Thanksgiving in the Kingdom Part 1 — Chuck Smith

Welcome to the Word for Today, featuring the Bible teaching of the late Pastor Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel Movement. This radio program is a verse-by-verse study through the entire Bible, and on today's edition of the Word for Today, Pastor Chuck continues with Thanksgiving in the Kingdom, as he picks up in Isaiah Chapter 12, Verse 1.

And now, with today's message, here's Pastor Chuck.

Thanksgiving in the Kingdom: Turning Back to God

And in that day, again this day, when the Lord is reigning, thou shalt say, O LORD, I will praise thee. For though you were angry with me, your anger is turned away, and now you comfort me. Now, God had warned Israel over and over that if they turned from Him, He would turn from them.

If they rejected Him, He would reject them. And this is true, not only of Israel, but of all people. If you will turn to God, God will turn to you. If you turn from God, God will turn from you. The prophet said to the king, the Lord is with you while you be with Him.

But if you seek Him, He will be found of you. But if you forsake Him, He will forsake you. And that's just the truth. Now, Israel rejected the Messiah. And having rejected the Messiah, they were rejected of God.

And God began to work among the Gentile nations and continues to the present day to work among the Gentile nations. And God is working in our hearts and lives, revealing His plan and His truth to us through the Word, giving us understanding of His kingdom that is coming.

Israel's Blindness and the Fullness of the Gentiles

And right now, the Spirit of God is working among the Gentiles. And as far as Israel is concerned, a blindness is over Israel for the most part. As Paul wrote of them, he said, when Moses came down with the law, God had to put a veil over Moses' face so that they could not see the declining glory.

Even so, he said, to the present day, they have a veil over their face when they read the law. They don't understand their own scriptures. Now, God is working among the Gentiles. By the Holy Spirit. But God will work again among the Jews when the fullness of the Gentiles is come in.

And so, Paul, writing in Romans, the 11th chapter, said, so blindness has happened in part to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles is come in. And then all of Israel shall be saved, for the scripture will be fulfilled, there shall come forth the Deliverer out of Zion, who will turn the hearts of the children unto their fathers, that is, back unto the God of Israel.

Daniel's Seventy Weeks and Israel's Future

Now, God promised through Daniel that there would be 77 year cycles in which God would deal with the nation of Israel. That 69 of the seven years would be accomplished between the time the commandment went forth to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the Messiah, the Prince.

And that did happen. There were 483 years between the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to Nehemiah from Artaxerxes to the coming of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Prince, in His first coming.

Now, that leaves one seven-year cycle in which God will deal with the nation of Israel once again. That seven-year cycle will begin when God takes the church out of the earth. Then God will put His Spirit upon Israel once more.

But then will the Antichrist be revealed, and the earth will go through this horrible period of great tribulation and destruction. But here we find that they will say, Lord, You were angry with us, but now Your anger is turned away, and we are comforted.

God will again pour His Spirit upon the nation of Israel, and He will deal with them for this final seven-year period prior to the return again of Jesus Christ. And as God deals with them, it will be harsh.

The Great Tribulation and Israel's Refuge

The Antichrist will turn against them and seek to destroy them. They will have to flee once more from Jerusalem, and in a couple of chapters we will come to their flight, and we will see that God prepared a place for them, the rock city of Petra, and they will be taken by Jordan and sheltered there in the rock city of Petra during this last three and a half years of great tribulation.

It will be a tough time, and again, it's a composite. There's bits and pieces here, and you have to put the whole puzzle together to see the picture. But as we go through Isaiah, we'll be taking the various parts and putting them together for you.

By the time we're through with Isaiah, you'll get a pretty comprehensive picture of what it's going to be and how it's all going to come to pass. And we will be looking week by week at the various parts of the puzzle, putting them together, giving you the picture of what the future holds for you, for Israel, for the world.

So God will deal with them again, and during this time of the Antichrist, their hearts will be turned back to God. They will realize their tragic mistake in the rejection of Jesus Christ, and they will begin to pray, O Jesus, come.

Christ's Return and the Mount of Olives

And Jesus said unto them, You will not see me again, until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. They'll actually be praying for his return. And he will return at that time and set his foot upon the Mount of Olives.

As he does, the thing will split in two. A new river will come bursting forth out of the bowels of Jerusalem that will flow on down to the Dead Sea and will break into another branch. One will go out to the Mediterranean.

