146. The Jewish Love Ran Cold

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Through the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10, 25 -37, he showed that even the

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Samaritans could do things that were morally righteous to the Jews, and he made them actually admit that it was the

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Samaritan who had done the righteous deed. Through his interactions with the Gentiles, he demonstrated God's love that knows no boundaries, and in doing so, he condemned the hateful pride that had consumed his people, and he called them to repent, because the gospel of God is for everyone.

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The gospel of God from the beginning of the Bible until the end of the Bible is for all who would call upon the name of the

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Lord. There is no place for racial supremacy and ethnocentrism among the people of God.

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 146,

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The Jewish Love Grew Cold. Well hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

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Whether you're a regular viewer or it's the first time that you're joining us, I am so glad that you are here.

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Our mission is to shake off the defeatist mindset that's been holding the church back, and to help revitalize

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Jesus's bride, so that she will joyfully rebuild Christendom, and to extend the dominion of Christ far as the curse is found, and I believe that that begins with robust eschatology, because if you think that the world is always spiraling towards an imminent collapse, and that our only purpose in this life is to prepare for the inevitable defeat, well then, you're going to spend your days like a traveling salesman going from one hotel to the next, with your bags always packed, but never putting down roots.

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But, on this show, we don't believe that. We believe that the world will increasingly come under the rule and authority of Jesus, and that with every passing generation, every century, or every bicentennial, that the population of the church on earth is going to grow, and that as the more people, more spirit -indwelled people that inhabit the earth, the more sanctified the earth is going to become.

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For instance, the more sanctified people, the more people who are indwelled with the spirit show up in your town, the more sanctified your town will become, well, why wouldn't that also be true of the world?

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As God raises up more Christians, which he's been doing for the last 20 centuries, well then, the net effect is not a world that's going to be becoming more lawless, but it's a world that's going to be becoming more

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Christian. As more Christians are added to the world, and as the church and families faithfully disciple little believers into faithful adults, the net effect of that is going to be a world that grows more submitted to Jesus, more in alignment with his vision, more submitted to his will.

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That's of course what's going to happen, and that's what we believe is going to happen, and that's what we're working to see happen in our life, in our families, and in our churches.

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Now, this doesn't mean that we believe that there's not going to be setbacks. There's going to be setbacks. We're living right now through a period of setbacks where things feel depressing and gross, but the antidote to depressing times like we are living in is not doctrines of defeat, doom, and dispensational gloomery.

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The way to win when times are tough is not to throw up the white flag, but to throw up the

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Jolly Roger. The way to honor Christ in hard times is not to become soft men, but hard men, now soft of heart for sure when it comes to the gospel, but thick of skin and hard of courage when it comes to taking back a world that belongs to Jesus and not the demons.

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A good picture of this is the book of Acts. They were ever advancing, even if they were beaten up and bruised and imprisoned, even if they were slandered and even if all men of evil were set against them, even if they were martyred, they were ever marching forward.

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And guess what? That is what we need to do in our day, and if we do that, we will win back the world.

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That's what this show is about, and that's why we focus so heavily on eschatology, because eschatology informs the way that we live, the way that we move, the way that we work, and the way that we build.

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So, with that, welcome to your weekly shot in the arm and your weekly boot to the tuchus.

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This is meant to prod all of God's people to righteousness, to crush the enemies of God underneath his boot, and to encourage the saints to serve him faithfully.

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Welcome to our show today, which is called Their Jewish Love Ran Cold. But before we dive into today's topic,

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I have some exciting updates and a big thank you that I want to share with you all. So with that, first off, as we near the end of the year,

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I want to brag about this show. We're almost at 1 ,700 subscribers, which that may not seem like a big deal if you're

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Mr. Beast, but for our show, which is only one year on YouTube, that's a big deal, especially considering that we're not talking about mush -mouthed evangelical topics, but rot -gut -in -your -face eschatology.

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These are two hour -long episodes at times on deep eschatology, and yet we've seen 1 ,700 % growth this year.

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So with that, I am beyond encouraged at the growth that we've seen so far. And if you haven't subscribed yet, then do that.

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Now's the perfect time to join our little growing community so that we can finish the year strong and set our sights for our goal next year, which is 5 ,000 subscribers.

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And in case you think that's too ambitious, I didn't think we were going to get to 1 ,500 subscribers this year.

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That was like the biggest and the most audacious goal that I could dream of, and yet here we are.

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And by the way, if we grow by the same percentage as we did this year, next year, 1 ,700%, we're going to blow past our goal in like May or June.

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I mean, to be honest, 5 ,000 subscribers seems like a pretty small goal given the growth that we've seen this year.

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And if we, like I said, if we grow by that same metric next year, we'll be at like 29 ,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

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So maybe I'm setting the bar way too low. But if you haven't subscribed and if you like these videos, go ahead and click the subscribe button.

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Now, if you do that, you'll get alerted whenever new videos are found, and it will actually help this channel reach more people.

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YouTube will see that this is an important topic, and it will populate our videos and other people's feeds, and it will help us grow and will help us reach more people, which is the goal.

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If we're going to defeat defeatism, then we actually have to get onto people's feeds so that they can see this material and so that they can understand that the book of Revelation is not about their disaster and not about the world spiraling into chaos, but it's about Jesus's victory.

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So we want people to understand that. We want people to get this incredible content that is in the book of Revelation so that they can understand it just like we are on this journey together, understanding it today.

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So hit the subscribe button and help us get there. Next, another announcement. Our merch store is almost ready to launch, and soon you're going to be able to snag exclusive broadcast gear, but I want your input on this.

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I want to know what kind of merch that you want. Maybe you don't want any, and then I don't need to spend time or money or effort on this, but maybe you want humorous shirts that beguile dispensationalism, or maybe you want series specific apparel like Revelation series stuff, or maybe you just want a shirt that says broadcast.

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Tell me what you want. Drop your ideas in the comments, whether it's hats or coffee mugs or anything like that.

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I want to know what you think. What do you think about the kind of merch that would be good for this show that would help us even be like walking billboards to get this message out to more people?

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So that's something that's going to be starting next year as well. And here's one more bit of exciting news to share.

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Coming soon, and by soon, I don't mean like the pre -millennialist who detaches thousands of years to the word soon in the book of Revelation, I mean soon like January.

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I'm going to be starting a Discord server for all broadcast members. That means if you're a

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Defender or Prod Squad member, then you're going to get access to this private

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Discord channel so that you can chat with me, you can ask questions, and we can build a community together.

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We can discuss theology or life or Monty Python or Aragorn, or we can also do live

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Q &As. I want to set this up so that we can have a place to chat.

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We can encourage one another, we can build one another up in the faith, and we can build the kind of community that goes beyond just a two hour

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YouTube show, but a growing community of people who are growing deep roots in their post -millennial courage, and they're encouraging one another to live this out in their marriages, and in their homes, and in their work, and in their community, and in their churches, and in our world.

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So I want this to be a hub for us to be able to encourage one another, and that's going to be available for Defenders and Prod Squad members in the new year.

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So if you're not a Defender or a Prod Squad member, check that out, sign up for that.

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That's going to be going live in just a few weeks. So give me a few weeks to get that going, because I don't know how to use

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Discord yet, and I need to figure it out, but it's in the works, and I'll let everyone know when it's live.

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Now, and finally, I do want to extend a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting this show. Whether you're emailing me, calling me, texting me, or leaving comments in the comments section below, your encouragement means so much to me, and it keeps me excited every week to make these episodes.

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So with that, I want us to get started, and I want us to get started with our

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Olivet Recap. Setting the Stage. Now as we begin, we need to be reoriented back into the first century world, and every week

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I give these long -form recaps that focus on different aspects of the context of Matthew 24, not to bore you with unnecessary details, but to make sure that we are hearing and seeing things like they did, seeing and feeling the weight of the text like we were actually present in their world.

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You see, we live a lot of life between these videos that I make. I only make them once a week, and there's a lot of things that have happened in our world, in your world, in my world, in our lives, that are going to yank us out of the world of the

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Bible and into the world of the here and now. And as John Stottwich famously said, the preacher is supposed to have one foot in the biblical world and one foot in the modern world so that he can bridge the gap of those two worlds and make it relevant for everyone who's listening.

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We have to, every week, find a way to get back into their world, because meaning exists in their world, since the meaning of the text exists within what the original author was communicating to the original audience.

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So because of that, our goal is to try to get back into the biblical world and get as close as we can to the first century

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Jewish Christians so that we can hear these texts in their world and in their context, and we can see what they would have seen and hear what they would have heard.

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And when we do that, eschatology actually becomes easy and dispensationalism becomes foolish.

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Now, let's jump into their world. I want you to imagine the bustling streets of ancient

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Jerusalem. It was a city steeped in a thousand years of history and culture. It was a proud city with a heritage of the

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Davidic bloodline and kings, the lavish wealth of Solomon, the righteous reforms of Josiah, the agony of exile, but the joy of rebuilding.

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Yet, by the time that we get to the New Testament, the once proud and royal

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Jerusalem had been under enemy occupation for more than 600 years.

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In fact, by the time that Jesus gave his blistering rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23, it had been 616 years since Jerusalem had had a king.

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Now, if you remember from the Old Testament, Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC by the Babylonians.

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So that means 616 years that it, that it had sat without a king. It had been handed from one empire to the next, which is what

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Daniel tells us in Daniel chapter seven, Jerusalem was handed off from Babylon to Persia, from Persia to Greece, and then to Rome and the

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Jews the entire time as they're being pinball bounced between empires were under the heavy yoke of their oppressors and they were becoming exasperated by waiting on their deliverance.

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And as we'll see today, this frustration turned them into a mangled knot of sin and vice like Gollum.

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After hundreds of years of carrying his precious, he no longer looked the same. He was mangled and twisted and no longer in his original form.

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That's what happened to the Jews as they held onto their idolatrous loves. It mangled them to the point that we barely recognized them in AD 70.

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Now it was into this tumultuous and turbulent world that Christ was born a beacon of hope that was going to reshape

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Israel's destiny forever. Matthew one, 18 through 25 and his birth wasn't just the arrival of a savior, but it was the beginning of a mission that would force the

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Jewish nation to choose. He was bringing them to a crossroads. They would either embrace

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Jesus as the fulfillment of their covenant with Yahweh and follow him or they would reject him and they'd be plunged headlong into the catastrophic judgment that both he and John the

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Baptist were predicting. This is why Simeon said that the infant Christ was born and the reason that he was born was for the rise and fall of everyone in Israel.

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The rise of the true Israel of God who would be bought and paid for by Christ and brought into covenant through him.

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But the fall of fake Israel, the Israel of the flesh, the circumcision who would be left on the outside of Christ looking in.

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Now from the outset of Jesus's life, it was marked by both purpose and adversity.

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Even as a fragile infant, it seems like immediately the war begins for this covenant reality.

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He was hunted down by a paranoid psychopath named King Herod whose insatiable lust for power drove him to slaughter innocent babies in a desperate attempt to eliminate his prophesied rival

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Matthew two, 16 through 18. This wasn't merely a political act. It was wholly satanic.

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It was an assault aimed at thwarting God's redemptive plan, the coming Christ. Now in God's providence,

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Jesus's family fled to Egypt, not only for his survival, but also as a profound sign that he not the

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Israelites was the true son that was called out of Egypt, Hosea 11 one. He's the true

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Israel. That's what the point of Matthew is trying to get across to us. Unlike the rebellious Israel of old,

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Jesus would be the faithful son who would perfectly obey the father's will in all things.

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Just as Israel was delivered through the waters of the Red Sea, so too would Jesus deliver his people from the bondage of sin and death.

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Yet as Egypt's rejection of God climaxed in their destruction at the

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Red Sea, so too would Jerusalem. They would face the fiery judgment for rejecting the true and greater son.

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Those who followed him would be the true Israel inheriting the blessings of the covenant. But those who rejected him would face the drowning judgment that was unleashed upon the apostate

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Jews in AD 70. Now as Jesus stepped out of his quiet obscurity of his youth and into the public eye, his ministry thundered with an urgent and unyielding message.

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He said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Matthew 4 17 side by side with John the

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Baptist. He confronted the Jews with the sobering reality that centuries of covenant infidelity had finally led them to the very edge of catastrophe.

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Matthew three, one through 12. This wasn't a rhetorical warning. It was a final summons.

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If they did not repent, their stubborn rebellion was going to culminate in their own destruction.

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Yahweh himself had come in the flesh to his people in the person of Jesus Christ, fulfilling the words that Malachi had spoken four centuries earlier that he's coming like a refiner's fire and like a fuller soap.

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Malachi three, two through three for the penitent, for the repentance, for those who are willing to bow their knee and humble their heart before this king.

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His presence was going to be a purifying flame, burning away the dross of sin, restoring them to covenant purity.

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And they were going to have so much joy. They were going to leap like calves that were let out to pasture is what Malachi says.

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But for the rebellious, his fire wasn't a refining fire, but it was a consuming fire.

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It was reducing their self -righteousness to ashes and leaving nothing left.

