Palm Sunday — Jacob Prasch

Palm Sunday and the Stones That Cry Out

My name is Jacob. The video about the watch is Tom Sunday. Give us prosperity. Now with a question mark, we seek to understand the original Jewish background of what happened on Tom Sunday, Pesach or Passover, when Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and what it means for the church today and what's happening in the church today.

Now, there's a number of things we have to look at. First of all, on Tom Sunday and Luke's version and Luke chapter 19 verse 40, the Sanhedrin and the temple officials were quite indignant that the people were bringing Hosanna to Jesus.

And Jesus tells them in verse 40, I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out. If these become silent, the stones will cry out. What did he mean? Well, first Peter was written to Jewish believers, and it's a very Jewish epistle.

In first Peter chapter 2 verse 5, Peter says that we are the living stones of the temple. On Tom Sunday, Jesus was referring to the large Herodian stones of the enlarged temple complex. You can see stones of that size today at the wearing wall of the Kotel in Jerusalem.

Some of those stones are more than 40 times as heavy as the largest stones of the Great Pyramids. You find that Egypt and Giza outside of Cairo. Also, these stones are the ones that the apostles would have referred to on the ultimate discourse, Matthew 24, when Jesus said not one stone will be thrown down upon another.

Looking at these scriptures about the stones midrashically, that is the way that the rabbis interpreted scripture in the days of Jesus, we see what the stones mean. Peter says that we Christians believers are the stones of the temple.

So on Tom Sunday, Jesus tells the temple officials, if these, that is the Jewish people, remain silent, the stones will cry out. What he was saying midrashically, in midrash, in Jewish metaphor, was this.

If the Jewish people, the Jews, do not proclaim me to be the Messiah, the Christians will. John the Baptist uses the same metaphor. There were Jewish people who thought they were special simply because they were physically and culturally Jews, circumcised, or descendants of Abraham genetically.

However, John the Baptist says, God can raise up Abraham's children out of the stones. And so Christians too are descendants of Abraham, by faith, through the seed of Abraham, the Messiah Jesus. That is the whole point.

Israel, the Gentiles, and the Danger of Redefining Scripture

The Jewish people, most of them, not all, but most, made a series of tragic mistakes. Now Romans 11 tells us, if God didn't spare the natural branches, he won't spare you either. My fear as a believer, from what I see from understanding and studying the scriptures from a traditional Jewish perspective, is that so much of the church in the Western world is making the same mistake as the Jews did.

The Bible speaks of this. A time will come when the age of the Gentiles will come to a close and God will turn his grace back towards his ancient people, Israel. And I'm convinced we already see the advent of that transpiring.

It's already beginning to happen. We have an avalanche of prosperity theology which will be addressed in this video. It's overtaken much of the Western world. We have to understand what it is. If we were to recontextualize scripture, that's perfectly biblical.

Paul said, I became as all things to all men that I may reach them. When he spoke, and often to the Greek, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophers, he communicated the gospel to them within their famous lessons.

When he spoke to Jews, he became as one under the law. It is perfectly biblical and entirely correct to contextualize. However, when we redefine, when we rewrite the gospel, when we give the word of God a new meaning to suit our worldview, it's a problem.

To contextualize is to take the meaning of scripture and to give it to people packaged within the framework of their own culture. However, when you redefine, you give it a new meaning to suit that culture.

This was a big problem in the early church when platonic philosophy entered and Christianity was rewritten as a platonic religion by Plato and later when it was rewritten as an Aristotelian religion by Thomas Aquinas.

This kind of redefinition has always made all kinds of problems. We have to go back and understand the original meaning. What we have now is a redefinition. I'm speaking to you at the moment from Africa.

Here in Africa, the gospel is exploding among the native African people. When the Wycliffe translators came to a certain tribe in Equatorial Africa, the people had never seen snow. So how would they translate Isaiah 118?

So your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow. The Wycliffe translators said, your sins shall be white as coconut. They recontextualized it. They gave it a new meaning. No, they gave it the same meaning, culturally packaged.

They contextualized it. They didn't change the meaning. They just said coconut instead of snow, but the meaning was the same. That's perfectly acceptable. That's contextualization. But when you redefine it, you have a problem.

Prosperity Theology and Consumer Christianity

We live in a Western consumerist society where people are rewriting Christianity as a Western consumerist religion. We have television networks in the United States, particularly with no programming, no programs, only commercials.