And we'll get to that also as we move along and get into the prophecies of Ezekiel. We get that part of the picture and the puzzle put into it. But right now, this song that they're singing, you were angry, but now your anger is turned away and you comfort us.

Jesus as Salvation and the Wells of Salvation

Behold, God is my salvation. The name Jesus is Yahshua, which in Hebrew means Jehovah, my salvation. He said, I will trust and not be afraid, for Yah, Yahweh, is my strength and my song, and he also is become my salvation.

The recognition that the salvation is in Jesus, Yahshua, Yah, Yahweh, is become my salvation, my Yahshua. Therefore, with joy shall you draw water out of the wells of salvation. Jesus said, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.

And he that drinketh of the water that I give, as the scripture saith, out of his innermost being there will flow rivers of living water, wells of salvation, with joy drawing the water out of the wells of salvation.

The Coming Kingdom Age

And in that day, this glorious day of the Lord that is coming, you will say, praise the Lord, call upon his name, declare his doings among the people, make mention that his name is exalted. And so the glory of the Lord and glory to the Lord in that day.

And thus the exhortation, sing unto the Lord, for he has done excellent things, and this is known in all the earth. Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee.

Glorious, glorious kingdom age that the prayers of the saints fulfilled. The time has come that God's will shall be done in this earth, even as it is in heaven. Satan will be bound and cast into the abyssal.

The Antichrist and the false prophet will be in Gehenna. And Jesus Christ shall begin his reign over the earth in a renewed earth, in an earth in which you won't have violent storms. You won't have fear of earthquakes.

You won't have the fear of wild animals or beasts. You won't have the fear of war. You won't have the fear of assaults. You won't have the fear of robberies. We will be here, actually, as enforcers of righteousness.

Glorified Believers Ruling With Christ

But you're going to have a tremendous advantage, because you're going to be in your new body. And in your new body, we will have, much as Jesus, the insight into what people are thinking. So you'll be able to stop a crime before it ever begins.

A guy will be thinking, oh, I maybe go over there and take that. And you'll say, hey, buddy, we'll go into this a little later. You see, there will be some few people that do survive the Great Tribulation and will be allowed to enter into the kingdom age when the Lord comes and separates the sheep from the goat.

There will be those who will be allowed to enter in. But they will still be living as we live today, only under much better conditions. Jesus will be reigning in righteousness. We will be in our glorified bodies here on earth with Him, enjoying the glory of His reign, and with Him as enforcers of righteousness.

Read Revelation chapters 2 and 3 as messages to the churches, to them that overcome. Well, I grant that they will sit with me on my throne, even as I sat down with my Father in His throne, and they will rule the world with a rod of righteousness, and so enforcers of righteousness in His kingdom.

Satan's Release After the Thousand-Year Reign

But those that do live through the Great Tribulation and are allowed to enter into the kingdom age will bear children, and the earth will be in ideal circumstances. And at the end of that thousand years of His reign, Satan will be released for a short season once more upon the earth.

And those who have never had to deal with the temptations and the power of Satan, who have been forced to serve Jesus Christ during His righteous reign, will then have an opportunity to reveal what is in their hearts.

And some will rebel and gather together against Christ, even at that time. And then they will be cut off from the new heaven and the new earth. We'll get that as we go through Isaiah. We'll get more and more parts of the picture as we are in now to the books of prophecy.

We'll begin to see God's glorious plan for your future. And so much of Bible prophecy has what we refer to as a near and a far fulfillment. Many of the prophecies had an immediate and addressed immediate situations, but in a secondary sense they looked down the road and there was a secondary prophetic aspect to what was being said.

Near and Far Fulfillment in Prophecy

And in the prophecies of Isaiah, we find so often this dual kind of fulfillment of the prophecy, that immediate and then that far fulfillment that would take place. In the prophecies concerning Jesus Christ, we realize that there was that which was the immediate or that which was to be fulfilled in His first coming, but also that which would be fulfilled in His second coming.

And many times the prophecies, as they were given, were not really divided, so that issues of the first coming as well as the second coming were just bunched together. The 61st chapter of Isaiah is an example of that, and Jesus, when He took the scriptures in Nazareth, when He began His public ministry, reading the 61st chapter of Isaiah, stopped at the portion of the prophecy that dealt with His first coming.

He did not read on in the portion that dealt with His second coming, but stopping at the portion that dealt with His first coming, He said, this day is this scripture fulfilled in your eyes. And that first part was fulfilled in His first coming.