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But the smoldering remains of their obstinacy that would be swept away in judgment. Now, at the beginning of his ministry, his baptism in his 40 days in the wilderness was nothing less than him saying to the people of Israel, I am true

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Israel. Just like we said before, unlike the faithless generation that crossed between the waters and were led into the wilderness by the spirit and who died for their rebellion, numbers 1435 through 38,

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Jesus faithfully crossed the waters. He was faithfully led by the spirit into the wilderness. And unlike them, he emerged out of the wilderness on live, having totally and completely obeyed the living

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God, Matthew four, one through 11. When he called his 12 disciples, the number 12 in that moment was not accidental or coincidental.

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It wasn't just simply a nice round number like, yeah, I think I'll choose a dozen. He was deliberately reconstituting the 12 tribes of Israel, putting himself at the center, which means that he's true

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Israel. And see, instead of a tabernacle at the center, instead of sacrifices at the center, if you go back to the book of Leviticus, you'll realize that the tabernacle, the sacrifices and the priesthood sat right in the center of the camp.

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Now Jesus is the center of the camp. And if you want to be a part of true Israel, then you have to be a part of him.

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Matthew 10, one through four throughout Jesus's ministry. He was issuing an urgent call for the lost sheep of Judah to repent.

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That's why he tells the woman that that it's not yet time for you, that I've come for the lost sheep of Judah.

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Why did he say that? Many people wonder why did Jesus say that I came for the lost sheep of Judah? Because his purpose was to save all of the lost

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Judeans that were his before Judea was plunged into the fires of AD 70.

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He came for two reasons to bring his enemies, the apostate

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Jews underneath his feet and to bring to life his people, starting with the faithful Judeans that repented.

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And then the Samaritans who repented and then the Romans that repented and then the

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Gentiles that repented in the first century, the second century, the third, fourth, fifth, and all the way down to us, his message to them wasn't merely an invitation to change their life.

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It wasn't merely an invitation to raise their hand and fill out a I just decided to follow

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Jesus card. No, it was a, it was a call to radically repent, to radically leave their adulterous, idolatrous ways to lament for their refusal to fall in a line with their covenant.

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God, time and again, he exposed their adultery and he exposed their refusal to obey the words of God and his words were, were chilling and his words cut to the bone and he was calling them to leave their sin.

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He even said, he even said this, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgment day than for you,

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Matthew 11, 23 through 24. Do you get what he's saying that Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgment day, they're going to get more grace than you.

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Why? Because they stood there watching the miracles of God by God in the flesh and they didn't repent.

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The brazen audacity of Judea's defiance stood in sharp contrast to those infamous cities of old

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Sodom, Gomorrah, Tyre, Sidon, even Nineveh. These were the vilest collections of God hating people that had ever been.

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And yet Jesus declared that if they would have seen the miracles that he performed, then they would have repented as well.

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I mean, think about Nineveh, Nineveh repented at a half -hearted sermon from Jonah. And yet the

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Jews who had a first century or a front row seat, and yet the first century

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Jews of Jerusalem who had a front row seat to the miracles of God incarnate remained unyielding and unrepentant.

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Jesus's comparisons cut deep. He exposed how the Jews of his day were worse than the most wretched assemblages of sinners that had ever walked the earth.

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That's why he compared them to Sodom and Gomorrah. He's saying that they're worse. Their judgment will be more intolerable.

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But Jerusalem bloated with their pride, bloated with their self -righteousness and their hardened hearts.

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They spurned the very Messiah who came to save them. It's not a fluke of human history.

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It was the outworking of God's curse upon the land. The old covenant that they dishonored and desecrated for centuries came with covenant curses and those covenant curses were being poured out in that generation.

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And the catastrophic fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 was the climax of the covenant woes and covenant curses and God's righteous judgment being poured out on them.

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And what we see at AD 70 is that God's judgment had ran its course.

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Now as Jesus's ministry intensified, so did his message. You get to the middle half and to the back half of his ministry.

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Jesus's rhetoric is now sharper, it's more pointed, and even says to the

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Pharisees that their father is the devil. He says, you are of your father, the devil,

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John 8 44. And he was telling them straight up, you have no lineage to Moses or Abraham.

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Stop thinking that you're children of Abraham. You're not. You're worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. You're worse than Tyre and Sidon.

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You think that you're Jews simply because you have Jewish bloodlines, but you're children of Satan. You're the bastard kids of hell and you're being influenced, led by, and manipulated by Satan himself.

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Their unrepentant hearts made them fertile ground for Satan's tyranny and where their former loves were manipulated and replaced and perverted by the

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Lord of darkness. Matthew 24 13. Their light was consumed by darkness,

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John 3 19. And tragically, all of this, and Satan's influence upon that generation, because he is their father.

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That's what he said. It's what Jesus said. All of this led the Jews to a showdown between Christ and them, where they murder him and then they murder his people and they murder his followers until finally

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God pours out his covenant fury upon them, which is what Matthew 23 says is what

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Matthew 24 says. When Jesus entered Jerusalem in the spring of 80 30, just days before his final

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Passover, he stepped into the climax, the most climactic moment of his ministry.

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He arrived with a kind of pomp and circumstance. He arrived and he said to his followers that now the hour had come.

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What hour? The hour of God's judgment. And with it, the old order stood upon the brink of collapse.

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Matthew 21 1 through 11. His triumphal entry celebrated by the crowds was a symbol of judgment.

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He came to a city that was supposed to be bearing him fruit, but they only offered him leaves and Jesus the next day curses, a fig tree that was supposed to be bearing him fruit, but only offered him leaves.

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It became a powerful symbol of Israel's covenant failure and a clear prophecy of their doom.

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Matthew 21 18 through 22, the tree that was once full of promise now stood as a fruitless example of unfaithful

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Israel that would be withered and thrown into the fire. Then he goes and he starts telling parables.

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He plainly declares to them that the kingdom of God is going to be taken away from the Jews and it was going to be given to a people who were going to bear its fruit.

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So the destruction, the desolation of Jerusalem was a deliberate act of God's judgment because of their unfaithfulness and it demonstrated

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God's long suffering patients had finally worn out and that justice was coming.

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This is why Jesus told his disciples that Jerusalem fall was going to happen within a single generation. Luke 21 20 through 24 and he told them that they would know exactly when all of these things were going to happen because it would be evidenced by numerous signs.

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Jesus gave them multiple signs that they need to be looking out for, like false messiahs that were going to rise up, wars and rumors of wars that were going to break out.

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The Roman world was going to be shaken by earthquakes and famines. A great apostasy was going to happen among Jewish converts to Christ who leave

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Jesus and who go back to Judaism. And as we're going to look at today, he gives them another sign that the love of the

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Jewish people was going to run bitterly cold like the frigid waters of Antarctica cold.

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And what Jesus would tell his disciples today is when his disciples saw that sign, when they saw that the

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Jewish love for the Jews had grown cold, that it would be a plainly patently obvious symbol that the judgment was drawing near.

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They would know when they saw this particular prophecy happening that the

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Jews didn't have much more time left today. We're going to look at how the love of the

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Jews grew cold. We're going to look at what that means. What does it mean that the love of the Jews grew cold? How does the

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Bible prove that the love of the Jews grew cold? What role does Satan have in the love of the Jews growing cold?

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And how does history record to us that the love of the Jews grew cold?

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There's a lot of new information in this episode. I think a lot of interesting and fascinating information. So with that, buckle up and let's get into it.

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Our text begins this way. At that time, many will fall away and will betray one another and will hate one another.

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Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many because lawlessness has increased.

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Most people's love will grow cold, Matthew 24, 10 through 12. What I want you to learn today is that this is not a general promise that at some point in the future, people in general are going to have their love grow cold.

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This is not a passage about 21st century people who don't look you in the eye anymore because they're too busy and they don't send you a holiday card because the love ran cold.

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This is not about us. What I want to show you today is that this happened in the first century and it was about the

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Jews and it was about their love growing cold. And with that, let us jump right into part one, the hatred of the

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Jews. Now, on the rugged slopes of the Mount of Olives, Jesus stood with his disciples, resolute and burdened with the gravity of his mission.

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Below him was the city of Jerusalem, stretched out with all of its teeming life and traditions and robust faith and everything that was united them together in this sort of unbreakable covenant bond.

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Yet, on this day, the city of Jerusalem was blind to what was getting ready to break out upon them with a steady and unyielding voice.

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Jesus proclaimed to his disciples the dark and certain judgment that was soon going to descend upon his people.

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And what was the cause of this calamity? You might be asking yourself, what was the reason that Jesus gave that they were going to be ripped apart just like the temple?

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Well, he tells his disciples the reason that they were going to be destroyed, the reason that they were going to be driven like cattle to the slaughter, was that their love had grown cold.

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Essentially, Jesus declared that they would be reduced to a kind of pure hatred, a kind of hatred that chokes out all love and all hope.

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And it's the kind of lovelessness that actually leads people to commit suicide. That is the destiny of the

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Jewish people, according to Jesus. The love that once burned brightly within their chest, the chest of every

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Jewish patriarch and woman and child that was now waning and had been waning for the last 400 years.

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And now in the first century, now as Jesus standing on the Mount of Olives, there was a single tiny ember of love that was still growing within the hearts of the

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Jewish people. But it was about to be snuffed out. Of all the peoples on earth, the

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Jews were made with love. They were made by love, they were made for love. They were made with God's love to be at the very center of their being.

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They were made to love God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength. They were made to love their fellow man as ardently as they love themselves.

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They were made by a God of love. And here they are in the first century, filled with all sorts of hatred, so that they had become a shell of their former glory.

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And what remained of them, that little spark of love that they had perverted for 400 years, was going to completely be snuffed out in that generation.

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The Jews of Jerusalem, the chosen people of God, were not made by a

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God of hatred, but a God of love. And they were now being reduced to a people who were filled with animosity, filled with judgmentalism, filled with pride, and ethnic purity, and ethnocentrism, and callous aversions to anything that was not their own.

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And yet, this wasn't even the worst of it. Because Jesus foresaw that in the immediate future, the only bit, the only kernel, the only ember of their love that was left, the only warm spot remaining in their heart was going to be the thing that they would use as fuel for their destruction.

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They would take the one thing that they had remaining that they loved, and they would learn to despise it. By the first century, the

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Jews were a people who were filled with a myriad of hates. And Jesus was predicting that their final idolatrous love would not only be taken away from them, but it would be the very reason for their undoing.

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Let me explain what I mean by that. When Jesus said that the love of the first century

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Jews were going to grow cold, many in the ancient world would have probably bent over with a rip roaring belly laugh.

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And they might've said something like, oh yeah, well, that's rich. The Jews, the

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Jews are going to have their love grow cold. They would have said that because they would have known that the

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Jews weren't a very loving people. That reaction would have been quite justified.

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They would have wondered, well, gosh, if their love grows cold, whatever small miniscule amount that there's left, what kind of demon, what kind of horrible creature, hate -filled, judgmental creature is going to become of them if their love grows cold.

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We're not talking about a sweet little grandma with soft little pillowy hands. We're talking about a people who were consumed with rage, consumed with racial hatred.

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People who, it was almost like they were fueled by their hatred. If Jesus was prophesying that the smallest little lingering affection in their heart was going to be snuffed out soon, well, you can only imagine the awful grizzly state that those people would descend into.

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And I can tell you, it would be nothing short of madness. And I don't say this to be mean,

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I'm merely pointing out a historical fact that others have pointed out. For instance, like Cassidus, who once said of them, the

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Jews are extremely loyal to one another, always ready to show compassion, but towards every other people, they only feel hate and enmity.

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To see this a bit more clearly, I think we need to surveil some of the history so that we can see just how hateful the first century

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Jews really were. Section one, the Jews' hatred for Rome.

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Now, the first people, the group of people that I want to talk about that the Jews hated was Rome, and they had every reason to hate

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Rome. This wasn't just a petty grudge or some baseless resentment. It was a fire that burned with fuel from centuries of oppression.

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The Roman Empire was the current boot that was standing on the neck of a people who had been in a long line of people who were trying to curb stomp them into oblivion.

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The Romans, like the Seleucids, like the Greeks, like the Persians, like the Babylonians before them, came in with one mission, and that was to quell the revolutionary spirit of the

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Jews and to stop and thwart any potential uprising that could happen.

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Think about it. Your empire is not really stable if you've got a group of people who are unstable and constantly wanting to start a revolution, which is what the

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Jews were doing. The Romans' main goal was to silence that, stop that, neuter that, and they did that in a variety of different ways, such as physical presence, standing armies, governmental infrastructure, taxation, and other means.

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Concerning taxes, Rome was actually bleeding the Jewish people dry. In addition to the

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Roman imperial taxes, the Romans appointed ostentatious Jewish kings like Herod who had ambitions for lavish building projects, which meant more taxes were going to be leveled on the people.

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They were not only going to be taxed by Rome, but they were going to be taxed by the Jews, the Jewish king. If that weren't enough lemon juice in the wound, the

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Romans also appointed their own starving Jewish peasants to be the tax collectors who would gather the money for Rome from their own people.

