Daniel 12, The End, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Daniel 12 and the End of History

Daniel chapter 12, we'll be reading the entire chapter,.

Here the word of the Lord.

At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who is charged of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time, your people shall be delivered.

Everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.

But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall increase. Then I, Daniel, looked and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream and one on that bank of the stream.

And someone said to the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream, how long shall it be till the end of these wonders? And I heard the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream.

He raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times and half a time. And that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end, all these things would be finished.

I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, oh my Lord, what shall be the outcome of these things? He said, go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end. Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly and none of the wicked shall understand.

For those who are wise shall understand. And from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate is set up, there shall be 1 ,290 days. Blessed is he who waits and arrives at the 1 ,335 days.

But go your way till the end and you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. Well, it's the end of the year.

If you like to reminisce, it's a time to look back, see all the things that have been ended, what's come to an end in this past year. Jonas ended his career as an only child and now he has a little sister.

Ivy, who ended her preschool years and started kindergarten. Both Raymond and Anson ended being non-guitar players with Herbie's help. We had two families in their time with us moving away and that's a shame, of course, but we had Gladys who ended her time elsewhere and now is with us officially joining.

Tina ended her life of being a mere permanent resident and became a US citizen. Here we ended, here in this building, we ended having a leaking roof, which is a relief in case it rains during the service.

With endings come, of course, new beginnings. Sometimes time reveals that what has ended is different than what we thought it was when we were in the middle of it, what we thought was ended. A dozen years ago, as 2010 ended with a new decade, I thought the infancy of this church had ended because we had first been gathered at least three years earlier and I thought we had now learned the lesson that we're gonna be different than what I call the old time religion and we're not just gonna be another expression of it, that we're not just gonna be the same old thing, just maybe we talk a little bit more about predestination than other churches do, that we are going to be a genuinely reformed church like the Puritans, bound together by a covenant.

But I was wrong. The infancy continued. I don't think it really ended. Now, I don't think it ended until June of 2018 when we, by our actions, made the statement that we're not gonna be a hypocritical bunch, that we're gonna keep our covenant, that we're not gonna have a former elder just walk out like it was meaningless and us pretend it didn't happen or even just kind of enable it.

That was when the new age began, I think. I wasn't sure we would make it, that we would even survive. In fact, one Sunday morning, I concluded that we would not and it was that morning that the bees first arrived and I thought, well, maybe I'm wrong.

Soon after, Shannon joined us after she had been attending for a while and then he officially joined us and then a little after that, Herbie came and now we have a whole lot of haze here. What stage we're in now, I don't know.

We may not know until it ends. Often, we don't know what stage we're in until it has ended, true with life, true with history. From 1989 to 1991, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Eastern European communist regimes to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we thought that the Cold War had ended and maybe some were talking about wars in general had ended.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he got kicked out and we thought, well, that's the end. Nobody's gonna start any wars anymore. This is a new age of peace and prosperity. The feeling in the 90s was that communism would continue to fall, there would be no more threats to peace or to prosperity or to democracy anywhere.

It was just peace and wealth coming in for the rest of eternity. In the early 1990s, an American scholar named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book entitled The End of History, which got a lot of attention, a lot of talk.

The Cold War had ended in America, America especially felt it had been vindicated. We had reached the end of history, meaning the goal, the finish line, the purpose that it had always been moving toward for millennia.

Fukuyama said that finally all the struggles and the wars, the conflicts, the debates of history, they had all been resolved. We know who the victor is now and everyone can see it. We had thought that he said, quote, the last bloody battle.

He believed that there was nothing else to fight for and that nearly everyone recognized it all around the world that democracy and politics and capitalism and economics were the undeniable victors. The end result of all of history was democracy and capitalism and with that triumph, the quest of history, what it was all about, was at an end.

Time would keep ticking, of course, but there was, according to Fukuyama, nothing higher for which to strive. No more debate, no more struggle. Everyone realized it. There would be no more bloody wars contesting it.

At about 9 a .m. on September 11, 2001, that fantasy of a utopia went up in smoke with the World Trade Center. What is the end of history? Now, some have said that history is the story of the triumph of the master race so they can have their 1 ,000-year Reich.

