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Pastor David Mitchell
I'm anxious to get started on this. This is something we've been teaching through the book of Romans now.
We're in Romans chapter 8, a little bit beyond verse 23, but naturally, since a lot of you weren't here the last few times
I taught, I get to review, which is my favorite part. That'll leave me about five minutes for the main message because the review is my favorite part.
It's because I always learn something new every time I go through the same passage, right? But we've been going through Romans verse by verse, so we're in chapter 8 now.
So this is our eighth year to be doing this study. No, I'm kidding. It's probably more like 10.
I don't know. It's been a while. We go slow through the scripture. One time I asked
Dr. Myron Golden, how do you pull so much out of the Bible when you teach?
It's amazing. And he said, I don't know, David. He said, I was dyslexic, and as a kid,
I didn't like to read, so I kind of read slowly. He said, I just read the Bible real slow, and that's the key.
That's the trick. All right. Well, let's get started here. I'm going to do a little bit of review, and then we'll get to the main part of the passage we're in today.
And oddly enough, this passage in the middle of chapter 8 of Romans, which I've never known my whole life as I've studied this, preached through it, talked through it many times, in the middle of this passage, in the middle of Romans chapter 8, which many great scholars think is probably the best chapter, if you had to be stuck with just one chapter on an island and you didn't have the whole
Bible, this would be it. Maybe so. But of course, whichever verse or chapter you're reading, that's the one you would think you'd want to keep at the time, right?
So let's just get started here, Romans chapter 8, verse 23, and what you're going to notice right here in the middle of chapter 8 is a passage that has to do with the rapture of the church.
And I never really noticed that that's what it was talking about my whole life until this past few months as I've been studying through this passage and then getting ready to preach on it.
And it popped out, and I said, wow, that's amazing. And then when all this stuff happened with the coronavirus scare, and here we are, not even able to meet for church today.
By the way, at first, I sort of thought, oh, this is nothing but just political junk, you know, it's just the flu and all that stuff.
And that was kind of the attitude that I was taking about it. And then my daughter
Katie sent me an email from one of her doctors that so intelligently described the difference between this and the flu and actually had facts in his description and how he worded it, and I went, wow, okay,
I'm paying attention to that. So that's the only reason we're not in the church building today, because I wasn't going to call it off.
And then, so thank you, Katie, for calling off church, no, I'm kidding. She sent me that, and from her doctor, and I read it, and I said, oh, okay, now that makes sense, and I do see there's a difference.
So we do have to be careful with this, really careful. And those of us who are 60 years old and older, we got to be twice as careful.
So I know people have different views of it, but you read,
I'll make that available to you guys. I'll email it out to the little note she sent me. I guess that's okay, Katie. We don't really have permission from the doctor to do that, but maybe we can get that permission.
It's a really good little note. But anyway, with this happening, it's really interesting that the
Lord had brought us to a place of talking about the end times from the middle of the chapter 8 of Romans, which most people don't even see that in there, but that's where we are, and we're going verse by verse, so we're just going to continue that little study.
So let's start here, Romans 8, 23, and not only they, but ourselves also.
Now the word they is talking about the entire creation of the universe. You'll see that in a minute. The entire creation of the universe, which was affected by the fall of Adam and Eve.
When man decided to sin, they did it because they wanted to. They made that choice. When they made that choice, there was a curse on the earth, on the people, on the serpent as you remember, and the entire universe was cursed, and now it is like it is because of that event.
Of course, none of that surprised God. It was in His eternal plan always, and there's only one plan. So God sees this as the only plan.
This is the plan. It's the perfect plan. When you're perfect, you don't need a substitute plan or a fallback plan.
So this was always the plan. We know that because the book of Revelation says that Jesus Christ was slain before the foundation of the world in God's mind, right?
So it was always the plan, and Adam and Eve, though, they weren't forced to do it.
You know, you have trouble figuring out sovereignty of God and the will of man. We all try to put those two together all the time.
It's not as easy for us to put them together as it is for God to, but let me assure you, both are going on in parallel all the time.