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Because they were starving peasants, they would also gather more than what they were required to gather, and they would skim money off the top so that the

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Romans actually made the Jews rob the Jews, which made this both devastating and deeply personal.

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Now, their land that was promised to them by God, it was promised to their fathers, it also was a source of frustration because it was being trampled by Roman soldiers who worshiped false

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Roman gods and defiled everything that they considered holy. The Romans would hang their idolatrous symbols in public places just to tick off the

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Jews. They stood up their debauched bathhouses, they polluted the land of Judah with all kinds of cultural trappings and idolatry that the

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Jews deeply and ferociously hated. And when you add on top of all of this that the Roman authorities mocked the

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Jewish laws, they violated the temple sanctity, they imposed imperial cult worship throughout the providence of Judah.

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Well, you can kind of imagine why the Jews were so furious, but if that were the only reason that the

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Jews were filled with hatred, if the Romans were the only people that the Jews hated, well, I think we could probably maybe understand.

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Maybe we could even sympathize with them, because if you and I were in the same situation and we were oppressed or someone came in and took over our country and we were treated like the

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Jews were treated, well, maybe we would be angry too. Maybe you and I would have the kind of murderous revenge plots playing up in our head like they did, like an angry cobra that was ready to strike.

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But sadly, that's that kind of justifiable hatred towards Rome that we can maybe sympathize with is not the only kind of hatred that the first century

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Jews had. It did not stop there. It was only the beginning. Section two, the hatred of the

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Samaritans. Now as we said, they didn't only hate the Romans, but they also hated everyone. Take for instance, the way that the

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Jews felt about the first century Samaritans. The first century Samaritans were a half -breed of people in front of our historical records and from the text in the

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New Testament, they hated the Samaritans with a ferocity that rivals any hatred that you can conjure up in any period of time from one man to another.

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They hated them. And this hatred wasn't a godly kind of hatred of your enemies. It wasn't the perfect kind of hatred that David talks about in the

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Psalms. This wasn't that kind of hatred. This was self -righteous arrogance fed by a twisted understanding of their own scriptures that made them feel like they were the superior race and that the

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Samaritans were nothing more than mongrels and imposters. This kind of self -love poisoned them and it destroyed their own humanity.

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For instance, the Jews of the first century didn't just dislike the Samaritans, they despised them and they thought of them as vermin, as maggots, as people who were polluting the pure bloodline of Israel.

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They thought of them as a stain on their own national identity. The Samaritans' audacity to claim that they were the true inheritors of Jacob, they were the ones who had the wells of Jacob, they were the ones who worshipped on the true mountain

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Mount Gerizim to the Jews was blasphemy. And it was a blasphemy they could not abide with.

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Their hatred of them is recorded in the scriptures. For instance, John writes this, the

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Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans, John 4, 9. Yeah, that's true.

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Maybe even an understatement. They called the Samaritans dogs, which is a term of complete dehumanization.

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They spat on the ground at the very mention of a Samaritan. Their blood boiled at the sight of a

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Samaritan. They defiantly refused to even look at them, much less to travel through their lands. The Talmud even records the prevailing first century

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Jewish sentiment of the Samaritans when it says this, he who eats the bread of Samaritans is like one who eats the flesh of swine,

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Mishnah, Shabbat 8, 10. To the Jews, the swine or pig was one of the most detestable of all the unclean animals.

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So making this comparison was the highest form of insult and revulsion.

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Their contempt didn't stop at words, though. Historical accounts tell us that Jewish travelers would go miles and miles and miles out of their way to avoid walking through the

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Samaritan territory, which would have been a straight shot from some points in Galilee to Jerusalem. But they refused to even step foot in the land for fear that it was going to defile them.

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They viewed the Samaritans as an unholy plague upon the nation of Israel and that their very existence was an affront to the living

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God. When Jesus and his disciples traveled through Samaria, you have to remember, his disciples were a part of this.

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They were shocked that he would be even willing to speak with a Samaritan woman, John 4, 27.

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And this disdain was ingrained within them over years and years and years of growing up in a country that hated them so bad.

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Think about this. James and John, when Jesus is preaching to the Samaritans and they don't immediately repent in Luke, they want to call down fire from heaven upon them.

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Luke 9, 54. It takes a lot for you to hate someone so much that you want to have

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God in the flesh call down fire upon your enemies. But that was what they wanted. The depth of the

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Jewish hatred for the Samaritans can't be overstated. The Jews of the first century regarded them as dung, as unworthy of existence, a race so impure that the very presence of them on earth was a violation of God's holy law.

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And if they had even a modicum of social power, if they had any modicum of freedom to enact their will, then the tales of men like Hitler and Stalin, the killing sprees that those men perpetrated as evil as they were, would have looked like child's play at the hands of the hate filled first century

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Jews. Again, this is not righteous indignation. It was sinful racial arrogance born out of a corrupted understanding that they were

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God's chosen people, which meant that they were the only people on earth that mattered.

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Now, it wasn't just the Romans. It wasn't just the Samaritans. They hated everybody on earth.

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They literally hated everybody but themselves, which takes us to section three, their hatred of the

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Gentiles. Now, the Gentiles, they considered as bad or maybe even worse than the

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Samaritans. To many Jews, the Gentiles weren't just outsiders. They were vile, unclean, irredeemable, and detestable.

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Their hatred for the Gentiles wasn't just an abstract prejudice. It was a blistering, all -consuming, loathing hatred that poisoned their worldview and corrupted their understanding of God's grace and his mission.

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To the Jews, the first century Gentiles were nothing more than spiritual filth. They were incapable of knowing

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God. They were destined for destruction. They were unworthy of life itself. This hatred was so ingrained in them that one rabbi even said this, the best of the

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Gentiles, the best of the Gentiles should be killed. Think about that.

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The very best of the Gentiles, no matter what race, no matter what group, the very best of them, the very most honorable among them were deserving of nothing but death.

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Their hatred was so blinding, so entrenched, that murder in their twisted minds became a virtue.

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A way to cleanse the earth of everyone which was everyone that they deemed unworthy of existence.

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This contempt was embedded in every fabric of the

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Jewish psyche. In their religious life, especially in their worship. In the second temple, the

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Soreg, I don't know if you know this story or not, but there was a stone barrier between the court of the

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Gentiles and the court of the women, which was the inner court. The beginning of the inner courts where only the Jews could go in.

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There's a stone placard that was found inside the temple complex that now is existing in a museum somewhere that says this, no foreigner is to enter within the balustrade and forecourt around the sacred precinct.

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Whoever is caught will himself be responsible for his ensuing death.

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This wasn't a hollow threat. This was a law that they had actually etched into stone so that when the

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Gentiles saw it, they would have to take their own life in their hands if they violated it.

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And it's another fragment, another evidence, another proof that the Jews despised the

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Gentiles. The Jewish historian Josephus also documents that any Gentile that was caught crossing into the barrier, the dividing wall, that's why

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Jesus says, or sorry, that's why Paul says that the dividing wall has been broken. That's why Jesus, when he died, the temple curtain was torn into.

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Why? Because the wall of hostility was broken down. Josephus is telling us that that wall of hostility, according to the

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Jews, was still very much in operation and that if you went past that wall, hostilities would come upon you.

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It wasn't about preserving a sense of righteousness or holiness. It was about exclusion. It was about making it clear to everyone that the

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Gentiles were so detestable to the Jews that they could not even come near or approach the very presence of God.

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This is why Jesus cleansed the temple, because they turned his house from being a house of prayer into a house of commerce.

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Why did they do that? Because they hated the Gentiles so much that they would rather have animal feces and merchants with their money changing stuff there instead of the

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Jews, or instead of, sorry, instead of the Gentiles being anywhere near their holy and perfect and purified temple.

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Their hatred went beyond their boundaries and beyond their warnings. It permeated their hearts and minds, and it soured everything about them.

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To the Jews, the Gentiles weren't just unclean. They were an affront to everything that they believed was holy.

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The very existence of Gentiles was an abomination in their eyes, a stain upon the world that needed to be wiped out.

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And the Talmud even records this hostility explicitly, teaching that Gentile women are regarded as animals.

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That a Gentile mother nursing her child was no different than a beast feeding its young.

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This is a depth of hatred that goes down to complete dehumanization.

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The Gentiles were not seen as fellow humans, but as subhuman creatures who only existed to be used or to be discarded.

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Their hatred caused them to twist their scriptures and read their prophets wrongly. They read in the prophets that Israel was a light to the nations,

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Isaiah 42, 6 and Isaiah 49, 6. But they turn these passages into fuel for their ethnic arrogance.

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Instead of saying, we're a light to the Gentiles, we're the ones that are going to tell the world about the glories of God.

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Instead of that, they said, we're the light. We're the ones who are holy.

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We're the ones who are good. Everyone else is vermin. They ignored

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God's call that their existence was about blessing the nations.

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Genesis 12, 3. The reason they exist, existed was to bring the light to the nations, to bring the blessings of God to the nations.

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And yet they use these passages to revel in their own smug, self -righteous superiority.

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They look down their noses at the Gentiles. They imagine themselves as God's favorite, while everyone else was nothing more than fodder for the fires of judgment.

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They missed entirely the vision of Isaiah 56, 7, where God declares, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.

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Instead, they saw the temple as their exclusive insider domain, a fortress of ethnic pride dedicated to their own self -righteousness.

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Even in their daily lives, they maintained this hatred constantly. They would refuse to enter

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Gentile homes because it would defile them. Acts 10, 28. They wouldn't eat Gentile food.

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They wouldn't drink Gentile water. They wouldn't touch Gentile objects. Their hatred ran so deep that they would even shake the dust off of their own sandals when they were leaving

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Gentile lands, as if the dirt itself was contaminated by their non -Jew swinery.

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They saw Gentiles as fit for servitude, death, or annihilation. In their warped view, even

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God himself joined in the hatred of the Gentiles, a sentiment that was utterly contrary to the scriptures, but caused them to be filled with this kind of self -righteous pride.

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And this hatred wasn't just private, it was public. It seeped into their interactions with the occupying

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Roman forces and the broader world. Their loathing for the Gentiles was so intense that it often led to riots and uprisings, as they refused to accept even the slightest hint of Gentile authority over their lives.

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This seething hatred culminated in the rejection of the Messiah himself, who dared to extend

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God's mercy to the Gentiles. Do you know, as you read the Gospels, pay attention to this, the Jews do not start hating

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Jesus until he becomes friendly with the Gentiles. When Jesus praised the faith of a

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Roman centurion, Matthew 8, 10. When he healed a Gentile woman, Matthew 15, 28. When he drove the demons out of a

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Gentile man, Mark 5, 1 through 20. That's when their fury started bubbling up.

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That's when it knew no bounds. When Jesus was signaling that he was going to break down the dividing wall of hostility between the

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Jews and the Gentiles, they could not stand it. And they turned on Jesus with a kind of fury that eventually led to them murdering

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God in the flesh. The brutal truth is this hatred obviously did not come from God.

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It came from their own idolatry, from their own sin, from their own refusal to embrace God's love for the nations.

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They were called again to be the light that was going to draw the nations into the beauty of God's holiness. But instead they built their walls and they built their division.

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They nurtured their hatred as blasphemous as it was until it led to their destruction.

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Their contempt for the Gentiles was not a defense for God's honor, but it was a perversion of it.

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They thought their hatred made them holy, but in reality, it made them haughty, sinful, and blind.

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Jesus exposed the ugliness of this at every turn. He healed Gentiles. He praised Gentiles.

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He rebuked the arrogance of his own people through the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10, 25 through 37.

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He showed that even the Samaritans could do things that were morally righteous to the

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Jews. And he made them actually admit that it was the Samaritan who had done the righteous deed.

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Through his interactions with the Gentiles, he demonstrated God's love that knows no boundaries.

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And in doing so, he condemned the hateful pride that had consumed his people and he called them to repent because the gospel of God is for everyone.

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The gospel of God from the beginning of the Bible until the end of the Bible is for all who would call upon the name of the

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Lord. There is no place for racial supremacy and ethnocentrism among the people of God.

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And wherever it shows up, destruction for that people is not far behind.

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It was spiritual rebellion. It was a rebellion against everything God had called

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Israel to be. And it stands as a sobering reminder to every single one of us that pride and self -righteousness can corrupt even the most religious heart and turn it into a monster.

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This all -consuming pride and hatred didn't stop with the Romans, didn't stop with the

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Gentiles, it didn't stop with the Samaritans. Their malice, as we pointed out many times before, also turned against the

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Christians of the first century. Jews that had converted to Christ, well, those who proclaim

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Christ as Lord, their hatred turned on them as well. And Jesus warned his disciples that their allegiance to him was gonna provoke the

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Jews to a kind of unrelented fury. He told them plainly, he said, they're gonna make you outcast from the synagogue.

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But an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God, John 16 too.

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This leads us to section four, their hatred of the church.

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In the first century, the love that was supposed to define God's people had completely eroded and fallen apart.

