15

They were dealing with this in their city. Now, similarly in his letter to Pergamum, Jesus rebukes them for tolerating the teachings of Balaam, he says, which is a symbol of false prophets in the old

01:14:29

Testament who leads God's people into idolatry. So here you have one of the great false prophets of the old

01:14:36

Testament, and Jesus is condemning the people of Pergamum because they're enduring the false prophet

01:14:44

Balaam. Likewise, in his letter to Thyatira, Jesus warns against the influence of Jezebel, who is like the false version of a king.

01:14:53

She's that wicked queen who is one of the worst figures in the Bible. I mean,

01:14:58

Jezebel, the name just strikes infamy whenever you listen to it or hear it. You don't name your children

01:15:03

Jezebel or Judas. I mean, it's just not what you do. They're not good people, just like you wouldn't want to name your child

01:15:10

Benedict Arnold, as so it goes. But this self -proclaimed prophetess who was living in the city of Thyatira was leading many people astray.

01:15:20

She was leading many people into immorality and false worship, and she was claiming for herself divine authority.

01:15:26

Revelation 2 .20. These false prophets, false Christ. Remember, Christ means anointed one, anointed prophet, priest, or king.

01:15:36

These false prophets, these false priests, and these false kings like Balaam and Jezebel were acting in ways that were akin to the prophecy that Jesus said about false messiahs.

01:15:47

They were leading people into error. They were leading people into immorality. They were leading people astray, and they were acting out this false anointed office.

01:15:56

So there you have it. Revelation. You have three cities that were dealing with that already. But it's not just Revelation.

01:16:02

This shows up in the epistles as well. We've got all kinds of clues in the epistles that let us know that this kind of thing was happening all over the

01:16:11

Christian world. For instance, in the New Testament epistles, this kind of thing is saturated. False teachers, false prophets, deceptive leaders.

01:16:19

They're all contributing to this generation of false messiah that Jesus prophesied about in Matthew 24, 4 through 5.

01:16:30

For example, in the book of Jude, Jude tells the church in Jude 1 .3 that the church is to contend or to fight for or to be at war for the true gospel.

01:16:42

Why? Because there was many false messianic messages that were bouncing around in Jude's time period that he was warning his people about.

01:16:52

For instance, in Jude 1 .12, he tells us that these false messiahs were like clouds without water.

01:16:59

Think about that. When you look at a rain cloud and you're a farmer and you say, you know, my crops are withered and I need the rain.

01:17:07

You look at it and you say, oh, thank God, a cloud is coming. And when it comes, it has no rain.

01:17:14

What he's saying is that these false messiahs are presenting themselves as if they have something good to give you.

01:17:20

But when they get there, they have nothing but death. He also calls them hidden reefs in your love feast.

01:17:26

You think about that. You're sailing a ship and you're going to harbor and then all of a sudden you hit a hidden reef in the water and it rips your boat apart and you sink and you drowned.

01:17:38

He's saying that they're hidden, that they're disguised, that you think that they're leading you into something good and something righteous and something holy, but they're hiding so that they can rip you apart.

01:17:49

He calls them like a dead tree that's doubly dead and needs to be uprooted. Just like the fig tree example of Jesus.

01:17:56

He says that they're like unreasoning animals and that they're fomenting this, this awful, false, false messianic teaching that Jesus was warning about, revealing that they're not only deceptive, but their doctrines lead unto death.

01:18:13

These false teachers were claiming divine authority within the church. They were acting as spiritual guides, but they were offering nothing of value.

01:18:22

This is what he says. For certain persons have crept in unnoticed. Those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our

01:18:34

God into licentiousness and who deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ.

01:18:41

These false leaders were doing exactly what Jesus said.

01:18:46

They were leading people away from him. They weren't just heretical teachers.

01:18:52

They weren't just teaching a false doctrine. These were false messianic movements, false anointed movements in the early church that were leading people away from Jesus, leading people into death, leading people into destruction.

01:19:06

And Jude, like Christ is warning the people not to follow them.

01:19:13

They were promoting a version of grace that led people into sin while claiming to have divine approval.

01:19:18

And Jude's harsh condemnation of this lets us know that he sees the false

01:19:26

Messiah prophecy of Jesus being fulfilled in his church. And he is warning people not to follow them.

01:19:34

Here's another example coming out of the book of Philippians and Philippians three to Paul warns the church about a specific group of false teachers that he refers to as dogs.

01:19:43

He says this, beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision.

01:19:52

Philippians three to these dogs that Paul's referring to are the Judaizers. It was a group of first century

01:19:59

Christians who said that that you had to be circumcised in order to be an actual Christian.

