99. How the Story of Israel Proves Postmillennialism

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

This is episode 99, the story of Israel proves post -millennialism.

Part one, an analogy of relationships.

In human romantic relationships, progress is made through promise.

When a man enjoys the company of a particular woman and the natural things start bubbling up inside of that man,

he ought to ask her if she will become his woman.

Now, this is not an open -ended promise where he reserves the right to spend time with any harem or throng

of women that he so chooses.

No, this is a personal pledge that she would become the lone object of his

affections moving forward.

His commitment and his promise carries with it exclusivity.

Now, when that dating relationship advances beyond those initial phases, progress is again precipitated by

promises.

Without new pledges of increased loyalty and commitment, the relationship will stagnate and it will usually wither

into relational bramble.

No woman wants to date a man who's going nowhere.

No woman wants to date a man for 10 years without any sign of marriage.

That's because promises precipitate relational depth and if they're not there, well, then the

relationship withers.

But after the pledge of lifelong fidelity comes, the dating couple then transitions into engagement

with a ring of promise and then the engaged couple transitions to the altar where wedding rings are exchanged and they're lawfully wed.

This normative period is filled with promises that progress every relationship from

stranger and acquaintances to friends, then from friends to dating, eventually betrothal and then

on into marriage.

Now, this period of promise -making is a finite allotment of time and it's there to establish

interest, trustworthiness and commitment before the era of promises is over.

And I do mean that the era of promises must come to an end in every relationship because no woman,

again, wants to marry a man who continually rattles off his guarantees and assurances but never ends up

keeping them.

He would be a promise breaker instead of a promise keeper.

Once all of the promises of, I want to be with you for a lifetime and I want to do this, once all of that is

made, then the man must and the woman must transition to a period of marriage.

They're not going to go on making oaths and pledges and explaining their intentions.

They don't need to do that anymore.

They need to transition to the relationship from being a promise -making sort of relationship

to a promise -keeping sort of relationship.

Or if they don't, the only progress that they're going to make is towards breaking up, separation and divorce.

Now, this movement from promise to fulfillment is the most natural

step in any relationship's maturation.

It is how trust is baked in time.

It is how marriages become ironclad centers of love for communities and clans of burgeoning people.

And in some ways, we can actually apply this concept to what we spoke about last week.

Maybe you're like, where's he going with this?

Well, let me tell you.

Last week, we transitioned away from the wrong view of eschatology to the correct view.

And we saw how God himself has littered the book of Genesis with monumental promises.

He promised to fill the world with worshipers through Adam.

We said last week, he's going to keep that promise.

He repeated those same promises to Noah.

He kept those promises during the rocky and turbulent era of the time period called Babel.

He made those promises even more explicit and exclusive through the era of the patriarchs.

That's Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah.

And like in our metaphor before, the young man who's making covenantal promises to the woman that he loves,

God in those early years of Genesis was showering his people with all kinds of promises.

And he was letting her know what he was going to do when he went into covenant union

with her.

And as we saw last week, the content of those promises are astounding.

It was God himself promising to make a people into a fruitful worldwide worshiping people,

worshipers in every aspect of life, covering every square inch of the earth.

And I mean, in every sector, in every space, in every family, we're talking about eventually,

because we believe God is going to complete those promises in Genesis one, that there's going to be worshipers in all of the

academic disciplines like science and music, worshipers in local and national government,

workers in technology sectors and engineering firms, worshipers who create law

practices where they work in libraries and restaurants and public squares and plumbing and electrical.

And you get my point.

The whole world is going to be filled with worshipers, not just in our churches, but in every single

sector of reality.

God is going to fill the world and every space is going to have his joyful human worshipers so that

everything on this rebel planet comes under the dominion and the will of God.

He will have a world that looks like heaven before it's over.

Now, in just the same way that a man shouldn't keep making promises with no intention of

fulfilling them, God does not go on speaking promises without a plan to do

something about it.

And that's where we're at today.

He transitions from relationship promise -making to promise -keeping when we turn the pages from Genesis

to the book of Exodus.

And he continues in that promise -keeping posture all the way through the conquest narratives, the

histories of the people of Israel and Judah, the kings and the exile and all of that.

What we're going to see is that while Israel and Judah are perpetually unfaithful to their God,

and while they provoke him to jealous fury, and while they play the harlot with the nations instead of

bringing them into the covenant family, and while they cause him to even issue a decree of divorce

to the northern 10 tribes of Israel, that God is never once unfaithful to his promises.

He is going to fill the world with worshipers who worship him in spirit and in truth.

And what we're going to see today in the history of Judah and Israel is rock -hard textual

evidence from the Bible that this is God's plan and that God will accomplish it

whether he gets our help or not.

Now, in what follows, I want to sketch out all of this, how the promises that God made in the book of Genesis are going

to come to fruition in the book of Exodus, where the entire world is going to be filled with worshipers, where all the families of

the earth are going to be blessed by the seed of Abraham, where all of the nations are going to come under God's blessing through the seed of

Jacob, and they're going to obey Yahweh their king through the promise Shiloh that God told

to Judah.

And all of that is going to begin to come true in Israel in the book of Exodus, like an acorn

transitioning from the seed to the sapling.

The Exodus, the conquest, the kingdom of Israel is going to show us how God is committed

to what he initially said he was going to do.

He is going to deliver on those promises in the life of Israel.

And in the weeks ahead, we're going to see that.

We're going to see that today in the history of Israel.

Next week, we're going to see that in the song book of Israel, which is called the Psalms.

Two weeks from now, we're going to see that in the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi.

And we're going to continue going seeing that over and over again.

God is faithful to keep his promises.

These post -millennial and optimistic future promises that God has made, we will

see their roots today in the book of Exodus and beyond.

Part two, the Exodus and a world filled with worshipers.

Now, after God had given those promises to Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, and eventually Jacob's fourth

born son, Judah, the family, which had about a dozen men at that point, along with their wives and children, they're

about 70 people who left Israel, left Canaan and went and settled down in the land of Goshen, which is a

providence of Egypt.

Now, if you're familiar with the end of the book of Genesis, there was a massive famine that hit the land, so

much so that the people of God were going to starve.

And yet God, through wonderful providence, allows Joseph, the favorite of

Jacob, to be sold into slavery.

