106. Interview With Martin Selbrede (How the Bible PROVES Postmillennialism - Part 2)

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 106, part two of my interview with Martin Selbretti.

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Let's go. This is part two of our

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Martin Selbretti interview. If you just finished the last one and you couldn't wait to the next one and you just went right ahead and started watching it, you will know that we had an incredible time talking about post -millennialism and the biblical case for it.

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So today, what I wanted to do is I wanted to, it seems like last time that we covered more of the

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Old Testament case for it, I'd like to now move to the New Testament and build a biblical case for post -millennialism from the

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New Testament because we are whole Bible Christians. So brother, with that,

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I will hand the floor over to you. Certainly, we can't start much earlier than John the

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Baptist's testimony, seems to me. So we can look at passages like Matthew 3, 11 to 12, where we read that the

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Baptist informs us that the winnowing hand is in the Messiah's hand, is Christ's hand, and he said he will thoroughly purge the threshing floor.

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And I think this is an important passage here because he talks about the actual activity that Christ is involved in.

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The first thing we need to know is that he's not standing there century after century after this announcement not using that winnowing fan.

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The purpose of the fan is to drive away the chaff and leave nothing but wheat behind. That's the whole purpose, to get nothing but a solid block of wheat because all the chaff has been driven away by the wind.

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And when we say this, we're talking about passages like Psalm 1, which speaks about the wicked being like the chaff driven away by the wind, or Daniel 2, which talks about all these nations, these kingdoms that are then crushed into chaff, and then they're blown away, and no place is found for them anymore.

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So this process is something that's initiated by the Messiah, and John the Baptist tells us so. He says his winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge, and that's a compound

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Greek word, diakathrizo, means completely, totally purge the threshing floor.

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You ask, well, what's the threshing floor? Well, we learn in Micah, it's the surface of the earth, it's where all the armies of the world gather. It's where all the people of the world live.

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That's the threshing floor. That's what's going to be made pure and purged of all chaff, and is happening now.

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That winnowing chaff is in effect now, and it's operating now, and it's Messiah who's doing it. And this is a

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New Testament witness to it, that the Messiah is in the process of purifying the world.

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Now, this is a long, long process. It's a long, long process to do this, but are we informed that he will thoroughly purge it?

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Now, let me ask you a question real quick on that. In the ancient world, when someone started the process of breaking the chaff away from the wheat germ and doing that, did they stop before the job was finished?

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I know it's an obvious question, but what was—did they go to the end? What's that?

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Not if they want to get paid by the Master. You see, Christ is appointed to do this, right?

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He was given the winnowing than, and his purpose is to purge away all the chaff in the world.

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We have a doctrine of chaff in the scripture, and also a doctrine of dross, that he sits and refines and leaves silver behind, and the dross is driven away, and dross suffers the same fate as chaff.

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And it's a biblical doctrine from one scripture to the other that we get this chaff doctrine again in Matthew 13, and we have it here in Matthew 3.

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It comes out of Christ's mouth when he speaks about the harvest, and here it is in the Sound of the Baptist bearing testimony of what

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Christ is going to do, and specifically that he's already got his tool and he's going to use it. So we have two things.

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One, that it's not something that he holds off on for a century and say, I'm going to clean up the world later, let go for 21 centuries and go from bad to worse.

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No. His winnowing than is kind of inane to actually be holding the thing prepared for action and to sit there poised like a frozen statue for 21 centuries doing nothing in effect, which is the way some eschatologies treat this passage.

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They just ride right over it, ride roughshod over John the Baptist. I think it's a bad idea. Right. He paid with his life for his testimony here, and he bore it honestly and faithfully, and so we should accept it.

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We should also notice again that that word, dia catharizo, dia is like diameter, dia goes all the way through from one end and up and down and left and right, the entire, you won't find any chaff left encumbering the ground.

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It's all wheat. That is so good, because if Christ came back today, then he would have basically purged the chaff of 33 % of the wheat.

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Let's just say that the kingdom of Jesus has taken over 33 % of the world, and maybe those numbers are inflated,

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I don't know, but it's clearly not. It's not finished. No. Yeah. He's not partial.

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It's a complete end front to back, end to end purging. No one wants to eat wheat that's full of chaff.

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You would probably call the FDA and report that manufacturer, this stuff's got dreck in it and schmutz, and we don't want to eat that.

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And so the same thing, the wheat had to be properly prepared before you, it's a staff of life, right? So Christ knows what he's doing, and the winnowing fan is an active part of his suite of tools.

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Obviously it is a symbol, but it's a symbol for a very real function that he executes as the

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Messiah. And we're warned about it. He will baptize you with Holy Spirit and with fire.

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So these are the two aspects of the work of Christ, and they're both exemplified by this winnowing fan.

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There's different destinies. If you're wheat, well, you will be purged and cleansed of everything and you'll remain wheat.

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But if you're chaff, you're driven away. There's no place found for you, right? Depart from me, you workers of iniquity,

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I never knew you, is kind of what the chaff's going to hear at the end of time. So that means that he's actively working in the world, and I think we get this notion too later on in Matthew, out of Christ's mouth, when he's quoting

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Isaiah 42, and he modifies it. That's the interesting thing. The actual passage in Isaiah 42 says that he will lead justice to truth.

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The Messiah will lead justice to truth. Notice the little twist that Christ gives it in Matthew 12, 20, it says, he shall lead justice to victory.

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Ah, Nikos and victory. So now we have something very interesting, that Christ is leading justice to victory. He doesn't lead it to disaster or failure or anything like that.

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Justice will, in fact, be victorious over the world, and the rest of the passage explains the process.

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The islands are waiting for his law, and he shall not fail nor be discouraged until he has set justice in the earth, and he will lead justice to victory.

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So these are victorious tones that are given in the New Testament, and they reflect the

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Old. I know we like to say, let's focus on the New Testament, but since the New Testament tends to talk about the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, we always end up getting tied back to the source material, if you will, because as Paul says, all those things spoke of him, of Christ, and Jesus made the same comment, and all those passages in the

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Old Testament that you say, well, give me some New Testament, the Old Testament, we want to skip that. Well, that part justifies the Christ too, so this kind of snobbery about where the scripture came from,

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I think, is not constructive or edifying. You should know the whole scripture, the whole counsel of God, and we talked about this last time.

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So what you've done, just right there, in those two passages, I mean, we could push pause now and be finished with it, but we're not going to do that, because I would miss out on all the good things you're going to say.

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But what you've done is you've said, by the mouth of John the Baptist, he could have said anything he wanted to say.

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He could have used any characterization of who Jesus is and what his kingdom is going to be like, and that's the one he chose, and then

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Jesus himself affirms it. So you have, by the mouth of Christ, and by John who's testifying of Christ, this is what my kingdom is going to be like, why do we still doubt it?

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Well, we stagger at the promises. This is plainly what we read in Romans 4, 13 or so.

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Abraham did not stagger at the promises, did not consider the circumstances, they were not as important to him as what

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God's word said. So even if everyone in the world told him he was an idiot for believing that his 90 -year -old wife was going to have a baby, he was right to believe it, because God said so.

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And so, yeah, the promises of God are yea and amen in Christ, and we tend to be nah and maybe in church.

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So this failure of nerve is interesting, because what we're basically doing is walking by sight.

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I think we touched on this last time, we need to walk by faith, not by sight, and we should not consider the circumstances when it comes to what

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God can or cannot achieve. After all, we're told with man certain things are impossible, and I would agree.

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If there's only man in the picture, then the idea of a post -millennial triumph of the gospel is impossible. But that's not the situation at all.

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God's in the picture, and God's driving the bus, and we're kind of riding along for the ride basically, and clicking tickets as we go.

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So we need to see this, and by the way, John the Baptist was not finished with his testimony, in Matthew he might have been, but in John, the

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Gospel of John, he has also spoken to this. He points out Jesus and says, Behold, the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the whole world.

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And I think this is a very powerful passage. Warfield did a sermon on it, I believe it was delivered in Princeton, at the chapel there, at the seminary, and he basically pulls no punches in this sense of what

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John actually means in its fullness. He says he literally is going to take away the sin of the world. It's a process that is part of the chaff -blowing process that the

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Winter Winged Fan is doing. Now, if you're going to take away the sin of the world, the first thing you need to do is take away the sin of unbelief, obviously, because you can't just have people being compelled to bow the knee unwillingly.

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God doesn't accept praise. Jesus wouldn't accept any acknowledgement from the demons. He says, He will not speak of me, or declare me to be the

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Messiah, because unclean lips, they were hypocrites and liars, and so Christ had no part to play.

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And they believe in Him, and even shudder. And shudder. But there's not a, Christ receives nothing from them that He would want.

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But what He does want is His people to sing His praises. He wants His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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And so these things are very real. So when we talk about a prayer life, does it really match up with the third petition in Matthew 6?

