Ezekiel Part 16

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Ezekiel Part 17

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Let's pray and then we'll get started. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we recognize that your word is truth.

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And yet at times it's hard to understand. We pray, Lord, to a diligent study of your word that we would properly understand what you have revealed there.

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That as a result of that proper understanding, we would believe rightly, but also do accordingly.

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We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. So when we last left off in Ezekiel, which was two weeks ago, because last week we had the kids program for Christmas, which was really darn cute.

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You'll note that in Ezekiel chapter 16, which is where we were, we had a

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PG -13 description of the Lord's faithless bride.

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And the details were salacious. And God's description of his faithless bride were less than flattering.

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And you'll note, I've said this before, and I'll continue to make the point. And that is that idolatry is the spiritual equivalent of adultery.

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And just kind of think this through. You know, so there's a fellow who's fallen in love with his secretary at work, right?

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And he's having a salacious affair. And I don't know what that guy is thinking, because at some point, this is all going to come out.

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And when it comes out, it always goes horribly. If you've spent any time in the corporate world,

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I've seen this play out before, and it's just terrible to watch. Because what ends up happening is that he gets caught.

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It absolutely traumatizes his wife. His kids are destroyed by it.

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His marriage blows apart. He loses half of his assets to his wife, ends up having to pay child support.

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And then the affair that he was having, that comes to a grinding halt too, because the two of them were not in it for the long term.

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They were just in it for the short term pleasure. You know, what on earth are you thinking?

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And if you just think of the absolute destruction that happens in a human family as a result of adultery, now put yourself in kind of in the shoes of God here.

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And this is the reason why he's describing this. Idolatry is that exact same scenario run out spiritually.

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And the worst bit is that when you commit the sin of idolatry, the deity that you're oohing and aahing after and are fearing and obeying doesn't even exist.

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That's the worst bit of all of this. You're just sitting there going, what is going on here?

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You know, and so you'll note that the demonic is always at play when it comes to idolatry.

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And that's one of the big themes that we have to see here. So as we kind of considered last time these really, really strong words that God had for idolatrous

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Judah, the faithless bride of Yahweh, you know, let's not forget just how absolutely reprehensible the sin of idolatry is.

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And that when we hear that God is a jealous God, that's not a fault in Him. You know,

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God is the one who made us. And for us to, you know, it's weird to say in these terms, but to traumatize

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God through idolatry just is, it's horrifying at its core.

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And so God rightly lashes out in judgment against such things.

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So, but then we're going to hear in the midst of this, where we left off last week, was the kind of the little bit of the resolve, the

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Lord's everlasting covenant. So you got the faithless bride of the Lord, this adulterous bride who

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God cared for and raised and loved and nurtured and, you know, and all this kind of stuff.

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And then she goes and, you know, and gives herself to every foreign deity and every foreign country man out there, rather than being faithful to God.

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Now, here's what it says. For thus says the Lord Yahweh, I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant.

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Yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant.

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Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and I give them to you as daughters, but not on account of the covenant with you.

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I established my covenant with you, and you shall know that I, Yahweh, I am

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Yahweh, that you may remember and be confounded and never open your mouth again because of your shame.

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When I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord Yahweh. And so, you'll note here, this is like an out of the blue, not foreseen thing.

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Normally, when a husband is cheated on by his wife and cheated on in such a way that his wife is like engaged in like prostitution, there's no words of kindness here, but God is saying that he's going to atone for all that you have done.

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Wait, what? Okay. Huh? Right. Such is the faithfulness and the love of God.

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And so, you'll note in the midst of these words of horrific judgment, there is an absolute gospel note here that it gets and it ends up on.

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Law and gospel. Despite all of this, I'm going to atone for your sin.

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Wow. Okay. Yeah, you'll know that gospel never gets old because it shows the absolute love, patience, steadfastness, long -suffering of God, and it is truly his glory to forgive and pardon and to atone.

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So, all right. So, the word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, propound a riddle and speak a parable to the house of Israel.

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Say, thus says the Lord Yahweh. So, here we've got one of these. Okay. We got a little bit of a parable and an enigmatic statement by God that is going to need a little bit of unpacking and an explanation.