Jacob thinks that he's dead for a season of time.

God allows him to supernaturally be lifted out of prison in Egypt to the second

position in the kingdom of Pharaoh, perfectly positioned in the right place to rescue

Jacob's family and the nation that would come from Jacob's body from starvation and death.

That family was reunited in Egypt under the leadership of Joseph, and they began

growing rapidly.

For 400 silent years, the Bible does not speak about them sort of just

kind of dying out and integrating into Egyptian society.

You know, the Bible talks about them being fruitful and multiplying even in a foreign

land.

Now, that is precisely the way the book of Exodus begins.

God promised Adam in the first chapter of Genesis and Noah in the ninth chapter of

Genesis, that's the early part of Genesis, that he's going to make these men and their families fruitful and he's going to

multiply them.

And now in Egypt, in the earliest parts of the Exodus narrative, we see God

keeping those promises.

He made the promises in Genesis.

Now he's keeping those promises in Exodus.

Here's what the text says.

But the sons of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly and multiplied and became

exceedingly mighty so that the land was filled with them, Exodus 1 .7.

Do you see what God is doing here?

Do you see the promises that God is actually fulfilling?

He made all the way back in Genesis one.

Do not overlook the significance of this moment.

God created world and we're Eden, and in Eden where his covenant people, if they live under his covenant rule

and stipulations, they will come under his covenant blessings.

They will thrive and a key component of that is that they will be fruitful and that they will multiply and that they will

expand and populate all the lands of the earth, establishing God's dominion over

the planet.

Now, these events that we're talking about in Exodus, they're unfolding in this passage.

Though not yet on a universal scale, God is doing them here in Egypt.

Not global, but he is doing it on a local scale.

And what we see here is the people of Israel were proliferating in Egypt.

Their number was swelling so quickly and so fast that they eventually filled the land full of

their people, indicating to everyone who was watching that they were under the

blessings of Almighty God.

Now, in typical fashion, the native occupants, the adversaries and enemies of

God, the ones who are watching this happen perceive all of this and

they respond with a kind of terror at the prospect of

Israel's multiplication.

And they even view it as fearing Israel's expansion and increased dominion is gonna continue

to the point until it usurps their own authority in the land.

Egypt was apprehensive.

They were fearing that Israel's expansion and dominion was gonna continue until the point to where they had no

place.

And that highlights a profound understanding that I think has been lost today.

They lost upon many people.

God has not devised a plan where we are destined for failure.

Egypt understood this.

When they saw the blessing of God on the people of God, they became terrified.

Why are the enemies of God no longer terrified today?

Because they've forgotten that when the blessing of God comes upon the people of God, they will multiply

like rabbits in the summer and they will fill the land full of people and the

enemies of God will lose their place.

God will strip his enemies of their place, of their nation, of their status.

And in that divine plan, God's people are destined to dispossess the lands

that the squatters have occupied illegally.

Thereby, the church, and we're talking about the Exodus right now, so the people in Exodus

are extending Yahweh's dominion far beyond its current boundaries and the Egyptians

are torn up about it.

The Egyptian pharaoh and his advisors are grasping the enormity of God's plan with all of the

visceral clarity that could be needed.

And it filled their hearts with a kind of dread that spurred them on to very, very dark actions, desperate

strategies that led them to participate in what they thought would be a Jewish genocide.

And it became a futile attempt, actually, to try to thwart God's holy intentions, which we see in

Exodus 1, verse nine through 10.

Now, as is always the case, there is an inevitability to those who dare to challenge the Almighty.

Their sinister schemes always come crashing down in flakes of dust.

Well, Moses recounts all of this with poetic justice, that the harsher that the Egyptians

treated the Israelites, the more prolifically God blessed them, the more of God's favor that was poured

out on them with unimaginable success and continued fruitfulness and multiplication, Exodus

1, 12.

And in a twist of irony, when Egypt sought to drown the Hebrew legacy in the Nile,

to quite literally drown their fruit and their multiplication through their children, it was the fearless

midwives, the unsung heroes of the early Exodus story who were under God's watchful aisle

and not only safeguarded the lives of countless infants, but they unwittingly became a part of God's

plan to fill that nation full of worshipers, to fill

it to a burgeoning population, which further frustrated Pharaoh's draconian degrees.

It's Exodus 1, 20.

Now, as we saw last week, God is not going to give up on his plan.

He made promises to Adam, he made promises to Noah, and he came and elected a sinner named Abraham, and he gave that

man children in his old age that would eventually settle down in Egypt.

And now God's not abandoned that family.

He's now under the mighty hand of his blessing, he's pouring out his favor upon them.

And they're doing what Yahweh promised would happen.

They're being fruitful and they're multiplying, and they're spreading out and they're threatening the enemies of God.

They're threatening their security, they're threatening their dominion, they're threatening their sovereignty.

Sounds a whole lot like post -millennialism, if you ask me.

It sounds like God is being faithful to his promises, that he's ensuring that he will extend his dominion globally and

he's gonna start that locally with his people and with his worshipers.

Now, this plan, of course, ran afoul of the Egyptian leaders, no doubt.

It whipped them up into a fury as they whipped the Israelites back a little bit harder each day.

All the while they were doing this, they were increasing the miseries and the suffering of the people of Israel, and it all

reached a breaking point.

Now, the first breaking point sort of happened when this man named Moses, a strapping 40 -year -old young lad at the

time, barely had any gray in his beard, well, he decided to take matters into his own

hands.

See, God had miraculously orchestrated by divine providence for him to grow up in the palaces of Egypt.

So he was, in some sense, a son of Egypt.

And yet he also knew his Hebrew lineage.

His mother was allowed to teach him and homeschool him in the palace so he understood who his people were.

And when he saw them being mistreated, he took it in his own hands, killing an Egyptian, attempting to bury

the body and hide the evidence, and attempting, honestly, to free his people by his own strength and a

40 -year -old vigor, which I know something about because I'm 40 this year.

It's a strong age.

Now, this was not God's plan.

It was not God's plan for Moses to kill anybody, and it was not God's plan to extend his kingdom through physical

violence.

That is what jihadists do.

That is what different periods of time that were gross and disgusting have done, but that's not

the way God extends his kingdom.