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This wasn't just a cultural failure, it was a judgment from God. Jesus had warned them and he said that because lawlessness has increased, most people's love will grow cold.

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He wasn't just talking about a random sin that just happened to creep into the people of the

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Jews, he's talking about a doom. That's what Matthew 23 is all about, that God is intentionally cursing the

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Jews. And then we know because of that curse that this is not a random event, but this is

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God pressing down his Deuteronomic woes, Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 26,

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God is pressing down these woes upon them that's causing them to devolve into self -centered love that took over their hearts.

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Their love wasn't for God or for their neighbors, that's what they were designed to be loving, but it was wrapped up in their own pride and their own traditions.

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It was so twisted that it became the very thing that God hated, leaving them to face the consequences of their covenant rebellion.

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And yet their hatred for Christians was probably the hottest hatred that they had so far.

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Yes, they hated the Romans. Yes, they hated the Samaritans and the Gentiles, but those were distant people living somewhere else in foreign lands.

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It was easy to hate them, they were outsiders. But the Christians, the people that they once called mother and father and sister and brother and neighbor and countrymen and friend, to the

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Jews, Christians were traitors of the highest order. They had abandoned the pure and undefiled religion of Judaism to sup with the unclean pigs at Jesus's table.

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That betrayal of Jews leaving the faith to go follow a Nazarene upstart was a level of betrayal that they could not endure.

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And it fueled a rage in them. Yes, the Jews hated the Gentiles. Yes, the Jews hated the Samaritans, but they weren't at war with them.

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They looked at them judgmentally from a distance and they hated them quietly in their hearts and they talked about it in their conversations and all of that.

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But they never went to war with those people, but they went to war with the church.

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It was a pain that stung them so deeply. They felt betrayed by their own people that led to a rage that comes when the edifice that you've created, the world that you've created begins crumbling right at your very feet.

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And it's then that you know that you're losing. When they saw

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Jews turning to Jesus, it mystified and it broke them.

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For the Jewish leaders, Christianity wasn't just wrong, it was treason against heaven.

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It threatened everything that they held sacred, the law of Moses, the temple, their place as a nation, their ethnic purity and pride.

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All of these things were pillars of their identity. And now the Christians were claiming that Jesus is the one who fulfilled the law.

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Jesus is the one who's gonna replace the temple. Jesus is the one who's gonna bring salvation, not through the works of the law and not through the sacrificial system and through the blood of the lamb, but he was gonna bring salvation through faith alone.

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That was maddening to them. Even worse, the

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Christians were welcoming Gentiles into their table, Samaritans to their table. They were preaching that God's family was now open to everyone.

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Red, yellow, black, white, all of them are precious in Jesus' sight. And they were saying that through Christ, the world was gonna be ransomed to himself, to the

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Jews, that was blasphemy. It felt like an attack on the existence that they created that was fueled by hate and madness.

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They hated Christianity and they weren't quiet and they weren't restrained about it like they were with the

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Samaritans and the Gentiles. It caused them to boil over into a kind of violent persecution that you can read about in the book of Acts.

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The book of Acts, other New Testament writings are filled with accounts of the Jews violently rushing against the

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Christians, wiping them out, accusing them, whipping them, imprisoning them, taking them and hauling them up before Roman authorities, even killing them.

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Stephen was stoned to death by the furious mob that looked like they could not even control themselves, Acts 7, 54 through 60.

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Paul was chased out of town and then another town and then another town by Jewish zealots who wanted to murder him.

01:00:04

There was even a conspiracy that was formed by 40 men to assassinate Paul. And they said that they weren't even gonna eat bread until they killed him,

01:00:11

Acts 23, 12 through 22. This wasn't a theological disagreement between two rival sects, the

01:00:17

Jews and the Christian. It was blood lust. It was like wild animals attacking the early church, determining to destroy it before it could grow up in out of its infancy.

01:00:29

And so far on this show, we have covered a lot of this. We've covered the kind of Jewish hatred that was perpetrated against the

01:00:37

Christians. We've talked about how they've persecuted them. We've talked about the biblical evidence for this. If you don't remember, you can go back and look at it in the episode on the tribulations.

01:00:46

We go in depth about that. So we don't need to go into that any further here. But what I do wanna point out is the truth of this is that the first century

01:00:54

Jews were defined by hatred. They were a people who were given over to hatred.

01:01:01

They hated the Romans who ruled over them. They hated the Samaritans who lived beside of them. They hated the

01:01:06

Gentile world that was filled with goyim. And they hated Christians who came from them.

01:01:14

Every moment of the first century Jewish day was filled with a variety of hates so that they barely did anything that wasn't tainted by their hatred.

01:01:28

They ate with their hatred. They woke up in their hatred. They fell asleep in their hatred.

01:01:34

They were committed to their hatred. And Jesus warned of this in Matthew 24, 12.

01:01:41

Like we've been saying, because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold.

01:01:47

Jesus is not talking about most people on earth like those in China and those in Australia and those in Canada and those in Panama or whatever else.

01:01:56

Jesus is talking about most of the Jews' hatred will run cold.

01:02:02

How do we know that? A few verses later, Matthew 24, 34 says, all of these things is gonna happen to this generation.

01:02:09

In the book of Matthew, this generation means that generation of Jews. It alludes back to the

01:02:14

Exodus narrative, to the wicked and adulterous generation that died in the wilderness, which is exactly what was gonna happen to the

01:02:21

Jews. They were the first century version of that generation. And they were now the generation that all these things were gonna happen to.

01:02:29

So when Jesus says the love is gonna grow cold in most people, he's saying that the Jews are gonna experience a plunging into hatred that will push them to utter destruction.

01:02:42

This wasn't the final sign that Jesus gave, but it was a final verdict that was gonna come against the

01:02:50

Jews. Their most ardent love, which was the love of themselves. They didn't like anybody.

01:02:56

They didn't like the Romans, the Gentiles, the Samaritans or the Christians, but they loved themselves.

01:03:01

It was that love that was gonna be the very thing that turned against them.

01:03:08

Like rabid animals, they were gonna thrash and they were gonna lunge and they were gonna destroy each other.

01:03:13

They were gonna turn on one another. Their hatred was going to be completed by God when their self -righteous racial purity love, that love that caused them to think that they were superior to all the other peoples on earth.

01:03:28

Their hatred was going to be completed when they started turning on themselves. They were a people who rejected the

01:03:34

God of love. They replaced it with their own idolatry of national love. And in the end, it was going to turn back on them and it was going to destroy them, which leads us to part two, the love that Jesus extinguished.

01:03:53

Jesus' prophecy in Matthew 24 wasn't ultimately about the Jewish hatred of the Romans. It wasn't about the

01:03:59

Jewish hatred of the Gentiles or the Samaritans or even the Christians. Because when Jesus says their love is gonna grow cold, then what he's talking about is a love that currently as he's speaking was either warm or hot.

01:04:14

Your love can't grow cold if it's not hot first. If it's already frozen, then it can't grow cold and grow colder, but that's not what

01:04:21

Jesus is saying. They already hated the Romans. They already hated the Gentiles. They already hated the

01:04:27

Samaritans and they already hated Jesus and his followers by the time Jesus gives this prophecy. So that wouldn't have been a very helpful prophecy.

01:04:35

It would have been like calling Mother Cleo and talking to her and asking her, what's gonna happen in your life?

01:04:40

And she said something like, well, you're gonna eat a really important meal today.

01:04:46

And you say like, really? Don't I do that every day? Well, in the same way,

01:04:52

Jesus is not saying that the Jews who hate everybody are gonna just start hating everybody.

01:04:57

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the particular love that they have, not a love for outsiders, not a love for other men, that all that was already frozen solid by the time that Jesus was speaking.

01:05:14

Jesus is talking about a different kind of love, a love that the Jews absolutely possessed.

01:05:20

And at the time of the New Testament, ran hotter than the liquid magma that was flowing swiftly under the mountain doom.

01:05:29

What was the love that they had? Was it the love of God? No, no, it wasn't.

01:05:34

Was it the love of biblical truth? No, not exactly. Was it love for their

01:05:40

Mosaic system? No, they misinterpreted that by their own traditions. This wasn't the kind of love that gives life in devotion to God.

01:05:52

This was a warped inward facing love that folds in on itself and leads only to their death.

01:06:00

It was the kind of love that spoils in its hours. It was the kind of love, it's the kind of love that when you pour out your idolatry, that it turns on itself because whatever you idolize, remember this, whatever you idolize, you will end up demonizing.

01:06:17

Because the Jews had idolized themselves, Jesus is prophesying that they were going to end up demonizing themselves.

01:06:27

They were lovers of self instead of lovers of God, 2 Timothy 3, 2. And because their love was so self -centered and so self -righteous, their entire worldview was about to collapse.

01:06:37

They were gonna be consumed with bigotry, jealousy, and malice for their own people.

01:06:43

Their pride was gonna give way to a revolutionary spirit that normally was aimed at anyone else who challenged their authority and their power, but soon it was going to turn inward on themselves.

01:06:55

They were gonna turn from sanity to madness. Their love for themselves was gonna be torn apart.

01:07:05

Their love for themselves was going to blind them to the truth.

01:07:11

It was gonna harden their hearts and it was gonna lead them straight into the judgment that Jesus has been warning about.

01:07:17

Their idolatrous self -love was going to be their downfall. And the evidence of their downfall is they were going to turn on each other and kill each other.

01:07:30

This is precisely, this is what Jesus was predicting. He was alerting his disciples that the most self -loving people on earth were gonna turn on themselves.

01:07:43

And as the Jews entered and neared their extinction event, and what

01:07:48

I mean by that, clearly we still have Jews that exist today, but they're not Jews in the biblical sense.

01:07:54

They're not. The Jews in the biblical sense, which is temple,

01:08:02

Torah, priesthood, sacrificial system, they don't exist because we don't have

01:08:09

Mosaic Judaism. The only Judaism that exists today is a kind of created, manufactured, and fabricated

01:08:18

Judaism that was created out of the Talmud. That's not the kind of Judaism that Jesus was talking about.

01:08:27

When that Judaism, the old kind, the ancient kind, the one that had a temple, as that Judaism was nearing its extinction event, they were going to abandon their hatred for all people so that they could turn in on themselves and hate themselves, and kill each other, and maim each other, and pile up their bodies in the city as the

01:08:55

Romans watched. Like a flesh -eating venom from a brown recluse,

01:09:02

Jesus had injected the covenantal poison into that generation, and over the next 40 years, we are going to watch as they rot and as they decay into a festering, stinking mass that would be left dead in the city of Jerusalem.

01:09:24

What does this mean? It means fathers who once tenderly taught their children the law of God were going to turn on their own kids.

01:09:35

It meant brothers who normally would be bound by their tribal bond or by their blood are going to become bitter enemies with one another.

01:09:44

It meant daughters are going to betray mothers. Sons are going to sell their fathers into slavery.

01:09:50

It meant mothers were going to cook their own children alive and screaming over the fire in order to feed themselves.

01:09:57

It meant patriarchs were going to slash and hack their families to death, callously and chillingly in cold -blooded murder as the

01:10:09

Romans watched. We'll talk about this in a moment. The city that was once the pinnacle of the

01:10:16

Jewish world, the place where they believed they were the greatest people on earth was devolving into infighting, civil wars, blood -soaked streets, and insanity so that the

01:10:32

Romans barely needed to lift a finger in order to eliminate that first century group of Jews.

01:10:40

The Jews eliminated themselves as Jesus predicted that it was going to happen.

01:10:45

And herein lies the fundamental truth. This is what Jesus is predicting.

01:10:51

You see, the most natural affection that any man or woman could ever have is the love of kith and kin, means friendship, neighbor, countrymen, family.

01:11:02

Even the most wicked societies on earth that are consumed by unimaginable hatred for outsiders universally maintain some degree of affection for the insiders, for themselves.

01:11:15

Consider history. The proto -Babylonians, despite their cruelty and disobedience to God, they rallied together to build a monument erected to their glory.

01:11:26

The Assyrians, if you study the Assyrians, they're some of the most bloodthirsty people in all of the ancient world known for their conquest.

01:11:35

They still revered their kings and honored their people as a great nation upon the earth.

01:11:43

The pagan Greeks, despite their internal rivalries, they fought furiously to defend their city states like Athens and Sparta.

01:11:51

And they demonstrated a fierce love for homeland even in their brotherly combat. Even the most tyrannical leaders in world history have some semblance of natural kinly affection.

01:12:05

For instance, Joseph Stalin is a man who's responsible for millions, if not hundreds of millions of deaths.

01:12:11

He still loved his mother. It's reported that he visited his mother as often as he could even while he was murdering and responsible for murdering millions of people.

01:12:20

Genghis Khan was one of the great murdering people in all of history. He was known for his deep affection for his children and he took great care to secure their future.

01:12:32

This is not, it shouldn't be eye -opening. The love that we have for our people, no matter how corrupt or twisted a society is, is often the final thread of humanity that's holding a broken society together.

01:12:50

When a nation begins to turn on itself and to begin to hate itself, that final thread snaps and its collapse is imminent and horrific.