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So, we'll see what we can work out of this. All right. All right. So, here's the parable. A great eagle with great wings, long pinions, rich in plumage of many colors, came to Lebanon and took the top of the cedar.

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He broke off the topmost of its young twigs and carried it to a land of trade and set it in a city of merchants.

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Then he took the seed of the land and planted it in fertile soil.

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He placed it beside abundant waters. He set it like a willow twig and it sprouted and became a low spreading vine.

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And its branches turned toward him and its roots remained where it stood.

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So, it became a vine and produced branches and put out boughs. And there was another great eagle with great wings and much plumage.

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And behold, this vine bent its roots toward him and shot forth its branches toward him from the bed where it was planted that he might water it.

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And had been planted on good soil by abundant waters that it might produce branches and bear fruit and become a noble vine.

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Thus says the Lord Yahweh, will it thrive? Will he not pull up its roots and cut off its fruit so that it withers, so that all of its fresh sprouting leaves wither?

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It will not take a strong arm or many people to pull it from its roots.

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Behold, it is planted. Will it thrive? Will it not utterly wither when the east wind strikes it and wither away on the bed where it sprouted?

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Okay, so there you go. There's the parable. And the question is, what does that mean?

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Okay, well, we're going to do a little bit of work here. And we'll see if I can pull this up in my

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Ezekiel commentary. All right, let's see here. We want... Okay, allegories.

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Okay, the allegory of the two eagles and the cedar spring that grew into a vine. Okay, so we're going to rely on a commentary here so we don't mess this up.

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In the nature of the case, there is little, if any, explicit theological content in the riddle or the allegory narrated in these verses.

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Yet, of course, the rest of the chapter hangs on them. So, you know, we have to kind of understand this to kind of get the rest of the chapter.

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Because of the inseparable interrelation between translation and interpretation, occasionally a matter of interpretation was interjected into the text notes above in order to explain or defend a does not emerge until chapter 17, verse 19.

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So you'll note that we don't have any theology until we get to verse 19, where it says, therefore, thus says the

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Lord Yahweh, as I live, surely it is my oath that he despised and my covenant that he broke, and I will return it upon his head.

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The question is, who's the he here? Okay, so let's kind of take a look at what the allegory's meaning is before we go further so we can understand how the theology then works later in this.

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Okay? Okay, let's see. The image of cedar and the image of a vine as representing

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God's people are motifs that are prominent in other biblical passages, the most famous vine passage being

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John 15, where Jesus says, I am the true vine. My father is the vine dresser.

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Okay, so here's the meaning. The nature of the material continues to be non -theological, at least on the surface, as these verses present historical interpretation of the allegory in 17, 1 through 10.

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Surface qualifier is necessary because of the ever -present temptation to divorce theology from history in one direction or another.

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I know a lot of theologians that do that, and they do that to their own peril. History unilluminated by revelation is at best mute and certainly does not disclose anything but inscrutable deus absconditus.

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This is a great sentence, by the way, here. And so what's really interesting is that this is a point that we made in the sermon today that I made, and that is that to the untrained eye, the eye that is not in tune with the

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Word of God, Christ the infant doesn't look any different than any other baby boy of his time.

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He still cries. He fills his diapers. He nurses. He's going to grow.

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Like every other boy, he's going to have to learn his aleph, his baiths, his gimels, his daleths, and he's going to have to learn how to read and write.

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He's going to have to go to school. He's going to have chores. So to the untrained eye, if you were to just look at the infancy history of Christ, there is no theology to be seen just in the history.

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The theology has to be given in other portions or given throughout the scripture. Otherwise, you don't know the theology.

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If it weren't for Simeon and Anna teaching us and teaching those people in the temple who

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Christ was and what was going to happen, and they did this by the power of the Spirit, then for all intents and purposes, without that voice of God, it appears that you cannot interpret history without theology.

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And if you interpret history without theology, then you end up with this Latin phrase, the absconded deity, the deity who's hidden, who's gone, who's been whisked away.