So God exiled Moses into the wilderness for an entire generation.

He was 40 years old when he went into the wilderness, and God was exiling him for another 40 years to cool his jets down

a little bit so that he would no longer trust in his strength and his vigor, but he would trust the Lord, that the

Lord would do exactly as he has promised.

So 40 years later, as an octogenarian, God summons Moses back to

Egypt with a mandate to go to his people and to reassure them that God has not left them, that

he's not gonna leave them to languish in the desert sands, and he's not going to turn his back on his people,

and he would assuredly rescue them from the shackles of Egyptian servitude, and he's gonna do so with a mighty

hand.

In the same way that his mighty hand of blessing was on Israel, his mighty hand of cursing was gonna be on Egypt, and that

liberation that he was stirring up in this early chapters of Exodus was not just about

freeing the Israelites from their bondage, but it was about relocating them to the land of promise,

the land of Eden, Eden 2 .0, you might call it, because it calls that land of Canaan a land that's

flowing with milk and honey and blessings.

Now there, they were to flourish.

They were to tend the garden land, and extending Yahweh's sovereignty across it, across its breadth and depth

and height, and to transform that Canaan land into a region where God's will would come on earth

as it already had in heaven, Exodus 3 .8.

They were to basically take a people who had filled Egypt full of their worshipers, and then

set up Canaan as a base of operations.

Now this elaborate plan traces its way all the way back to the pages of Genesis, and it was not merely for their benefit,

but it was being enacted by a God who wanted the entire earth to hear about him, and to

worship him because of his awe -inspiring deeds.

See, God was doing all of this for his own glory.

He was partnering with Israel to make his name known among the nations.

And God had appointed Israel as his emissary, as his helper, to bring his blessings to all the world.

And he announced those purposes, first and foremost, in the book of Exodus,

to a man named Pharaoh, which I think is a striking feature that he announces these things to a pagan.

God says to Pharaoh in Exodus 9 .16, but indeed, for this reason, I have allowed you to

remain in order to show you my power, and in order to proclaim my name

through all the earth, Exodus 9 .16.

Now you ask yourself,.

Why would God tell the egotistical Pharaoh that his intention was to fill the earth with his name?

Well, I think for one reason, because the Pharaoh wanted to fill the earth with his little name.

So instead of that, God tells him, no, I'm going to fill the earth with my name, with stories of my power and my

glory.

And God is telling him that your kingdom is not going to be successful, mine is.

God would not have said all of that to the Pharaoh if he had no desire to fulfill it.

God has no intention of doing divine locker room talk.

God has no intention of boasting in things that he has no intention on completing, not at all.

God is going to do what he promised, and he showed how serious he was by raining down a

furious assortment of 10 devastating plagues on Egypt, crushing their egotistical

pride, crashing their agricultural industry, farming and shipping, and causing the

entire country to experience an economic collapse that would cripple their empire for

generations to come.

Now, more importantly, God was laboring to set Israel free so that Yahweh's name would echo in every

hole, hole or cave, plain and hilltop on earth.

That alone reminds us that God is still committed to his original plan and purpose, because he did not lie about that.

He wants his name to be made much of all over the earth, and he will not stop until it happens.

Now, he will make his name great, and he'll do that by multiplying worshipers everywhere that the sun shines,

everywhere that the shadow falls, and no one in hell and on earth is gonna stop him.

If you doubt that, my encouragement would be for you to ask the Pharaoh of Egypt how that worked out for him.

He hardened his heart against the Lord, and he got the unenviable opportunity to see all of his

wealth and power flushed down the Red Sea toilet.

God will complete his promises.

Part three, the law in a world filled with worshipers.

Now, from there, God brought this newly -freed nation out of Egypt, and he brought them as an

assortment of people.

There was both Jew and Gentile.

There was Egyptians, actually, in a mixed multitude who came out with them, Exodus 12, 38.

And this throng of people, this group of people consisted of a couple million people who walked out of the land of Egypt.

This was no small gaggle of people who crossed over a shallow pond.

No, this was a massive group of people who left Egypt, crossed over a Red Sea, watched

Egypt defeated right before their very eyes, and God drew them by cloud and fire

to Mount Sinai, where he would enter into a covenant relationship.

Think about Mount Sinai sort of like a marriage ceremony.

That's what Ezekiel tells us.

That's what the Jewish scholars who look back on that time tell us, that this was God drawing his bride

out to the desert so that he could perform a marriage.

And like all covenants, especially the ones before, there are specific stipulations and rules and

precepts that the people of God are to follow.

It's in the same way that you make pledges and you make vows when you get married.

Well, if the people of God followed them, they would be in relationship with him.

If they followed the stipulations of the covenant, they would inherit the blessings of the covenant, which God

describes in various ways all throughout the Torah.

The Torah is Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

So as we look through this section of scripture, we see all kinds of ways that God is gonna pour out his blessings

on an obedient people.

If they're disobedient, they're gonna inherit the curses.

If they're obedient, then they will inherit the blessings.

For instance, he promised the people that he was gonna walk among them in

their midst, just like he had with Adam and Eve in the garden, Leviticus 26, 11 through 12.

He promised that they would be fruitful and prosperous in a garden land, Genesis 26,

9.

He told them that he would give them dominion and authority among the nations on earth, Deuteronomy 28, 13.

And he told them that he would partner with them in filling the world with worshipers, like he said to

Adam before.

And he reminded them even that I will be your God and you will be my people, Leviticus 26, 12.

Now, God is encouraging them in this point.

He is lavishing on them reminders of the promises, but it's all predicated upon obedience at this point.

If they were obedient, then they could live in the presence of a holy God, Leviticus 20, 26.

If they would obey his voice, like unlike their father, Adam, actually, then they, and if they would follow his

decrees, and if they would do everything that he said, then he would make them fruitful and he would multiply

them, Leviticus 26, 9.

He would bless them in the land.

He would bless them as they come in, bless them as they go out, Deuteronomy 28.

And he would bless them to live in his presence, Deuteronomy 6, 3.

He would use them to bring his covenant blessings to all the nations, Exodus 19, five

through six.

Do you see what the law of God's saying?

Everything we see in Genesis 1, 28 is coming true in Exodus and in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy.