01:20:04

So if you're a Gentile, you could not be a true Christian until you were circumcised. And Paul calls these men dogs and he calls them dogs because they're leading people into a works -based righteousness.

01:20:18

Now, these individuals weren't actually claiming to be Messiahs themselves, but they were bringing a false messianic gospel.

01:20:27

They were bringing a different gospel than Christ, who is the true Messiah. So they were bringing a false gospel of a false

01:20:35

Christ. They claimed a new way of salvation that was not anointed by God and by Jesus, but it was a way of working your way into redemption through your works.

01:20:45

And Paul calls them dogs, which was a derogatory term in Jewish culture for those who are impure, disgusting, dirty, and who eat their own vomit.

01:20:57

That's what Paul's saying. They've offered you nothing but vomit, and you should let them go back to their own puddle of impurities and eat it up.

01:21:11

Don't eat it. Don't take it. Don't listen to it. Paul finds this group so egregious that in the book of Galatians, he calls them an anathema, which means that they're under the curse of God.

01:21:24

Galatians 1 .8. And he writes the entire book of Galatians to deal with their damnable theological blunder.

01:21:34

Now, when you come to the book of 1 John, which is what we've kind of been building to,

01:21:40

John the apostle is going to warn his churches, the churches that he is over.

01:21:46

And remember, John, the one who wrote 1 John is also the writer of Revelation. So this is really important that we understand what

01:21:53

John says, because is John saying that Jesus's prophecy of false messiahs and false antichrist, is that happening?

01:22:01

Well, he warns his church about the rise of false teachers who denied the incarnation of Christ, and he calls them antichrist.

01:22:11

He calls, he doesn't call them false messiahs or false Christ. He calls them antichrist.

01:22:17

That's John's terminology for the same thing. Now, it's crucial to understand that the term antichrist, which in Greek is anti Christos, does not refer to a single individual, but to a movement, a movement of false messianism, a movement of false messiahs, plural.

01:22:40

Since Christ in Greek means messiah in Hebrew, that's what they mean.

01:22:45

Christos means Messiah. Since Christ means Messiah, the term antichrist doesn't actually point to a single man who disguises himself as a new

01:22:56

Jesus, but it refers to any and every person who initiates a false messianic movement, a false priestly movement, a false prophetic movement, or a false kingly movement.

01:23:12

In fact, antichrist is nothing more than John's synonym for false prophet, which is pseudo profites.

01:23:21

Think about that auntie, which is anti pseudo, which means false.

01:23:26

These terms really resemble each other so that you can look at the word pseudo profites, which is what

01:23:34

Jesus uses in Matthew 24, false prophet. And you can look at what

01:23:40

John is saying, false Christ or antichrist, and you will realize very quickly that a

01:23:46

Christ was a messianic figure and a prophet was a messianic figure.

01:23:52

So when Jesus says false prophet, he's saying antichrist. And when John says antichrist, he is saying false prophet.

01:24:00

These terms mean the same thing. And the people who operate under the title of these terms are doing the same things.

01:24:10

They're leading people away from the one and only true Christ. John says it this way, children, it is the last hour.

01:24:21

And just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrist have appeared from this.

01:24:29

We know that it is the last hour. First John 2, 18, John tells us that it's the last hour.

01:24:36

The last hour of what is John talking about? The end of human history. That's what many people read that as.

01:24:43

But if that's what he's referring to, then he is more liberal with the word hour than Nancy Pelosi is with our budget.

01:24:51

Instead of believing the ridiculous that he said, it's the last hour 2000 years ago, and we're still in the last hour 2000 years later.

01:25:00

Instead of believing that we need to understand what John is saying, and John is saying the same thing that Jesus said earlier.

01:25:08

John is saying that the end of the Jewish age is coming. And by the time

01:25:13

John wrote the book, it was the last hour. The signs had been happening right before his very eyes, and he saw that there was, in fact, a rise of false messiahs of a rise of antichrist.

01:25:28

He saw that happening in his church and even said that there are many antichrist who have come.

01:25:34

Don't you see? When people tell you that the antichrist is coming, they have no idea what they're talking about.

01:25:42

John says that many antichrist had already come 2000 years ago.

01:25:47

He's not saying that there's this special secretive kind of individual that shows up at the end of human history and leads the world astray.

01:25:57

He's saying that people who are against messiah, people who are giving you a false messianic gospel had come in his lifetime, and it wasn't one.

01:26:07

It was many, which is what Jesus said. Many will, they will lead many astray.

01:26:14

These false messiahs. This is not a prophecy about a man who becomes the embodiment of pure evil.

