July 18, 2024 Show with David Reece on “The History of the World from Creation Until Now” (Part 2)

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of Founding Father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

Iron Sharpens Iron and the Call to Mutual Edification

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 18th day of July, 2024.

Before I introduce my guest and our topic today, I just have a very important reminder. All men in ministry leadership, whether you're a pastor, an elder, and by the way, I believe that's the same office, a deacon, a parachurch leader, whatever position of leadership you have in the church, if you're a man, you are invited to the next free, biannual Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon, which will be held Thursday, October 10th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is Perry County, Pennsylvania.

For the very first time, we are featuring our guest speaker, coming all the way from London, England, Dr. Joe Boot, the founder and president of the Ezra Institute. If you would like to attend this free event, send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line.

You will be automatically registered for free, and not only is the admission free and the lunch free and your time of edification by hearing Dr. Joseph Boot's message free and your time of rest, relaxation, fun, feasting, and fellowship all free, everybody is going to receive a heavy sack of free, brand new books personally selected by me and donated by Christian publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom.

It's all absolutely free, so if you would like to take advantage of this extraordinary free event, please send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. Well, today, back by popular demand, is a returning guest who I love interviewing, and I'm hoping that he is loving being interviewed just as much as I love doing the interviewing.

His name is David Reese. By now, he is certainly no stranger to the Iron Sharpens Iron listening audience. He is pastor of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and the CEO of ArmoredRepublic .com.

Today, we are continuing our series of the history of the world from creation until now. This is part two in our series, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese.

Brother, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about the history of the world that is laid out in the Scriptures and continue to help people to see our story and the story that God has revealed.

Amen. Well, as we always do, please remind our listeners or inform listeners for the first time, depending upon if they've heard you before, about Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

Thank you, Chris. So basically, Puritan Reformed Church is a church that is dedicated to the authority of Scripture. Our desire is to see doctrine taught according to Scripture alone, to see the worship of the church be governed by Scripture alone, and to see the government of the church to be according to Scripture alone.

So we desire to be very careful to maintain the Puritan principle that the church ought to be reformed after what's revealed in Scripture. And so we believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith is a faithful summary of the doctrines contained in Scripture.

We love to sing the Psalms, and we are a congregation that is in the middle of a period of growth, praise the Lord, but also that we're going through a process of having some men trained for office. And so we're in a period where we want to start to increase our ability to minister into the community and to be able to increase our evangelism.

And so we're hopeful that others will join us in that work of seeing the truth taught, seeing right worship performed and given to the Lord, and also to begin to see a more aggressive and assertive effort to evangelize and to see discipleship accelerated.

Well, if anybody is visiting Phoenix, Arizona, or if they are actually living in the Phoenix area, or if you have family, friends, and loved ones in or near Phoenix, Arizona, please visit the website to find out more about this valuable congregation, PuritanPHX, definition of phoenix .com, PuritanPHX .com, and God willing, we will remind you of that website later on.

Also, let our listeners know about this wonderful business where you are the CEO that, along with Puritan Reformed Church, sponsors Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Armored Republic.

Yeah, thank you, brother. So Armored Republic is a business that we sell principally body armor. But the idea is that we believe body armor is a tool of liberty. And so we believe that it's a part of sort of the kit that persons should have, that men should have, for the purpose of resisting tyranny.

So people should own a good rifle and a good set of body armor, and it allows you to be able to defend yourself, to defend your family, and to be able to rally around lawful magistrates to see the defense of Christian liberty.

And furthermore, we also sell things like inserts for backpacks, where you can easily have essentially pistol armor in a bag where nobody would even know you've got it. And the reality is that 95 percent of ordinary gun crimes are committed with things that would be stopped by that pistol armor.

So I would encourage people in kind of an everyday use to look at the possibility of having something like a pistol armor plate in a bag that they carry ordinarily. And then you've just got armor with you.

And so those are the main things there. But I wanted to point out that I've got a major thing going on with what's called the Reefs Fund, and so ReefsFund .com, that takes people to it. That's an opportunity for people to invest with me in helping to buy additional companies and have them have a Christian culture, Christian mission statement, Christian way that they project themselves into the world, to try to have capital provided to make it so that we can do things as Christians in terms of the business world as a part of trying to have the word of God applied in every area of life.

And so I'm looking for accredited investors to help with that and some new opportunities that are that are ongoing, including some acquisitions of businesses that we're in the middle of. And so just that's for anybody who's interested in potentially helping to add on to the number of Christian businesses that we can have in the country and to have opportunities for investment there for accredited investors.

Now, I know the website for Armored Republic is ArmoredRepublic .com, ArmoredRepublic .com, but what is the contact information involving this investment opportunity?

Yeah, so that is ReefsFund .com, and Reefs is R-E-E-C-E, and people could also just email me at David at ReefsFund .com, which is David at ReefsFund .com.