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At verse 10, most people do not pray it in faith. They do not honestly believe that the world will be as described, that God's will will be done on earth the same way it is done in heaven.

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As we pointed out last time, there's a verse in the Psalms, Psalm 103, if you remember, where it says that the angels are in heaven, flaming messengers that are doing

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His will continually, following the voice of His commands.

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So that's what it's like, and that's what it's supposed to be like here. And so we're supposed to actually be praying for God's will to be done on earth.

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Well, the first issue is, you know, no one but a saved person can actually keep the law, because if you don't love the

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Lord God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, then the rest is irrelevant. Right? You're a fraud. You're a hypocrite.

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And you're doomed, among other things. So even to entertain the idea of a world sometime in the future where God's will is being done, being done very, very well, entails a saved world to start with.

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And only then could the saved people ever be sanctified at that level. So... Right, and it's not a saved world like we have today, where easy believism and cheap grace abounds.

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You take some of the most ardent Christians that you've ever met, who just exude the joy of the Lord, and that's the kind of person you're talking about will be multiplied across the face of the earth.

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Right. And Warfield points out that when John declares, if he points into the distance, that Jesus walking away, behold the

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Lamb of God who taketh, that is interesting, is taking away the sin of the whole world.

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It's the entirety of the sin that's going to be taken away. It's a process, as Warfield points out, because of the way the verb is structured, but it's going to be completed.

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So we are actually seeing and are living in those early era during which this is happening. It's depicted in different pictures in the

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Old Testament, but here we have in the New Testament where the Baptist twice has said he's going to thoroughly purge the threshing floor and he's taking away the sin of the world.

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And that's a rather astonishing thing. That makes it possible, of course, for us to pray in faith that thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, because otherwise we would say, well, his will be done partially on earth, not like it's done in heaven where it's done completely and totally in heaven.

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So what's the problem? Well, the problem is we're not going to get to the finish line because we have drawn an arbitrary claim.

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And I think that might be fun to investigate that claim a little bit, right? For the

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Calvinists out there, and probably most of your audience is inclined in that direction, they might find it interesting to note that Augustine, whose question was posed to him, is it possible for a human being to lead a sin -free life?

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And he had to think about this, and the answer is a fascinating one, because he said, well, the answer has to be yes, because if I say no, then that would mean that I've just declared that there's something impossible for God to pull off.

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He says, so since nothing is impossible for God, the answer must be yes, but there are no examples of it. So he had to say, yes, but it's unexampled.

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So we have to say the same thing. It's a possibility with God, but not with man.

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And therefore, it is open question whether God can do it, and if he declares he's going to do something unusual like that, that's up to him.

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It's not for us to say, well, is the Lord's hand waxed short, as the psalmist said, as other people have said.

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No, God's arm is not weak, and he can do anything that he wants, and even turning aside ungodliness from Jacob is right there in Romans 11.

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It's kind of one of the things he came, is his people need to have this process, and it's a gift to the world that the curse is being reversed and driven back and pushed back.

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And the question is, how far can it be pushed back? Well, they say it's an arbitrary limit, because we have a theology that says, oh, well, everyone's at, you know.

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I agree, total depravity is a perfectly legitimate doctrine. But if you put the doctrine on top of God and say,

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God is constrained by this limitation, uh -oh, we've limited the Holy One of Israel, and we know that's one of the reasons that the people were blown into the desert for 40 years, exactly that problem.

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So you don't limit the Holy God of Israel. You realize our theology, as wise as it is, is to protect us against, guardrails to protect us against certain abuses, because there are people today saying, well,

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I'm living a sin -free life, and we know for an absolute fact that they are liars. The truth is not in them, as 1 John declares.

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You say you sin, not, you're a liar, and the truth's not in you. Whether God can pull this off in the last generation, and in fulfillment of all these interesting promises, that might be a different question entirely.

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But we get this information from the New Testament, right? So we can move along to a passage like in John 12, where—

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Well, real quick, I think about— Yeah, go ahead, question. I think about where it says that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, or it is

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He who is at work in you. So to the degree that He determines to work in you is to the degree that these things will occur.

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And who are we to say—I mean, Micah 4 says that the mouth of the

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Lord has spoken this. Who are we to look at God, who said, I'm going to do these things?

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It is my mouth that is saying them, and say, nah. Well, that's the whole point.

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He that's in you is greater than he that's in the world. So the Holy Spirit's operation is actually—He's omnipotent.

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We mentioned this last time, and the omnipotence of the Holy Spirit seems to be getting short shrift way too often.

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And when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we're obviously talking about a New Testament situation, because the gift began on Pentecost, and it's going to pour out on all flesh.

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This is kind of the blessing that's been predicted from Joel, and it's repeated in the

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New Testament. All those guys who say, I don't want to hear Old Testament, it's in the New Testament too. So read it right there next to you, that the

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Spirit of God will be poured out upon all flesh. Now, that process has not yet been completed.

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It has not yet been poured out on all flesh. And by all flesh, we mean all living flesh. Once you've checked out of the hotel, you're gone, right?

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We said this last time, too many people don't understand the Hebraic and biblical notion that the world is the world you're standing on when you're breathing air.

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If you're not doing those kind of things, and eating and consuming things, you're not in the world anymore. You've departed the world, just like David's son has departed the world, and David's not going to see him anymore, because he's gone, not in this world.

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But in the world, the situation is going to be radically different over time. And so we're going to have this fulfillment where the

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Holy Spirit is going to be ultimately poured out on all flesh. And this is depicted also in Isaiah 4, verse 4, upon all the assemblies in the

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Zion, as we come onto Mount Zion, according to Hebrews 12, shall be of flame by night.

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What used to be a single pillar of fire and smoke guiding Israel, now is divided into millions and millions of flames on every single

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Christian household. And so we have this expansion of the Holy Spirit, spreading like a spreading flame, to use

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F .F. Bruce's book title, The Spreading Flame. And that's the process by which all flesh will ultimately have the

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Spirit poured out upon it. And it's a saving pouring, not just, you know, for the fun of it.

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And oops, I guess it didn't stick. They didn't stay saved. So yeah, we have to understand that this promise is an important one.

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Why would it be something that would also prick people to the heart? Because what is Peter doing after they're very upset to hear that they've killed their own

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Messiah, their own King? He's giving them hope. And the hope is that the Holy Spirit will be poured out on all flesh.

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And here's the promise of it. You're seeing it already with people speaking languages they couldn't possibly know. So this is kind of like the down payment of something very stupendous.

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This is miraculous. And so with this, so you have a qualitative miracle, people speaking in things they can't do.

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And he said, and it's going to be a quantitative miracle. It'll be poured on all flesh. Yeah, for you and your children and for everyone who's far off.

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Far off, far off geographically, but also far off in time into the future. So, and so this notion of the future is your children, children's children, and also the geographic.

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So you have both protention extension of the promise of this pouring out of the Spirit. And I think this is important because Jesus makes the comment when he's leaving, he says it's expedient that I go when the

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Spirit come, that he can convict the world of truth and of sin. There's a job that the Spirit has been given to do.

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He's to sanctify everyone. And that process takes time. You know, he's not going to be poured out on all people at any given point, but every single generation, more and more people have the

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Holy Spirit poured out. And that's a saving touch. It means that they were elect. And therefore, they call, the application is called the

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Spirit occurs in their life, right? And so then what follows is a life devoted to Christ.

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It won't be a perfect life for the vast majority of them, but it's still God's working in burning off the dross.

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He burns off the dross individually in each of us, but also in the large, in national levels, community levels, he's burning off dross.

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Now, since we're early in the process, we're kind of misreading things, which is typical because we walk by sight.

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And that's exactly what the scripture says. Pay attention to Abraham, the father of the faithful. He did not walk by sight because if he did, he would have told his wife to knock it off.

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We're not going there in the bedroom to do any such thing as you imagine. But guess what?

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Isaac was born, he was the child of promise and that defied all expectations. And that's going to be the truth here.

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We're going to have defied expectations when it comes to the promises of God, because we don't want to make them small.

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We want to say, treat them as big as they actually are presented to us. Now, when you say we're early, just I want to clarify, many, in almost my whole life,

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I've heard in eschatology that we're near the end. What you make, maybe I'm saying this wrongly, but I think you would say we're actually probably nearer to the beginning.

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Yeah. I think we touched on it last week when we spoke about Ezekiel 47, the waste part of the wall of the temple.

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Then it became a little stream, you know, toe high, and then a thousand cubits more, it's up to his heels, a thousand cubits farther down.

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Now it's up to his knees. Finally, it's going to be up to his... And so the question is, where are we at? And I said, we're probably in the heel level.

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We have a long way to go. God is in the big picture. In fact, Warfield usually put it this way, he says, far from being the last days church, probably still in the days of the primitive church, which is a very interesting proposition.