Call in, give us your visa number, and you can have this. This can be yours. Name it and claim it. Consumerism. We have people, faith prosperity preachers, so-called, who are attempting to rewrite Christianity as a religion based on consumerism.

Name it and claim it. God wants you rich. You're a king's kid. You can have it. That's not contextualization. That's redefinition. More tragically, here in Africa, we have much poverty. There are many poor Christians.

There are many persecuted Christians, particularly in places like Nigeria, where the Muslim tribes persecute the Christian tribes. Terrible situations happen here in Africa. People living in almost subhuman poverty.

In fact, the area, one of the areas most devastated by the famines in Ethiopia, was an area with many Christians, even evangelical Christians. And we have people coming from America, telling these people that they're not prospering.

It's because of out of God's will. They don't have faith. Friends, these Christians who are being persecuted for their faith by the Muslims in Africa, from where I speak to you now, are people with tremendous faith.

The kind of faith that people in the West once had, but have long lost. These false doctrines, which have destroyed so much of Western Protestant Christianity, are now being pumped into Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia, where the gospel is growing.

The same false doctrines that destroyed Western Protestant Christianity are now being pumped into the developing world, where the gospel is exploding. We have to understand the basis of what these people are teaching.

It is Gnosticism, an error in the early church, where the word of God is mishandled. Instead of using exegesis, you claim a subjective mystical insight, some personal revelation, making the scripture a matter of one's own interpretation.

Now, the New Testament tells us no interpretation of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. But that is what these people are saying. They have a subjective revelation. God has shown me. Well, God will never show anybody anything that does not agree with his words.

Now, I point out that I myself am a Pentecostal minister. I believe in the gift of the Spirit, and I practice the gift of the Spirit. In no sense am I a cessationist. But what we're seeing today with the fake prosperity preachers is not the faith of the New Testament, as you'll see in this video.

What these people are teaching is not faith in Jesus. They're teaching faith in faith. They're not teaching faith in the Lord Jesus. They're teaching faith in faith. Read Hebrews 11. Their faith is not the faith taught in scripture.

Naming False Teachers and Defending Apostolic Doctrine

But let's look further. Some people become very disturbed when teachers of false doctrines, even though they themselves may disagree with these false doctrines, are publicly challenged by name. They say it's wrong to name the names to stand up and challenge the teachers of error.

Well, let's look at what the Word of God says. St. Paul, writing in First Timothy, does the following. In First Timothy, chapter one, St. Paul says directly, there will be false teachers in the church who would deceive the church, who would harm the church, who would hurt the church.

And he says, some have rejected and suffered shipwrecked in regard to their faith. And in verse 20, among these are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have delivered over to Satan. He named the names of those who were teaching aberrations and false doctrines.

Indeed, we read in Second Timothy, Paul does the same thing. In Second Timothy, chapter four, verse 14, Paul says Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. The Lord will repay him according to his deeds.

Be on guard against him yourself, for he vigorously opposed our teaching. What was he doing? How did he harm Paul? Paul was not indignant because of what Alexander did to Paul. Paul was indignant because he was opposing the teaching of the Apostles, the teaching of the New Testament, right doctrines.

You also find John the Apostle writing the same way. In third John, verse nine, the Apostle John says, I wrote something to the church. It's to the church. It's to be read out publicly. But dioceses who love to be first among them does not accept what we say.

For this reason, if I come, I'll call attention to his deeds. Wicked words. The teachers of false doctrine are men with wicked words, John says. Wicked words. The Apostles name them. John was the beloved disciple.

He named them. Paul names them. I look at the book of Jeremiah 28. We have people making false prophecies like the prophet Hananiah. Jeremiah says he's a nebesheker, a false prophet. And he says he's made God's people trust him alive, Hananiah.

Jeremiah names him. Several years ago, at the Docklands Arena, John Wimber of the Vineyard came with Mike Bickle from Kansas City and the Kansas City Prophets, led by Paul Kane, a man who was influenced by William Branham, who said the Trinity was of the devil and who practiced the occult, who also claimed to be the angel of revelation, chapter 3, verse 14.

John Wimber of the Vineyard and the Kansas City Prophets made wild false predictions. They claimed that a lot of day rain of some kind, a fire was going to fall on Great Britain and revival would sweep across Britain in October of 1990 and would fan out across Europe, particularly Germany, said Mike Bickle.