01:26:22

Sometime in our future, during a seven year tribulate, that's hogwash. I can think of few interpretations of the

01:26:30

Bible. That's more stupid and cockamamie and outlandish as that.

01:26:37

Instead, John is saying many antichrist have come. Why? Because Jesus said it was going to happen in Matthew 24 five.

01:26:46

Jesus said that false messiahs were coming and guess what? John saw it and John wrote it.

01:26:54

And he said, many were already here. And he said, that was the reason that it was the last hour.

01:27:02

Because why? When he stood there and he, and on the, on the Mount of Olives, when he stood there and he looked at Jesus face to face and he says,

01:27:09

Jesus, give me a sign of your coming. Remember that in Matthew 24 verse three,

01:27:17

John was one of the ones who asked Jesus the question. Jesus said, okay, I'll give you a sign. False messiahs are going to come.

01:27:24

That's how you'll know that it's the last hour. And then John in first John says, okay,

01:27:31

I'm seeing the false messiahs. I'm seeing the antichrist. Therefore, just like Jesus said,

01:27:40

I know that the last hour had come not in our lifetime in John's, what was the last hour?

01:27:47

The end of the Jewish age, the destruction of Jerusalem. Here's another example in John in second,

01:27:54

John one, seven, John reiterates the threat. He says, for many deceivers have gone out into the world.

01:28:03

Those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver.

01:28:08

And this is the antichrist. Many have gone out. That is what antichrist false messiah, false prophet.

01:28:17

That's what that means. John is saying that many antichrists, many false messiahs have come.

01:28:24

And unsurprisingly, our incarnate God who lived among us in the flesh, who is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent and perfect.

01:28:32

And all his being knew that it was going to happen. He was correct in his prophecy. Can we imagine that?

01:28:39

It's not even shocking. Jesus got his prophecy, right? What is shocking is how many evangelicals look at this passage and are still waiting for it to be fulfilled.

01:28:48

They're still waiting for something Jesus said was going to happen in a single generation to come to pass sometime in the future.

01:28:56

We've got to pull our head out of our proverbial rear ends and look at what Jesus said. And look at what

01:29:01

John said. And look at what Paul said. In nearly every New Testament letter, we find warnings about false teachers, false prophets, false messianic movements from the dogs and Philippians to the clouds without water and Jude, the antichrist in the book of John.

01:29:15

The fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy is screaming from the New Testament text.

01:29:20

These deceptive leaders were everywhere in the church's early years. They were spreading false reports, false gospels, and they were misleading many.

01:29:28

And Jesus predicted it. The evidence is overwhelming.

01:29:34

Jesus' words in Matthew 24 were not a distant prediction of some far off future event.

01:29:40

They were immediate realities that the first century was going to walk through and face and that they would need to resist these movements or else they would perish.

01:29:54

This is irrefutable at this point that his prophecy came to pass exactly like he said it would.

01:30:03

And that leads us to our final section, a section that I want to conclude with, because I think the story is so interesting.

01:30:09

So with that part five, the Jewish war and the false messianic king, there's one final story that I have to give you that we can't ignore.

01:30:21

It just kind of brings all of this into focus and it shows how the dispensational view is just so foolish and so stupid and ignorant.

01:30:32

There's so much evidence and yet the enemy has been so good at blinding our eyes and making us afraid of our own shadow.

01:30:40

We've got to get past that. Now, the story that I want to tell you about is a man named

01:30:46

Menahem ben Judas, a man who would rise and suffer a brutal fall.

01:30:54

And he captures the essence of this messianic chaos that we've been talking about that gripped the city of Jerusalem and led to its destruction.

01:31:02

Now, Menahem wasn't just any rebel. He was the son of Judas of Galilee, who was the founder of a movement called the zealots and the zealots were like, they were like, they kind of sound, they were angry, they were violent, and they were trying to be a purity movement in Jerusalem to bring the people back to pure religion.

01:31:25

But in so doing, they became tyrannical and instead of leading people in righteousness, they led people with clubs and bats and swords, and they killed a lot of people too.

01:31:39

So this, this son of the founder of basically Jerusalem's hell's angels, a group that was dedicating to resisted roaming

01:31:47

Roman rule and beating up their own people. Well, when the rebellion against Rome erupted in AD 66, that's the year when, when

01:31:57

Rome started moving in and they were fed up, they were done. All these false messiahs and all these false messianic and antichrist movements had worn the patients of Rome so thin that now they sent three

01:32:11

Roman legions to squash and eliminate the Jews. That's how angry they were.