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It also changes your outlook and your practical walk. If you're realizing we have generations to go, which means

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I need to be planting seed for my posterity now.

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I should be mindful of my posterity. God certainly is, inheritance is a big deal to him.

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And that's a very interesting point. There's so much in scripture about inheritance. And if we're supposed to be checking out anytime soon, all this inheritance talk is nonsense.

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It's a distraction. But why is it focused on like every third scripture in the Old Testament is about inheritance and our duties with respect to it?

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Because it creates a responsibility for us in terms of our future and our posterity.

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That's how we should be looking at it. We should be saying, well, whatever else is true, I need to be at my post when the Lord calls me home.

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You see, there's two different aspects to an eschatology. There's the theoretical part and there's the practical part.

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If someone is acting in accordance with God's commands, I'm not that concerned about his eschatology because he's acting like a post -millennialist at that point.

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He's acting like he believes in the victory, even if he harbors all sorts of doubts and figures this is all for nothing. But if he's giving his energy in it, if he's, you know, whatsoever his hand finds to do, he does it with all his might and works for the

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Great Commission, regardless of his faith, whether it could happen or not. I'm probably going to be that guy's buddy.

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I'll probably actually go shoulder to shoulder with him and say, let's do this together at that point. Oh, you're starting a Christian school.

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Okay, let's do that together. I've seen many, many people whose eschatology I thought was fairly deficient work against their own interests, theoretically, by their practical steps.

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So we become practically oriented. Now, if you take your eschatology and make an excuse for indolence and inaction and laziness and sloppiness and sitting on your hands and saying there's no point.

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Christ is going to come back any moment now. The eclipse proved it, etc., etc., etc. Then what?

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You eventually have become salt that has lost its savor and therefore is fit to be trodden under foot of men.

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And that's about it. It's ground cover as is the destiny because its purpose to be the salt of the earth is shot.

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It's gone. So we must be mindful that we have a job to do. And it's not our position to sound the five o 'clock whistle on ourselves, right?

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It's Christ who determines when that happens. Now, as you actually look at the theoretical side of things, you might say, well, maybe

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I've been fed a load of goods by some of my pulpiteers out there who have been told telling me, oh, we don't hear we lose this and that and the other.

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And next thing you know, why bother? In fact, Darby made it very clear.

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And why should you work for any project that's distant in time? It shows you don't prove that you don't agree or believe in that Christ is coming any second.

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Because if you did believe it, you would act like it. And you wouldn't do anything other than urgent emergency evangelism 24 -7.

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Because this is the last second before Christ returns. It's your last chance, last gasp to be saved.

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And if I'm not actually actively evangelizing, if I'm trying to build a Christian school, I'm an idiot.

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Because that's not the calling right now. Our calling is to pull brands from the fire. So the whole mission of the church shifts with these different eschatologies.

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But what happens is we're gloriously inconsistent people, Christians. And God uses that inconsistency.

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He says, well, we can certainly use someone who's willing to pitch in and do the work. And that labor will follow them, right?

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Their works will follow them. The labor in the Lord is never in vain. So that work will count toward the expansion of God's kingdom, even if you don't believe it will expand.

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But our point here is to say there is fundamental reasons to believe it will expand. When Christ says, he talks about the defeat of the devil in John 12, verses 31, 32.

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Now is the judgment. Now is the prince of this world being cast out. And I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all men unto myself.

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I believe that that needs to be taken exactly as it's written. There's no reason to evade the force of the words.

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People do it all the time, but it's an irrational thing because now. What do they say? How do they get around it?

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I'm, it's an interesting point. I guess they say all does not mean all. So you say, so what do you say?

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Well, what Christ, what word should Christ have used to mean what you think? Um, I don't know. Well, it turns out that all is a pretty clear word, especially if it's contrasted with something else.

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But the point here is that all who are living will ultimately be pulled to Christ.

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It's that there's a process by which this is happening in every generation. We're having more and more because the Holy Spirit is being poured out.

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All these things are concurrent functions and operations of the son and the spirit and the father electing all these things work together gloriously.

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And, uh, so they're like looking at a diamond from, from different angles and seeing different facets, the way it reflects the light of day into your eyes.

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Um, so, but they're on, they all speak on the same wise. They all talk about a victory of Christ and the different adjuncts and aspects of it.

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And so one of the things that Christ informs us is that he will ultimately draw all men unto himself.

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And that process is not instantaneous. It's seeing the end from the beginning.

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God, of course, is able to do exactly that. We're told that he sees the end from the beginning. People do not.

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We were informed in Ecclesiastes 3, 10 and 11. It's a very interesting verse. He says that man cannot see the work of God from beginning to end.

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And therefore he's exercised in it because he's unable to grasp the work of God.

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And therefore it vexes man because man is finite and it cannot fit that into his head, if you will.

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So this vexation requires faith at that point because he's infinite.

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We're finite. And therefore we are not able to reach one end of God's work to the other. And for us to attempt to do it is simply going to create vexation because now we are kind of walking into the

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Deuteronomy 29, 29 trap. The secret things belong to the Most High God. So we're not allowed to penetrate into those areas and attempting to do it is a vexation of us.

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So we should be basically speaking what God says, right?

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To the law and the testimony they do not speak according to these is because there is no light in them. So if I say a quote of Scripture, unless you can show that all those words need to be completely revamped and re -engineered and rejiggered, as they say, to mean something completely different than prima facie, then we should accept it.

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And if we refuse to accept it, that's a problem already. Right. Go ahead. What I've heard is the ones who say he will draw all men to himself, what

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I've heard of the folks say is he will draw all kinds of people to himself, which is not in the text, but I think it's a really slick way of sort of inserting that it's not going to be all people.

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It's just going to be all kinds of people. There's going to be one person from this country, a couple people from that tribe and tongue, and maybe some from that nation.

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That's eisegesis. Yeah. It's the theory getting in the way. There's a word for it.

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Mott Smith used this word or term, massive theological override of the text. It's where my theology dictates that, oh, here's a text that contradicts me.

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What do I need to do to bend it to the theology, as opposed to bending theology to match the text?

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So this is what gets Warfield in trouble. And my people chose to ignore him as a protagonist, because you can't win if he's arguing from the text.

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They ignore him, which is not really going to be effective if people are bringing up those arguments from scripture on his behalf, since he's not alive to a century now.

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It's time for us to say, okay, that was the high watermark of biblically taking the word of God exactly as it stands written.

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And that would be this passage here. And by the way, that argument, all kinds of people, I don't think it works with Romans 11 all that well.

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We have a very, very different, and here we're in the New Testament again, right? And by the way, since we're talking about Romans, I want you to notice something interesting.

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There's a phenomenon in it what I call the Roman bookends, and other people have noticed it too,

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Rush Tooney and other scholars, that there's an interesting phrase proclaiming the gospel to the nations for the obedience of faith.

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And it occurs in the first and the 16th chapter. He begins with his idea and he ends with the idea of proclaiming obedience to the faith to all nations.

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So this is kind of like the package deal. All nations are to obey the faith. And there is no, what

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I would use, provisos or conditions or exceptions to the rule. That's the calling.

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And so everything in the book is geared to this notion. That's why Abraham is determined in Romans 4 that Christ is a savior of the world, right?

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And that's kind of what he's supposed to be. And so he's not the savior of the world, but he only saves a piece of it. What needs to happen is that by the end of the time that we actually have a saved world.

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And there's plenty of evidence that this is what we're doing. We're going from darkness to dawn to the fullness of the day.

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And that's why Christ is called the bright and morning star. Peter alludes to this in one of his epistles.

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And it's taken from an imagery from Malachi and other passages. Again, every time we look at a

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New Testament passage, they say, this is authoritative because Christ had already fulfilled this passage in the

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Old Testament. But there it sits. Here we have this passage in Romans 11, and it says that darkness has happened to Israel in part.

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So now we have this issue of partial blindness on Israel, that is those who descended from Abraham according to the flesh.

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Genetic Israel is probably the best way to put it, not national Israel, because it has nothing to do with political boundary lines at all.

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It has to do with descent from Abraham. But the promises are not ruined because he says, this is so that all the

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Gentiles may come in, not all kinds of Gentiles, because that's what we only have one kind of Gentile, which is a non -Jew.

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So they're all in a category. And I'm going to explain this a little further in a moment. But he says, and then when all the

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Gentiles have come in, then all Israel shall be saved. So we have a contrast between part of Israel blinded and all

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Israel being saved. So you have a contrast between part and all. And that's where the contrast is absorbed.

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It is not adopted between all kinds or something like that, because we've already got this notion. And so the passage actually predicts a completely saved world in a process.

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It says you're getting partial salvation of Israel. And finally, complete salvation of all non -Jews.

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And then once that happens, all of Israel, the blindness is lifted, and all of Israel is saved at that point in time, importing nothing less than a saved world.

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By all Israel, you mean all of the genetic Jews and all of the non -genetic Gentiles.