Communists said it was the story of the proletariat throwing off the chains of the bourgeoisie, the workers of the world uniting and making for a paradise of shared wealth. Some Muslims believe it's the story of fateful jihadists imposing their Sharia law on the world.

Still others believe it's just purposeless story. It doesn't have any meaning, so it doesn't have any end. It's this purposeless story of conflict after conflict, no meaning or morality, and so the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that history was waiting on the rise of the supermen.

He called them in German the übermensch, driven by the will to power to give history the meaning they chose to stamp on it. Otherwise, it means what they say it means. History is written by the victors, they say, and so history is their story.

But we've seen earlier in Daniel that God has already had history written out, particularly last week in chapter 11. It's already written out before it happens, and that history is his story, that he will be the victor.

His kingdom will have no end. No one can resist his hand, Nebuchadnezzar realized in chapter four. And here in Daniel 12, we see the end, the end of history. We see it in three parts. First, the resurrection.

Then the refining. And finally, the rest. Daniel 12 is the clearest promise in the Old Testament of the resurrection. It's a continuation of the single incident started in chapter 10, all continues through all that prophecy in chapter 11, and here it concludes in chapter 12.

Daniel, remember, he starts out in chapter 10, he's in mourning, he's praying for God to fulfill his covenant. He's asking, why God, you promised we would go back to the land after 70 years in Babylon, and 70 years is up.

What's going on?

We're scattered all over the place. We're not back in Israel. The temple's in shambles, it's demolished. There's no temple at all. What are you gonna do? What are you doing, Lord, with history? That's what Daniel is asking, and God reveals much of the history that we call between the Testaments in chapter 11, and then here in chapter 12, he reveals the end.

So he's in mourning, and he sees this vision of a mighty angel by the Tigris River, and for the entire 11th chapter, the angel tells Daniel the history that takes God's people from the awful shambles of Daniel's time to the awesome coming of the kingdom of God at the end.

Chapter 11 ends in verse 40, discussing the time of the end. So chapter 12 begins with at that time. What time? Well, the time of the end. Michael, the good great prince over God's people, arises to defend them in a time of trouble such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.

This is what we saw in chapter nine, that on the way to the manger, that there will be trouble, and there still is trouble today, all the way to the end. We're not gonna reach like an end of history where everything's gonna be perfect, and with peace and tranquility, sorry, it's not gonna happen.

To think that things will gradually get better and better is a nice hope, especially as we look forward to a new year. I should say it's not gonna happen until God's kingdom comes and Christ returns. The thing people hope for, that we'll have peace and tranquility, especially as we hope for it in the next year, in 2024, as we look forward to this new year.

But scripture says that there will be times in the future of great trouble, worse than any nation has ever seen. But the angel assures Daniel in verse one that in that trouble, his people will be delivered.

Who are these people? Is it just the literal Jews this is all about? Are they the ones delivered? Well, if they're believers in the Lord Jesus,.

Yeah, sure.

If their names, it says at the end of verse one, are found written in the book, yeah, it's for them. That is Daniel's people are those written in the book, whether they're Jews or not. Daniel's people are those that the Lord himself has recorded beforehand as his.

They will be delivered. Now, how will they be delivered? Does that mean that they will avoid this horrible trouble? Altogether, they're gonna lead trouble-free lives, that they will be living in their comfortable middle-class American homes and eating lunch at Chick-fil-A and going to church on in their nice cars, perhaps hearing some troubling news, but nothing hurting their lifestyle, nothing really hurting them, until suddenly they are transported out of this world?

Is that what he means here? Are they delivered from the trouble or through it? Well, the first part of verse one suggests that they will experience trouble, but some could say, ah, but they're delivered.

Yes, but verse two tells us how they are delivered. Many of them will be asleep in the dust. That is, they're buried in the ground.

They're dead.

They are delivered from their death by being awakened from it, being resurrected. They were dead, and some of them died precisely because of the trouble. Some of them are the loyal people of God, they're true believers in the Lord, like from what Daniel was talking about in chapter 11, the type, the brave, knew their God, took action.

They would not taste the pork sacrificed to Zeus that Antiochus or Antiochus was making the Israelites eat. They were killed for it. Now, sure, the people who knew their God, they stood firm, they would not compromise.