01:32:18

The Romans tried really hard to make peace with the Jews. The Jews were approximately 10 % of the population of the

01:32:24

Roman empire in the first century. So they were a large voting block. I'm kidding. There was no voting in an imperial system, but they were in large group of people that Rome tried really hard to placate, tried really hard to make them happy.

01:32:38

Even Nero setting Christians on fire in the early sixties to try to make the

01:32:44

Jews in Rome happy. So like they were a group that Rome tried very hard to, to make and please, and yet they'd ran out of patients.

01:32:56

And now in the 66, 67 timeframe, Vespasian brings his

01:33:01

Roman legions against Jerusalem and against Judea and Menahem, the son of the founder of the zealot movement.

01:33:09

He saw all of this happening and he decided that he was going to take action by claiming that he was the messianic king.

01:33:17

And inside the city of Jerusalem, he gathered a band of followers who, who went and stormed

01:33:23

Masada and they went and looted Herod's armory and they took all of the weapons and all of the militia and they armored up and they went back to the city of Jerusalem and they made their stand.

01:33:34

Now in Josephus' dramatic account, he talks of Menahem's return to Jerusalem. And he says that he came in the state of a king.

01:33:42

He was a self -proclaimed Messiah, a Meshi, a Meshiach king, and he was ready to lead

01:33:50

Israel to freedom. But this wasn't just a righteous war or a power grab.

01:33:57

This was a bid, a brazen bid for messianic glory. Menahem quickly took control of the critical areas of Jerusalem by force.

01:34:07

He took over the temple mount, which is not something a king is supposed to do. A king is supposed to leave the temple to the priest, but he by force as Rome is sitting outside of the walls of Jerusalem, Menahem through brutal violence, took over the temple mount and made it sort of his area of operations.

01:34:29

And he declared himself not only a military leader, but he proclaimed himself to be the new high priest.

01:34:37

This combination of messianic king and messianic priest makes this guy a really interesting candidate for the anti -Christ and false prophet sort of figure that we talk about in revelation and in John and in other places, the man of lawlessness and Thessalonians.

01:34:59

This is an interesting candidate, and I'm not going to tell you what I think about it, but I am going to tell you the story. Now, after this messianic move to deliver the

01:35:07

Jewish people from Rome, rival Jewish factions started dividing in the city and they soon turned against him.

01:35:14

And Menahem's reign actually came to a very brief and a sudden collapse because you had so many different factions of Jewish people on the inside of the city who were turning against him.

01:35:28

And then eventually they ended his own life by torturing him and killing him.

01:35:34

Menahem's downfall is one chilling example of Jesus's prophecy in Matthew 24, four through five coming true at the very end.

01:35:43

Right before Jerusalem falls, you've got this man, Menahem, who leads many people into ruin, who claimed that he was an anointed king who claimed that he was an anointed priest who led the people in war and it absolutely fell into ruin.

01:35:59

And it accelerated the downfall of Jerusalem, making it more vulnerable because all the people

01:36:04

Menahem killed no longer could fight Rome. All the people who went against him and died fighting him no longer could fight against Rome.

01:36:11

So you have this as a catalyst moment that actually expedited the downfall of the city.

01:36:18

His rise and his bloody demise stand as one of the clearest examples of false messiahs that Jesus was warning about.

01:36:23

His audacious claims, his seizure of the temple, his violent end all look and point to exactly what

01:36:31

Jesus said was going to happen. The Jewish war filled with all the chaos and division and destruction is exactly what

01:36:39

Jesus was pointing to when the disciple said, tell us a sign of when these things are going to happen. The false messiahs, the false prophets, the anti Christ, they're the ones that led the city into destruction.

01:36:55

Jesus predicted it and it came true with pulverizing clarity.

01:37:01

To deny this is to turn a blind eye to scripture. It's to turn a blind and deaf ear to history.

01:37:11

Jesus's prophecy undeniably is not about the future, our future.

01:37:17

It was about what his disciples were going to walk through in their generation and it came true with devastating accuracy.

01:37:26

Conclusion. Now we've seen all over the Bible, all over history, all over everything that we've looked at that Jesus's words undeniably came true in the first century.

01:37:38

But the question that we need to wrestle with as we conclude here today is what does this mean for us?

01:37:45

What does it mean for us? What does it mean that all these things happen in the first century? Does that mean that none of this has any relevance to our life at all?

01:37:52

And no, that's not true. It does have relevance. The fact that Jesus's prophecy came true in such beautiful and stunning clarity means that we can trust

01:38:06

Jesus when he speaks. It means instead of doubting him and thinking that this is still going to occur at some point in the future, we should trust him because Jesus always gets what he says true.

01:38:20

It also means after a very long episode that we're finished for today.