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Everyone comes in at the end. Right. But the word Israel is actually limited to Israel after the flesh, because Paul would not shift the meaning of the word

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Israel so radically in only a span of a verse or two. That is a bad writing.

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And Paul cannot be accused of bad writing. In fact, he's a kind of a logician extraordinaire when you think about it.

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He was the right man for the mission of taking the message to the Gentiles and basically pushing

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Greek language to its breaking point to convey things that are important for us to know. The secret deposit, as was given to Timothy.

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We have it in this passage. Now, here's a funny thing about Romans 11. And so what's the question then is, what happens once Israel comes in?

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Well, in the 11th verse, it says, if they're casting away, brought life to the

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Gentiles, what would they're bringing back in be but life out of the dead, right? Necros.

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So we have this point of once the Jews have come in, then you have all saved

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Gentiles, all saved Jews, then death itself is destroyed. Then we have life out of death.

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That's the thing that happens. So basically, until the last Jew is saved, there's no way that the last enemy, death can be destroyed.

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But once the last Jew comes in, you have a world full of saved Gentiles are all saved, Jews are all saved.

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And then we have the destruction of death, which is the last enemy. And Augustine and others have taught exactly this out of Romans 11, 15.

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It says that bringing back into the Judaism of the genetic Abraham's children after the

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Gentiles have come in is what triggers the general resurrection out of the dead.

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So that means that these things are all on a, if you will, a time schedule. And I want to say that Romans 11 is actually a riff, if I will, on something that happens in Isaiah 19.

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Isaiah 19 verses 18 and following talks about the conversion of Egypt. In Egypt, if you will recall the time of Isaiah, Isaiah lived in an era where Israel had had two mortal enemies that tried to destroy it,

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Egypt and Assyria. And so Babylon and the other guys hadn't shown up yet.

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No Macedonia, no Alexander the Great, no Rome, and no Middle Persias. So that hadn't yet happened.

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But what he did know is Egypt is bad news and Assyria is bad news. And these are the bad guys. And these are lethal enemies because they did everything they could to exterminate us.

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So what is happening here all of a sudden in Isaiah 19? He says God actually converts them.

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He saves them. In fact, five out of six cities in Egypt will speak the tongue of Canaan, the lip of Canaan.

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In other words, they speak Hebrew and they swear oaths to God and perform it. And so they talk about the total conversion of these nations.

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And then it says Assyria also is saved at that point. And they will be part of God's blessed people listed before Israel.

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So Israel ends up being mentioned last in the list of God's saved nations in Isaiah 19.

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He says, blessed Egypt and Assyria, my hands in Israel, my inheritance. So all these things are listed and Israel is the caboose of history.

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So what Paul is doing in Romans 11 is he's doing the exact same thing. He says Gentiles come in first, the Egyptians and the

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Assyrians, the enemies of God come in first, which are the goyim, right? They've been looked on and deprecated by the

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Jewish nation because they thought they had privileges. But God brings them in first, just like Isaiah 19 says.

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So everything happening in Isaiah 19 is actually happening also in Romans 11. And it expands to all the other nations because we get this information from Psalm 87.

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Where in Zion, we're told, look who's born in Zion, Egypt, which is Rahab and Philistia, the

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Philistines and Babylon. All these nations that you would think would be the last people that would adopt

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God's covenant. God says that each and every man is, and this is in the verse there. The verse there in Psalm 87 says, each and every man shall be born in Zion.

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So this is not just a matter of some people being born in Zion, being saved, but rather that the time is coming when each and every person in the world will have been born in Zion.

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So that's the blessing of, that's why amazing things are spoken, marvelous things are spoken of those Zion Psalms 87 tells us.

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And it dovetails with Isaiah 19, brings us back into Romans 11. The promise that the

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Gentiles shall all come in and then all Israel shall be saved because God is in the business of turning aside ungodliness from Jacob.

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So the promises to Abraham and his spirit, or his tears of the flesh are kept.

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But also the promises that what? All the families of the earth shall be blessed in thee, right? Starting as early as Abraham 12 .3.

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And this promise just floats through the entire New Testament as well. So here we have a passage in Romans that clearly speaks of the conversion of the world.

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Now, people always want to try to mess with it and say, oh, this is the mode of conversion or Israel doesn't mean really

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Israel, which is again, doing damage to the text. I like the way the 19th century scholar, someone just threw balloons at me.

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So interesting format here. Meyer, H.

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A. W. Meyer, he said of the reformers, we're trying to explain away

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Romans 11 and evade the force of it. He says, these particular interpretations, he says, are rationalizing.

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He says, and offering ways to evade the text. He says, against which the clear and simple words do not cease to offer resistance.

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In other words, there's no way to bend Romans 11 to any other meaning than the literal meaning.

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And that's why Roman Warfield took it that way. He says, if we're going to be faithful to the text, then we're going to have to be regarded as idiots for believing this because this is what it says.

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So you have a choice. You can either say, let me, part of the offense of the gospel is the extent of the gospel because people are willing to believe in the gospel where a few people get saved, but they're not willing to believe in the gospel that might portend that a

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Greek commission actually succeeds. Because guess what happens when it does succeed? The new covenant tells us, right?

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No man shall need to tell his neighbor saying, Lord, Lord, for all shall know the Lord from least to the greatest. And this notion is repeated in the

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New Testament in Hebrews. So it's not as if it's only an Old Testament doctrine, but there it is in Hebrews again.

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So the New Testament also testifies that the new covenant is distinctive in that it puts the law of God in the heart and the mind and that no man needs to teach his neighbor saying,

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Lord, Lord, which means the great commission runs out of bait. There's nothing else to do.

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It's gotta be an instant period. Do you know anybody who's unsaved? No, I don't know anyone who's unsaved. Maybe you're unsaved. No, I'm unsaved.

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Yeah. It's also Ezekiel 37 talks about this as well, that God will bring

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Israel, which at this point in Ezekiel's prophecy has been totally decimated by Assyria, intermarried in the various people groups, lost genetically, 10 lost tribes.

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But God says that He's gonna bring Israel back to Judah, and He's gonna put one shepherd over them who's the righteous branch of David.

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All of that, I think, appeals to what you're saying, that the Gentiles will come in, then

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God will bring in the Jews, and then there will be one people under one shepherd forever.

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Right. And John 10 appeals to this passage about the one shepherd, one door, one faith, one baptism, again, from Ephesians.

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So there's a unity that happens where all mankind sees eye to eye.

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Now, this is far off in the future. You can argue how far. Some people think it's a few centuries, maybe.

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I'm inclined to think in terms of the long term. I think God has a lot of other things going on here that are going to be necessary to happen before we see the curse being pushed back.

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But that the curse will be pushed back, I think, is distinctive, because Christ came to destroy the works of the devil.

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Right there, it's in 1 John 3, 8. So again, I believe that that's the mission, and we're to be part of that process of taking every thought captive to the beings of Christ and being part of the destruction of evil, starting with ourselves.

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See, it's very easy to say, oh, the mission is to destroy evil. I'll go hunt it down. Well, look in the mirror first. In fact, spend your first few years, maybe look in the mirror so that you don't have that beam -in -the -eye problem when you're looking for people's specks.

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So a little bit of circumspect humility goes a long way, because God cannot use the arrogant and the proud.

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They've already given themselves their own reward, right? That's a wonderful place to go down this rabbit trail, or not rabbit trail, it's wonderful.

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But this is a good place to shift a little bit, because most people don't think about salvation as the destruction of wicked.

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Most people think about salvation as the giving of salvation, eternal life, all these things.

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But really, a more biblical view is that salvation is a combination of both rescuing

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God's elect and also destroying God's enemies, because it's a two -part work.

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If you just rescue God's people and you don't destroy the wickedness, then you haven't really truly brought redemption to all things.

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So I love that you say it starts with us. Salvation is God destroying the evil in us.

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And yet so many passages in the New Testament that are really confused as being future -oriented, dispensational, pre -millennial, millennial kingdom stuff, are about God beginning that work in the first century and destroying his enemies.

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You think about the Olivet Discourse, which I've talked about in other places, even the lead up of that,

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Matthew 21, 22, 23, all of those passages. So maybe let's jump into how the

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New Testament continues this vision, not just of victory for the elect and for his church, but also putting away all those who oppose him, like Psalm 2 says.

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Yeah, well, let me just put it this way. There's a metaphor, and we already touched on it, right, that he's baptizing the world with the

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Holy Spirit and with fire. The Holy Spirit part is a nice part that we like to talk about. Oh yeah, the salvation. But what about this fire part?

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The fire also has a destructive aspect for the unregenerate. So the scriptures are rife with this notion that we are actually living in a world that's aflame.

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God's fire, his active righteousness, his justice is happening all the time.

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It is active. Paul puts it this way, and I could say this is the didactic way, the doctrinal way to put it in Romans 118, that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men.