They took action. Some of them weren't killed at the time. Some of them became Maccabees who eventually drove out Antiochus' forces, but some stood firm. Some said, no, I will not compromise my God, and they were burned alive for it.

Remember Polycarp and the people like him, the martyrs? They experienced trouble, and so it will always be before the end. God's people will have to know him. They have to stand firm, take action, and many of them will suffer for it, and we should be grateful that we live in a country in which the government is not likely to kill us for knowing God, at least not right now, standing firm and taking action, but still we live in a fallen society that by its nature hates the kingdom of God, and so they will persecute as best they can, as much as they can, people who choose to live together under his rule, who want to be a part of God's kingdom, who seek that first.

They'll persecute those people. Perhaps here the best they could do, the most they could do is insults, baseless rumors, or mockery, calling you a bigot or whatever, a hater, exclude you from universities, from teaching in them, sometimes from being students in them.

Now don't say that's not real persecution, even if it does seem light compared to the trouble described here with suffering to death. Some people look at those suffering to death. When I suffer being insulted or being excluded, that's not real suffering?

Well, that's the way it begins. Trouble begins sometimes with little things, light things. This is in this book with Daniel and his three friends being willing to forego, remember the juicy meats, all the meat and the king's diet they were allowed to have, the wine.

They had to say no to that because of their walk with the Lord. Their persecution began by not being able to eat tasty food. And that was their first step. That's why they were able to stand up to being thrown into lions or being put in fiery furnaces.

And if you're not willing to suffer the light persecutions, you won't stand up to the heavy ones. It's not as though, well, I'm gonna give in on this or that, name my pronouns, whatever it is, because I don't wanna be called a bigot.

But if it comes to sacrificing to Satan or something like that, then I'll stand firm. No, you won't. You start giving in to small things, you'll give in on the big things. If you stand firm under light pressure, you'll likely keep standing when the heavy times of suffering come.

But back to our question. How were they delivered? They're delivered, how? After all, they're in the dust of the earth. The result of the troubles put them in the grave. They're killed for it. Where's the deliverance?

You look at them, they were killed. How are they delivered?

They're dead.

Well, the deliverance is in the resurrection. The death that was dealt to them by their enemies, thinking their enemies are thinking,.

This will finally put an end to them.

These troublemakers, these people who won't go along with the rest of us. Death, what the world thinks is the end, is ended in the resurrection. So death here is compared to a temporary state, like sleep, from which we normally awake, because God is gonna awaken the dead.

When he says, many will experience it in verse two, many who are asleep in the dust, the many, the Hebrew word means a great multitude and could indeed imply many as in everyone. Here, the resurrection is not just a reward for the faithful that is the faithful who knew their God and so stood firm and took action.

Sure, they will be resurrected to everlasting life. The first place that phrase is used in the Bible, everlasting life, it's common in the New Testament, right? Here's the first instance of it. They will be delivered out of death.

The shame of being down in the dust, perhaps the shame of those Jesus freaks, those Puritans to the brilliance of shining like the stars above. They are, in verse three, the wise, that they know the truth, they know their God and know he's worth dying for.

They stand firm, they take action. They lead many to righteousness, to being right with God. That's why we spend so much time and energy here in covenant trying to turn people to righteousness. Not only our own children, sometimes other people's children.

We have Jim Jr. in a gym and reach out to our own family members, hoping to be used by God to turn people away from sin to being right with the Lord. And the deliverance for doing that, the reward is to shine like the stars forever, it says here in verse three.

That is there, hopefully our end, our goal, glory and life. But others, the traitors, those who love their physical life and so gave into the threats here in the time between the Testament, they ate the pork, sacrificed the Zeus.

They went around along with the crowds in the New Testament times to shout, crucify him. They knuckled under to King Charles and compromised the worship of God with superstitious traditions. Or they conformed to the world and married their old time religion to the racism and deception of their culture or they use grace as a license to sin, adapting to the loose sexuality, affirming homosexuality, because that's just what educated, tolerant, civilized people do because the world pressured them.

The, if it feels good, do it attitude of 21st century America, they had to go along. They're the traitors to the world. And the traitors who claim to be God's people but go along with the world, the world's flow, they go with the flow.