They said this on video, it was documented. In the five years since the great revival predicted by the Vineyard, by John Wimber and the Kansas City Prophets and Mike Bickle, more moths have been built in England than churches.

Now, the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 18, warns us if people predict things in the name of the Lord that don't happen, they're false prophets. Get away from them. Jeremiah 23, the same thing, get away from them.

It doesn't matter if they do it by a demon or by the futility of their own mind, they're a false prophet. We don't stone people like Mike Bickle to death anymore, or John Wimber to death, or Paul Cain.

We're under grace, not law. But the sin is no less serious to continue to follow men who predict things that don't happen, whom the word of God says a false prophet is rebellion. The prophet Jeremiah says the prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love it so.

So it is also with the book, The Harvest, written by Rick Joyner. He predicted a worldwide avalanche of communism that would take over almost the entirety of the developing world and much of the developed world.

The categorical opposite happened. These men are false prophets. They're false prophets because their doctrines are wrong. They're dominionists, manifest sons of God, man-child. They believe things that are not biblical.

Because their doctrines are wrong, it says in 2 Peter, so are their prophecies. But let's look further. Why is it necessary to name the names and point these things out? Because God's people are being deceived.

That's why John pointed them out. That's why Ezekiel pointed these men out in Ezekiel chapter 11. That's why Jeremiah pointed them out. That's why Paul pointed them out. The Gospels openly name the names of religious and national leaders who are misleading God's people.

Caiaphas, Herod, go tell that fox. If we say we shouldn't name the names and confront error, well you better tear 1 Timothy out of your Bible, and 2 Timothy, and 3 John, and Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, and much of the Gospels.

As a matter of fact, if you think that we should not stand up and challenge those who persist in teaching false doctrines and making false prophetic predictions in the name of the Lord, if we should not challenge those people publicly as the Apostles and Prophets did, you may as well throw away the whole book.

You see, that's what Laodicea means in Greek, the lukewarm materialistic church that's blind to its own faith. Laodicea in Greek is the church of people's opinions, men's judgments, re-definition. If the Apostles had the attitude that we should not stand up and name the names of the false teachers as Paul did and John did, we'd have no church today.

Satan would have destroyed it in the first century. If the Old Testament prophets of the Tanakh, the Jewish prophets, did not stand up and name the names as Ezekiel did, and as Jeremiah did, and the other prophets did, Jesus never would have been born.

Satan would have seduced Israel, and the Messiah never could have come. If the pre-Nicene Fathers, the patristic writers, did not stand up for the Gnostics in their day, the way we need to stand up for the Gnostics of our day, and that's what you have if you understand John Wimber, for instance.

John Wimber does not teach Biblical Christianity. He's a Gnostic who teaches Gnosticism. His entire treatment of Joel chapter 2, Joel's army, that is Gnosticism. It is not Biblical exegesis. He does not teach Biblical Christianity.

John Wimber is a Gnostic. If the pre-Nicene Fathers did not stand up to Gnosticism in their day, we'd have no church today. Satan would have seduced it in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. And so today, when you understand the Kingdom Mount theology and its presuppositions, how it's Gnostic, and the faith prosperity teaches how it's Gnosticism, you'll have no church if you don't stand up like the pre-Nicene Fathers did.

So all of their mistakes and faults, if the Reformers, Luker and Calvin and Zwingli, and if Erasmus of Rotterdam, if they did not stand up to Pope Julius and the Popes of the Middle Ages, and to John Eck, and to Tetzel, the indulgence merchant, if they didn't stand up to these people and name them by name, we'd all be going to Mass today, because that's the only church we would have.

The counterfeit church of Rome. When I name the name, it is only because there is no other choice. It is because the Word of God does it, when these men will persist in prophesying things in the name of the Lord that don't happen, misleading God's people, and teaching doctrines that are utterly, not only contrary to His Word, but destructive to His people.

Public Rebuke, Repentance, and the Limits of Christian Unity

I would also point out two further things before we conclude. The Bible says, concerning the false teachers and the false religious leaders of Jesus' day, Jesus made a public spectacle of them. Indeed, the prophet Elijah mocked the priests of Baal, who led God's people into false worship.

And we have many instances of people from the Church Fathers onward, certainly the Church Fathers, mocking the Gnostics. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the harbinger of the Reformation, who inspired Luther, etc.