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So you see, let's pay attention to all these parts. The wrath of God is, not will be, doesn't say it will be revealed, is being revealed from heaven itself.

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So it's pouring out from heaven continually. There's a continual pouring of God's wrath onto the earth now against all unrighteousness, not some or selective, but all unrighteousness.

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God's wrath is being poured out continually. And it's in the picture, it's always characterized as a fire.

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And it's the baptism of fire that John the Baptist alluded to. It's the stream of fire coming down from the throne onto the earth in Daniel 7, in Revelation 15, two, before the throne of God, you see the sea of glass mingled with fire, which is the judgments of God, the wrath of God being reflected.

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I think last time when we spoke, we alluded to passage in 2 Chronicles 34, which is great as the wrath of the

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Lord that is poured out upon us. And the literal Hebrew is great as the glowing fire of the

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Lord that's poured out upon us. Wrath and fire are coordinates, they're correlates. They're the exact, the one is the symbolic form of the other doctrinal thing.

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So the scripture is always depicting fire being poured out on, I think. So passage like Revelation 27 to nine, which talks about fire from heaven coming down and burning up.

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That's not a last times thing. This has been going on for centuries that the fire of God has been being poured out and is destroying the wicked.

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Eventually you will not be able to find the wicked. Psalm 37 is very interesting at this point. He says, I looked diligently for the wicked guy and couldn't find him anymore.

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Because the promise of Psalm 37 is that meek shall inherit the earth, meaning we get it all and there's nobody making any claim to any other thing.

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That's why he said, I cannot find the guy, that the enemy is gone. So the Psalmist David there is seeing prophetically what's going to be like at the time that the fire has functioned and fully purged all the dross out of the world.

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So the fire is pouring down now and we have a choice with respect to it. We can either be on the side of the fire, which is to say it's implement

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God's laws so that we are not suffering as evildoers, as God's law would put it.

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Or we can be part of the problem, in which case that we will be wiped out and bypassed for a generation that will honor

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God. If we won't, someone else will. So that's just like Esther was told, if you don't do it, salvation will come from some other quarter because God's not going to leave this thing onto its own resources.

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So we have a choice to act or not act on behalf of it. Now, everything we must do must be in accordance with God's righteousness too, right?

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That all things be done into righteousness. If Jesus can condescend to be baptized the way he's the last person in the world who needed it, then we certainly can condescend to do a lot of things that God calls us to do too.

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So I think it's very important to realize that there's an image of fire being poured out on all the earth and we can always choose whether we want to be surviving with that fire or not.

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There's a fascinating passage in the, I'm going to pull it if you don't mind me grabbing it, it's in Isaiah 33, which talks about the fire that everybody is witnessing and Isaiah sees it clearer than anybody.

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Everyone else thinks it's just a metaphor, but it's not, it's very real to Isaiah. And the sinners in Sinai are afraid, fearful of it, have surprised the hypocrites.

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Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burning? See, they're seeing the fire and it's more than just a metaphor to them.

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They realize, yeah, the fire can kill the Assyrians on the other side of the wall, but can also kill us. So one of the scholars said, every

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Israeli realizes there's something burnable in himself that God's fire could attack legitimately and rightly, right?

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So then the question is, who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?

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And there's an answer, the very next verse. He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly, he that despises the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil, he shall dwell on high.

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His place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks. Bread shall be given him, his water shall be sure.

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He shall see the king in his beauty. So you can navigate through a world full of fire, but you have to be following God's law to do it.

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Otherwise, the fire is really hot and it hurts, and you're gonna get stung by it because you will always reap what you sow.

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And so if you sow righteousness and a goodly, godly seed, then you will be like the man who can dwell with the devouring fire, as Isaiah 33 alerts us to, right?

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So the promise is already laid out. There's this passage in Corinthians that also says something similar.

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It says that there will be those who present to the Lord wood, hay, and stubble, and it'll be burned up. But there will be those who present to him gold and fine metals, and it will be purified, and they will give it over to him.

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So it's not for the Christian who has a life of wood, hay, and stubble. They still are a Christian, and they still are saved, according to this verse, but they have nothing to show for it, which is a great shame and a dishonor.

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That certainly is the most popular interpretation of the 1 Corinthians 3 passage. There's an alternative view, which is very interesting, which is to say, this is referring to leaders and pastors, and that the thing that's being presented is their own flocks, and in their flocks, they have accepted stubble and weeds and things instead of gold and silver.

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In other words, they were not paying attention and lowering the bar, and well, as long as it brings a lot of tithe money, that's all

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I care about. And then God tests the work, right? And the fire consumes those who were not.

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So it's not so much works, per se, but the actual individuals that are consumed by the fire or purified by it.

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No pastor's gonna have to worry about that verse. Oh, I think they do. Yeah, you know. Now, the sad thing is is that you get in trouble for mentioning who put this into print, but it wasn't original with Dabney.

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Dabney is the one who said it, and there's folks who'll say, well, Dabney said it. I'm not gonna buy anything he had to say because it was

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Dabney, and I have problems with his racial views, and I have the same problems, but it wasn't original with him.

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He quotes the natural guy who came up with the exposition, and it's a very interesting exposition of the passage.

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So even if you don't like Dabney, you don't have to accept, you don't have to reject it because it wasn't Dabney's idea, but it actually carries through contextually better than the idea that these are our works being consumed.

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It's actually human beings that constitute the gold, the silver, the hay, and the stubble. And this actually comports better with the ideas of the chaff being burned, right, and quenchable fire and things like this.

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So yeah, the works on earth would be burned up, true, for 2 Peter 3, but also this notion could be equally there.

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So it's interesting when you dig in and realize sometimes the most popular views that everyone thinks are right may actually have a problem.

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There might be a better interpretation, but it's something that we might not like to hear because now it impinges on us, and we might say, what we're sure the pastor needs to do is to inform his hay and stubble guys we need to shape up, right?

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And that might... It's like Jonathan Edwards learned. He had been preaching what everyone wanted to hear for a long time and had a huge church.

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He decided that was a bad idea because God wasn't going to honor it. So he said, well, maybe I will choose to actually preach what they need to hear, the whole counsel of God.

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And that flock dwindled really quick. In a few Sundays, it was down like a fraction, 10 % of the size of the church he started with because he was telling them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear.

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But he actually was able to grow up a much bigger, stronger church as a result. But he was a little bit worried at first because he put it all on God saying, you know,

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I don't want to present hay and stubble to the Lord in my congregation. I want to present them all purified sons of Levi, so to speak, with all the dross gone.

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And he did. Edwards, of course, was one of the great post -millennial thinkers who believed in the victory of Christ.

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So I think that helped him when he made that decision. Let's preach the whole counsel of God, regardless of what the itching ears demand.

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Right. And he took the steps necessary. He took the hit to be faithful. Right. Jesus said the same thing.

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The things that he says are hard to understand. He lost most of his flock and he turned to his own disciples.

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Are you going to leave me too? Because, you know, everybody said, well, you got the words of life. No, we're not going to leave you.

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So finally, there was some insight. But a large group of people, they said, who can bear it?

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Who can hear it? They weren't interested in what Christ had to say. And today is the same. A lot of Christians really aren't so much interested in what

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Christ had to say, they're interested in what they have to say about themselves. And I have to say that the era of the selfish Christian is going to be an ugly stain on church history.

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We have plenty of such stains now, and I don't think we've finished standing our bed yet. But when we start with what?

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The pure word. And when we start with it and we handle it honestly, right?

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Not a workman ashamed, but a workman approved. I think this means we have to endure sound doctrine.

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We have to come up with scriptures and grapple with them and not try to explain them away, but to be serious and say, hey, even

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Rushdeny, when he was interviewed on television by Bill Moyers, he was questioned about some laws of God. And he says, well, some of God's law rubs me the wrong way, but God requires it.

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So it's like that. We have to look at it that way. We may not like it, but it's the God we serve and it's his orders, not my orders that matter.

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We can't rewrite our mission statement. I think too many Christians rewrite the mission statement.

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The mission statement is the one in the great commission, right? So we're talking about the New Testament. We always had to land there, right? We're to just make disciples of all nations.

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And it's not just all kinds of nations or all certain people out of the nations, but all nations are to be disciples.

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And I've seen attempts to tamper with this meaning. There's actual doctrinal dissertations at Dallas that attempt this, but they're egregiously wrong and they are misleading the flock.

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And it justifies indolence and laziness and slothfulness. It's fascinating because it's such a clear passage.

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Disciple the nations by baptizing them. So we must baptize the nations.

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And how do you, what's the second part of that work? By teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded.

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So if we're not teaching the nations how to obey Christ, we're disobeying the great commission.

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It's really that simple. And God even, or Jesus even says, I'll be with you always. I'm with you as you do that work.

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So do it, you know. You know, the promise corresponds to the task. We need to have him in it because it's a massive task.