That portion of the prophecy that will be fulfilled at His second coming, He did not read into that. He left that because that would be fulfilled at a future date. And thus, the prophets of the Old Testament so often just wrote of immediate situations, but there was a prophetic element that was to be fulfilled in the yet distant future.

The prophets did not always understand the things that they wrote about. They sort of desired to understand them more fully. But writing through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they just wrote down as the Spirit inspired them, not always fully understanding themselves the things that they wrote.

Isaiah's Prophecy Against Babylon

Now we find in chapter 13, it opens with the burden of Babylon, which Isaiah, the son of Amos, did see. Now, with the prophecy of Babylon, there was to be the near fulfillment, and we say near fulfillment.

However, the prophecies of Babylon, when they were made by Isaiah, at this point, Babylon was not a real power in the world. Assyria was the major power in the world at the time of this writing. Later on, Assyria was defeated by the Babylonians, and Babylon became the major power.

And Babylon was the nation that conquered Judah, the southern kingdom. So at the time that he wrote this prophecy, it was at the time of the death of Ahaz, which puts it at around 726 BC. This is the time at which the northern kingdom, Israel, was falling to Assyria and was being carried away by the Assyrians.

However, he goes beyond Assyria, and some 150 years later, Babylon is to be destroyed. So that near fulfillment would be the 150 years later in the destruction of Babylon. But with the dual aspect, the prophecy, as we will see in its context, really deals with the end times and the time of the Great Tribulation.

And so there is the dual fulfillment of this prophecy concerning Babylon. So when Babylon was destroyed, it was not destroyed by a confederacy of nations from all over the world. So this prophecy that he is speaking here concerning the destruction of Babylon was not fulfilled in the overthrow of Babylon by the Medo-Persian Empire.

But it becomes quite obvious that Isaiah is talking about another destruction of Babylon, which would be yet future, which would be accomplished by an amalgamation of many nations, the host of the kingdoms that God would gather together for the purpose of destroying Babylon.

And they come from a far country. Now, that could not refer to the Medes and the Persians because they were adjacent to Babylon. They come from a far country from the end of heaven. Now, in reality, if you were over there in the time of Isaiah and you were writing of troops coming from the United States into the Gulf region to battle against Iraq or Babylon, you would say they were coming from the ends of heaven.

Even the Lord and the weapons of his indignation. The word indignation is a word that is used in the Old Testament for the great tribulation that God had said was going to come upon the world in the last days to destroy the whole land.

We return with more of our verse-by-verse venture through the Bible in our next broadcast. As Pastor Chuck continues to guide us through the fascinating book of Isaiah, and we do hope you'll make plans to join us.

But right now, I'd like to remind you that if you'd like to secure a copy of today's message, simply order Isaiah chapter 12 verse 1 when visiting the wordfortoday .org. And while you're there, we encourage you to browse the many additional biblical resources by Pastor Chuck.

You can also subscribe to the Word for Today podcast or sign up for our email subscription. Once again, all this can be found at thewordfortoday .org. If you wish to call, our toll-free number is 1 -800 -272-WORD.

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And now on behalf of The Word for Today, we'd like to thank all of you who share in supporting this ministry with your prayers and financial support. And be sure to join us again next time as Pastor Chuck continues his verse-by-verse study through the Bible.

That's right here on the next edition of The Word for Today. And now once again, here's Pastor Chuck with today's closing prayer.

Praying for God's Kingdom to Come

Father, we thank You for Your Word that is steadfast and true. And that You have declared, and even Lord, by an oath have declared that these things are true. And Lord, we believe Your Word, and thus we look forward with anticipation to its fulfillment.

And we do pray, Lord, may Your kingdom come in order that Your will might be done in this earth even as it is in heaven. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

It's with great honor that The Word for Today would like to present Pastor Chuck Smith's book entitled Prayer, Our Glorious Privilege. With great clarity, Pastor Chuck masterfully taught the principles of praying to God our Father and emphasized the power that belongs to each one of us when we rely on the Holy Spirit to guide and nurture our prayer lives.

I want to encourage you to pick up a copy of Pastor Chuck's book, Prayer, Our Glorious Privilege, and study it to put these biblical principles into practice. Read this book and come to the most amazing realization that prayer is the most potent weapon in your spiritual arsenal.

And use it with great promise and hope, for when you begin a life of prayer, you begin a great adventure. To order a copy of this book in print or to download a digital copy, please visit thewordfortoday .org.

Or call The Word for Today at 800 -272 -9673.

This program has been sponsored by The Word for Today in Costa Mesa, California.