Well, they take the broad road to destruction and those Daniel has told in verse two, they will also be resurrected in the end, but their end is, he says, shame and contempt. People often go along with the world.

Because they claim to be Christians.

Because they want to be seen as sophisticated. They want a good reputation. They want to be esteemed because of their pride, because of their ego. They don't want to be some of those simple, bigoted fundamentalists, whatever they call us.

They don't want to be like that. And so in the end, what they get, they get the shame and the contempt that they gave into the world to try to avoid. Well, at the end, no one gets out of judgment, but the wise and the wicked are resurrected.

You will be resurrected to one state or the other, to life or death, to glory or to shame. One of those is the end of us all. Now at the end, there is resurrection. And that end started already when the one who was sleeping in the dust of death awoke.

He awoke to everlasting life, life that will never end. Thus, he began the end. He arose as the wise, the light of the world. He shines and is even right now turning many to righteousness. When Jesus rose from the dead, he began the end.

So we live now, after Jesus began the end, we live between the beginning of the end and the end of the end, between the two resurrections, between the first resurrection, his, and the final one, ours.

The Resurrection of the Dead

In the end, there will be resurrection. And to the end, there will be refining, second, refining. This passage tells us that to the end, there will be trouble. The optimist who thinks, well, the glass is always half full.

It's always good. Look at the sunny side. Everything's getting better and better. Well, such a person better be prepared for trouble. 2023 was a bad year for optimists. We saw in Israel, perhaps one of the most barbaric, murderous rampages in all of history.

I mean, compared to anything you find anywhere in history, the Vikings rampaging, the barbarians, whatever, the SS during World War II. What makes it worse is that those who perpetrated it were actually proud of it.

They were wearing GoPro cameras and uploading their atrocities to the internet. At least the Nazi SS death squads had this shred of decency left to be ashamed of what they did. They tried to cover it up.

Hamas was proud of what they did. So the world is not evolving toward getting better, at least not without Christians taking a stand and taking action, Christians influencing it. And so the pessimists will cynically mutter, well, I told you so.

Things are getting worse, always worse. But the pessimist needs also to see what this passage says, that good things will come all the way to the end. First in verse four, knowledge will increase. It's certainly done that, isn't it?

Verse four has been fulfilled clearly. Then as the vision is coming to a close, starting in verse five, he sees two men, two angels, I guess, standing on either side of the Tigris River asking the same question that people have today.

How long will it be? He says it will be for a time, times, and half a time. Very cryptic, isn't it? But literally first, refers to the three and a half years, which was literally the time that Antiochus, or Antiochus, however you pronounce it, Antiochus had his idol to Zeus set up in the temple.

It lasted there three and a half years, defiling the temple, the abomination that causes desolation. In verse 11, it desolated, it wiped out holiness. So it made the temple not a fit place to worship.

You couldn't, even if you were to do it sincerely, you can't go to the temple with your right sacrifice. And there's this idol to Zeus right there. So it wiped out the temple for what it was supposed to be for, it had to be cleansed.

For three and a half years, they couldn't offer their sacrifices there because of that, which is about the same time as the days mentioned in verses 11 and 12. The trouble will last for 1 ,290 days. Verse 11 says, but you had better be prepared to wait for an extra 45 days.

The next verse says, there was a literal fulfillment in history, therefore shadows the ultimate fulfillment yet to come, a time of trouble. Jesus told us that in this world, you will have trouble. It's true for the last year.

We can hope it won't be true for this coming year,.

But it probably will be.

But during that time, it's time of trouble. Pessimists should know, it won't be all bad.

Verse 10 says,.

Many, while this is going on, all this trouble, many, that's good, that's a lot, right? Shall purify themselves and make themselves white and it means righteous and refined. Others, they're getting sanctified.

They're growing in holiness. They're coming closer to God. Many will do that. So this age that is revealed is a time of constant refining, purifying, of people who were filthy and corrupt before turning to the Lord and being made right with him, being justified, seen by God, justified, never sinned, seen as holy in the sight of God, clothed in the spotless garments of Christ's perfect life.

So that's why they're there as if white, white clothing, perfect, unstained before God and undergoing the process of sanctification that is growing in holiness, being refined, becoming more and more holy and less sinful, experiencing the washing of water with the word.