If you were to read his writings, like Julius Exclusus and the Trays of Folly, he openly mocked the medieval prophecies. It is fully consistent with the example of Scripture, and consistent with the modus operandi of the heroes of Church history who God used to stand up and deal with false teachers and false prophets in that way.

The Word of God mocks them. The Bible says directly that God mocks His enemies. And those who will mislead His people have made themselves the enemies of God. I do not desire these people's destruction.

I desire their repentance. More than that, I desire a restoration of those who they have misled. May the same God who will judge them, and will also judge me, keep me faithful and prevent me from ever teaching error to His people, or exploiting them financially.

Finally, a word about division. We have an unbiblical attitude towards division. The Bible says to yearn for a unity of the Spirit. Father, let them be one as we are one. The Holy Spirit, however, haroach ha-kodesh in Hebrew, the Spirit of Holiness, is also called the Spirit of Truth.

He is not the Spirit of error. You cannot have a unity of the Spirit based on error, based on false doctrine. We have dangerous people today teaching the lie of the devil, that doctrine brings division, therefore we should have no doctrine, because doctrine goes against love.

That is what such people you'll see saying today. We actually had Paul Crouch on the TBN in America, Rick Godwin's mentor, one of his mentors, saying, don't talk to me about doctrine, I don't want to know about doctrine.

They want love. Well, let's see what the Word of God says. In Philippians chapter 1, verse 9, and this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment. Without real knowledge, knowledge of God's Word, and without discernment of what is of God and what isn't, based first and foremostly on Scripture.

Without knowledge and without discernment, there's not real love. There's some namby-pamby foolishness people are calling love, but it's not the love of Christ. God's love is a love based in truth. If you have real love, you'll seek the truth.

If people don't love the truth, they really don't love Jesus. Jesus said, I am the truth. And he said, in the last days, God himself will set a deception upon those who did not love the truth. If you don't want to know the truth about God's Word and what it's really saying, it means you don't love Jesus.

If you don't have a knowledge of the truth, the Bible says a time will come when God himself will deceive you, if you want to be deceived. If you want to believe men who teach error, who tickle your ears, as Paul says, a time will come in the last days when men wanting to have their ears tickled will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires.

If that's what you want, if you want men to tickle your ears with doctrines of their own invention, God himself will bring you to a time where he says, you don't love the truth, it means you don't love my son, and I myself will deceive you.

This is in 1st Timothy, it's in 2nd Timothy, you should read it carefully. But let's move on. Division. 1 Corinthians 11, 19 says, There must be factions among you to prove which is true. The Greek word here is heresis, or we get the word heresy.

False doctrine is the boast that brings division. Writing in Romans chapter 16 verse 17, Paul says, Mark a factious man who causes distension, that being one who departs from the teaching of the apostles.

When you find people teaching things contrary to the teachings of the New Testament, there's supposed to be a division. The Greek word here is dichostasis, or dichostasia, where we get the word dichotomy.

When false doctrine is being taught as it's being taught today by the kingdom now preachers, by the propounders of ecumenism, and by the faith prosperity preachers, there's supposed to be a dichotomy, there's supposed to be a division.

A split in the road, a dichotomy. One road leads to paradise, the other to Babylon. Which road will you walk down? These are not my words, these are not my opinions, these are not my judgments, this is what the word of God says.

You pray, you ask Jesus, you read his word for yourself the way the Bereans did in Acts chapter 17. With these things in view, please sit back carefully and carefully with your Bible open and watch this video on Palm Sunday.

God bless you. Today's subject, Matthew 21. They had approached Jerusalem and had come to Bethpage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples saying to them, go into the village opposite you and immediately you will find a donkey tied there and a colt with her.

Untie them and bring them to me, and if anyone says something to you, you shall say the Lord has need of them and immediately he will send them. Now this took place so what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, say to the daughter of Zion, behold your king is coming to you.

Gentle and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the fowl of a beast of burden. This is from Zechariah chapter 9 verse 9. And the disciples went and did just as Jesus had directed them and brought the donkey and the colt and laid on them their garments on which he rode and most of the multitude spread their garments in the road and others were cutting branches from the trees and spreading them in the road and the multitude going before him and those who followed him were crying out saying, Hosanna to the son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest. And when he had entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred saying, who is this? And the multitudes were saying, this is the prophet Yeshua from Nazareth in Galilee.