God said that he would bless them and they would be fruitful, multiply, spread out to the ends of the earth.

And I just showed you every element of those promises there in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

God is entering them into a Genesis 1, 28 relationship.

It's no longer a promised relationship.

Now it has teeth.

Now God is enacting it.

Now God is bringing them into it.

He's no longer a promised maker.

He's promised keeper.

And he's drawn them out of Egypt to bring them into what he promised back in Genesis.

And he's going to allow them the privilege of assisting him in accomplishing his Genesis 1,

28 vision to fill the world with worshipers.

Now, from the very outset of national Israel, and I would say national Israel begins at Mount Sinai, God

invited them into a covenant whereby they could partner with him like Adam was promised long

before to bring God's glory to all the earth.

Numbers 14, 21, they were commissioned to live such holy and fruitful lives aided by

the law and the sacrificial system that the nations would see and behold the glory

of God on them.

And the nations would either stream into Israel and repent and turn to know and love this benevolent deity, which

happens in Deuteronomy 4, 5, and 6, or they would tremble in absolute abject terror of him

because of his holiness.

And they would tremble because of his people, Deuteronomy 28, 9 through 10.

Either way, the Lord was committed to his earth -filling promises as long as Israel was faithful

to the covenant.

God would allow them to join him in that work, using them as a light to the Gentiles, Isaiah 42, 6.

But as we know the story, as we know the story, Israel

was not faithful.

They refused to be obedient to the terms of the covenant.

And instead of reaching the nations with the knowledge of God, they polluted the land with the idols of

demons.

Instead of inheriting the covenant blessings, they often languished under the torrent of covenantal cursings,

Deuteronomy 28.

So the question is coming out of the law, is God going to maintain his promises?

Or is he gonna give up and wash his hands of it?

Well, he does end up putting an entire generation to death in the wilderness, their dead bodies littered the sands because

of their covenantal disobedience.

But God is not finished with his promises.

The second generation rises up.

Moses gives them the entire book of Deuteronomy to prepare them for what's coming.

And then God calls them, the second generation, the Deuteronomic generation

to enter the land.

Part four, the conquest and a world filled with worshipers.

Now, despite Israel's apparent ongoing inability to keep the covenant that God had given them,

God remained faithful to his promises.

As we've said before, he is not only the promise maker, but he is the promise keeper.

He's the promise keeper in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers.

And he is the God who kept covenant with the wilderness generation in Deuteronomy, where he graciously repeated his

entire law to his people one more time, who were preparing to take Yahweh's cosmic

plan and his world filling goals into the land of Canaan.

And they were gonna enact it like they had in Egypt on a local regional scale.

Now, this means that the first phase of Yahweh's plan was to fill one

nation full of worshipers before he filled the world full of worshipers.

By choosing Israel, God's gonna partner with one nation to reach all the nations, but they have to start somewhere.

And they have to start in their hometown, in their homeland, and they were gonna become a people who loved him,

lived in integrity and righteousness under his dominion and rule, and they were gonna multiply those

blessings in their nation first.

And in this way, the land of Canaan would become a microcosm, or maybe you could call it a blueprint for what

God wanted to do all over the world.

The work that began in the land of Canaan as soon as the Lord's servant Moses died and the newly appointed leader was installed

would be emblematic of what God wanted to do in every nation.

And under Joshua, God commissioned the Israelites to get to work immediately, to go in and to bring the entire

land of Canaan under the dominion of Yahweh, Joshua 1, 2 through 4.

The second verse of the book is them getting to work.

Now, to do that, God had charged this newly minted leader to live a life saturated with the law of God.

Joshua, it was to keep the law of God in his heart all the time so that he could lead the people to be ever consecrated to

him, so that he could be a man of courage, and so that the Lord would make this nation prosperous and give Joshua

success wherever he goes.

It's Joshua 1, 8 through 9.

Now, at the end of Joshua's life, after all the battles, after Jericho had fallen, Ai had fallen, Ogden of

Bashan had fallen, after all of that, at the end of Joshua's life, he confesses to us through the

word of God that God had accomplished every aspect of the plan that he

had promised.

Joshua tells us that there was not a single promise that God gave to him that he did not

complete, Joshua 21, 43 through 45.

So we're at a high point here.

Joshua has done everything God said, and God has done everything God said, and the whole land of Canaan is

filled with worshipers.

That is phase one.

Phase one of the plan was complete.

Despite the apparent setbacks, the golden calfs, the generation that died in the wilderness, the whole

debacle that happened at Ai and with Achan and all of that, despite all of the setbacks associated with partnering with a sin

-loving people, God had used this motley crew to populate one nation full of worshipers, and it

said that he completed it, that all the promises had come true in Joshua's lifetime, which

is astounding, and way to end on a high note.

Part five, the judges in a world filled with worshipers.

And just like being on a cliff's edge or on a high point, falling down and going splat

sometimes happens, and that is exactly what the book of Judges is all about.

Even though it would have been reasonable to assume that God would have transitioned away from the local

national level fulfillment that happened at the end of Joshua, and he would begin using Israel to multiply the

knowledge of God and his blessings all across the globe, there is a significant problem in

the people of God when we get to the book of Judges.

God was entirely faithful.

He perfectly upheld his end of the deal to partner with Israel to fill the world with worshipers, but it was Israel that

was entirely faithless on their end.

See, after Joshua died, the nation plunged itself into a cyclical pattern of idolatry

and slavery, subjugation, which sadly became the norm throughout the book of Judges.

God would raise up a judge, because remember, there was no king in the land at this point.

He would raise up a judge to rescue the people out of their slavery.

They would cry out to God, and God would send a judge, which kind of like a second Moses figure, to deliver them out of their

slavery and all of that, and then God would rescue them, and the people would walk with God for a little while,

as so long as the judge was alive and well.

But when the judge died, Israel experienced a kind of spiritual death as well, falling

back into the most disgusting worship practices, harlotries, and macabre violence

that you can imagine.

The book of Judges is the darkest, most violent book in the Bible for good reason.

Now, that rebellion, that cyclical rebellion and idolatry would cause God to give them over

again and again and again to their enemies, which the vicious cycle would start over again and

again.

In that sense, no progress was made on God's world -filling goal throughout the entire book of

Judges.