01:13:01

A nation that loses even this most basic affection for its own people becomes a shell of its former self and it begins devouring itself.

01:13:11

It's no accident that Satan, the enemy of God, works tirelessly to sow this kind of self -destructive division.

01:13:19

His goal is to replace human natural affection for family and for marriage and for wife and husband and children, to replace that with hatred, turning love inward until it decays, until it corrodes the very soul that ties us all together.

01:13:37

When a people turn on themselves, when they hate their own culture, when they hate their own family, when they hate their own children, they're on the brink of total societal collapse.

01:13:50

It is the kind of death that Jesus is warning about here among the Jews, where their love is gonna grow cold and it's gonna lead them to hate themselves and turn in on themselves, which is the reason why their society is devolving into chaos and disaster.

01:14:06

But sadly, this is where America is today.

01:14:12

Not quite as bad as the Jews are, I don't wanna be too dramatic here, but we hate ourselves.

01:14:21

The love of neighbors grown cold, the love of people has grown cold. What does it even mean to be an

01:14:26

American today? You ask people on the street and they'll say, oh, we're colonizers or we came here and stole the land from the enemy.

01:14:35

You hear just one thing after another, after another of where woke -ism and critical race theory and all of these sort of self -loathing doctrines have poisoned the masses and the minds of American people and has hollowed us out as a country.

01:14:54

Now we're consumed by microaggressions, by intersectional fractioning, and by a withering of what it means to even be an

01:15:02

American at its root. And this is the game plan that Satan loves to play.

01:15:09

It's the pattern that goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and it's the pattern that we see happening here in Jerusalem on the grandest scale.

01:15:19

You remember in Eden, it was Satan that slithered into the garden and turned the first wife against her dear husband and the first husband against his beloved bride.

01:15:27

And the result was chaos, shame, exile, and war in the family. And in the same way, what we're watching in Matthew 24 is

01:15:37

Satan slithering into Jerusalem, turning the people against one another, fueling their mutual hatred for one another, which is gonna cause them to fall into ultimate ruin.

01:15:48

What we're watching is Satan turning the Jews against one another.

01:15:55

What began as national pride is gonna devolve into national hatred and chaos and disaster.

01:16:03

Satan led deliberately the Jews of that first century into an agitated state of delirium, into paranoia and into bloodlust to kill one another.

01:16:17

The ruthlessness that we see happening among the Jews can only be explained by two things.

01:16:26

That God has so removed his grace from them that they became monsters.

01:16:32

And the second thing is as God removed his grace, Satan became directly involved with the

01:16:40

Jews, turning them into some of the most degenerate people that history has ever recorded, those

01:16:50

Jews of that first century. And you say, how can you claim that? Well, hold on a second.

01:16:58

We're gonna make that claim. I'm gonna show you some examples of this, that what happened in Jerusalem is astonishing in the record of human history.

01:17:10

And I argue it's for two reasons because God pulled away his grace from the covenant lawbreakers.

01:17:17

And as he pulled away his grace, he poured out his covenant woes. And in so doing, Satan slithered into Jerusalem and led them into madness.

01:17:28

We're gonna see that in Revelation 12 now. So just to recap,

01:17:33

Jesus predicted that the love of the Jews, the love that they had for one another was gonna grow cold. And it did, much colder than is humanly normal or ordinary among any people that we've ever studied in history.

01:17:47

And that hatred came as a result of God pulling away his grace. And it came as the result of the diabolical handiwork of the father of lies, the slanderer, the murderer who

01:17:58

Jesus says was their father. And now for a moment, before we look at in detail, all of the different things that happened in first century to the

01:18:10

Jews, I wanna look at what Revelation says happened and how

01:18:16

Satan came in. And that leads us to part three, how

01:18:23

Satan possessed Judah. Now I could go into thousands and thousands of minutes here or maybe even hours on all that needs to be talked about here.

01:18:34

But I just wanna briefly sketch how Satan ended up concentrated in his power in Judah.

01:18:41

So if you remember, in the very beginning in the garden, Satan slithers in and he attacks Adam and Eve. And when he does that, he robs

01:18:49

Adam of the crown that Adam was supposed to wear, which came with rulership and authority and everything else.

01:18:55

And he puts the crown on his head. Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden and Satan is now in charge of the world.

01:19:01

And the first act that Satan does is he leads the entire world into rebellion. And if you know anything about the book of Enoch, you'll know that Satan sent his fallen angels down to the earth and the sons of God had sex with the daughters of man.

01:19:20

That word for sons of God there is Elohim. And we get this race of Nephilim and giant and all sorts of demonic activity that it was so bad that God actually destroys the world.

01:19:33

Now, it's not my goal to get into Nephilim today. I believe that fallen angels actually had sex with daughters of men.

01:19:41

I believe, I don't think that that, that we need to excuse that. I think the world was a very different place before the flood happens.

01:19:48

But so I think that Satan is waging war on earth over the whole earth by polluting it with his demonic seed.

01:19:56

Now, after the flood, what happens? Well, you get this people that gather at the tower of Babel and they proclaim their, they proclaim their rebellion against God.

01:20:09

God comes down and curses them and scatters them. And out of all the nations on earth,

01:20:14

God chooses one particular man and his family to start a brand new nation.

01:20:20

And he chooses them to go to the land of Canaan, which is very, very fascinating.

01:20:26

Because at the tower of Babel, you will know this, that the languages were confused and everyone on earth was placed in a particular geographic region.

01:20:36

So that somehow or another, after maybe some time of migration and everything else, the Chinese people ended up in that oriental area.

01:20:44

The Africans ended up in Africa. Indian people ended up in the Americas.

01:20:50

And over time, you have groups of people who are migrating to different places. But don't forget, and again,

01:20:57

I wish I could go into this more in detail. You'll just have to do some research on your own. Deuteronomy 32 tells us that God not only divided the world into places for different peoples, but he also divided the world into places for different powers.

01:21:12

Deuteronomy 32, I think it's eight and nine, but don't quote me there. Deuteronomy 32 says that God apportioned different geographies to the sons of God.

01:21:24

That word is Elohim. Elohim can mean God. It can mean God Almighty, the Elohim of the

01:21:30

Elohim. It can also mean stars. It can also mean planets. It can also mean seraphim and cherubim and divine angels.

01:21:38

The word Elohim doesn't mean God, but it means divine being. So God in Deuteronomy 32 tells

01:21:46

Moses that he has put these different demonic powers all over the world. We know that this is true, because of Daniel, who is praying a prayer and we see this heavenly scene where Michael, the archangel, is trying to come to,

01:22:02

I think it's Michael. Forgive me if I'm wrong on that too. I'm doing this off the top of my head. Michael comes to deliver a message to Daniel, but he's delayed because this demonic being, who's called the

01:22:14

Prince of Persia, intercepts him and starts going to war with him, which means that when

01:22:19

Daniel was praying, his prayer was being answered by God, but intercepted by whatever territorial demon that was over the land of Babylon.

01:22:30

Now, why is all of this important, you might ask? Because every geography on earth had a territorial demon, but Canaan, because God chose

01:22:43

Canaan to be the epicenter of his people. He chose Canaan to be where his people lived, where his people feasted, where his people sacrificed, where his people grew out of their curse and into covenant fidelity.

01:23:00

Because of that, Satan focuses his efforts there. Satan focuses his concentrated powers there to eliminate the people of God.

01:23:13

That's why when God calls Abraham out of Ur and puts him in the land of Canaan, that's why you have this massive demonic activity that's happening in Sodom and Gomorrah.

01:23:25

And that's why God intervenes by going to war and destroying those nations. That's why after Abraham's seed grows into a family of 70 and they go to the land of Egypt because of a great plague, you see that Canaan, God even says that their sins haven't yet multiplied as much as they were going to, you see that Satan is sewing into Canaan this disgusting idolatry that is unique upon the nations of the earth.

01:23:54

If you were to get in a time machine and go to ancient China and you were to look at the different sins that the ancient

01:23:59

Chinese people were doing or the Russians or whatever else, whatever their names of their nations were back then, if you were to watch those peoples, the kinds of sins they were committing were egregious.

01:24:09

But if you were to go to Canaan, it was disgusting. They were sacrificing human children and roasting them in the flames.

01:24:18

They were having ritualistic, disgusting sex with both humans and animals. The kinds of demonic activity that was happening was centered in Canaan.

01:24:29

So that when Moses leads the people out of Egypt and God goes to war with Egypt, the real battle begins when they get to the edge of the land.

01:24:37

And it says that the people of that land were bigger than, made the people even feel like that they were grasshoppers in size.

01:24:45

What am I saying? The same sins that were what caused

01:24:50

God to destroy the world are now showing up in Canaan. Satan has found a way to produce the

01:24:57

Nephilim again. The ancestors of the Nephilim called the Anakim and the Rethayim. You've got

01:25:02

Og who's sleeping on a 13 -foot bed, Og of Bashan, look it up. You've got

01:25:07

Goliath that's coming out of this area of land who's nine cubits tall.

01:25:13

Look up how much that or how big that is. You've got this concentration of demonic activity that's happening in this land of Canaan.

01:25:23

Why? Because God's people are there. God's redemption is there. God's promise to bring the

01:25:29

Messiah is happening there. That's why Satan directly tempts David. That's why

01:25:35

Satan causes Solomon at the end of his life to bow the knee to many idols. That's why you've got many nations who are attempting to conquer the people of God in Canaan.

01:25:44

That's why Satan comes and he directly tempts and accosts the priest named

01:25:51

Joshua. What you have throughout the Old Testament is evidence that not only is the land of Canaan controlled by a territorial demon, but Satan himself is involved and he's fighting against the people of God, leading them into idolatry, leading them into sexual sin, leading them into all sorts of things.

01:26:11

Why? To try to destroy them, which is why at the end of the book of Malachi, you've got 400 years of silence, 400 years of God not doing anything.

01:26:27

And then when you get to the New Testament, you have all sorts of demonic activity. Do you see the parallel here?

01:26:33

And we're just doing background right now. But when you've got 400 years of the people in the

01:26:39

Old Testament in Egypt, all the while Satan is sowing all kinds of demonic activity in Canaan, here you have in the

01:26:47

New Testament, 400 years of silence from God. So that when you get to the

01:26:53

New Testament and you see that demons are everywhere, you see that Jesus is casting out demons.

01:26:59

Demons are crying out. Demons are screaming. They're being thrown into swines of pigs.

01:27:05

You've got a man who's cutting himself at a graveyard because of demons. You've got Mary Magdalene, who's got seven demons that were cast out before she became a follower of Christ.

01:27:14

You've got demonic activity throwing a child into the flames. It seems like in the

01:27:20

New Testament, you've got demonic activity everywhere. Why? Because Canaan, Jerusalem, Judea was the epicenter of God's redemption.

01:27:28

This is where the people of God dwelled so that if Satan could attack them there, if Satan could kill them there, then

01:27:34

Satan could win the war. Remember, every nation on earth had already been conquered by Satan. He wasn't fighting for North America.

01:27:42

He wasn't fighting for the aboriginal countries. He was fighting for Canaan because God claimed

01:27:47

Canaan. He was fighting to kill God's people there. And if he could do that, then the war would be over and he would win.

01:27:56

That is why Jesus came to Canaan because he was coming to bring the war there, to crush the serpent there.

01:28:07

And on the cross, Jesus crushed the serpent in Canaan.

01:28:13

The cross of Jesus Christ became the death nail in Satan's head.

01:28:19

And what Revelation 12 tells us, and I don't have time to get into it. We're going to get into it when we get into Revelation 12, but just go look it up, be a

01:28:27

Berean. What Revelation 12 tells us is that Christ defeated Satan here on the earth.

01:28:34

And then Christ ascended to heaven and made war with Satan in heaven. And then Jesus cast

01:28:40

Satan down one final time. Why? Because Satan had one final thing that he had to do.

01:28:52

Jesus defeated Satan in heaven permanently. Satan has no more access to heaven.

01:28:58

He can't enter heaven ever again. He can't go and accuse the saints like he did in the book of Job. He cannot stand before the throne of God and accuse the brothers and sisters day and night.

01:29:07

He can't, it's over. Jesus throws Satan down to earth in Revelation 12.

01:29:12

And it says for a short time. What was that short time that Satan was thrown down for?

01:29:19

He was thrown down to possess Judah. He was thrown down to slither into Judah's camp and to cause her to be so consumed with her hatred.

01:29:33

Remember, that's what he does. He slithered into Eden and he caused Adam and Eve to break apart. He caused

01:29:38

Adam and Eve to be at war with each other. He slithered into Judah. He slithered into Jerusalem to cause the people who were obsessed with themselves to begin hating themselves.

01:29:51

Satan did his final work, which was to lead the covenant, the old covenant people of Judah into destruction.

01:30:01

And by God's grace, which we can't get into today, but I'll mention it. I think

01:30:07

Satan had every intention of also crushing the church as well. But God, by his grace, delivered her right before the

01:30:14

Roman armies came, the church fled. She fled to Pella.