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So you'll note then that in reading about this parable, this allegory of the two eagles and this top cedar twig thing and all this kind of stuff, you do not want to fall into the trap of just reading history here without theology.

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The two have to go together. I love the point that's being made here. So various theologies and philosophies may and do attempt to fill the void, but the gospel will never be discerned from any history alone.

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That's a great sentence, and absolutely, most certainly true. In fact, if you were kind of fast -forwarding to Good Friday, which is going to be earlier this year, it's going to be at the end of March, beginning of April, when you consider the history of Christ suffering, bleeding, and dying on the cross, if you just look at the mere history of it, you don't know the theology.

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It just looks like some poor bloke got nailed to a cross by the Roman Empire, and they mocked him until he died.

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That's what the history shows. But the theology of what happens there has to be gleaned from the

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Word of God. So, same ideas here. So just as great a danger is the docetic theology.

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Docetism is a form of Gnostic theology. Docetism teaches us that Christ really wasn't

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God in human flesh. He only appeared, seemed to be God in human flesh.

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I mean, he looked like God in human flesh, but he really wasn't. So that's a form of Gnosticism, which fails to see that God is the final author of all history and is directing it towards its conclusion at Christ's return.

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Docetic theology has alleged that God is not involved in flesh and blood history, either because of his indifference to human affairs or because of his impotence, so history is out of his control.

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The Gnostic deity sounds a lot like, it sounds a lot like that theology where, you know,

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God doesn't know the future at all, you know, it's just kind of lame. You know, it sounds like that same thing.

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Such theologies are anti -incarnational in essence. In them, the Old Testament, because of its enormous historical content, will be one of the major casualties and all that will be left is some purely intellectual, emotional enterprise.

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And that's kind of the point. You'll note that, I think personally,

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Gnosticism and, you know, and liberalizing theologies, like the woke ideology and the modernist belief that God cannot perform miracles and that miracles are not possible.

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These all are directly related to Gnosticism. There's just no way around it.

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And at the end of the day, you sit there and go, what's the point of believing, of calling yourself a

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Christian when you don't believe what the text says? You know, I think about the video that I did before Christmas of that fellow who, you know, that woke liberal ideologue who, from the stage at his church, he couldn't be limited to the pulpit, is wandering the, you know, the chancel, you know, and he claimed that Mary absolutely, positively wasn't a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, you know.

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And you sit there and you go, what on earth makes you want to stay with invisible

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Christianity if you don't even believe the theology of the Scriptures, you know?

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And so, you know, they always come up with basically hijacking these texts, evacuating it of the miraculous, evacuating of God's intervention in human history.

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And then at the end of it, you get some kind of moralizing philosophy kind of thing.

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And you'll note here, I know this is going to sound weird, that liberals are very moralistic.

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It's just that they have a completely different set of morals than the morals revealed in Scripture.

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It's a completely different focus altogether. So, you know, I always like to tell this story that when we, you know, decades ago now, and holy smokes, when was this?

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It was almost two decades ago. Barb and I were attending a Missouri Synod congregation in Indiana.

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And when we were there, you know, I was doing the podcast.

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And it seemed like at the time, kind of like the threat du jour against Christianity wasn't the charismatic movement as we know it now, the

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NAR, that was still ramping up. It was the seeker -driven, purpose -driven stuff and stuff like this.

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And people were basically, you know, transforming their churches into coffee houses and things like this.

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And so, I took… Have you noticed I'm a little snarky at times?

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Louise, I appreciate that. No! Chris, snarky?

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So, they had set up on one of those collapsible long tables, they had set up a coffee pot, a big coffee pot.

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And next to the coffee pot, they had put the kind of coffee creamer that you buy at Sam's Club or something like that, the big old thing of coffee creamer.

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And next to that was a thing of C &H pure cane sugar or something like that.

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And so, I took a

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Our churches decided that they're going to be cool and relevant. We now have a coffee bar. And nothing cool or relevant about it.

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But here's the weird thing that happened after I posted that photograph. The emergent guys who kind of hate -watched me on social media, they lost their minds and accused me of every sin that you could possibly imagine.