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He's just talking to just, you know, so many hundred people there at the occasion. And they're saying that's a tall order.

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He says, yeah, you have no idea. But I'm going to equip you. The Holy Spirit is capable of seeing this through, right?

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You will be poured out on all flesh. Don't doubt these things. Doubting not is the key.

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So doubt is the enemy of victory. And it's also the enemy's only weapon to use against us.

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Yeah. Did God really say? Yeah. If we were convinced of the victory of God, then we would be unstoppable in the sense that we say, death won't even stop me from fulfilling this because God is in this work.

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But if we're fearful, then one can put a thousand of us to flight.

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And that's what happens nowadays, right? If we're not anchored in the word of God really well, regardless of our view on eschatology, if we are not aware of our duties and our obligations and our responsibilities as parents, as Christians, as someone who's saved, you know, the question, what's the purpose of salvation?

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Well, you were just born again. You have a new life to lead and you need to grow up in it. You need to stop drinking the milk ultimately and be in the meat.

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Right? You cannot stay forever perpetually in the kindergarten. Cannot drink milk forever.

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And so life is a growth process. So when you're born again, I like the way

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Dr. Reshton puts it. He says, you know, you don't learn the alphabet so you can get a PhD in alphabet studies.

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Rather, you learn the alphabet so you can form words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books and things on this order.

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You actually build something out of the alphabet. It's a tool. But you don't just magnify the tool as the end of the game.

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It's not. It's the beginning. So he says for too many Christians, the salvation experience is the end of the game versus the start of a new life of service because the previous life had been squandered and not used for God's service.

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There's a fascinating passage about the Holy Spirit in James. Most people don't realize it's there, but it's astonishing. Where James says, you know, know ye not that the scripture speaketh in vain, that the

56:30

Holy Spirit lusteth in vain? Let's take a look at it. I think it's in James 4, 5.

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And it's kind of a stunning. It's the, how is it that the Holy Spirit is lusting? It's not a fascinating choice of words.

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And it means that the hope, that the love and that we owe

56:52

God. There it is. Do you think that the scripture sayeth in vain, the spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?

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Why does the Holy Spirit envy? He envies all the things that we set our heart on that we love instead of him.

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And he looks on, and he's inside our heart. He looks and sees us loving these things and these idols and those items and actions and activities and people.

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And instead of loving God and Christ and the Holy Spirit. And so he's lusteth, he's urged to envy is the strongest possible word because he has to deal firsthand up close with our lovelessness.

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With our betraying the Holy Spirit by the things that we set our hearts upon.

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So he points it out. He says the Holy Spirit is there. He has to do the dirty work inside us. So it's all the more astonishing that he's been sent to convict the world of sin and unrighteousness and to convert the world.

57:48

That's the entire mission of the Holy Spirit is given. It's like the spirit of God driving on.

57:57

It's in the passage in Isaiah 59, 19, I believe it is. It's badly translated in almost all the

58:03

English versions. I think Warfield and a few others have actually done justice to the passage. But it talks about the victory of the

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Holy Spirit driving the, he says before the kingdom of God was like a straightened stream.

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But then when it's released, it's like it surges across the entire globe to fill the world with the spirit of God driving it like a hurricane forward over the world.

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And that's what we're living in the time period during which the Holy Spirit is doing this. But he also has a very personal task in each of our lives.

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And to the extent that we squander the love that's due to him on other things that don't deserve it, he lusted to envy in our hearts.

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So there's a very strong dynamic going on in here internally that we should be mindful of.

58:49

If theology does not make us think back on our own activity, then we're missing the boat.

58:55

We're making it too palatable. We're making it too high and theoretical. But it's not. It always comes back upon us.

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Whatever theology articulates the truth, it gives us responsibilities. And like you said, the responsibility is laid out in the

59:07

Great Commission. We have a job to do. And it's a distinctive job. And it's one that we are equipped to do.

59:14

And to say the Holy Spirit is not capable of doing this is a mistake. I think Spurgeon's one of the greatest things he ever said is that the

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Holy Spirit would not suffer the imprecation to rest upon his holy name that he was incapable of saving the world.

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He would not allow that to ever be said of him. So he came to get the world saved. He's the active agent being poured out upon all flesh.

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And over time, we'll see that ultimately all flesh will have the Holy Spirit poured out upon him. Now, what do you say?

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I don't know what that is. It's a thumbs up floated in front of my face there. Yeah. But what do you say, brother, to say, like, let's go to Matthew 24.

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Matthew 24, you'll have someone say, well, Jesus said that at the end of time, there's going to be false prophets.

59:56

There's going to be famines. There's going to be wars and rumors of wars. There's going to be tribulations, great tribulations.

01:00:02

There's going to be all of these things. And then the end will come. So it's it's, you know, the future is not bright.

01:00:10

The future is not hopeful. The future is not Jesus having victory over the nations. No, they end in defeat.

01:00:15

Like, what would you say to a person who is reading Matthew 24 in that way? I'm sure it sounds like they forgot what they read in Matthew 16 before they got there.

01:00:25

Which is that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. So the building process of the church ultimately goes against the gates of hell.

01:00:34

Now, a lot of interpretations of what the gates of hell are. I think it's correct to say that they're defensive weapons from one point of view.

01:00:42

But you know something else? There's a biblical doctrine of gates. You can see it in Psalm 24 and other places.

01:00:48

The gates are the entry point, the entry point of hell. It's the mouth of hell. What happens with the mouth of hell?

01:00:54

That's the place where the big wide path ends up, right? The wide path that ends in destruction.

01:00:59

So it's got this gaping, big mouth of hell. The gates of hell are there. It's the entry point of hell. At the time that parable was spoken in Matthew 7, most of the people were on the wide path of destruction and very few are finding the narrow path, right?

01:01:16

So what happens? That's the hell's food supply. All these people on the wide path and the gates of hell are prevailing because they're consuming every soul that dies in its sins.

01:01:25

Boom, boom, boom. But what the promise is, as the church continues to grow, is that the gates of hell will not prevail. In other words,

01:01:31

God's going to cut off hell's food supply over time. Fewer and fewer after generation and generation will actually end up unregenerate and walking into hell until finally the wide empty road is empty.

01:01:42

At the end of history, before Christ comes back and death is destroyed, it's an empty road. The gates of hell did not prevail against the church.

01:01:48

The church defeated the gates of hell because no one's entering hell anymore except those who've gone before in the past.

01:01:53

Well, that's one verse that people use against your view and my view is that, no, no, no, no.

01:01:59

Narrow is the way that leads to life and broad is the path to destruction. Would you say that's a first century reality that will be reversed over time as we continue?

01:02:07

Yeah, because he says, few are they now that find it. It's all in the present tense there. But the fact that they're going to reverse the passages and the destinies is already laid out in Psalm 87.

01:02:18

We just talked about it. We saw Isaiah 2. All the nations flowing together to honor God and his law will go forth out of Zion and all the nations shall beat their spears into pruning hooks and shall not lift up sword against the nation, neither shall they learn war evermore.

01:02:32

He's the prince of peace for that reason, right? Of the increase of peace in his government, there shall be no end upon the throne of David to establish with justice and righteousness, henceforth, even forever.

01:02:42

The zeal of the Lord, the host will perform it. So again, God's the acting agent here that converts this to put everyone on the narrow.

01:02:48

The thing that drives people from the narrow road is it's difficult to travel, right? The wide road is easy.

01:02:55

So the different, the proportions of the people is due to the nature of the roads. But when God converts hearts, you walk on the narrow road.

01:03:02

So by converting more and more hearts and pouring out more and more spirit, the one road, the narrow road gets busier and busier and the wide road gets to be desolate and it's a piece of ancient history ultimately at the end of time.

01:03:15

So, but going back to Matthew 24, we have to remember that Jesus is asking, answering several questions, three different questions.

01:03:23

It's only the third question that asks about the end of the world, right? Until then, he had just said, see these stones, not one stone will be left upon another.

01:03:30

And the disciples actually pointed out the rocks and said, what are you talking about? Look at these rocks, this massive edifice here that was built by Nehemiah and rebuilt by Herod the

01:03:40

Great, who took away the foundations and built a third temple. So we're already at the third temple, ironically.

01:03:47

And so Jesus says, don't go by what you're seeing and not all these stones are gonna be pulled down because he had just cursed them.

01:03:53

He said, God's gonna take the kingdom away from you and give it to a nation that bears the fruits of their wrath. And so they've already been condemned.

01:04:00

And all the wrath of God from Abel to Zechariah is gonna be poured out on this generation, Matthew 23, what, 45?

01:04:06

So yeah, that stirred up wrath is gonna be poured out upon them. So a lot of what's going on in 23 is happening.

01:04:12

By the way, we should wind back before we get to 24 to 21. There's a parable there of what? The wicked husbandman, right?