Meanwhile, the wicked shall act wickedly, it says. So you have both these things going on at once, this refining of God's people and then the wicked being even more wickedly. The optimist can point to the many who are purified and refined and the pessimist can point to the wicked getting worse, the worst terrorist attacks, the worst depravity, the worst foolishness.

And so we have both these things going on at once at the same time, the world getting worse, giving us trouble and people being called out of the world. Being changed, being refined, being saved. How long will this age refining and trouble going on at the same time, how long will this go on?

Well, that's what the angel asked in verse six. How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?

What wonders?

World being more and more wicked and God's people being more and more refined side by side. How long will it be? Now, yes, there was a literal three and a half year trouble in the literal temple that was ended when the Maccabees put an end to that.

That was the end, celebrated now with Hanukkah. Remember with the end, with judgment and the last days, there is the now and there's the not yet, right? Some of God's promises are not yet, not yet fully fulfilled, but they come in now.

We get little taste of them, samples for taste, appetizers of them. That is God brings some of the end into this age before the end. He sometimes brings his judgment into the world as a preview of the final judgment.

He put an end to the campaign by Antiochus to end the worship of the Lord.

He ended that.

Antiochus thought he would end worship of the Lord. The Lord ended him. He put an end to that temple where the priests met traitors conspiring to kill the one they should have been worshiping in AD 70 within a generation of their crime.

Jesus said, these things will be fulfilled for this generation, within a generation of their crime and within a generation of that perfect sacrifice Jesus made, that old temple was destroyed. It first been made obsolete by Jesus' sacrifice, but then the Lord used the Roman general to put an end to that temple.

And then he put an end to the Roman empire. He put an end to a thousand years of the church drifting away from the gospel. When Martin Luther posted the 95 thesis and began the reformation, he used the Spanish to put an end to human sacrifices in the Americas under the Aztecs.

He put an end to slavery and crushed the society that had fought for it. He put an end to Nazism in Europe and to the brutal tyranny of Japan's absurd, self-serving greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere, one of the greatest lies in history.

Then he put an end to dreams of atheistic communism.

In Europe.

Then he brought an end to the arrogant delusions that history ended with the end of the Cold War and the triumph of capitalism and democracy, with us being prosperous and fat and happy just forever. God took a piece of the end, the not yet final end, and he brought it into this age, now.

So there's the now and there's the not yet. Not yet is the final end. And at the final judgment, when the wise and the wicked are raised at the end, when all are resurrected, one to shine, the righteous shine, God's people shine, and the other to disgrace, that's the end.

Well, now are all the little ends that the Lord brings into history, which is his story, as he continues to reign until he puts all his enemies under his feet. So we're now in that age. We're in the age of little ends and sometimes big trouble.

Sometimes experiencing the Lord intervening, putting an end to some abominations, an end to abusive relationships or hypocritical religion or a false doctrine, and sometimes experiencing trouble, but trusting that there will be a resurrection at the end.

The trouble was side by side with the refining. The trouble separates those who, in the words of our statement of faith, have a persevering attachment to Christ from those who do not. But the pressing question, even the angel wants to know here,.

How long will it last?

How long is this time of trouble, little ends and big trouble, side by side, gonna last? How long is this going on? In verse seven, the angel standing on the riverbank, he raises his hands, his right hand and his left hand, both hands, and he declares, when the shattering of the power, that is when this crusade, this jihad, to break the power of the holy people, God's people, comes to an end.

Notice that phrase, interesting phrase. When the shattering of the power, so there's this something going, something is trying to shatter the power of the holy people, of God's people, that's going on now.

And when that comes to an end, notice that in this time of trouble, the enemy is trying to shatter our power. This tells you right off, we have power. We have power to tear down strongholds against the knowledge of God.

In the gospel, we have the power of God for salvation, but the enemy is trying to shatter that power. The gates of hell are conspiring against us. We will have that power until the end. The enemy is trying to shatter it, but he won't succeed until the end.

When the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end, then and only then, all these things would be finished. That is, we will continue in this fight, neck deep in trouble, being refined, seeking to lead many to righteousness, being right with God.

We're doing this against the campaign to shatter and to scatter our power until it ends. When the attack on our power ends, then it will be the end. So we look at the world and we see that they're trying to attack our power.