In fact, this was a period of awful and bitter regression, where the

people surrendered sovereignty in Canaan, and they tarnished their witness among the nations.

They didn't move forward, they moved back, and they moved way back to where they lost their place in their

station in their own nation.

After all of the work to build up this nation with worshipers and to fill it full, be fruitful,

multiply, all of that, after all that work at the end of Joshua, it all comes crashing down in Judges.

Now, the attitude of this tragic period can be summed up by a couple of verses that are taken from the beginning and the

end of the book.

These are fascinating.

In Judges chapter two, God comes personally down from heaven.

God leaves heaven and comes down bodily, in the flesh, and he comes down to Canaan, and he

shows up as the angel of the Lord, a Christophany, if you're familiar with that term, which just means Christ in the Old Testament.

And he speaks to all the covenant -breaking sons of Israel, and he says this to them.

He says, I brought you up out of Egypt.

This is Jesus talking.

He said, I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have

sworn to your fathers and said, I will never break my covenant with you.

But as for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land.

You shall tear down their altars, but you have not obeyed me.

What is it that you have done?

Therefore, I also said, I will not drive them out before you, but they will become as

thorns in your side and their gods will be a snare to you.

Joshua 2, one through three.

The angel of the Lord, who is Jesus in the Old Testament, said to this nation of miscreants

that he is the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, that he had been faithful to all of his promises.

And it was certainly not his intention to bring them into the royal family so that they could go on wallowing in their

filth and feces like barnyard animals.

But that's what they were doing.

Christ himself, God in the flesh, reminded them that they had not been

faithful.

And if had they been faithful, God would have made them fruitful and multiplied them.

And he would have used them to take his blessings to the ends of the earth.

But because of their sin and rebellion, their country was in a state of

full -on collapse.

And God was bringing them into judgment.

And I'm not talking about the kind of judgment where God draws so near to them in white hot fury that he destroys them.

I'm talking about the kind of judgment that's often worse, where he abandons them to their own sick and

sadistic desires.

Kind of like you would see in Romans 1, 24 through 32.

Now, nowhere is this judgment more clearly visible than at the end of the book, where the author reports this.

In those days, there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own

eyes.

Judges 21, 25.

So when you think about closing out the section of judges, this cliff moment where they go crashing down

fantastically on the rocks below, it's crucial to remember that while God remained perfectly faithful to his

promises, and he did partner with the people to fill the world with worshipers, the plan encountered an all

too familiar snag.

And that snag was due to human sin, and idolatry and rebellion.

It's the same snag that was in the Garden of Eden that caused the world not to be filled with worshipers through Adam.

It's the same snag that ended up in the tent of Noah.

It's the same snag that caused Abraham's family to be a broken mess.

It's the same snag that caused Moses and the idolatrous Israelites to fail in their plan.

Joshua and the warring tribes to fail in their plan.

And now we see the kingless, debased people of Israel failing as well.

Now, at no point in this entire cosmic drama had God changed.

He was faithful through every scene, every millisecond of it.

Everyone was exposed as liars and oath breakers except for him.

And if anything, we are getting the most detailed glimpse in the book of Judges of the unsearchable

depths and the riches of his limitless grace.

God, by his mere good pleasure and long suffering goodness is

repeatedly rebooting his mission of partnering with humans who hate him

and who abandoned him and who forsake him.

This is not only because he abounds with limitless grace and he does.

And it's also not only to show us that we could never uphold our end of the covenant without him, we could not.

But it's also to make a way for his own son, the one who stood before Israel and

rebuked them in the book of Judges.

He's the one who would one day come and complete what they never could.

And in that sense, these passages in Judges do not remind us about how useful and how

helpful we are to God, far from it.

Instead, they show us how useless and faithless we are when it comes to God.

And they show us God's unwavering commitment to accomplish his plan with or without us.

This plan to partner with a man is not gonna be filled by any of us men.

It's gonna be fulfilled by a man who's gonna fill the world with worshipers, a man who's gonna be fruitful and multiply, a

man who's gonna be faithful.

And while the Bible repeatedly recounts how none of the sons of Adam could be faithful in that role, none of the sons of Noah

could be faithful in that role, a true son of Adam, the true son of God is coming and he is gonna be faithful in

that role.

He's the one who's gonna do what we could not do.

Why?

Because God doesn't give up on his plan.

And if God has to leave heaven and come to earth and die on our behalf in order to accomplish his plan, then

that's what's gonna be.

Despite the thousands of years of failure of God's people and all of the delays, God's plan

was never in jeopardy because he would never be thwarted.

His intention to partner with a man was always about the man, Jesus Christ.

And that plan remained intact throughout the period of the judges.

And as we will see next, that period remained intact through the wishy -washy topsy -turvy period of the

idolatrous, faithless kings.

Because God will use these eras to usher in a true son of Adam.

He's gonna use these eras to showcase to us the inability of man and the hope for the coming

God -man, his only son, who will be successful.

That's what the book of Judges and the era of the kings is going to tell us.

And that's where we're going to end our time today.

Part six, the kings of Israel, the promise of Jesus, and a

world filled with worshipers.

Now, humanly speaking, the era of the kings was birthed out of the same DNA,

the idolatry -addicted DNA that was typical during the period of the judges.

Same people who craved the idols and the gods of all the nations were now asking for a

king so that they could be like all the nations, 1 Samuel 8 20.

Instead of converting the pagan world, they were being converted by it, which is the great temptation of all generations.

You'll either convert them or they will convert you.

And here they are most certainly being converted by them.

Now, in some ways, this dark period of Israel's history set the trajectory for how the kings are gonna crash

and burn, how a future messianic king is gonna be needed.

Because God, again, we've said this over and over, is not gonna abandon his plan.

And since no human being could accomplish it, God's gonna have to come from heaven to earth in order to establish it.

This is because neither Israel's or Judah's kings could ever be enough.

Now, instead of taking the covenant with Yahweh seriously, partnering with him to bring his covenant blessings to the nations and

filling the world with worshipers as he intended, the kings of Israel and Judah are a

dumpster fire.

They fell like a blind man walking off a cliff's edge.

They are, of course, there are, of course, notable exceptions in among the kings, good

kings like Josiah or Hezekiah, David.

But those good kings even rarely got complete control of the land like Joshua did.