01:30:21

She fled out of the city. The Lord spared her, but the Lord did not spare

01:30:26

Judah. So what I want you to see, and look this up in Revelation 12, by the way, is that Satan had always been attacking

01:30:36

Canaan. Satan intentionally, after he was kicked out of heaven, went back to Judah.

01:30:43

And under his influence, the Judeans turned from a people who were fascinated by and obsessed with the law to a people who became utterly and totally lawless and loveless.

01:30:58

And in our final section, I'm going to prove that. Part four, the apex of lovelessness.

01:31:08

After Jesus ascended into heaven, the nation of Judah under satanic influence spiraled into a dark descent of madness and ruin.

01:31:15

As we noted in Revelation 12, they were under the dominion of Satan, who was pushing them towards insanity and pushing them towards their own ruin.

01:31:24

And what should have been an era of repentance and a recognition that their Messiah had come and that they killed him.

01:31:32

Instead of repenting of those things, they became the generation that underwent the tragic unfolding of God's divine judgment.

01:31:44

Political instability and spiritual depravity gripped this people as external pressures from Rome collided with internal factions that were happening at home.

01:31:53

It was a time of unparalleled chaos and one that fulfilled Jesus's prophecy with picture perfect clarity.

01:32:02

Section one, from the 30s to the 40s. Now, what

01:32:07

I'd like to do for just the last remaining moments of our episode is I'd like to sketch decade by decade what happened to the

01:32:14

Jews. And I wanna show you how they started out as the people who killed the Messiah, but they would end in the early 70s as the people who killed themselves.

01:32:26

The years, and we'll start right now with the 30s and the 40s. The years following Jesus's death marked a pivotal descent into chaos for the

01:32:35

Jewish people. The seeds of their self -loathing and their fratricidal hatred that were sown for many centuries now began to sprout little leaves and break through the ground.

01:32:45

But now they began to sprout amid external pressures from Rome and internal corruption among the

01:32:50

Jewish factions themselves. For instance, these forces converged to produce a volatile situation in Judea that had not happened before.

01:33:00

And central to this descent was the rise of a group called the zealots whose radicalism would ultimately, in 40 years from that point, ignite in the

01:33:11

Jewish war. Now the zealots were around before the 30s, but they started gaining momentum in the 30s.

01:33:16

And by the 30s, Roman oppression was a constant weight upon the Jewish people.

01:33:22

Tiberius, the emperor at the time, delegated the governance of Judah to Pontius Pilate, who we read about in the

01:33:29

New Testament. He's the guy who oversaw the trial of Jesus. Well, it was Pontius Pilate who in the scriptures looks like a very careful man and a man who doesn't want to provoke, or he doesn't want to provoke the

01:33:44

Jews, and he also doesn't want to punish Jesus. History tells us that Pontius Pilate also was a calculating and a harsh man.

01:33:54

And he did certain things that provoked the Jewish people to a breaking point. For instance,

01:33:59

Pilate, he brought Roman images into Jerusalem in defiance of the

01:34:05

Jewish law and defiance of their custom. And it caused widespread outrage among the

01:34:10

Jewish people. Josephus himself even recounts how Pilate refused to remove the images until the

01:34:18

Jews finally started showing him that they were willing to die rather than tolerate such a desecration.

01:34:25

Only then did Pilate remove the images. That's Antiquities 18 .3 .1.

01:34:30

Later, Pilate decided to seize some of the temple's money so that he could build an aqueduct projects, which that sparked another riot in the city.

01:34:41

It sparked violent protest, which Pilate ended up suppressing by sending soldiers disguised as Jews into the crowds in order to kill the unarmed protest with swords.

01:34:52

Antiquities 18 .3 .2. Now, these actions deepened

01:34:58

Jewish hatred of the Romans and it actually caused the nation to become even more unstable than it already was.

01:35:07

Now, amid these provocations in the early 30s after Jesus ascended into heaven, a faction of radical nationalists known as the

01:35:15

Zealots began to gain momentum in the country because the nation had tried the

01:35:22

Pharisees, they tried the Sadducees, the Essenes that kind of went off and left everyone behind.

01:35:27

So now it was the Zealots turn to try to enact their ideological hatred against the

01:35:34

Romans. And they drew their inspiration from the Maccabees who a couple centuries earlier had successfully thrown off the tyranny of the

01:35:44

Seleucid Empire. They were the ones who, they were the ones who when Antiochus Epiphanes put a pig on the altar in the

01:35:53

Holy of Holies, they're the ones that cast off the Seleucids. They're the ones who fought that eight days war which ended up being celebrated as Hanukkah.

01:36:02

So very important event. Now, that's where their inspiration came from. The Zealots of the first century preached a gospel of violent resistance.

01:36:12

They were the ones who wanted to cause an uprising against Rome. They portrayed Rome not just as their political oppressor but as their spiritual adversary in the war that God was waging against the pagans.

01:36:24

The, this rhetoric as inflammatory as it was in the 30s while the church was trying to preach a gospel of peace and a gospel of hope, this rhetoric ignited the

01:36:35

Jewish people and united them together in their hatred of the Romans.

01:36:40

It, this is a rhetoric that inspired the downtrodden. It offered hope of liberation to those who had lived their entire life under the oppressive thumb of Rome and the

01:36:50

Zealots targeted Jewish leaders who were actually trying to play footsie with Rome.

01:36:57

The Zealots were doing a power play. They were calling these Jewish leaders traitors.

01:37:02

They were turning the crowds against them and the Zealots rise to power marked a turning point in the political structure of the

01:37:11

Jewish society that we don't read about in the New Testament but it's recorded for us in history. Now, the rise of the

01:37:18

Zealots also coincided with increasing stability in the Roman world.

01:37:23

For instance, Tiberius died in 37 AD, seven years after Jesus rose from the dead and he was succeeded by Emperor Caligula whose erratic behavior to say the least, his sacrilegious actions that he attempted caused even more instability to happen in the land of Judah.

01:37:45

For instance, Caligula's most infamous act was that he ordered a statue of himself to be erected inside the

01:37:53

Jerusalem temple which sparked instant controversy and everybody was willing to die.

01:38:00

They were willing to go to war and absolutely die over this atrocity. Philo of Alexandria, I think, quotes

01:38:07

Caligula at this time period when he says this. Caligula, according to Philo, says this, you are the only ones who refuse to recognize my divinity, the embassy to Gaius 30, 203.

01:38:20

Philo is telling us that Caligula was whining and he was complaining that the

01:38:25

Jews are the only people in the Roman world who refuse to worship his image and it was a situation that caused so much controversy that it almost led to absolute war right then and there in the 30s.

01:38:38

The war that could have happened was only averted by the intervention of a man named

01:38:44

Publius Petronius, the governor of Syria, who delayed the statue's installation long enough to where it didn't matter.

01:38:54

For instance, why do I say that? Caligula ended up dying four years later in 41 AD and the statue never got erected.

01:39:01

He basically quelled the passions and the tempers of the Jewish people so that civil war did not break out and Rome did not come in and destroy them then.

01:39:11

It could have happened in the 30s. But Caligula's assassination attempt ended the immediate crisis, but the damage to the

01:39:21

Roman -Jewish relationship was already well on its way towards disaster. In that same year, a new emperor arose.

01:39:28

His name was Claudius and he ascended to the throne and he initially sought to stabilize the empire, especially the land of Judah.

01:39:37

He was the one who appointed, if you remember, Agrippa, which was one of Herod's sons.

01:39:42

Herod Agrippa I as king of Judea, and that appeased some of the Jews and it calmed the tensions down in the early 40s because Agrippa was from the

01:39:54

Herodian dynasty. He was one of Herod's children and the

01:39:59

Jews, while they hated Herod, for some reasons, he was better than Roman rule. So Agrippa was installed as the king, but only three years later,

01:40:09

Herod Agrippa dies in 44 AD which meant that this three year period of somewhat peace, of somewhat calming the temperature of the nation, erupted again because now with Herod Agrippa dead, the

01:40:25

Romans are going to go into directly ruling the Jews once more by 49 AD. It was in 49 that Claudius expelled every single one of the

01:40:35

Jews from the city of Rome because they were disturbing the peace. Suetonius tells us that the

01:40:41

Jews were angry about a man named Crestus. Well, what does that mean? Well, this is clearly a garbled reference to the name of Christ.

01:40:49

Christos is the Greek word for Christ. Suetonius doesn't quite know who Jesus is, but he's saying

01:40:56

Crestus. This is clearly the Jews in 49 AD were causing so many disturbances in the city of Rome because of Christians who were proclaiming

01:41:08

Jesus. They were so angry and filled with fury that Emperor Claudius kicked them out of the city for good.

01:41:16

This expulsion, though, it was far removed from Judah, shows us the kind of hatred and civil unrest that went with the

01:41:25

Jews no matter where they were in the Roman Empire. They were a community that caused civil unrest everywhere that they went.

01:41:35

Now, meanwhile, back in Judah, the zealots were gaining a lot of momentum. Their ideology was spreading like wildfire.

01:41:42

And in the 40s, there was a splinter group that branched off of the zealots called the

01:41:48

Sicarii who emerged during this period. And they were named after the curved daggers that they hid underneath their cloaks that they used to assassinate their targets.

01:42:01

The Sicarii, who, again, is a fractional group of the zealots, they turned the streets of Jerusalem in the late 40s into a battleground.

01:42:11

They targeted not only Roman officials, but they also were targeting Jewish collaborators and wealthy

01:42:18

Jewish elites who they thought were disloyal to the cause of overthrowing

01:42:23

Rome. Let me put it this way. If you were a Jew in that time and you didn't want to overthrow

01:42:28

Rome, but you wanted to try to play nice and try to cooperate with Rome, the Sicarii would come and murder you.

01:42:36

That's what happened. So do you see how Jesus' prophecy of the love of God will grow cold?

01:42:41

Their love for one another will grow cold. They will turn on one another. They will kill one another. That's happening right now as early as the 40s.

01:42:49

Josephus writes this of the Sicarii. They mingled themselves among the festal crowds and they struck down their enemies with daggers, leaving the rest in terror.

01:43:01

The Wars of the Jews, 2, 13, 3. The reign of terror that was created by the

01:43:07

Sicarii, the atmosphere of paranoia and division where devout Jews were killing other

01:43:13

Jews without trial is very much in alignment with Jesus' prophecy. The festivals, which used to be about unity and about joy and about celebrating their common redemption under God, now became stages of conflict.

01:43:30

Pilgrims who were traveling to Jerusalem were now traveling terrified that someone was going to murder them.

01:43:37

This led to all sorts of tensions. The temple courts no longer a place of joy.

01:43:42

They descended into not a place of prayer, not a place of even the commercial exploitation that was happening in the 30s, but a place of fear and a place where ideological factions were beginning to clash against one another in what would eventually be civil war.

01:44:01

By the late 40s, the combination of these Roman provocations and the zealots' radicalism had actually transformed

01:44:08

Judea into a pressure cooker. The zealots' message of violent resistance was resonating with the populace who was weary of Roman oppression and it was causing a powder keg to occur.

01:44:21

The Sicarii's brutal tactics were alienating the moderate Jews while Roman governors like Cuspus Fatus and Tiberius Alexander were weak and failing to maintain order so that the

01:44:35

Sicarii and the zealots were capturing power in the vacuum that these Roman politicians were leaving.

01:44:42

The Jewish nation, already divided by religious and political factions, now faced an internal war or at least the prospect thereof that would continue rising the temperature in the nation that would eventually lead to its downfall in 80 -70.

01:44:58

Josephus reflects upon this tragic period lamenting the following. He says, it was indeed

01:45:03

God who condemned the whole nation and turned every course that was taken for their preservation to their destruction.

01:45:12

Wars of the Jews 513 -5. Did you hear what Josephus said? He said that every time the

01:45:18

Jews could have been spared that God was working for their destruction. It was God who was working against the

01:45:24

Jews in the 30s and the 40s leading the temperature in the country to continue to be inflamed so that they would be on a collision course to civil war and death.

01:45:37

What should have been a time of spiritual renewal. What should have been a time where their

01:45:42

Messiah came and they bowed down and worshipped him. What should have been a time of wonderful feasting and glory.

01:45:48

What should have been a time of them finally knowing the living God in that generation actually was a tragic spiral into ruin.

01:45:58

And the rise of the zealots made it worse. The rise of the zealots were inflaming the population.

01:46:04

They were stirring up Rome to be a little bit more aggressive every single year that went by. And while they had legitimate grievances, the zealots were causing the nation to head towards destruction.

01:46:18

They were at this time in the 40s. They were starting to execute even Pharisees. They were starting to execute

01:46:24

Jewish leaders who were in bed with Rome and the situation was only going to get worse as we turn to the 50s, which leads us to section two, the growing self -loathing during the 50s.

01:46:38

Now, the 50s marked a grim uptick in the chaos and in the temperature and in the frustrations that were going on in the city.

01:46:48

What had been a gradual descent into the division and hatred in the 30s was picking up steam in the 40s.