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And what was the big offense? They claimed that the sugar that was being offered at our church was put out by a colonialist oppressive company.

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And that by using that sugar, we were basically funding human slavery and trafficking and colonialism and stuff like this.

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And it's like, are you kidding me? It's like, what?

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In fact, if you travel to Europe in the United Kingdom, there's a coffee house.

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The name of the coffee house is Costa, C -O -S -T -A. And if you ever go into a

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Costa coffee house, they make a big deal about the fact that all of their coffee, all of their sugar, all of their creamers and stuff like this are sourced in a way that is contra -colonialism and things like this.

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And you sit there and I realized at that point that what these people have done is that they've exchanged certain morals of God, especially sexual ethics when it comes to what the scripture says, and they're highly legalistic in a different way.

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I don't ever accuse liberals of not being legalistic. They're extremely legalistic, but just in a way that doesn't make biblical sense.

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So, all right, well, I'm off topic. Let's keep going. So then talking about these docetistic ideologies, and they deny that God's redemptive actions at Bethlehem, Christ's incarnation of the

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Virgin Mary and Calvary, His physical agony and atonement, death and bodily resurrection took place in real physical history.

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And so in them, those events must at best retain only symbolic value.

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Fascinating when you consider that. If you don't believe in the actual virgin birth of Christ, you don't believe in Christ's physical resurrection from the grave and all this kind of stuff, what are you left with?

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Something like Aesop's fable. The moral of the story is, you know, get up early before the other birds eat the worms.

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I mean, it's weird stuff like that, right? Okay. Okay, Don is weighed in.

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Hang on a second here. It says, always use American crystal beet sugar grown and processed by North Dakota and Minnesota farmers.

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They haven't colonized anything. I will say this, that I know,

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I know some Minnesotans and North Dakotans who are super legalistic about American crystal too.

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If you show up with C &H sugar, you will be, you'll have your ears boxed. Okay, you can't do that here.

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Lily says, recycling everything is also very important. Better recycle or else, a signal to everyone that you are doing it right.

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James says, liberalism, legalistic, dare say fascistic. You know, you're not wrong.

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You know, I would note that, you know, a lot of liberals would balk at the idea that they're fascistic.

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But the thing is, is that fascism is a form of Marxist socialism.

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There's just no way around it. So, you know, they actually are kissing cousins. So, you know, when you see the communists and the fascists fighting each other, run.

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It's like Godzilla and Rodan fighting in Tokyo. It's just going to be death and destruction all over the place. You know, stay out of that fight if you can.

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Anyway, all right, moving on. All this means that chapter 17, 11 through 18 is an indispensable part of the exegesis of the chapter.

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The basic historical details they relate about Israel are just as integral to salvation history as the historical fact of the gospel.

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Traditionally summarized in the baptismal apostles' creed among those facts, one also included in the

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Nicene Creed is that Christ's vicarious atonement took place under Pontius Pilate, a historical detail that anchors the gospel in actual history.

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Funny enough, I may have mentioned this a few weeks ago, that I remember back in my

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Concordia University days, a fellow who legitimately struggled with the phrase suffered under Pontius Pilate in the creed.

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That was the big offending bit because he had a hard time believing that God can intervene in human history and that the story of Christ's death, burial, resurrection, and ascension is actually history rather than some kind of religious spiritual legend.

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But it most certainly is not. Christ's death, his life, his virgin birth, his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension are all historical.

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That's not, this is not, it's not some kind of a legend. So then here's the meaning. The first eagle, the first eagle mentioned, chapter 17, three through six, is actually

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Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. The cedar is said to be in Lebanon, the land famous for its cedars, but the tree represents

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Jerusalem. That the eagle breaks off the topmost of its, the cedar shoots, refers to Nebuchadnezzar removing

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King Jehoiachin, whom he took to Babylon along with the other leading

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Israelites in the deportation recorded in 2 Kings, chapter 24, 10 through 16.

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So, Nebuchadnezzar is the eagle. The topmost bit is actually what?