Great. Well, as I already announced, we are continuing our series on the history of the world from creation until now. This is a series that will continue until 2056. And we are actually in part two of this series, and I was wondering if you could give us a recap of what we've addressed and then we could pick up where you left off.

Creation, the Covenant of Works, and the Fall

Fantastic. So what we started with last time is the realization that God is eternal, and so he's outside of time, and time itself is a creation. And so we saw that the scriptures teach us that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And so we have this, there's a start to time. And a pastor named James Usher did a magnificent job of kind of calculating out the dates in the scriptures and has provided a very useful outline. There are some other scholars that have done a great job of looking at some of the details.

And so there's some very excellent scholarship by Christian men who are conservative Bible believers who have kind of mapped out the timeline, and they're very close to each other. The calculations on and points of difference for the major dates are generally very minor based on some claim of a technicality or another.

And so we get back to the creation of the world at 4004 B .C. And we're about 6000 years into world history now. And that's where we are as we listen to the show or as you and I talk about it. And so that that we talked about the fact that God made the world from nothing.

We talked about the fact that that we have the days of creation laid out where God is creating space and then he's forming it and he's filling it. He gave the dominion mandate to man to basically take the earth and to form it, to subdue it and to fill it as a continuation of work that the man has been given authority by God and that the knowledge of God will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea, as the believers are increased and as the knowledge of God in them increases.

And so there's this there's this mandate to do that work. Now, we we saw the days and the big things to to remember regarding those days having to do with the first day God created light and separated from darkness and he created the heavens and the earth and evening and morning were used to differentiate the second day with the ordering, the heavens and the water cycle and preparing the heavens and the sea to supply the land.

On the third day, God ordered the land and the sea to prepare the land, the habitat for man. On the fourth day, he created the things that habitat the heavens in terms of for signs and seasons, days and years, the greater light and the lesser light in terms of the sun and the moon.

On the fifth day, he filled the first heaven with birds and the sea with with the the the beasts of the sea. And on the sixth day, he filled the land and gave beasts to the land. But he also created man, gave him created in the image of God, which is rationality, gave him authority over the all that was made.

And then we got to the seventh day, which was the Sabbath, where there is this God commands rest. And he gave his example of rest. And so we had the week as a part of what God gave there. When we when we when we realize that the history there with the creation of man, there was this giving of the covenant of works where we had a tree of life and there was a tree, you might call it a tree of death, which is this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And so having these these two trees to emblemize the reward for obedience and the punishment for disobedience, we have we have the covenant of works there, which is a covenant of justice. It can be summarized as do this and live.

And what we found is that when Eve was created and marriage was given, we had the individual with Adam. Now we have the household created and those two covenant institutions. The individual has responsibility before God.

And then the family is a covenant institution. There are there's a responsibility as family where where the actions of the leaders of the family, the husband and the wife, can potentially have effects across generations.

So the man has a a leadership responsibility that the wife is under the authority of the husband, but has a responsibility over the estate and the children and servants. And so we find that this household is there.

And so we have these two major institutions, the individual and the household. And shortly thereafter, after the making of those, and by the way, notice only two genders, only two sexes, male and female, that God made.

And so we find is we have that shortly thereafter, Satan comes. He tempts us to fall. And we have the curse given to man of strife, toil and and death, physical death. And there's this issue of spiritual death.

And so we have a promise that's given there after the fall where God establishes the covenant of grace with Adam, where he has a promise essentially of as opposed to do this and live in a covenant of works.

We have the covenant of grace that the just by faith shall live. And and there's this promise of the the seed of the woman crushing the head of the serpent. And so Adam and Eve believe this promise. Adam says that his wife, he will call her Eve because she's the mother of all the living.

So there's this idea that the death is not immediate and there's spiritual life with the giving of faith. And God gives two major symbols there, clothing to cover nakedness and shame to point to the righteousness of Christ that covers us.

And also animal sacrifice was given to point to the need of another to pay for our sins, the death of another to pay for sins. And we went into Cain and Abel and the idea that Cain offered a sacrifice that God did not accept.

Abel offered a sacrifice that God did accept. And so we saw this idea of the worship that God that God commands is important to give. And when Cain killed Abel, we ran into this differentiation of the city of God and city of man.

But there was no magistrate. So there was nobody to kill Cain. God didn't give authority to execute Cain. And instead, violence fills the earth. So murder is used to to largely destroy the church. And then the seduction of men chasing after unbelieving women out of a desire for their beauty, a lusting after their beauty, as opposed to caring to have godly women that they marry to raise a godly seed.

And that led to the flood. And so at the flood, there's a destruction of this violent world. God saves four families, eight men and women. And he reaffirms covenant with Noah and expands the covenant to now make it so that not only is there animal sacrifice, but there's the eating of the animals.