Adam and Eve did what they wanted to do, and they were held accountable for it. That's just how it works, and yet it didn't surprise
God. So they, in verse 23, is talking about the entire creation, and the
Bible says it's groaning, which means it's out of whack. It's cursed. It's not like it was, and it wants to go back like it was.
And now it says not only the universe, but we ourselves, that's those of us who are born again Christians, we're groaning also, which those of us who have the first fruits of the
Spirit, there's so much in every word of every verse, right? We could preach on this one verse today. Not going to do it, though.
I have endless time. I mean, you know, you can leave when you want to, right? All right, so I may get to like this internet church stuff.
All right, so you hate it when I joke like this. I know that, especially about how long I'm going to preach.
It's not funny anymore. All right. Well, anyway, can't stop joking about it. Well, and you can't see our faces to know when to stop.
Isn't that when you— That's true. I don't know if I've got you laughing yet or groaning or what, but we're talking about groaning.
It said in Hawaii that you stopped only when you saw the audience not able to receive anymore. So how are you going to know when to stop?
Oops, that's going to be a problem. Yeah. Okay, if I hear Ben snoring,
I'll stop. Oh, no. Now Ben's going to snore when he wants me to stop. Oh, well, we got a lot to learn about doing it this way.
All right, so look at the first fruits of the Spirit. What does that mean? Well, that's—and it's all through this message.
Who knows how much of this I'll get to. I always have two or three Sundays worth, so we'll see. But yeah, but, you know,
I was talking about the state that we're in now, this old man, new man situation, this schizophrenic thing where I want to follow
Christ, but sometimes I don't. I go with the flesh, and it seems like a miserable existence to those of us who really, really, really want to follow the
Lord all the time, and we find ourselves not doing it. Even the Apostle Paul had that problem right at the end of the previous chapter before this chapter started.
Oh, wretched man that I am, he said, who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to Jesus Christ our
Lord, right? That's what he said. Best Christian ever lived, and he had this problem. Well, this is a reference to it.
We who have the firstfruits of the Spirit—it's like the earnest money put down on the house, but the house isn't really completely—transaction's not completely done until the rapture.
So here's one of our first hints that this is actually beginning to talk about the rapture, which have the firstfruits of the
Spirit. Now, if you don't know what the rapture is, you'll see in a minute. Even we ourselves groan within ourselves.
Why? Because we don't like this existence where we sin again. We want to not be sinning.
The new man—listen, when the Lord gave us a new birth, the new me is the real me, all right?
The new man is the real me. I don't want to sin, and sometimes the world, the flesh, and the devil will influence us, and somehow we go back down into the flesh, we'll sin, and we hate ourselves.
That's the life of a Christian. So we groan because we want to serve the Lord all the time and be right with God all the time, and we feel dirty sometimes.
And so much of this passage is speaking to this issue, and the great Charles Spurgeon, the prince of preachers, would preach on this thing a lot.
He'd say, the very fact that you guys out there are doubting your salvation proves you're saved, because a goat doesn't even think about his salvation.
A goat or a tare, they don't even worry about it. They love their sin. And he would have people in his congregation that had sinned or something, and they felt like, well,
I'm not even sure if I'm saved anymore. And he would rebuke them and say, the fact that you're worried about it shows that you are.
Get up and go again. Confess our sins. Get up and go again. He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
That's not only the one you just remembered, but the ones you didn't remember to confess. It includes them because he cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
And we get up and go again. That's why we're groaning. That life, I'm not sure, you know, most of us, if we were
God, we'd think we'd do it differently. We think that, don't we? But God did it this way. Now, I'm going to show you more scripture about that in a minute, too.
But we groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to wit, the redemption of our body.
And that is a specific, definite reference to the rapture, the moment in time when those who died before us are raised from the grave and put back together in a perfect body.
It's their same body, but it's perfected where it can't die anymore. It can't be sick. The coronavirus won't affect it one bit.
And then those of us are still alive at that moment, which I think we are that generation, by the way. I'll try to prove that in a minute.
But we will rise up with them and go to be with the Lord in the air. And that's called the rapture.
The rapture affects both those who have already passed away and in the grave because they're resurrected, put in their new perfect, well, their perfected old body, actually.
And we are just simply changed in the air. We don't have to experience physical death. And that is the great hope of the church.