And Jesus entered the temple and cast out all those who were buying and selling in the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling guns. And he said to them, it is written in my father's house to be called a prayer house of prayer for all people, but you are making it into a den of robbers.

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. And when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he had done and the children who were crying out in the temple saying, Hosanna to the son of David, they became indignant, gripping on and they challenged him.

And it says this in verse 23. And when he had come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching and said, by what authority are you doing these things?

And who gave you this authority? And Jesus answered and said to them, I will ask you one thing as well, which is you tell me, I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John was from what source from heaven or from men.

And they began reasoning among themselves saying, if we say from heaven, he will say to us, why did you not believe him? But if we say from men, we fear the multitude for they all hold on to be a prophet.

And Jesus said, they asked me, Jesus, they said, we do not know. And so he also said to them, neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. Now, just turning over to Matthew 23, one more verse where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, Matthew 23, 39.

For I say to you, from now on, you shall not see me until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Heavenly Father, we just ask you now in the power and presence of your spirit to open our eyes, our minds and above all our hearts to the glory and meaning of your word.

The Messiah Must Be Recognized as Both Suffering Servant and King

Help us Lord God to be not only hearers of your word, but in your grace and your strength to be also in Jesus name, for Jesus sake. Amen. So when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, he says to the Jews, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

However, just a few days earlier, that's precisely what they did say to him. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. They say, Hosanna to the son of David, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

A few days later, Jesus tells them, you're not going to see me again until you say those very words. It's as if they had not said it to him. What does he mean? You're not going to see me until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Well, that's precisely what they did say to him. Why the apparent contradiction? Now, obviously this is the first coming of Jesus depended on the Jews and God's prophetic purposes for them. So this is returned.

The Jews have to see him and recognize him as Messiah. To understand this, we have to understand something about the Jewish faith. Jesus was a rabbi. Christianity in its real form does not come from the Protestant Reformation, nor from Roman Catholicism, nor the church fathers.

It comes from the Jewish faith of the Tanakh, the Old Testament. In the Jewish faith, we have two pictures of the Messiah as the rabbis came to explain it. Two pictures. One is called the Messiah, the son of Joseph.

The other is called the Messiah, the son of David. Hamashiach ben Yosef and Hamashiach ben David. The rabbis came to define it that way. But Jesus was the first one who was really trying to tell them about it.

There's some suggestions in the Dead Sea Scrolls that it might have been known by other people in his lifetime. We can't be sure. But Jesus certainly knew it. And in time, the rabbis themselves grasped it.

Two different pictures of the Messiah. One, the son of Joseph, and the other, the son of David. The son of Joseph was a suffering servant like Joseph in the book of Genesis. It's fortuitous that Jesus' foster father's name was Joseph.

Yosef, God shall add or he shall add. Let me explain. In the book of Genesis, we have Joseph. Joseph was betrayed by his Jewish brothers into the hands of Gentiles. God took that betrayal and turned it around and made it a way for all of Israel and all the world to be saved.

So Jesus, the son of Joseph, was betrayed by his Jewish brothers into the hands of Gentiles. God takes that betrayal and turns it around and makes it a way for all Israel and all the world to be saved.

Joseph was betrayed by his brother Yehudah, Judas, for twenty pieces of silver. After inflation, Jesus, the son of Joseph, was betrayed by Yehudah, Judas, for thirty pieces of silver. They bring Joseph's clothes to prove he's not in a pit.

They bring Jesus' shrouds to prove he's not in a tomb. Joseph is condemned with two criminals. One lives and one dies. Jesus, the son of Joseph, is condemned with two criminals. One lives and as it were, one dies.

Joseph goes from a place of condemnation to a place of exaltation in one day. So Jesus, the son of Joseph, goes from a place of condemnation to a place of exaltation in a single day. When Joseph's exalted, he and every knee had to bow.

And to the Lord Jesus, every knee shall bow. Joseph, upon exaltation, takes a Gentile bride. In figure, Jesus, the son of Joseph, takes a Gentile bride. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are a few dozen parallelisms like that between Joseph and Jesus.

We have a tape on it called One Messiah Two Comments. That's the son of Joseph. The rabbis identify him correctly with the suffering servants of Isaiah 52 and 53, the fourth servant song of Isaiah, Yishayahu Hanavi, who has believed our reports to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed, not Jesus.