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It's the royal family and being deposed by King Nebuchadnezzar. The member of the royal family was

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Jehoiachin's uncle, Mattaniah, whom Nebuchadnezzar renamed Zedekiah and stationed as his vassal, king over Judah.

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The act of renaming him probably was intended as a reminder that the real power lay with Nebuchadnezzar.

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That Zedekiah rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar is also recorded, is recorded also in 2

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Kings 24 and elaborated in 2 Chronicles 36. Not all the details of the rebellion are known, but it is clear that it was no sudden impulse by Zedekiah, but probably had been brewing almost since his ascension.

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Jeremiah 27 records an order from Yahweh to Jeremiah to denounce Zedekiah in the fourth year of his reign for joining four neighbors who had met to conspire against Babylon.

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And Jeremiah 51 mentions a visit by Zedekiah to Babylon, presumably to defend his behavior, which apparently he did successfully since he retained his office for a little while longer.

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At about the same time, I cannot pronounce that word. One of the

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Egyptian pharaohs, Samotikus II, that guy,

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Samotikus, okay, he assumed power in Egypt and may well have encouraged

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Zedekiah to revolt, promising him assistance if needed. Clearly, when the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem began,

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Judah looked for assistance from Samotikus' successor, Hophra, but to no avail.

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Thus, Egypt is the second great eagle toward which the vine turned. So, you got

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Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, and Egypt. They're all kind of working it. The uprooting of the vine and its desiccation by the east wind, since Babylon is east of Israel, in 179 correspond to the punishment described in 1760 -18 and refers to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, Zedekiah fled, but he did not escape.

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His sons were slaughtered in his presence before he was blinded and brought to Babylon, where he died, fulfilling

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Ezekiel 1716. Okay. All right. So, theological meaning.

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Let's take a look at the theological meaning and then, well, actually, I should probably read out a little bit more here and then we'll look at the theological meaning.

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At least now we understand what the different things in the parable represent. Lily says, I always get the

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Assyrians and the Babylonians mixed up. What is the connection between these two empires? I don't know the formal connection.

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The Assyrians, one has to wonder if the

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Assyrians were not part of the early proto -nation that would become

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Babylon. Babylon itself, it's kind of like a multi -ethnic state.

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It's not one that is comprised of just one thing. And the Assyrians, I think, get rolled up into that empire.

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The Medes, the Persians, the Assyrians, and all of them, it kind of rolls over and takes over everybody.

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So, there is a connection, but Assyrians, I think, are going to be more, kind of more ancient than the

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Babylonians. So, I'm doing this from memory. Hopefully, I'm not messing it up too much. All right.

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So, let me back up now and let's take a look at the text and see, now that we kind of know what the reference are, the one eagle is

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Nebuchadnezzar, the second eagle is Egypt, and God asked the question, and what has been taken away is the royal family, hence the stump of David, if you would, the stump of Jesse.

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All right, let's see here. So, the question it asked, behold, it is planted, will it thrive? Will it not ugly wither away when the east wind strikes it, wither away on the bed where it is sprouted?

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So, then the word of Yahweh came to me, say now to the rebellious house, do you not know what these things mean?

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It will tell them, behold, the king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and took her king and her princes and brought them to him to Babylon, hence the first eagle.

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And he took one of the royal offspring and made a covenant with him, putting him under oath, the chief men of the land he had taken away, that the kingdom might be humble and not lift itself up and keep his covenant that it might stand.

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But he rebelled against him by sending his ambassadors to Egypt that he might give him horses and a large army.

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Will he thrive? Can anyone escape who does such things? Can he break the covenant and yet escape?

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I think the answer to God's questions are no, no, and no. I'm beginning to see a negative answer here.

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So, as I live declares the Lord Yahweh, surely in the place where the king dwells, who made him king, whose oath he despised, and whose covenant with him he broke in Babylon, he shall die.

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Pharaoh with his mighty army and great company will not help him in war when mounds are cast up and siege walls built to cut off many lives.

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He despised the oath in breaking the covenant and behold, he gave his hand and did all these things, he shall not escape.