And they rarely finished the revivals and the

purification movements that they led.

And they almost never multiplied and filled their land full of worshipers.

What we see in Joshua and what we see at the end of the reign of Solomon, or sorry, the middle of the reign of Solomon

is sort of the high points of Israel filling just one nation full of worshipers.

And God is calling them to fill all of the nations full of worshipers.

In fact, the all too normal method and mode for the kings was not to

live under the obedience to God, but to lead the people and themselves forcefully away from him and to bring

them into devastating fury and in the cursings of God's punishment and wrath.

Because that was the default mode of the human heart, especially the heart of the kings.

Well, God begins the era, this era of the kings with a powerful admonishment in scripture.

And he does so on the most unlikely candidate.

I love how God speaks beautiful promises to the Pharaoh or to a

donkey.

When you look back on Balaam's account here, he's speaking it on the lips of a humble maiden.

Her name is Hannah.

And this is the song that she sang by the spirit of God.

She said,.

Those who contend with the Lord will be shattered against them he will thunder in the heavens.

The Lord will judge the ends of the earth and he will give strength to his king and he will

exalt the horn of his appointed.

First Samuel 2 .10.

God is warning the nation and its rulers that he will shatter anyone who is disobedient to him.

And then he's gonna execute his justice over the face of the earth.

He's not saying I'm gonna execute my justice just in Canaan.

He's saying, my justice, my righteousness, my rule, my authority, my government is going to be

executed across the entire earth.

That hasn't happened yet, but it will.

So he's saying to them, if you disobey me, you don't have to worry about disobeying me just in the land of Canaan.

If you disobey me anywhere on earth, my justice, my watchful eye will see you so that no

one will escape his glance.

But to the Lord's anointed king, Hannah sings a song, a picture of a future coming

Messiah.

This is not a song about David.

It's not a song about Solomon, not a song about Hezekiah or Josiah or any of those kings because this song is

bigger than them.

This is a song about a coming king, the true anointed one of God, who God will give his own

strength to and who will bring about the plan that God has been enacting since Eden.

Hannah says that God will give his strength to the appointed king and that appointed king will extend God's justice

to the nations.

That is none other than Jesus Christ.

Case you missed it, none of the kings, none of the priests, none of the judges, none of the prophets, none of them would measure

up to the song of Hannah.

None of them would measure up to the latter part in 1 Samuel 2 .35.

None of them ever would or ever could usher in the promises made to Adam, Noah, Abraham,

Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Judah, or the lot of them, none of them.

But as I've been saying all along, even though we are unfaithful to God's plan, it

does not mean that God will be unfaithful to his plan.

Just because we're unfaithful doesn't mean God will be unfaithful.

We forget his promises, we fail to bring about all that he's desired to do, but he doesn't.

If his plan is to partner with a man and there are no good men to partner with, then he will leave

heaven and earth and come down and he will be that true man, that true king.

He will leave the throne of heaven and become the better king that we've all been waiting for, Hebrews 1, eight through nine.

And since God is looking to partner not only with a perfect king, but with a perfect kingly priest, I am speaking about

Jesus here, he will come as the eternal priest from the eternal line of Melchizedek, mediating the

relationship between God and man that God has always promised, Hebrews 7, 24 through 25.

Jesus Christ, the righteous one will bring God's kingly victory to the nations, Revelation 15, four.

The era of the judges and the kings, as dark as it is, does not tell the story of God abandoning his plan,

but revealing that a better man, better judge, better priest, better king is coming in Christ.

Now that shift in the language is striking.

Before the era of the judges and the kings, God was using sort of Israel -centric, Israeli -centric

language.

He was speaking about partnering with that particular peculiar slave -saved nation to accomplish his

global purposes.

And there's fewer hints about the Messiah in the Exodus narrative, and even some in the

conquest narrative.

But as the tremendous inability of the nation becomes more exposed over time,

more light on God's coming Messiah floods in, so that more light comes in in the book of judges, more light

comes in the era of the kings, more light comes in the songs of Israel, and more light even comes in the prophets.

The worse that humanity gets, the more clearly we see that God is gonna send a better

human, the God -man.

You see, in the providence of God, God had entered into partnerships that he knew was going to

fail so that he could showcase the Christ.

This is not an accidental bug.

It is not a mistake within his calculus.

It's a feature.

God partnered with Adam to fill the world with worshipers because he knew that Adam couldn't do it.

God partnered with Noah because he knew Noah was gonna fail.

God partnered with Abraham because he knew Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Israel, all their kings, all of it.

He knew all of them were gonna fail fantastically.

Maybe you're like,.

Well, why would God enter into a relationship with them if he knew they were gonna fail?

Why would God choose partners who can do nothing but fall flat on their faces?

Well, it's not because God is capricious.

I will tell you that.

And it's not because God enjoys spectacles or try not to laugh videos where he watches us

slam our faces on the sidewalk.

That's not what God does.

He was showing us something in all of this.

He's showing us two things, in fact.

First, that he will never fail at bringing about his promises.

It doesn't matter how bad we get, God is faithful.

And he's showing us that all throughout the Old Testament.

And second, you can doubt him all you want.

You can go on living in a doom and gloom worldview where the world is gonna collapse, the sky is always falling.

You can be Chicken Little if you want, where the church is gonna end in an abysmal and pathetic failure and

God is never going to succeed in accomplishing what he promised to all those men in Genesis.

You can believe that if you want, but you believe that against scripture and you indict the character of God and you say

you're a liar and you're not faithful.

If that's what you believe, then that's what you're saying about God.

Third, I had two, now I've got three.

Third, you can realize what our place is.

You can realize that our place in the divine metanarrative is not about us.

The Bible tells a story of human failure over and over and over again, because the Bible is not about

us, it's about him and his victory and his success.

You are not the story's hero.

You are not the one who comes in and rescues the day.

You and I are cast as the villains in this story who need rescuing.

Our people failed, our priests failed, our prophets failed, our kings failed, our feasts failed, our morals

failed, our ability failed.

Every aspect of the human story is accurately subsumed within the words of Romans 3 .23,

all have fallen short.