Every generation of the church has thought they would be alive when that happened. I'm going to give you some evidence why, even though, yeah,
I know they all thought that, and people say that, well, they all thought that, as if it's not going to happen in our generation.
Well, I mean, there are some signs we can look at, despite what some scholars say.
There are no signs of the rapture. There are many signs of the rapture. The Bible's full of it. And that's an error in theology to think that.
So let's go on here. Even we grown waiting for the adoption to wit, the redemption of our body, that is talking about the rapture.
All right? Now, Romans 8, verse 16. I'm going to go back and pick up a little context.
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the sons of God, the children of God.
A Christian who's truly born again knows that he's saved. Now, it's not that we won't sometimes have doubts if we get into sin, especially if we're a new
Christian, where it hadn't been in the Word long, and we're not maybe in the full walk yet. We don't know the
Lord that well, and we sin. We think, well, maybe I didn't get saved. But then as we study the Word, we find out our salvation wasn't based on what we do or don't do.
It's a gift. It's a free gift from God. It's pure grace, and it's by the blood of Jesus plus nothing that we can add to it.
So we realize we are saved, but the more we get to know the Lord, the Holy Spirit Himself, one of the 33 things
He did at the very nanosecond He saved you, many things. God did a lot of work to save us, but He put
His Spirit in our bodies, and our bodies became the temple of the living God. And His Holy Spirit witnesses to our spirit saying, yeah, you're saved.
The Lord died for you. He's your redemption. He is the one who gave His blood to cover your sins and to pay for them, and the deal is done.
And He propitiated the Father, which means He satisfied God that the sin debt had been paid on your behalf, and it is finished, paid in full.
And the Holy Spirit reminds us of that when we need it, and that's what that verse means. And if we're children, we're also heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together with Him.
Now, that's beautiful. I remember Brother Otis, this older gentleman who was a member of our church for years and taught the
Bible 50 years when I met him, and he loved to have coffee, and he'd try to ask me questions
I couldn't answer, which made it really fun for both of us, but I would do a lot of studying to answer his questions.
He asked me one time, Brother David, do you know the difference between a co -heir and a joint heir?
And I said, well, I'm not an attorney, Brother Otis, and he probably laughed and thought, well, you know, you are a businessman, but you don't get all my business questions right either, but he didn't say that.
But he said, well, Brother David, a co -heir is like you and I are brothers and our dad dies and we each get half of everything.
I said, that's right. He said, you know what a joint heir is, Brother David? We both get all of it.
I said, wow, you know, that may be difficult to make happen with a human father, but with God, it's not because his assets are endless.
They're infinite. You can't divide them in half. They're just more and more and more. We all get all of it. That's the message.
Everything, the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ himself made everything for himself and by himself.
Jesus Christ made everything. He owns everything, and he did everything that the
Father told him to do, and so he owns everything and we own everything Jesus owns. Is that amazing?
So let's keep going here, but you know, don't you think it's interesting right there where it says, you know, we're going to suffer with him.
There's a promise. We don't want to skip by that one in verse 17. You know, only by suffering do we enter the kingdom of heaven,
Jesus said, but here he speaks about this fact that, yeah, we're going to suffer with him, but we're also going to be glorified with him together, and that makes us look forward to that so that when we have the suffering, we can go through it.
I had a really dear friend of mine who just, we just went to a funeral two days ago where he lost his son, and he was just so broken like I would be if that happened to me, but he was just so broken, and his wife, and he is suffering right now.
He's on his way to heaven also someday. He's a wonderful Bible teacher, brilliant man, the father of the son was, and yet he's hurting so badly
I can't even identify with it really. I know grace, God gives us the grace we need only at times when we need it like that, that kind of grace, and he gives it, and so my friend has it, but still we suffer to enter the kingdom of heaven, but look what it says.
Look forward to that time when we're all glorified together. He'll be with that son again. We'll all be with the
Lord. Now, verse 18 says, For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed in us someday.
Now, isn't it interesting in this passage that the Lord seems to be, and the
Holy Spirit, the direct author of the Scripture as he inspired the human penman, this is
God's book. Every word is God's book. He's the author of it. He begins to tell us about suffering and to encourage us and comfort us.