01:46:55

And now in the 50s, it was starting to get really bad. The Jewish people were caught in between two massive tidal waves, the

01:47:02

Roman imperial system and this internal strife, this internal zealot class that was stirring up the population and inflaming

01:47:12

Rome against them. And this decade, the decade of the 50s would be characterized by a great intensification of this problem.

01:47:22

This decade was going to be characterized by the intensification of factions, by the rise of extreme zealotry and by an atmosphere of paranoia that was settling down upon the

01:47:35

Jewish people. Jewish writers, Roman historians, pagan observers were all recording the exact same thing, that the love of this nation was growing cold before our very eyes and the situation was becoming more and more dire the further along that it went.

01:47:55

By the 50s, Roman oppression was constant and the weight of that, that they were pressing upon the

01:48:00

Jewish people was fierce. Tiberius, who had been the emperor long ago and his rule was now gone.

01:48:08

Claudius, and then later succeeded by Nero was the new power in town and they were also responding to the

01:48:16

Jewish hostilities by inflaming the Jews right back again. The province of Judea had not been this unstable in a long time and Claudius does the unthinkable by appointing a new governor called

01:48:29

Antonius Felix in 52 AD and that made matters way worse.

01:48:35

Felix, who was infamous for his greed and for his cruelty was using his position in Judah to enrich himself and to murder the

01:48:46

Jews, which could not have been a worse idea on the part of Claudius. Claudius could have put someone in place who would have calmed the temperature down, but that was not what

01:48:57

God wanted. God, through Christ, prophesied that the love of the

01:49:03

Jews was going to grow cold, that they were going to descend into hatred and malice and every event of history that happened between AD 30 and AD 70 supported that event.

01:49:16

Claudius appointed this man, this greedy, cruel tyrant of a man to be governor over Judah because that was what was going to provoke the

01:49:26

Jews to all out war and God was intent upon destroying them and he would do nothing but destroy them.

01:49:34

Tacitus, a Roman historian, says this about the man named Felix, that he wielded the power of a king with the disposition of a slave.

01:49:44

He was a ruler, Felix was, who saw violence as the only solution to most of his problems. His heavy -handed tactics did not calm down the situation in Rome.

01:49:54

It actually inflamed it and as it became inflamed, the Jews obviously responded with more anger, which led him to respond with more cruelty.

01:50:04

The more angry the Jews became, the more that he punished them and killed them, including mass crucifixions and indiscriminate arrest, which left a deep scar and a penetrating wound upon the

01:50:16

Jewish populace towards their oppressors, the Romans, and his tenure was by no means coincidental.

01:50:23

It coincided exactly during the time of the rise of the Sicarii, which we talked about a moment ago, was this splinter group from the

01:50:32

Zealots. The Sicarii, who was just a splinter cell of the

01:50:39

Zealots in the 40s, now, in response to Felix, was gaining power and gaining momentum and gaining aggression.

01:50:48

They specialized in stealth assassinations. They targeted not only the

01:50:54

Romans, but they were killing the Romans, but they were also targeting Jewish elites that were trying to play footsie with Rome to try to calm things down.

01:51:02

Anyone at all, Roman or Jew, who tried to calm the situation down, the

01:51:10

Sicarii made them their mortal enemy. They struck people dead in crowded marketplace who they saw as compromisers.

01:51:18

They killed people at festivals. Their targets were being murdered right in the open, right before they disappeared into the throngs of the crowds.

01:51:26

They were the first century hit squad, the assassination crew, and they were good at it.

01:51:32

Josephus describes their tactics with chilling clarity. They mingled in with the crowd, striking down their enemies before disappearing into the throngs.

01:51:41

And their actions spread terror and suspicion among both the

01:51:47

Jewish society and among the Romans. No one with the Sicarii running loose could be trusted.

01:51:54

Every conversation that you said about, gosh, I wish that war wasn't inevitable.

01:52:00

I wish that we would stop provoking the Romans. I wish the Romans would stop provoking us. Every conversation to that end would possibly get you turned in by your neighbor so that when you're at the grocery store, you're gonna be the ones who's hacked to death by the

01:52:15

Sicarii. No one could be trusted. Friend was turning on friend, neighbor on neighbor.

01:52:21

Accusations of collaboration with Rome was being thrown out all over the place, and it was leading to many people to be suicided in the streets of Jerusalem.

01:52:30

The Sicarii turned the streets of Jerusalem into a battleground where family members were turning on one another and turning people over to be executed in this secretive, stealthy, assassin -like way.

01:52:44

The religious landscape of Judea was being fractured. The Sadducees and the

01:52:50

Pharisees and the Essenes and the Zealots now, even though they had existed with an uneasy tension their entire careers, now by the 50s, their disputes were erupting into open conflict.

01:53:03

The Pharisees who were known to, by their strict adherence to the law of Moses, were now clashing with the

01:53:10

Pharisees in violence. You remember the Sadducees were the ones who rejected the traditions of Moses.

01:53:16

These two groups were now clashing. The Essenes who viewed both of these groups, all of these groups, as being totally corrupted left.

01:53:23

They left and they said to hell with this city, basically, and they withdrew into isolation.

01:53:31

They were done. The Zealots, for their part, condemned every single person that they did not think were ready to join their revolutionary cause.

01:53:41

So if a Pharisee says, hey, you know what? I think it's probably not a good idea that we go to war with Rome because they're a superpower and we're not.

01:53:48

The Zealots thought you were a compromiser and they would have been ready to kill you, especially the

01:53:53

Sicarii. These divisions were playing out, not just in the marketplaces, it was happening at the

01:54:00

Temple Mount. The Temple Mount was becoming places where people were being executed. Blood was spattering on the temple, which is unheard of.

01:54:10

At this time, the nation became consumed by this factional rivalry and violence.

01:54:19

And this was happening as early as the late 50s. The Zealots' message of violent resistance to Rome would either be adopted or you would be killed.

01:54:31

And it did find its voice. It found its ear among the disillusion and the impoverished people in the city who wanted to be free, even if it meant they would be destroyed.

01:54:44

Moderates who were advocating for compromise were ostracized and assassinated.

01:54:50

The Sicarii's campaign of terror alienated the nation who saw their methods as vile.

01:54:58

Josephus even wrote that the love of countrymen was replaced by suspicion.

01:55:05

Neighbors became enemies, and even the temple was profane by their violence. Did Josephus know that he was actually saying that Jesus' prophecy is coming true right before their eyes?

01:55:16

The love of countrymen was being replaced by suspicion.

01:55:23

The love of God, the love of each other, was growing cold.

01:55:30

Families were being torn apart in the 50s as loyalty to different factions was overshadowing their loyalty to one another.

01:55:39

Trust was eroding. The natural bonds of community that would have normally held them together were dissolving under the weight of mutual hatred and paranoia.

01:55:48

The actions of the Roman governors during this decade didn't help the situation either.

01:55:56

And it only exasperated the divisions. Remember, this is the era where Felix was the governor.

01:56:02

And Felix's successor, Portius Festus, he inherited a providence that was teetering on the edge of explosion.

01:56:11

And his attempts to restore order, which were more reasonable than Felix, but it was too little too late.

01:56:21

His attempts to restore order were met with fierce resistance from the zealots and from the

01:56:27

Sicarii. Who, by their own measure, their tactics were growing bolder, more violent.

01:56:34

They were killing people more out in the open instead of hiding it. The countryside became a hotbed for insurgency.

01:56:40

Bands of rebels began attacking Roman outposts directly and seizing supplies from the

01:56:46

Romans. They were actually fighting out in the open against them. And Festus, who wasn't Felix, he wasn't the angry rage head that Felix was.

01:56:55

He responded, likewise, with brutal crackdowns. But his efforts, like I said, too little too late.

01:57:02

They only deepened the resentment between Rome and the zealots and Rome and the Sicarii. And it did nothing but raise the temperature once again.

01:57:11

Now, all of this drew the attention of Roman and pagan writers like Cassidus, who remarked about the divisions that were happening in Jewish society, noting this, they show loyalty to one another, but are bitterly hostile to all others.

01:57:23

And their seditious ways bring ruin upon themselves. Philo of Alexandria, a

01:57:31

Jewish philosopher, lamented the spiritual decay of his people by writing this. They no longer honor the laws of God, but each man becomes a law unto himself, driven by pride and ambition.

01:57:44

These accounts reflect a society that had lost its way, lost its cohesion, and they had lost whatever love that they once had for the

01:57:52

Jewish people. Now had been replaced by suspicion, pride, and hatred. This is as early as the fifties.

01:57:59

They're not killing each other yet on a wide scale, but they're suspicious of each other.

01:58:05

They no longer love each other. Their love, their idolatrous love that we talked about that was in the thirties had now turned into suspicion and hatred.

01:58:14

And again, even in the temple, which was the heart of Jewish life, the atmosphere of division and self -loathing was palpable.

01:58:22

The fifties also saw the Romans' perception of the Jews begin to change. For the longest time, the

01:58:29

Romans thought that the Jews were a people who could be governed, a people who could be ruled over, a people who could be brought into submission.

01:58:36

But that opinion was changing quickly in the fifties. They were beginning to see the Jews as irredeemably rebellious, irredeemably ungovernable, a people who were incapable of living in peace and harmony in a

01:58:52

Roman system. And because of that, it was causing the Romans to consider war as early as the sixties.

01:59:02

By the end of the fifties AD, by the end of the fifties, the Jewish nation was a fractured, embittered society that bore every single mark of Jesus's prophecy.

01:59:17

Their lawlessness had increased. Most people's love had grown cold. And the city was descending into madness, which brings us to the final decade of the

01:59:30

Jewish people, which was the year 60 to 70. Section three, the beginning of the end.

01:59:38

The sixties AD were a decade of unparalleled turbulence as the atoms that were being held together by the nucleus of Mosaic Judaism was falling apart.

01:59:50

This decade was characterized by not just a suspicion and a hatred of one another, but a total societal collapse within the people of Judah.

02:00:02

The simmering tensions between the Jewish factions were erupting now, not in secret, but an open conflict as the zealots and the

02:00:11

Sicarii were no longer supportive groups of one another, but now factional groups that were against each other.

02:00:18

Other radical groups were gaining prominence as well. And Rome's heavy hand was pushing down even harder, which would lead to the beginning of the

02:00:27

Jewish war. This was the beginning of the end of the Jewish nation as they spiraled into madness and mutual self -destruction.

02:00:36

Again, Matthew 24, 12 predicted it. Lawlessness and lovelessness pushed these people towards their end.

02:00:45

The zealots who were emboldened by decades of resistance and radical rhetoric became so very militant and unyielding in the 60s that they were killing people openly in the streets.

02:00:59

Their ideological fervor led them to seize control of entire towns and villages in Judea and started enforcing their rule of terror and violence, kind of like a demilitarized zone, if you remember back a few years ago when a group of woke lefties took over parts of Seattle.

02:01:20

Here, the zealots took over entire towns and they proclaimed that these towns are no longer under Roman rule, they're under the rule of the zealots.

02:01:31

Josephus recounts how they patrolled the streets of Jerusalem, executing anyone that they suspected of disloyalty or collaboration with Rome.

02:01:40

And this internal violence marked a turning point as the Jews began to see one another no longer as compatriots, but as enemies, no longer as family, but as people that they despised.

02:01:54

Families were torn apart by these accusations and betrayals. The entire community descended into paranoia.

02:02:00

The Sicarii escalated their campaign of terror, again, doing things now in the open, killing

02:02:06

Roman officials, killing Jewish elites and moderates. Their attacks became indiscriminate.

02:02:13

They were leaving the streets of Jerusalem, and I'm not talking metaphorically here, soaked with blood. There was blood all over the city from the different people that they were killing.

02:02:23

For instance, listen to what Josephus says. The Sicarii filled the temple courts with the blood of their own people, violating the sanctuary with murder and sacrilege.

02:02:35

These actions by the Sicarii were shattering any semblance of unity They were foiling any possibility that they were gonna return from this, and they were pushing everything forward to a

02:02:46

Roman war. Roman rule during this period of the 60s was exasperating the divisions among the

02:02:53

Jews. Nero was flaming the fires even hotter. You remember Nero was the one who set fire to Christians in the city of Rome, but he's also the one who through his policies and through his heavy taxation and through his brutal reprisals was fueling

02:03:11

Jewish animosity in Judea worse than any emperor before him. His appointment of Gessius Florus as procurator of Rome in 64

02:03:20

AD proved disastrous for the Jews. Florus' greed and incompetence led to widespread unrest, rioting, and it all culminated in him plundering the temple so that he could fund his government.

02:03:35

When the protest erupted this time, Florus responded with mass killings, with mass executions, and the flames of revolt were just about ready to pop.

02:03:47

By the mid 60s, Jewish war was imminent. The zealots were seizing control of Jerusalem. They were literally expelling

02:03:54

Roman forces and telling them to get out of their city, which is foolish. Their actions divided the

02:04:02

Jewish society. Moderate Jews were leaving and they were fleeing and they were leaving to go to other towns as open conflict with Rome was inevitable.