01:04:20

And I think that's a fascinating passage in its own right. The thing that triggers the wrath of the owner of the vineyard is not that they killed and all his messengers, right?

01:04:33

The prophets says, when he sent his son, he'll honor my son, he says, but they killed the son and cast him out of the vineyard, saying, we'll get the inheritance.

01:04:41

That's the triggering event that earns Israel destruction. And that's a triggering event in Daniel 9 as well.

01:04:49

That's the cutting off of the Messiah. That is the wing of abomination. The high point of abomination is the murder of the only innocent person who ever walked the earth.

01:04:59

That's the high point. So Matthew 21 tells us how to interpret Daniel 9. But it also tells us moving forward, what

01:05:05

Matthew 24 is primarily about. And Jesus is gonna talk about the dispossession of the husband, wicked husbandmen who are gonna kill the son.

01:05:15

So he spends all of 24 and half of verse chapter 25 on the passage, dealing with the question of what's going to happen and what's your responsibilities,

01:05:26

Christian responsibilities and ethical duties in this time period. And so he's not talking about the future.

01:05:33

He's talking about what's gonna happen to the Jews who said we have no king but Caesar, the ones who killed

01:05:39

Jesus. You're kind of mixing John in there, but yeah. The interesting thing there is that Jesus does finally answer the question about the end of the world.

01:05:46

He does it at Matthew 25, 31. He talks about the white throne and all the nations arrayed in front of him.

01:05:53

And at that point, Matthew 25, 31 aligns with the vision of Revelation 20, 11.

01:06:00

He says, and I saw a white throne and him who sat upon it from whose face or presence the heaven and earth fled away and no place was found for them.

01:06:07

That's the end of the world when the white throne appears and the earth and the heavens flee.

01:06:13

So the white throne appears in Matthew 25, 31. That's the point where he's actually describing what's the end of the world, true world cosmologically is about.

01:06:22

And so he doesn't get to that answer until that point. He never really tells us a lot about what's going on between the two advents except that's described elsewhere in the

01:06:31

Old Testament. And then also in terms of the mission that's been given to them. And that's detailed throughout the

01:06:39

Pauline epistles. And we find it also in John. For example, 1 John 2, 8 is a powerful passage and people miss it all the time.

01:06:47

And Warfield said, look, there's a prophecy embedded in this very short verse which thing is true in him and you because the darkness is passing away and the true light is shining already.

01:06:58

And the King James has it wrong. It says the darkness has passed, but the submittal voice passes imperfect in the Greek paragatai means an actual process of passing away.

01:07:06

John sitting there in Asia Minor in the middle of pagan darkness says the darkness is an actual process of passing away and the true light is shining already.

01:07:15

He also asserts that the true light will broaden into the fullness of day because Christ is the day.

01:07:20

So we have this promise of a transition from darkness into light.

01:07:27

And so how many people would be willing to say the darkness is passing away? I can tell you that the vast majority of prophecy teachers are telling us the darkness is increasing.

01:07:35

I have a choice now. I can choose John 1 John 2 8 who said the darkness is passing away and the true light is shining already.

01:07:42

Or I can choose the people who say the darkness is increasing. I have to go with John. You want to go with prophecy teachers.

01:07:49

I think they're going to be guiding you into a ditch because John's correct. John is right. John is inspired.

01:07:54

They're not, but they are making money on their books and pulling money and tithe money down for their causing hair -raising tales of eschatological catastrophe.

01:08:06

John's not doing this. John is actually being very practical. The darkness is passing away and he's also the one who talks about Antichrist in the same chapter.

01:08:14

So it's the very one who's talking about Antichrist and Antichristic spirit is the same person who says the darkness is passing away.

01:08:20

So he's not saying Antichrist is going to be around forever. In fact, they're a temporary phenomenon and they will also end up in the dunk heap of history because what's distinctive about an

01:08:31

Antichrist is they deny the incarnation. That's the only thing that constitutes it is that lie, that misrepresentation, that deception is the whole matter of the

01:08:39

Antichrist. But he also points out that Christ came to destroy the works of the devil. And one of the works, of course, is fear of death.

01:08:47

We're now in Hebrews 2 .8 territory. Those who, and 14, 2 .14 as well, that those who have been in bondage to the fear of death all their life because of their fear of death,

01:08:58

Christ removes that. So once you're not afraid of death, then you're not afraid of a lot of other things, starting with other Christians.

01:09:04

What question in your theology might say, well, you know, if the word of God says it, I'm going to have to stick with it.

01:09:09

And if they say, well, you're a fool. Well, that's, I'm God's fool then because a lot of people have been

01:09:14

God's fool and been vindicated, right? In holding to that truth. So most of Matthew 24, actually all of Matthew 24 and half of the 25 is really talking about what's going on in the next generation upon the generation, within a 40 year span of time.

01:09:31

They're really predicting the run up to the Vespasianic War and Titus and the attacks on the

01:09:39

Israel. And most of Israel's sufferings were self -inflicted too. Such that when

01:09:45

Titus arrived and the generals arrived, they saw the whole bodies around the walls of Israel already stacked up, you know, 12 feet high or whatever the distance was.

01:09:56

And they said, God bear witness to me. It was this way before I got here. That's what the Romans said. They already killed themselves pretty much.

01:10:03

What's so fascinating about that, brother, is that there's an ignorance. I'm not saying that in a mean way.

01:10:11

There's just an ignorance of history. Most Christians have not even heard of Josephus, much less read the

01:10:19

Jewish War. I've read the Jewish War about four times now, and it is unbelievable.

01:10:25

Like Titus is a man who's pleading with the Jews, stop doing this. I don't really want to destroy you.

01:10:31

I don't want to destroy your beautiful temple. And he sees it as an omen of judgment from God against the

01:10:37

Jews on how they were acting in the city. They're eating trash out of the trash heaps. They're roasting their infants in the fire and eating them.

01:10:46

They're killing each other. You've got faction war that's going on in the city from John of Gera and Simon.

01:10:53

And you've got them killing themselves. It really is a. It is an astounding book and an eyewitness testimony of what

01:11:02

Matthew 24 is talking about. Yeah, it's people would rather grab a newspaper and it exists anymore sometimes, but rather try to use the newspaper versus digging into dusty old history books.

01:11:14

But the fact of the matter is you're going to probably get much closer to the truth with the antiquities of the Jews by Josephus.

01:11:21

It's interesting you mentioned the Romans coming in. God himself, it's a strange work for him, judgment.

01:11:27

It's not something that's actually native to his character. So it's a strange, unusual work on his.

01:11:32

So when he comes around to having to judge Israel and Isaiah, you know, Isaiah 720, he says,

01:11:38

I have to I'm going to hire a razor to cut Israel down because he doesn't have a razor of his own.

01:11:44

He has to hire one. So he hires the Assyrians for the job and they kind of get mouthy with him and arrogant as Isaiah 10 points out.

01:11:51

They think they're not a piece of wood when they are a piece of wood and they boast themselves against the man

01:11:57

God who wields them. But the point there is it's a hired razor and Rome was a hired razor. Again, where God uses the unrighteous nations to judge people who should have known better.

01:12:09

And all these things occurred to them as what examples unto us. So we learn from history from First Corinthians 10.

01:12:16

All those things happen to Israel. These horrible things as a warning to us. And if we don't take warning from it, guess what? We're probably going to repeat the kind of behaviors that will earn us similar wrath and God will bypass us again.

01:12:27

Because he's not limited by us. We're limited by him, but we're not limited. He's not limited by us or our conduct or our faith.

01:12:34

So it's in our best interest to study the Bible well, to apply it, and to another point

01:12:41

I should say, better are five words that are understood than a thousand that aren't. It's a word that I, Paul says this and I think it's important.

01:12:48

When you study the Bible, actually get it. Understand that passage. Five words that are understood better than a thousand that aren't.

01:12:55

So just don't zoom through the Bible with annual readings and not be able to answer questions.

01:13:01

I stood before someone who said I've read the Bible through 15 times and I said, can you tell me about the passage about circumcising fruit trees?

01:13:07

And he says, what, what? During the headlights, like I said, yeah, that's what I thought. And it is in there.

01:13:15

So it proves he didn't read with understanding. And in fact, he was actually violating the law that required him not to eat from the fruit trees for the first three years.

01:13:23

And so you missed the instructions as well as the doctrine in there. So there we go, right?

01:13:29

If you don't understand it, you're not going to apply it. Right. But if you understand it, then it'd be then and only then is it actually hidden in your heart.

01:13:36

Too many people think they're hiding in their heart by reading it now. They're hiding it in their head. The heart, it only hits the heart when it actually possesses the spirit and convicts you of this great commission is not a mediocre commission.

01:13:46

And by God, it's not going to be mediocre on my watch. I'm going to shoot for the nations. William Carey wanted

01:13:52

India, right? And so he got India. And not even hiding it in long term memory.