And because of this feature, God from Genesis and all throughout the Torah, the conquest narratives, the book of Judges,

Samuels, Kings, Chronicles, all of it was lining up in front of us the very best of our

representatives, the most excellent of our people showing us that even our mighty men have fallen.

And if they have failed, then you and I would fail too.

If you were in their place, you would have fallen too.

If you were in their place, you would have picked up the stone and you would have cast it.

If you were in their place, you would have been outside the ark.

If you were in their place, you would have sold your wife into the arms of Abimelech too.

All of the examples of failure of the people of God, the adultery of David, all of it, you would have done it

too because even our best representatives cannot obey God in the way that God desires.

And here we arrive at the point of what God is doing.

He is not writing a story that pumps up our pride and makes much of us.

He is teaching us to take our eyes off of us and to put them on him and to

put them upon the one whom he will send.

The one who would succeed where Adam fell and the one who would be fruitful and multiply where

Noah collapsed.

God is pointing us to the overarching point of the entire Bible that we must look to the

King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

He is going to be successful.

He will never fail and he will bring the promises of God and he will

fill the world with worshipers.

Now, in case that's not clear enough for you, let me speak on the level of crystal.

God is gonna fill the world with worshipers through Jesus Christ.

No other man is worthy, the era of the judges and the kings tell us that point in ugly

clarity.

But after the period of ugly failure, after the period of rebellion, God sent his one and

only son and he would be successful and he has been successful for the last 2000

years.

This means the coming messianic King Jesus will be a picture of what faithful Israel was

supposed to be, Matthew 2 .15.

He will succeed where Israel failed.

He will be the true firstborn son like God called Adam, Luke 3 .38 and like God called

Israel, Exodus 4 .22.

He will be the one who fulfills and obeys the covenant with God and like all before him, Matthew 5 .17.

And like Israel, he will be tasked with taking God's fruitful and multiplied kingdom to

the nations, Isaiah 49 .6, Matthew 28 .18 -20.

Jesus comes like Joshua.

He comes at 30 years old and he explodes upon the scene.

His name even is Joshua, Yeshua, Jesus, Joshua, same name.

And he has a mission like Joshua.

He goes through all of the land of Judah, conquering and bringing freedom for the kingdom of God.

He's bringing freedom to the captives and he's putting the enemies of God under his feet, Isaiah 61 .1 and Luke 4 .18.

And he promises that he's gonna set the city on fire, which is what Joshua did in the conquest.

He's gonna set the city on fire that has been given over to destruction.

Matthew 22 .7, Matthew 23 .36, Matthew 24 .34, Luke 21 .20

-24.

He's like Joshua, the conqueror.

He's going through the towns and he is devoting to destruction those things that don't belong to God and

he is bringing into the kingdom those that do.

And like Joshua, he sends out his armies, he sends out his disciples

and he sends them out into Judah's highways and byways, bringing into the land and

into the kingdom the worshipers the king has called, Matthew 22 .1 -14.

He's the true and better Joshua.

And then as he dies, he's the true and better fulfillment of the law.

And then as he ascends, he's the true and better king, the one who sits down in heaven's throne room, the Lord of

glory who will do what no one else could do.

He will lead his people, not just into Canaan, but he will lead them to all the nations,

to Judea, to Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the world.

By his Holy Spirit, he's leading the church and he has been leading the church for the last 2000 years into the world.

And he's leading the church.

Into the world that Adam was supposed to claim, the world that Noah was commanded to accomplish, the one like Israel,

the one that Israel never could.

This shows us that in Christ, in his redemption, in the forgiveness of sins and the death and the burial and the resurrection and

the reversal of the curse and in the new creation nature that he's given us and in our regeneration and indwelling of the Holy

Spirit, that God has partnered with Christ and Christ has brought us in union with him so that now you and I,

through the gospel, are partnered back with God.

How Adam failed in his partnership, Jesus succeeded.

Now you and I, the church, are partnered with God to accomplish his plan, to spread his dominion to the nations.

That's what Jesus says in Matthew 28.

All authority in heaven and earth now belong to me.

Now therefore go.

Jesus fulfilled the law perfectly.

And because of that, he could bring us in union with him.

And as he ascended to heaven, he would take us spiritually with him so that now

in Christ, we are partnered with God and we are partnered in the mission of God.

And this mission, because of Christ, God Almighty, will be perfectly victorious

in filling the world with worshipers.

How do we see this truth revealed in the era of the kings?

Well, consider what God said to the first of his anointed kings, David, who was the first

king and arguably the best king.

In the covenant God made with David, God does not promise him that David will accomplish God's plans.

He can't.

He's too sinful.

He doesn't even allow the warrior king to build him a temple because of his bloodstained hands in 1 Chronicles 22 .8.

This is the best king.

He doesn't promise that his son Solomon, who at the end of his life, bowed his knee to countless idols, is gonna

do anything to advance God's kingdom the way that God designed it, 1 Kings 11 .4.

He promised that an enduring house.

He promised that an enduring house would be built for David and that a perfect king

would come out of that house and would extend that line forever.

That's Luke 1 .32 -33, the God -man born in the city of David, Luke 2 .11, who would take up the mantle of

God's mission to bring his rule and dominion to the earth, 2 Samuel 7, 12 -13, and 16.

In no way was God gonna ever accomplish this through one of us.

This Jesus is the one that God set aside to have an eternal reign in all of us,

every one of us.

All of our failure, brokenness, sin, and misery are all pointing to the fact that we need him.

Jesus will be the one who obeys the covenant stipulations of Yahweh.

And as Solomon prayed, he would be the one to bless all the peoples on earth, 1 Kings 8

.16, 2 Chronicles 6 .32 -33.

Solomon certainly didn't do that.

He was praying for Jesus.

Jesus is the one who delivered Hezekiah from Assyria and who threw the nations into panic and

confusion so that they were the ones who killed themselves in the valley outside of Jerusalem.

It was Jesus who delivered him, 2 Kings 19 .15 -19.

He's the one who, unlike the kings of Judah, will not lead his people into idolatry.

He will not fail in his righteousness, but he will establish and uphold justice and righteousness all across the

face of the earth, Isaiah 9 .7.

Jesus, the perfect king, unlike Hezekiah, will not falter after great successes and be

consumed with pride, nor will his kingdom face the downfall seen by Judah at the hands of Babylon.