02:04:13

The Sicarii were intensifying their campaign. They were targeting not only collaborators, but they were now targeting wealthy

02:04:21

Jews and everyday normal citizens as they were killing people left and right out of madness.

02:04:30

Josephus records how their actions were spreading terror. All throughout Judea, as no one could be trusted at all with the

02:04:39

Sicarii running loose. Amid this turmoil, the temple became a focal point of violence and desecration.

02:04:46

The zealots were turning it into their own fortress. They were using it as sacred spaces and strongholds for their battles that they were waging against the people of Judea.

02:04:56

Josephus writes, the holy ground was defiled with the blood of those who sought its refuge.

02:05:01

Of those who sought refuge and of the sanctuary itself echoed with the cries of the dying.

02:05:10

This sacrilege shocked even the Romans who viewed the temple as a symbol of Jewish faith.

02:05:16

And yet, here it was a symbol of murder and death. The divide between the

02:05:24

Jewish factions became increasingly pronounced. The zealots clashed with the Sicarii in the late 60s over tactics and over ideology.

02:05:33

And they became the roots of a civil war that would end in the late 60s with Rome besieging the city and the

02:05:43

Sicarii and the zealots trapped in a battle where they would murder one another right in front of the

02:05:50

Romans and the Romans didn't even have to lift their fingers. The Pharisees, the Sadducees and the

02:05:56

Essenes were sidelined as these two groups of radicals were waging war against each other and against sanity itself.

02:06:06

This fragmentation made it impossible for the Jews to prevent war.

02:06:11

As Tacitus observed, their mutual hatreds weakened them far more than the arms of their enemies.

02:06:20

Isn't that astounding? Tacitus said that their hatred for one another, we are talking about the

02:06:26

Jews who hated everybody but themselves. Tacitus says that their mutual hatred for one another did far more damage to them as a country than their hatred of their enemies.

02:06:39

And it was in this situation where the zealots were kicking Romans out of Jerusalem, they were taking over small cities and they were inflaming their hatred towards the

02:06:50

Romans. It was during this season that Nero declared war on Judea and he sent his greatest officer that was alive in that time period whose name was

02:07:00

Vespasian, he sent him to go wage war.

02:07:06

The war that would destroy old covenant Judah, the people who were brought out of Egypt, the people who were brought into covenant, the people who

02:07:17

God called his firstborn son had descended into such a deep and dark and dank level of madness that now the

02:07:30

Romans were coming. They were coming as the beast coming out of the sea which

02:07:35

Revelation talks about. They were coming from Rome, they were sending their warships and they were sending with them the greatest general that they had which was

02:07:45

Vespasian who along with his son Titus would advance upon Jerusalem and they would watch as the city that had descended into chaos ripped itself apart at the seams which leads us to our final section.

02:08:02

Section 4, AD 70 and the end of Judah.

02:08:08

In 68 through 70, the apocalyptic climax of Jewish rebellion and Roman retribution unfolded with horrifying clarity.

02:08:18

The Roman legions who were under the command of Vespasian at first but then General Titus marched upon Jerusalem, a city that was already weakened by its internal chaos and divisions and they just watched it as it killed itself.

02:08:34

What unfolded before the Romans eyes was not merely a military conquest but it was a catastrophic implosion of a nation consumed by hatred and madness fulfilling the grim prophecy of Jesus that their lawlessness and their lovelessness was going to rip them apart and the

02:08:55

Roman campaign was a success. You'll remember that it began in Galilee in 68 where Jewish resistance was fierce but ultimately doomed.

02:09:05

Towns and villages were taken back by Rome from the zealots and they set those cities on fire.

02:09:11

They raised those cities and they set them on fire and Josephus describes the utter devastation that happened which was unlike anything else that had happened in that time period.

02:09:22

He recounted the madness of certain Jewish defenders who in the face of inevitable defeat were turning on their own families.

02:09:29

Josephus tells us of one story of a man who instead of his family being arrested by Rome, he walks up to his father, he grabs his father by his gray hair and he slits his father's throat.

02:09:41

Then he walks up to his mother and his mother welcomes the blade and he shoves the blade into his mother's chest and then he kills his wife and then he kills his sons and then he kills his daughters and then he stands on top of the bodies of his family members and screams at Rome and then he kills himself.

02:10:01

That is the kind of insanity that we're talking about. That is the curse that was coming upon the

02:10:07

Jews. These grotesque acts of psychopathy were emblematic of a society that was under the doom of God.

02:10:17

He had pulled back his grace so far that they were acting out a kind of hellish nonsense on earth and the

02:10:28

Romans town by town were raising and burning and scorching these towns left and right, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

02:10:38

Town after town after town, they murdered these rebels and anyone who survived ran to the next town and anyone who survived then ran to the next town so that eventually all the survivors ended up in Jerusalem.

02:10:57

By the time the Romans had encircled the city, its population had swelled to unsustainable levels and none of these people probably could have known what was going to happen.

02:11:08

They ran right into the belly of the beast. The city of Jerusalem was controlled by the

02:11:13

Zealots and the Sicarii. So all of these refugees who were seeking refuge from Rome were going right into the belly of the beast and they would get caught in the crossfire.

02:11:28

There was a million, a million point two Jews in the city of Rome. The Jews themselves, whether it was the

02:11:34

Sicarii or the Zealots, between their factional infighting killed hundreds of thousands of their own

02:11:44

Jewish people. It was so bad that the city was filled with bodies, that they were piled on top of one another.

02:11:55

It was so bad that Jesus even predicted that the vultures were going to be swarming over the city of Jerusalem for where the vultures are, there the destruction event was going to happen.

02:12:06

Jesus predicted all of this beforehand. We can keep going.

02:12:13

There's so much more that I could say, but the point that I want to make to you is this. Everything in Matthew 24 has already happened and Jesus predicted it with astonishing clarity.

02:12:27

He predicted that the false Messiahs and false Christ were going to rise up and we've proved that.

02:12:33

He predicted that earthquakes and famines were going to happen. We've proved that. He predicted that wars and rumors and wars were going to happen and we've predicted that.

02:12:42

He predicted that an apostasy was going to take over the country and people who had converted to Christ were going to leave

02:12:48

Christ. We've proved that. And today we've seen how Jesus predicted with astonishing clarity that the love of the

02:12:58

Jewish people was going to run cold and it did. The people who are known for hating everybody but themselves turned on themselves and murdered themselves so that when

02:13:13

Rome came into the city, the only thing they had to do was finish the job. And that, the lovelessness that Jesus predicted was the reason why the

02:13:27

Jewish city was destroyed and is the reason why the covenant people were no more.

02:13:35

Conclusion. Josephus once said this about the city of Jerusalem.

02:13:43

Neither did any city suffer such miseries nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in their wickedness than this from the beginning of the world.

02:13:57

Josephus was saying that out of all of human history from his scholarly historic opinion, that this was the greatest tragedy that had ever happened.

02:14:06

That this group of people perpetrated upon themselves the greatest tragedies, the greatest calamities that had ever been recorded.

02:14:15

And Jesus warned about all of it before it happened. When he said that their love was gonna grow cold and history bears witness to the fact that this prophecy came true.

02:14:27

Under Satan's relentless influence, the Jewish nation spiraled into a psychopathic frenzy of hatred towards their enemies, their brothers and eventually themselves.

02:14:37

Their love curdled into a kind of unrecognizable hatred that led them towards total collapse and certain death.

02:14:48

And in this episode, we've traced this chilling descent through every decade.

02:14:53

We followed from Christ's ascension all the way into the destruction of Jerusalem where their hearts grew so cold and so vile that all they had left to do was destroy themselves with a gruesome divine judgment.

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What we have seen has been purely horrific. And again, there's more.

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I didn't read all the quotes that I had prepared for this episode either. There's more we could have shared. But what

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I wanna challenge us with as we close is while this period of time was a unique period of evil, and a unique period of judgment,

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I do want us to remember that the pattern that we've seen happening here is not unique to Judah.

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I mean, look around. Our society, while not being at the same level, because I don't believe that any society will ever reach these levels again,

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I think that this was a unique judgment that Jesus said would never be repeated ever.

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And I think he's right, obviously. He's Jesus. But we're heading down the same road, maybe not to the same degree.

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The love of Kith and Kin in our country is evaporating under the acid of critical race baiting, woke cancel culture, and the self -worshipping insanity of intersectional policies.

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Families today are being torn apart. The natural bond of affection that should categorize a nation and a people and a family is being torn apart and replaced by manufactured microaggressions and divisions.

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This is not just a cultural problem. It's a spiritual problem. It's a spiritual problem because every time a nation goes down the path of its collapse, it always falls apart like this, where families are torn apart, where nations are torn apart, where the love of country and the love of people erode.

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And even in my reformed circles, I'm reformed. I'm a Calvinist. I love covenant theology.

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I love the confessions of faith, the Westminster, all of that. That's my jam. I love that.

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But even among my people and among the reformed people, there's this Sicarii -like slashing that is happening where we, on Twitter, throw out our bombs and where we criticize one another over increasingly insignificant trivialities.

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What's wrong with us? Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder under our shared confessions and our creeds and our catechisms, we've become these snipers splitting hairs and gunning for one another for no good reason.

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If the church doesn't unite together, this society that we live in is going to fall.

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And again, I'm not saying that we're on the same level as Judah. That was a unique covenantal curse.

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But what I am saying, what I am saying is that why are we as Christians the one who are bringing this unity?

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Why are we the ones who are constantly poking at the other side and trying to inflame tensions?

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Why are we doing that? If the church doesn't pull her head out of her rear end, she's going to fail this culture.

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She's going to fail to show this culture the love of God. She's going to fail to lead this culture out of her divisions.

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She's going to fail as the ambassadors of Christ. And she's going to watch like the Romans watched as our culture descends into destruction.

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I don't want that. This has got to change. And it starts with us. I want us to be the people who showcase the love of God, who showcase unity in Christ, who work together to build

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Christendom instead of tearing down everything. We don't live in the ultimate age of lovelessness of the

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Jews. Thank God for that. But we do live in an era where love has grown cold.

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And if we've learned anything from the Jews in this episode, we need to repent and we need to stop being hard of heart.

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And we need to turn again to our God and begin to build again the foundations of the next

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Christendom that will last hopefully for a thousand years. We're not in a world that's getting worse and worse, but we are a people who've become unsubmitted to the

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Bible. And we need to repent to that. We're not watching a world spiral into the homicidal rage of the

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Jews. Thank God for that. We are watching overall over the course of history,

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Christ conquering the world one nation at a time. We need to stop believing that we're losing.

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We need to stop standing by as bystanders. And we need to stop contributing to the problem of division by constantly being divisive.

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And we need to become builders again. We need to become the kind of people who preach the gospel, who live the gospel, who disciple children in the gospel.

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We need to be the kind of people who build something that will actually stand and will actually last. Christ's kingdom will grow.

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Christ's kingdom will triumph. The only question is whether you and I are going to get to see it happen in our lifetime or whether we're going to be the generation that dies thinking that the kingdom was failing.

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I don't want to be a man who watches the church falter and did nothing about it.

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I don't want to die in a generation of faithless Christians who allowed the walls of Christendom to crumble and to be overrun.

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I don't want to be counted among the people who stood by and did nothing. I want to be accounted as the people who stood up, who fought, who built, who reclaimed what was lost.

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I want the church to unite to rebuild the fallen walls of Christendom and to bring back the love of God into this country and good doctrine into this country so that we can see

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Christ's kingdom advance again. We know Christ wins and we know the church will triumph.

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But I also pray that we would let it be said of this generation and what it means is we need to repent and we need to strive for this, that it would be said of this generation of Christians that we did everything we could to see his kingdom built and when our master and Lord and savior returns, we won't be like the people or the man who buried his talents in the ground and he was called a wicked and a lazy servant, but we will be the one who put his talents to work and increased those talents over a lifetime and we saw the king's kingdom advance.

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And to that generation, I pray, I pray we're that generation, to that generation, he will say, well done, my good and faithful servants.

02:22:08

Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast. This was a heavy one and this was a long one because we had to go through a lot of different historical material and I hope that we've learned from the

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Jews and I hope that we walk away not with sadness. I actually hope that we walk away with gladness because Jesus was accurate in his prophecy.

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He was proven true, even when every dispensational says that this hasn't occurred, we've seen now that it has.

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I pray that we would trust our Lord, that we would trust his prophecies and I pray that we would be invigorated to fight, to labor, to build, to swing the hammer and the ax and to bring

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Christendom into our world, into our families, into our homes, into our marriages, into our jobs, into our communities, into our churches.

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I pray that we would be the most vigorous Christian generation since the book of Acts.

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I mean that. I pray that for you. And I pray that you have a very merry

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Christmas because I only will be seeing you again next week for one episode on Monday, I think, or Monday or Tuesday, I'm gonna put that out and I won't see you again until the new year.

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So God bless you. Thank you for supporting this show. Thank you for encouraging me.

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Thank you for all of your support. And I'll see you again in, I'll see you again next week and then not until the new year.