01:13:59

Like we need to remember that if we're just reading it, letting it wash over, we're really hiding the word in our short term memory that might not even make it to long term storage.

01:14:09

Yeah, I think that's key. It has to be important to you. I always say, don't have it memorized.

01:14:15

Remember what's important. So if the word of God is important to you, I think it'll stick. But if it's simply a superficial scan through, skimming, yeah, you don't skim the

01:14:25

Bible. You don't glean from Exodus. It's books by Pink called Gleanings from Exodus. No, no, no. You read

01:14:31

Exodus and get the meat out of it. You don't glean little chunks out of the corners of Exodus. So this whole attitude and the approach of the word of God is not treating it like treasure that it is.

01:14:40

You know, the proverb says it's in Psalms. It's the word of God is more precious than much fine gold.

01:14:47

We don't treat it that way. We treat it as basically something we take for granted.

01:14:53

And that's even more dangerous. You're taking God, the universe for granted and his word is optional and you're too busy living to worry about it.

01:15:01

Well, you fool this very night. Your life should be required of you. Now what? All your plannings don't make sense anymore because they were couched.

01:15:09

You were living for the wrong purpose. You need to live for something bigger than yourself. The biggest thing in the world or actually out of the world is

01:15:16

God himself and his kingdom. So Matthew 6, 33 counts is our mission, right?

01:15:22

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, its righteousness and all these other things will be added to you.

01:15:28

So it's just, we're not going to lack for anything if we put God's kingdom first. But if people are disputing whether even there's a kingdom around here for us to work with or to extend or to impede, maybe it's probably to do that.

01:15:43

We're going to get somewhere. So yeah, the New Testament, I think is rife with these passages. If we're open to hearing what they have to say, there's eschatology from one end of the

01:15:55

New Testament to the other. But sometimes we are not willing to pay attention to it.

01:16:00

Look at what happened in Samaria. In what, how many days they converted the vast majority of the

01:16:06

Samaritans, but very little fruit was happening in Israel. This is again an indication that there are going to be tremendous successes in beyond genetic

01:16:17

Israel, but Israel will be hardened. And that's the judicial blindness God's inflicting upon Israel, even today.

01:16:25

And it's there so that the Gentiles can be pressing in violently into God's kingdom. And when all the

01:16:30

Gentiles are in, then all Israel shall be saved. And that's New Testament. It's right there in Romans.

01:16:37

And I think we can take that to the bank. By the way, we're talking about the victories. Don't ever forget Romans 8, 19, verse 19 to 21 or so.

01:16:46

It talks about the revealing of the sons of God, right? And the liberation of creation as a result of this.

01:16:54

And this happens over time. Rastouni has done a fascinating exposition of this passage in his commentary.

01:17:02

And it's on, look at it for free online. Chalcedon .edu has all the material for free online.

01:17:08

But take a look at that exposition. It shows historically how it was understood very differently than today.

01:17:14

That there's going to be massive transformations in this world as a result of people doing what they're supposed to be doing.

01:17:21

The law of God actually being applied in this world. And that the creation is subjected to futility, suffering from the curse.

01:17:30

But it is subject to be liberated. And that liberation is a process that gets better and better over time.

01:17:36

And the evidence of that is laid out in Isaiah 11. We talked about that last week, last time we talked.

01:17:43

And that's where Romans 8 comes in. It actually gives us the New Testament analog of Isaiah 11.

01:17:51

The two passages function together. One gives the fulfillment and how that works out with God's people doing his will in this world and how that transforms the world and reverses the curse.

01:18:04

The curse that went all the way back to Genesis 3, inflicted upon us by our fathers and our own predilection to want to seek our own way and be autonomous.

01:18:14

Ultimately, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven versus my will. Human beings are prone to say, no, no, my will be done.

01:18:22

It's my way or the highway. In actual fact, there is a highway in the future. But guess what? It's God's highway.

01:18:27

Isaiah 35a says it's the highway of holiness. And even the wayfaring men, the fools, will not make a mistake walking on it.

01:18:34

It's that clear and clean. And so the future is where everyone walks on the highway of holiness. You talked about the narrow path that leads to life.

01:18:42

It's actually talked about in Isaiah 35a. It's the highway of holiness. It is the straight, narrow way.

01:18:50

But it says everyone can walk on it. Even fools won't make a mistake walking on it. So the narrow way has a huge future and Isaiah 35a predicts it.

01:19:00

That's so good. Just to summarize what we've talked about, and I know that we could talk more.

01:19:06

There's so much more depth. We really didn't get very deep into what the New Testament says about eschatology.

01:19:11

There is a massive amount of verses in the New Testament that are eschatological. And if Christ, if his

01:19:18

Hebrews 1 says that we're living in the last days from the moment that God is now speaking through his son.

01:19:24

So we've been living in the last days for 2000 years. The whole New Testament actually is eschatological in nature.

01:19:30

So there's so much we could cover. But just as a summary, I would say that what we've said is that the

01:19:37

Edenic curse and everything that is involved in that, the fall of man's soul, the fall of man's body, and the failure to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion of the entire world, filling the world with worshipers will be reversed under the true and better Adam, Jesus.

01:19:53

He will make us fruitful. He will multiply us. He will fill the world with his worshipers, and he will reverse the curse so far as the curse is found.

01:20:01

That's what the whole New Testament is saying. Yeah, I would echo Matthew 5 .18.

01:20:07

It says the heaven and earth will pass away. But not one jot or tittle of the law shall pass away until all of them be accomplished.

01:20:18

In other words, the law of God, which was given to be kept, to be obeyed, has been perpetually broken billions of times every moment.

01:20:26

But it's the promise there in Matthew 5 .18, in the literal sense of the words, is that the law will be accomplished.

01:20:33

Every jot and tittle of the law will actually be walked in before the universe can fade away. So it really tells us what the condition is for the world to pass away is the keeping of the law of God.

01:20:44

All the jots and tittles must one day be kept. And that's what you pray for in Matthew 6 .10. Thy will be done on earth as heaven.

01:20:50

All those jots and tittles be kept on earth as they are kept in heaven. And then the heaven and earth can pass away, and the last enemy can be destroyed.

01:20:58

And that's what we're waiting for. But we also are not just waiting, but working actively toward that. You have to pray for it in faith, and you have to work toward it.

01:21:06

And God uses our faithfulness in that mission. That's why they call it the mission of God, right?

01:21:12

As Joe Booth's book title indicates. It's a big plan. It's a great commission for a reason.

01:21:17

It's not a mediocre commission. And we're in that train. We're 21 centuries in.

01:21:22

We have a whole bunch of faithful saints behind us. And isn't it exciting to think that we might have a whole bunch of faithful saints ahead of us that we're the stepping stones for and providing materials for them to be able to excel and to do valiantly for the

01:21:39

Lord. I think about it like this as we draw to a close today. I think about what's our generation going to be known for?

01:21:46

Are we going to be known when all of history is written, whether it's 10 ,000 years from now or 100,

01:21:51

I don't know. But when all of church history is written and that book is compiled, what will our generation be known for?

01:21:58

Will we be known as the generation that refused to believe the promises of God and basically we were passed over?

01:22:06

Or will we be the generation that push the gospel forward like the first apostles did and take it into the nations and stop worrying whether the nations actually find us winsome or not, you know, whether or not that they think that we're reasonable.

01:22:24

Take the gospel to the nation, see the gates of hell fall down. Will we be known for that? Or will we be known for our lack of faith?

01:22:31

Yep, like the Roman bookends proclaiming beings of faith among all nations. That's the mission.

01:22:37

And we should care about our legacy. It's certainly

01:22:43

Abraham did. And at that end, we know that Esau did not, that he despised his birthright.

01:22:51

Let us not be like Esau. You know, that's a good point, brother. I just read that in my

01:22:56

Bible studies a couple of weeks ago about Esau. That's really good. I think we're going to have to do a third one if you're up for it.

01:23:04

I am up for it, but not today. We've talked about the old. I could talk to you anytime, man.

01:23:10

I've so enjoyed this. We talked about the old, we talked about the new. I think next time let's talk about problem passages that on the surface seem like that they work against what we're saying.

01:23:21

I want to hear how you would respond. So until then, God bless you.

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Thank you for being on the show. And God bless everyone who's watching and learning and gleaning from these things.

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May the Lord use this content to bless you and to build his kingdom honor as it is in heaven.

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God bless. Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast.

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I'm so thankful and I'm so blessed that you've been tuning in to watch this content. Martin is an excellent

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Bible scholar. I really hope that you've been blessed by his content. You can check him out at the

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Chalcedon Foundation. You can check out articles and different things that he's been involved in. But no matter what, be a

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Berean. Search the scriptures. Check out and see if what we're saying is true. Learn more about Jesus every single day.

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Become encouraged and enriched in your faith. And until next time, we'll see you again on the podcast.