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Therefore, thus says the Lord Yahweh, as I live, surely it is my oath that he despised and my covenant that he broke,

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I will return it upon his head. And so, you know, this is then making reference to some of the, even the things that God said to, you know, through prophet

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Jeremiah. All right. And so, let's see, I will spread my net over him and he shall be taken in my snare.

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I will bring him to Babylon and enter into judgment with him there for the treachery he has committed against me and all the pick of his troops shall fall by the sword and the survivors shall be scattered to every wind and you shall know that I am

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Yahweh, I have spoken. Now, interesting here, this is where you'll note that although Zedekiah was captured by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar, near the city of Jericho, by the way, that despite the fact that he was caught by human beings, it was

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God who laid the snare, God who cast the net and Nebuchadnezzar was God's net.

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So, all right. So, we continue on. And all the pick of the troops, so they will fall. Okay. Thus says the

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Lord Yahweh, I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out.

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I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs, a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.

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On the mountain height of Israel, I will plant it that it may bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar and under it will dwell every kind of bird in the shade of its branches.

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Birds of every sort will nest and all the trees of the field shall know that I am Yahweh. I will bring low the high tree and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.

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I am Yahweh. I have spoken. I will do it. Now, here's the fun part about this, is that, all right, the standard question is, who is that about?

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And if you say, the standard answer had better be, that sounds like it's got to be about Jesus. That's kind of the point.

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And you'll note some of the same imagery that is used here about this tree growing and every kind of bird and shade and all that kind of stuff, that was used, that same language was used by God to describe the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar.

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And then Nebuchadnezzar's tree was lopped down, right? So this here is

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God himself taking a from the lofty top, from the family, royal family itself, and then that tree growing, right?

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And the fun bit here is you can see the cross kind of in sight.

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I will bring low the high tree, all the lofty trees kind of represent, you know, the kings of the earth at this point.

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I will make all those lofty trees low and I will make high the low tree, that's

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Christ. And again, think incarnation here. This goes really well with our Christmas text today. I will dry up the green tree.

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So the living trees right now, they're all going to dry up and I'll make the dry tree flourish.

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Ooh, that has to be the cross, right? I'm just saying, you know, prove me wrong.

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That has to be the cross. There is no drier, deader tree than the cross of Christ.

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And yet that dry tree God causes to flourish, right? So Karen says, that sprig parable reminds me of the parable of Christ talked about, about the faith, the size of a mustard seed growing into a tree in which the birds roost.

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Karen, you're not wrong. That fact, that's a great connection. That is a most appropriate connection.

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Well done. Here. So let's fact check me to see if I'm too far off, but you'll note here.

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So in the Bibles and Christianity's two -storied view of history, the focus now shifts to the upper heavenly one where earthly history is really made.

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What a great sentence. Okay. Okay. You think you know what's going on, do you now?

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You follow the news religiously. You watch the news channel. You know what's happening in the

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Middle East. You're aware of the potential war conflict with China and their machinations out there in the other side of the

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Pacific Ocean. You think you know what's going on? No, you don't know a thing. And I would note that if you want to be a good student of history and have a proper understanding of real earthly history, you cannot be a careful student of history apart from knowing that Christ, Jesus is

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King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Right? Everything has to be interpreted theologically.

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Don't believe me? Let me remind you here of what Romans 13 says.

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All right. Let's see here. I want Romans 13. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities for there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God.

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Wait, what? Okay. Let that settle for a second here.

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I'm going to do one of those psalm things where we do a say law. Just let that sit there for a second. I'm going to take a swig of coffee.

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Are you saying that God established the Soviet Union? Yep. China? Uh -huh.

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Oh, no. What? Joe Biden? Yeah. You know, and I would note that sometimes

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God allows magistrates and kings and heads of state to be a form of his judgment.

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At this point, I would say America has all the signs necessary if they would just interpret the current administration theologically that we would call on all

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Christians to repent in sackcloth and ashes and pray for the repentance of the nation.

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We get the leaders we deserve. As true as that is,

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I fear we deserve much worse. And God does overthrow them. That's true.