Just this past weekend, a Christmas weekend, terrorists attacked churches in Nigeria, killing at least 140 Christians. Elsewhere, they ban Bibles, they ban churches, they suppress the gospel. Here in this country, they call it hate speech or try to get you to love money more than God's word, tempt you with what the world has to offer instead of seeking first the kingdom of God.

They're still attacking, right? The good news of that, this attack is still going on, which means you still have power, because they haven't stopped,.

Which means you still have power.

They're still trying to shatter it. Jesus is with us until the end of the age, so we don't have to worry about Him running out on us before the end. So we can know that as long as there is trouble, as long as there's shattering going on, trying to shatter our power, we will have power to overcome it.

Refining in the Time of Trouble

So there's the resurrection in the end, there's the refighting until the end, and then third, there's rest at the end. If we stop just with the news that we will have power until the end, power that our enemies are trying to shatter, but we still have it, then that could sound very exhausting.

It sounds as if we gotta keep striving and fighting until the end, we gotta hang on as the enemy is trying to shatter our power. But Daniel is told, and we're told, at the end of this chapter, at the end of Daniel, rest.

Daniel is told to go your way, verses nine and 13. He's been given this elaborate, detailed information about the history that God has written in advance, written ahead of time, that God is the victor.

So he has written a history of king after king, the ebb and the flow of empires in chapter 11. And so he admits in verse eight, Daniel admits, verse eight, that he doesn't understand it. Yeah, he doesn't understand all this about the king of the north, the king of the south, and all this going back and forth, because that's later history.

He doesn't need to understand it. It's for us, not for him. He asks in verse eight, what shall be the outcome of these things? What's the end of it all? What's the purpose of it all? Daniel is told at the end, don't worry, you shall rest.

And that's not just a prediction, it's a promise. You will rest. Maybe after another hard year of work or a year of hard work, you need to hear that. You will rest. Like in Psalm 95, today, if you hear his voice, enter his rest.

Just like judgment, there's a perfect full rest at the end, at the not yet. And there are little rest, foretaste of rest, appetizers of rest that we have now. We sometimes get a foretaste of the great rest at the end.

We get a foretaste of that now. At the end of a year, it's good to be able to take some days off and look back and rest, rest from a year full of work or studying or chores, errands and busyness. And here Daniel, now an old man, brought to Babylon as a boy, deprived himself of luxuries to be faithful to God, willing to be devoured by lions rather than give up praying, now working for his second empire, working for the Persians.

Near the end of a long, wise life, he is told, Daniel, you're gonna get rest. So now take it easy. After this elaborate revelation, write it down, seal it up, pass it down. Don't worry about if you don't understand it all, relax.

Daniel, you've been faithful.

You've known your God.

You stood firm. You took action. You resisted evil with the power that is at work in you. And soon, you'll have perfect rest. And be assured, you and all your people, you have a blessed place reserved just for you.

You have a reservation to have a place for you at the end. Remember how he began in chapter nine? He's seeking, God, your promises, you're gonna send us back to the promised land. You're gonna give us our place.

Where is it? Where are you doing? He's told at the end of chapter 12 here. You will get it. You will rest. You will have an allotted place, a restful place. Set aside for you. So here we are, the end of a year, 52 church services, 52 psalms, 52 sermons.

We got a new roof. After being almost flooded out in one service, we got a lot of teaching, a lot of songs, a lot of prayers, a lot of driving to get kids here, a lot of gospel lessons to small kids and evangelistic messages to youth.

Hopefully, a lot of sharing of the word in your own families. A lot of the gospel going out as we seek to tear down strongholds against the knowledge of God with the power of God and bring many to be right with God.

The world, the flesh, and the devil is still trying to shatter our power, but we still have it. Knowing that, we can rest. Indeed, we will rest because of Christ's work, because of His work to keep all the law, His work of living perfectly for us, His work of bearing the punishment that our sins deserved.

The first one to be raised from the dead who was asleep in the dust of the earth, He awoke to everlasting life so that we could too, so that we could awake to everlasting life and rest. So know that if you have that life now from Christ, know in 2024 that you can rest and that in eternity, you will rest in your allotted place.

So now, hear His voice and enter into His rest.