So you have, as opposed to just a sin offering or burnt offering, now you have this peace offering idea of being able to take in and enjoy the nourishment, the nurture, the peace, that the fat of the land is a part of it.

But to not eat the blood, because the blood is a symbol for life and the blood of the animal and its sacrifice, the idea that the life is given as a substitute must be maintained. And so the sword of the magistrate is also given to restrain evil.

The sword of the magistrate is to punish the wicked and to protect the innocent. And by the time we've gotten to Noah, we're already about sixteen hundred and fifty six years into the history of the world.

We are one fourth of the way through world history so far. And so that right there, that little summary, that's a quarter of the world history. And then you get into this idea of we have after the flood and after Noah is given this extension of the covenant, the add on to the covenant of grace, including the rainbow as a symbol for the preservation of the world so the church can live and grow in it.

We then have fall into sin and apostasy quick again, and the world has this huge period where where there's empire building and enslaving that occurs with Nimrod leading to the building of the Tower of Babel.

And then we have God causing the nations to be scattered with the table of nations for seventy to seventy nations with all these different languages so that man is spread out across the face of the earth.

And so there's this way in which the empire building of the city of man is restrained so that human empires, beast empires don't destroy the city of God. And so the languages help to separate people on a practical level that prevents a total consolidation into centralized power and and encourages sort of a decentralization de facto and prevents this world empire from being consolidated for a period of time.

And at the at the end of a period dealing with another 300 years or so, we get to this period of time where Abraham is called out. And so now here we are at actually, forgive me, about 400 years later with Abraham after Noah.

And we're now at about two thousand and ninety two years after the creation of the world. So we're now one third of the way through world history. And we ended last time with Abraham. And I want to make sure that we can spend some time looking at some of the overlap of Abraham and Isaac's life.

But the last time we managed to get through about one third of world history. So that's a that's a lot to get through in a couple hours. But we did it. And so we come to Abraham with with additional information to be looked at and adding in as we see the history of the world and of the church as a history of our people.

Amen.

Well, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we return, we're going to enter into uncovered territory in our series. And if you have any questions for our guests today, David Reese, submit them to Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com.

Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com. Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back.

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Go to RoyalDiadem .com and mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with David Reese and we are in part two of a series we are calling a history of the world from creation until now.

And if you do have a question, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us first name, at least city and state and country residence. So, Pastor Reese, if you could pick up where you left off then.

So we're getting back to Abraham. And so I want everybody to remember the four big the four big covenant institutions, which are the individual, the household, the church and the state. And we have the church with the covenant of grace back in Genesis three.

We went through Noah. We had the state established with Noah in Genesis nine. And we're in Abraham. And what we find with Abraham is he's given a symbol that distinguishes his household. And those that covenant with him, those that are bought into his house and those that are born into his house, it distinguishes that people from other people.

And that symbol, it was given a circumcision. And so in Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham. And we have there this famous line that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

And then we also have in Genesis 17, this giving of the symbol of the covenant. And there's this weird language where it says that this is the covenant is what says that circumcision itself is the covenant.

And that gives to us what's called sacramental language. And sacramental language is this language where a thing that's a symbol is used to be talked about as the thing that symbolizes. And so the covenant is actually the promises that were given back in Genesis 15.

But the sign of the covenant circumcision is given there in Genesis 17. And it's supposed to represent that covenant. It represents the promises of God that are given to Abraham. Now, Abraham and his wife are one of the promises.

They understand that they receive from God is going to be a child that's given. And Abraham's old and his wife, Sarah, is old. And so the idea that they're going to have a child seems unrealistic to them.

So they contrive this plan, this sin, to have Abraham take a concubine, take a slave wife, and to have a child through her. And that is, of course, a violation of the seventh commandment. It's a type of adultery.

But also, it is not what God had commanded. God was saying that he is going to provide a child through the lawful marriage that Abraham has through Sarah. And so this simple plan is something that results in the birth of Ishmael.

And then later on, God causes Isaac, the child who is promised to be born. And Isaac is famous in the line of scripture. We have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as listed out as the great patriarchs. Isaac is provided a wife.

Isaac has...Abraham sends out a servant to find a wife. He comes back and Isaac has a wife. We're told that Sarah dies and that Abraham marries a woman named Keturah. And so then right after that, we have Abraham's death and his burial.

And we end up with sort of, in Genesis 25, this line where we look at Isaac and Ishmael, and Isaac has a number of kings that come from his line. Sorry, Ishmael has a number of kings that come from his line.

And Isaac leads into having...we have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We lead into Israel, or Jacob, and he has 12 sons. And those 12 sons become the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel. So we have Isaac, and Isaac has a number of issues that come up, including the famous birth of Jacob and Esau.