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Christians don't, but God does. Those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what

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God has appointed. Those who resist will incur judgment. I would note that in our day, we've seen a rise of something called

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Christian nationalism. I don't know how they reconcile their beliefs with this text.

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There's different types of Christian nationalists. On the one hand, you've got the people who claim that they've got to somehow create a

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Christian nation. We have no orders to do such a thing. And then you've got the truly legitimately fascistic anti -Semitic version that reflects a modern day reincarnation of Nazi ideology.

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These are people who are calling for the overthrow of the current

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U .S. government and installing in place a Christian monarch over the

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United States who would then deport anybody who wasn't of white

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European descent or put them in concentration camps. It's just crazy stuff. I wish that wasn't true, but it is.

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But I don't see how they get around a text like this. Whoever resists the authorities resists what

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God has appointed. As awful as the United States is, it's a duly instituted,

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God -appointed governing authority on planet earth. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.

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Would you have no fear of the one who is an authority? Then do what's good and you'll receive his approval. And Paul's writing this about the

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Roman Empire. Right. Okay. So then do what's good and you'll receive his approval, for he is

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God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is the servant of God and avenger who carries out

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God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Okay. Therefore, one must be in subjection, not only to avoid

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God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this, you pay taxes. For the authorities are ministers of God attending to this very thing.

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Now, when the governing authority now begins punishing good and exalting evil, what do we do?

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We still submit to the governing authorities, but if they teach us to contradict God's word, we tell them, no, we have to obey

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God rather than you. But we call the state to repent and to get back to their duly instituted job of giving to them by Christ to punish evildoers.

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So you'll note that some states, they don't do their duty. The Jennings said, when

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Trump became president, we had multiple pastors in our old town that wished harm on him.

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I've seen that before. Yeah. That's not how

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Christians are to behave. You assume that they've read this text and comprehend it.

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That may be an incorrect assumption on my part. Oh, bummer. A great question is, who does

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God use to overthrow these governments that are terrors to those who do good?

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So Adam, I would note that as a Christian, that's not for me to participate in.

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Although I would note that there is one notable person in 20th century history that stands enigmatically, and that was

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was an interesting fellow, pastor, theologian, and spy and co -conspirator in Operation Valkyrie to basically assassinate

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Adolf Hitler. Of course, he was put to death for his participation in Operation Valkyrie.

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But yeah, you get the idea. There's some very interesting things that have to be considered.

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When the government is murdering its citizens left and right and murdering other people's citizens left and right, at that point, you can't obey the government.

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But you'll note that I would note that Adolf Hitler was not overthrown by any insurrection.

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He was overthrown by other states. The United States and Russia and the

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United Kingdom were working together. And then the allies of the

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European nations that were under the boot of Nazis, they all worked together to overthrow the

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Nazi regime. And so God used them for that purpose. But all other attempts failed.

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And one has to wonder what that's about. Okay, what is the best place to start ordering these commentaries?

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Yeah, Concordia Publishing House. Jody, these commentaries, I get them through Concordia Publishing House.

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But I would note here, since you're asking a question about my commentaries. So you'll note that when

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I'm teaching on Fighting for the Faith, I use Accordance. But when

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I'm teaching on complex books of the Bible that require some help from commentaries,

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I'm using Logos. And let me show you. Let's see here.

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I want to go here. Because I can legitimately say this, and that is that I don't have any more room in my house for more books.

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If you've been to my house, you know that it's almost hit like joke proportions, how many books we have here between my wife and I.

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You get the feeling that reading is kind of a big deal in our family. But Logos is the software that I use for my theological library for the most part.

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And I also use Kindle Books. Kindle is just a reader, whereas Logos is a whole system.

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But if you were to go to Concordia Commentary.

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Okay, there we go. All right. So the Logos versions have to be purchased from Logos directly.

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And so I've got a very large number of the Concordia Commentaries.

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And every year I add more and more books to my library from the Concordia Commentary series.

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But I get them on Logos so that I can read them on my iPad.

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I can read them online and things like this. Okay. All right. Let's come back to this. All right.

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So in the Bible and Christianity's two -story view of history, the focus now shifts to the upper heavenly one where earthly history is really made.