01:38:27

We've done our work. We've waded into the waters and we've discovered what the Bible says, which is the work of a

01:38:33

Christian. That's what it means to be a Berean is that we dig down into the depths of the Bible and we exegete and we look at it, we work at it.

01:38:40

We try to discover and how does that have relevance to our life? Brothers and sisters, we just did the work of a

01:38:47

Berean. We proved what Jesus said was going to happen, did happen.

01:38:55

And it happened in the first century and not in our century. So with that, you can trust in the sufficiency of scripture.

01:39:02

And I hope today that you've seen an example of how to be a Berean and how to dig into the

01:39:08

Bible and how to see what words like Antichrist or false Messiah, false prophet, what they really mean and how they don't apply to us, but they applied to them.

01:39:19

Now, next week, we're going to look at more signs because Jesus gave more signs. He didn't just give the sign of false prophet and false

01:39:26

Messiah. He gave more signs like wars and rumors of wars and famines and earthquakes. We're going to look at all of that and see how every bit of it is pointing to the doom that was going to happen to Jerusalem.

01:39:37

But until then, I really mean this. God richly bless you and thank you so much for diving into these complicated topics with me and for being willing to learn.

01:39:50

This channel has been such a blessing to my life. It's been a blessing to me every week as I prepare for these episodes.

01:39:56

And I hope that it's been a blessing to you. You are greatly appreciated. And I thank you so much for supporting this channel.

01:40:03

And just for a moment, if I could talking about support, if you would like to support this channel financially and to help me make more of these videos, then you can go to the main page of our

01:40:16

YouTube channel and you can sign up and become a member. These videos take a lot of love and they take a lot of research and they take a lot of time for me and for my daughter, who is standing right here.

01:40:29

Hey, daughter, standing right there recording this video. They take a lot of time for us to produce.

01:40:34

My daughter right now is doing this as an elective in her homeschool class, which means basically that's my justification for allowing her to miss her homework.

01:40:44

Anyway, I do these videos not to make money. I do these videos to help the church of Jesus Christ grow up into eschatological maturity.

01:40:54

I do these videos because I want to defeat defeatism. I do these videos because I want people to understand the most difficult portions of the

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Bible. And I do these videos because I want the Christian, the Christian church to stop feeling so defeated and discouraged and depressed and to step into what

01:41:12

Jesus has said, to trust what Jesus has said. And for you and I to get on with the mission that Jesus gave us.

01:41:19

Now, if you want to help support a work like that, then join as a member. You can give and, and there's several different tiers that you can give to.

01:41:28

And there's some fantastic little perks that are attached to that. They're going to be launching soon. And you can actually help me pay the bills for this channel because believe it or not, this channel is not free for me to produce.

01:41:39

I'm actually paying to make this channel. This channel costs about a thousand dollars a year. When you look at light bulbs for the lights that are in the studio, when you look at camera equipment, memory cards, when you look at subscriptions that I have, like I have a subscription to Adobe that where I licensed the theme song for this show,

01:41:58

I've got subscriptions to, uh, uh, programs that helped me make the YouTube shorts and the

01:42:04

TikTok videos that I, that I'm producing. So this channel costs money and I would love it.

01:42:11

If faithful men and women who are already tithing to a local church would join with me to help support this so that I can continue to make these videos and talk about things that aren't really being talked about enough.

01:42:24

I've got a lot of plans for the future. I would actually like to do an entire series at some point on Josephus and the

01:42:32

Jewish war and, and actually, and bring that to YouTube as a resource to the church.

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And there's a resource to Christians because it's so important. So I have a lot of ideas. I have a lot of passion and desire, but I can't do it if, if I don't get support.

01:42:47

So thank you for the support you've already given. Thank you for liking and sharing and, and all the things that you're doing.

01:42:53

But if you feel compelled, if you feel convicted, if you feel like you want to help support this, we would love to have you as a member.

01:42:59

You can do that by joining on our YouTube page. So with that, be of good cheer, rest in the sufficiency of scripture.

01:43:08

Do not let yourself be discouraged or deceived by all the pre -millennial and dispensational fakeries out there who are running amok like joy police, trying to convince you to become twice the son of chicken little.

01:43:20

Instead, work hard for Jesus, pick up your hammer and build, grab your sword and swing it and get to fight because our

01:43:29

King wins. He defeated apostate Jerusalem. He toppled secular

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Rome. And for 2000 years, he's been putting his enemies under his feet. Believe that work towards that.

01:43:40

Teach that to your family. And let us until next week, continue to do that work to see

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Jesus's kingdom come on earth. As it is in heaven. Thank you so much. I'll see you again next week on the podcast.