That's the son of Joseph. But there is another picture of the Messiah who has to be a descendant of King David. He'd be a conquering king. He would be somebody who would drive out the enemies of God and set up the Messianic kingdom reigning from Jerusalem in the way David did.

They all knew the Messiah had to be like David. Now, the son of Joseph, as it were, was a kind of priestly Messiah, offering a sacrifice for sin. The son of David, a legal Messiah reigning from Jerusalem.

One Messiah, two comings. For Jesus to be the Messiah of the Jews, he had to fulfill all of the Old Testament prophecies in the Old Testament, all of them about the Messiah. In fact, Jesus did not fulfill all of the Old Testament prophecies.

He's only fulfilled the son of Joseph prophecy. He has still to fulfill the son of David prophecy. The son of David prophecies can only be fulfilled in a spiritual sense, but they're not being fulfilled in any kind of a literal sense.

Most Jewish people will reject Jesus as the Messiah for two reasons. One is because of the history of Christian anti-Semitism, and you have a resurgence of that even in this country. You have people coming to South Africa, like Rick Godwin, who are teaching the Jews get nothing.

The Jews have no right to be in the land. Israel is nothing but wasted money. People who preach against Israel in Christian, mainly Pentecostal and charismatic churches, men like Rick Godwin, who hate Israel and teach Christians to hate Israel.

That's one reason Jews will reject Jesus, but that's not the main reason. The main reason Jews will reject Jesus is because he did not bring in worldwide peace, set up his kingdom in Jerusalem. If he's the Messiah, why are there still wars?

Why is there still racism and social injustice? Why is there still hatred? Why is there still crime, etc.? The answer to that is in the prophet Daniel. Daniel chapter 9 says that the Messiah would come and die before the second temple would be destroyed in 70 A .D., which it was.

So whoever the Messiah was, he had to come and die already. Then it says wars and desolations are determined until the end. It's when he comes the second time that he brings in the worldwide peace and prosperity.

In other words, as Christians, we know it's one Messiah, two comings. In his first coming, he's the son of Joseph. In his second coming, he's the son of David. That's why the pre-Nicene fathers tell us the apostolic church was pre-millennial.

If there's no millennia, if there's no literal reigning of Jesus from Jerusalem, the rabbis would have to be right. He's not the Messiah of the Jews. And if he's not the Messiah of the Jews, neither is he the Christ of the church.

All of this amillennialism and post-millennialism was invented after Constantine Christianized the Roman Empire. And followers of Augustine puffed it up and Augustine began it, actually. And then it developed from there.

They had to find a way saying, what are we going to do about the millennia? Now that Christendom is the religion of the state. So they began saying the millennia is fulfilled in the church. Amillennialism and pre-millennialism, they're inventions of incipient Roman Catholicism.

They have no basis whatsoever in biblical Christianity. People who believe it are in error. One of the mistakes of the reformers was they went back to Augustine instead of back to the New Testament. Nonetheless, if there's no millennia, he's not the Messiah, because he didn't fulfill the prophecies and he has to do it.

So we have one Messiah, two comings. On Palm Sunday, they were singing Hosanna to the son of David. They should have been singing Hosanna to the son of Joseph. You understand? Now let me explain further.

The Jewish Calendar and the Two Comings of Christ

We have to have a 10-minute Bible study on the typology of the Jewish calendar. This is the Jewish calendar from Leviticus 23. It is a type of what theologians call trials geschichte, salvation history.

It had three practices. It was a civil calendar, a religious calendar, and an agricultural calendar. It followed the annual agricultural cycle. The first purpose was it was a polemic against paganism.

The Canaanites had agricultural feasts on the same days as the Jews, only they were giving thanks to pagan gods. God wanted the Jews to thank the true God for the rain, the sun, the harvest, etc. So there is the first reason.

It is a polemic against the pagan religions of the ancient Near East. The second reason is this. God wanted the Jews to remember the needs he met in the past. These holidays by Passover, coming out of Egypt, and goods, God's provision in the wilderness, and so on.

They always recall God's past provision for them. He wanted them to remember the needs he met in the past so his people would have the faith to trust him for the present and the future. So it is for us as Christians.

We should always remember the needs the Lord Jesus has met in our lives in the past. The difficult situations he's brought us through, the times of difficulty he's delivered us through. We should always remember his past deliverances, his past provisions, because that is the way that God has ordained to engender faith, to trust him for the present and the future.