And we have that great differentiation between Jacob and Esau, where Esau is supposed to represent the nation of Edom that will come later, but Esau also, even though he's born in a covenant family, even though he's circumcised and separated from the world, he sells his birthright.

He does not believe. We're told that he...still, we have this issue of unbelievers born into the houses of believers, and this danger of evil that comes even inside of Christian households. So there's this danger of unbelief coming out of our own households.

There's danger of people being raised in the faith and apostatizing. And so we have this contrast of Jacob and Esau. We're told that Jacob, God loved, and Esau, he hated. And of course, that's used by Paul in the book of Romans to help to show that there is an eternal purpose of God.

And we need to remember that God's purpose in history is to glorify himself, and in glorifying himself, he shows his justice and he shows his mercy. And so Jacob is used to display the mercy of God. Now, when we continue with Isaac's life, he has run-ins with kings, and he has this run-in with a king named Abimelech, where there's a dispute about property.

And there's this constant pushing that occurs where the unjust, the wicked in the world, will seek to take the possessions of the righteous. And Isaac manages to...essentially, he gives and gives until he reaches the point where he has to hold on to some property to prevent his family from being oppressed.

And so he ends up forming an agreement with Abimelech where there's a recognition of the distinct lines of authority that they have. And so we see this theme that comes up over and over again where the wicked of the world would oppress the righteous, and the righteous, even in seeking to be peaceable, even in turning the other cheek, if they will not defend themselves, will not resist tyranny, will not flee oppression when they don't have the power to fight, we have this continual message that there's a danger that the world would seek to stomp out the church.

So God providentially preserves his church. God also strengthens his church to use the ordinance of the God to convert people and bring them in, and also causes people who are Christians to defend themselves, to use institutions like the civil magistracy to see that justice is administered and that evil is restrained.

Now, one of the things that happens as we come closer to the end of Isaac's life is there's this story where Esau is the favored son of Isaac, and Jacob is the favored son of his mother. And so the two of them are a bit at odds here.

And when we find that what happened, the conspiracy between Jacob and his mother, sorry, between Isaac and his mother to go deceive Jacob and to convince Jacob to give a blessing, forgive me, I just messed up the wording there, Jacob and his mother were going to deceive Isaac and cause Isaac to bless Jacob so that he could receive the blessing that Isaac intended to give to Esau.

And so there's this process of coming and smelling like Esau and feeling like Esau because Isaac is blind at this point, incapable really of seeing. And so there's this deception that occurs, which is followed shortly thereafter by Jacob running away.

And when he runs away, he's trying to flee Esau's wrath. And in running away, he ends up meeting a woman that he wants to marry named Rachel. And he ends up promising seven years of labor to Laban, Rachel's father, to be able to marry Rachel.

And what happens is Jacob is then deceived by Laban in a similar way to how Jacob deceived Isaac. And so what happens is the inability to see is used to make it so that Jacob ends up marrying Leah. And then Laban extracts another seven years of labor out of Jacob to make him earn Rachel.

So he ends up working 14 years. And then there's another seven years where he works for Laban. And there's this constant changing of his wages that occurs. So that Jacob and his house end up fleeing away.

And we're introduced to this theme that one of the great problems that continues to happen with Christians is the failure to keep what God commands, the failure to do what God commands, that we need salvation by grace.

That's emphasized with Abraham. It's emphasized with Isaac and Isaac unjustly favoring Esau. It's emphasized with Jacob and the fact that Jacob has cheated his father, cheated his brother. And he has also had this situation where he got cheated in a similar way to how he had previously cheated his own father.

And so we end up with Jacob being an emblem for us of the reality of salvation by grace. That we are not capable of earning our own salvation and that even his house has failures in it, mixtures in it, where he runs away and his family takes his wife, his favored wife, Rachel, takes idols out of the house of Laban and runs away with them.

So eventually Jacob ends up leading his family to put away their idols and this this need for repentance and to remove the unclean things. But this occurs relatively late in the life of Jacob. And so the weakness of the church and its need for God to not only save it out of its out of its guilt, but to also to see God's mercy extended in such a way where we grow in terms of our ability to do what is right and God reduces the power of sin.

Such a powerful thing is displayed in the life of Jacob. We need God to, in his mercy, cause the power of sin to be diminished in us. And so as Jacob realizes more and more his need to devote himself with God, we have the famous wrestling with God that occurs where he is about to meet Esau.

He's running away from Laban because he's taken his family away. He's taken the idols out. His wife has taken the idols out of Laban's house. Laban chases them down. Jacob is able to make a covenant with Laban that they're going to leave each other alone.

That is a line where God is going to guard them from each other. And as Jacob is fleeing back towards his ancestral home, he hears that Esau is coming to meet him. And he is fearful that Esau is going to kill him and destroy his family and his children.