Instead, his reign will bring about the peace and the prosperity that God promised David, a peace that

extends not just over Judah, but over the entire earth, fulfilling the true extent of the

Abrahamic covenant from Genesis 22 .18.

Jesus' kingship and his kingdom will contrast starkly with the failures of the

kings of Israel and Judah.

Where they brought division, he's gonna bring unity.

Where they led the nation into sin, he leads the people into holiness.

Where their kingdom ended, his is eternal and will never end.

In this, Jesus Christ embodies the true and better king that God had promised all along to come from the line of

David, a king whose kingdom would be established forever, just like 1 Samuel 7

says.

In his first coming, Jesus inaugurated this kingdom, not with might and warfare and weapons and

swords, but through humility of a servant death on a cross to save his people from their sins,

Philippians 2, six through eight.

And in his resurrection, he demonstrated his power over death and his authority over heaven and earth and a

foretaste of the kingdom to come would come in his rule and his reign.

Now, as our ascended Lord is at the throne of God, he is gathering a people from every tribe and every tongue

and every nation.

He is building his church as the new Israel, as the true Israel, a global assembly of worshipers

who obey his commandments and worship him over every square inch of the earth.

It's not full yet, but it's coming.

He's doing it.

He's been doing it ever since the day that he ascended into heaven.

And as we live today, we are caught in the already, but the not yet

reality of his kingdom advance.

Through Christ's work on the cross and his resurrection, we are being made citizens of this kingdom.

And we are called to live under his lordship and extend his rule by making disciples of all the nations.

You and I are a part of that today.

For 2 ,000 years, he's been successful.

For 2 ,000 more, if the Lord should tarry that long, he will continue to be successful.

We await the day when he will return after he has made all

things new, after he has brought his kingdom all across the face of the earth.

Now, I'm not saying that he's gonna bring us into a state of perfection.

I'm not saying that.

I'm saying that he will bring his kingdom until every one of his enemies have been put under his feet and he will

bring his kingdom on earth until the entire world is filled with worshipers, just like God promised Adam, Noah,

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and all of it.

I'm saying that he will do this before he returns because that's what 1 Corinthians 15 says, but we're getting ahead of ourself.

We'll talk about that in the weeks ahead.

With all of that, with all of the robust failure and the flickering glimpses of godliness that we see in

the era of Israel, the true and better King Jesus shines through.

The adultery of David, the disloyalty of Solomon, the foolishness of Rehoboam, the pride of Josiah,

the pride of Hezekiah, the disgusting practices of Manasseh, Ammon, and Jehoiakim, and the failure of their reign

to materialize into anything at all that goes towards your promises, God, they make us

yearn for your perfect reign in Christ.

Their mistakes highlight the coming success of the King.

Their temporal kingdom point to the eternal kingdom and their inability to bring about what you promised

makes us long for the only one who can, the only one who can

fulfill every promise, the only one who every knee will bow to, the only one who every

knee or every tongue will confess to Jesus Christ.

We see the shadow of his victory in the story of Israel.

We see the shadow of his coming success in the failure of Judah.

In Jesus Christ, we don't know the shadow anymore, we know the substance.

As post -millennialism teaches through this true and better King, God is going to partner

with his people again, made new in Christ to fill the world with worshipers,

bringing his rule and his reign and his dominion to every corner of the earth, not through the sword, not through human might, but through the

preaching of the gospel, through the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.

So our hope for the future is not in our ingenuity, not in our might, not in our weapons, our hope for

the future, brothers and sisters, and our work in the present, brothers and sisters, and our understanding

of the past are all anchored in him.

He is the capstone of our faith, Ephesians 2 .20, and in the narrative of redemption, we

find our place not as the hero of the story, but as the grateful recipients of Jesus's

love and mercy and grace.

And you and I are called into the faithful service of his kingdom as we await his glorious return.

Conclusion.

The story of God's plan to fill the earth with worshipers is a sweeping narrative from Genesis to

Revelation.

You and I witnessed God's steadfast commitment to those promises throughout the ages, partnering with very flawed and

very broken human people who fall short, who yet in his boundless grace, God

remains faithful forever.

And he uses such unfaithful creatures as us to paint a more vivid picture

of his goodness, kindness, and his glory that he showed to us most perfectly in Jesus Christ.

In the era of the Exodus and the conquest and the judges and the kings, and in the whole Old Testament, we see the pattern

unfold with striking clarity.

God's people's rebellion and their leader's shortcoming expose our need for a true and a better king,

one who would succeed where all others failed.

And in the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, the embodiment of true Israel, the fulfillment of

the Abrahamic covenant and the eternal king whose reign knows no end.

Through his obedience, through his sacrificial death, through his glorious resurrection from the

dead, Christ inaugurated a kingdom that was foretold by the prophets and that will never

end.

And he is gathering to himself a redeemed people from every nation, tribe, and tongue, and he is

forming a nation of people, a holy nation, a priesthood, a global assembly of worshipers who

will live under his lordship from now forevermore.

As we await his return, as we await the consummation of this kingdom, when Christ returns to judge the living and the

dead and where he comes to renew all things, brothers and sisters, find your place today in

that kingdom.

Don't sit on the sidelines, don't wait to do anything, don't play passive, don't play coy, find

your place in his kingdom today.

Not as the heroes, because you're not, you're a failure just like me.

Find your place as a grateful recipient of his grace.

Our calling is to be faithful slaves and servants.

One day our king's gonna return, he's gonna look at all that we've done and he's gonna say, well done, good and faithful servant, he's gonna say, depart from me, I never knew you.

He's gonna say, you did with what I gave you very much, go in and do this, or he's gonna say, you

buried your talent in the sand and now you go into shame.

Our calling as slaves is to faithfully serve our king, to extend his rule

and his dominion to the ends of the earth through the proclamation of the gospel, through the transformative power of the

Holy Spirit.

God's promises stand sure, brothers and sisters, and his purposes will prevail.

Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of the glory of God.

Do you believe that?

Do you believe that God is going to complete everything that he said he was gonna complete?

Well, live that way and work that way.

And live that way until I see you again next time on the broadcast.

Until next time, thank you so much for joining us.

We'll see you again.

Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the broadcast.

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encouraging, even post -millennial messages of what the Bible says.

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