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It has often been noted that the Bible really has no vocable corresponding to our history, which as a discipline divorced from theology is a child of the enlightenment.

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Another great statement. It's like, that's so well said.

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It is not that what people call and know as history is illusory or some platonic shadow of reality outside of the cave, but that it is the only part of the totality that apart from the scriptures is accessible to human reason and the senses.

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Thus is no accident that in many respects, the theological interpretation of the allegory does little more than restate what has already been explained in the preceding verse, except that God now becomes the constant subject.

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Everything is now viewed subspecies as part of God's eternal plan.

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The divine revelation about the purpose and goal of history moves from the deus absconditus to the deus revelatus, the revealed deity.

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The theme of breaking the covenant recalls 1659 and the result that Yahweh will impose the proper punishment on the head of the offender.

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Now, a little bit of a note here. So, let's kind of take what he's saying here, and let's then run history through a proper understanding of God's word.

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Going back then to the 2020 election. The 2020 election, you had

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Trump's spiritual advisors all prophesying that he was going to be reelected.

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How did that go, by the way, for Trump? Not so good.

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Okay. And that being the case,

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I would note that God has a funny way, and we can get this from biblical theology, of repudiating false prophets, you know?

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And so, you know, I quipped back then that, you know, if they really wanted Trump to win the election, they should have prophesied that Biden would have won, you know?

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Because God seemed to see fit to do the exact opposite. And then when

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Kenneth Copeland decreed and declared that the COVID -19, that the pandemic ended in March of 2020, how'd that work out for the world?

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It didn't, right? The thing drug out for another year and a half. That being the case, you know, it's like,

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I would note there is a kind of a way of theologically interpreting some of what's going on here.

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And so, you can't say, thus sayeth the Lord. You can say that person's a false prophet, and it seems interesting that God set about to contradict the false prophets of today, and to punish those people who were listening to them, which then kind of leads to the next question with the upcoming 2024 election.

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Has Trump repented of his spiritual advisors? Is he still hanging out with those yahoos, you know?

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You know, I look at Trump's run in 2024 and sit there and go, this theologically is not a good thing, you know, on multiple levels.

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So, you know, I just have to kind of sort that all out and think accordingly, right?

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Okay. All right. So, you get the idea here. I love the point that's being made in the commentary that we cannot divorce a proper study of history from theology.

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The two always go together, and if you divorce history from theology, you've got a story without any way of interpreting the meaning of it, right?

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And that's kind of the point of modern day history, is that it evacuates God from his dealings within our own human history.

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And I would note that you think all the way back to this time of the Civil War, the people who fought in the

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Civil War and the men who led the nation through the American Civil War, they believed that the

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Civil War was God's judgment against slavery. And they interpreted the destruction and the suffering and the cataclysm of the

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Civil War through the lens of Christian theology. And as a result of it, it gave meaning to what happened.

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Nowadays, what's the meaning behind any of the wars or the battles or the things that take place in our history?

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Because nobody even considers God's involvement in any of it, you know, which is a formula for disaster.

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Okay. Okay. Jody says, there seems to be an odd worship of Trump as some kind of savior to save the nation, though we need to pray for that freedom.

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Yeah, no, there is a weird, almost cult -like obsession with Trump.

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And I legitimately do not understand it, anything. Yeah, it's a Cyrus thing.

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They use Cyrus as the pretense. They call Trump the

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Cyrus of our times. He's not. Is that a type of idol worship? For some, yes, absolutely.

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I would note for some people that their absolute belief that Trump is the savior of the nation is, it is pure idolatry.

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I'm pretty sure Christ is the savior of the world, including the United States. And so we humbly pray to God that he give us good magistrates and leaders.

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And I'm pretty sure there's more than one guy that could fill those shoes, you know, just saying.

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All right. All right. Let's see here. I have to look at my time.

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Okay. I do not have the ability to start another section because this has to be dealt with on its own.

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So what we're going to do here is we're going to end our Bible study here. All right.

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Peace to you all, Lord willing. We will see you next time. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.