What does that mean? That means suffering is coming. That means he's about to go into a part of the passage of Scripture where he's going to talk about the end times, the tribulation period, and all of that is going to be tough.
It's going to be full of things like famines and pestilences and diseases that never had arisen on the earth before, worse than ever, and this may be the first one, quite honestly.
We've always had them. You know, we've had bubonic plague back in the dark ages killed millions of people.
The flu kills thousands of people, but there are some signs we'll talk about, and how we read the signs is very important.
But here he's about to get into this tribulation period, and he is simply saying,
I want to comfort you. I want you to understand that the sufferings that you may go through cannot even be compared to the glory that we're going to have together in eternity forever and all the things we're going to do, and that's the
Lord Jesus speaking to us as children. Now, if you drop down a little bit to verse 23, it says, for we know that the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, and that's where I knew on the little verse
I started out with is talking about the whole universe. The whole orderly universe, in the
Greek it's called kosmos, the entire kosmos fell into a cursed state when
Adam and Eve sinned. It didn't surprise the Lord. Jesus Christ had already been slain in the
Father's mind. Everything was going to be in place, but it is what happened, and so the whole earth groans, the rocks, the trees, the environment, the universe, the earth is on a tilt.
Who knows if it always was? I just know there was a lot of catastrophe that happened with that fall, all right?
So, Ben, you can still hear me, right?
Yes, sir. Okay, good. All right, so this is talking about the effect of the fall on the whole universe.
Now, that Greek word for universe there, I mean for creation, is tsitsis, which means the original formation.
That, ladies and gentlemen, that goes all the way back to Genesis 1 .1, when God spoke everything that is out of nothing into existence.
He spoke everything that is out of nothing into existence at that moment, and that's when time began,
I suppose, at that point, and I know that's when stuff began, and you have to have time to have stuff, so there you have it.
That's what this is a reference to, and this Greek word means that event. So, it's the creation of the universe that's being talked about.
All of God's creation is groaning, travailing in pain together because of the curse. Got that?
All right, let's go to the next one up here, verse 19, and the reason I bring this up on this Greek word,
I'll show you why in a minute. Now, verse 19 in the Old King James, which, by the way, I believe is the most accurate
English version of Scripture, especially with the Greek New Testament. I don't have time to go into why
I believe that, but I studied it and only that for two years, manuscript evidence, for two whole years of my life when
I was younger, and that's why I believe that, but it is so good, but sometimes we have some old
English we have to deal with, but this says, for the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
There's the rapture. It's a reference to the manifestation of the sons of God. Right now, we have the earnest money.
I'm saved, right, but the body part of me, my brain, my physical part still isn't.
I mean, it fights against God all the time, and yours does too, and you know it, but our soul and our spirit is born again already.
That's the earnest, and we have the Holy Spirit living in us, and He becomes one with our spirit when we're filled with the
Spirit. When we're holding Jesus' hand while we walk, we're filled with the Spirit, and we can't even sin.
We cannot sin when we're in that state, but we're not always in that state, so we groan, and the earnest expectation is the rapture where all of a sudden our body, the old man drops away, and it's fixed.
It's put together right where none of us, nothing about us pulls against God ever again. Can you imagine the weight that would be lifted off at that moment of the rapture as we are changed in the air?
Well, this is a reference to it. Now, this is interesting because—hold on.
I've got to move something out of the way where I can see that. The manifestation—all right, let's look at that word there.
The manifestation of sons of God. How do I know this is a rapture? Passage in the middle of Romans chapter 8, because look at the
Greek word. Apocalypse. That's the apocalypse. That's the book of Revelation is what it's called in the
Greek. This is a reference to what's coming in the book of Revelation.
So, all right, now, next verse is kind of interesting because what we see is that this word for creature in the
Greek is tsitsis, exact same word as we saw down here in creation.
So, a better translation here would be creation. So, this is literally talking about the whole creation of God.
For the earnest expectation of the creation, that's all of nature, all of the universe waits for the manifestation of our change.
Why does it wait for our change? Because at the same time we change, it gets to change. It's put back into a state similar to the
Garden of Eden. Not totally like it, but similar. The next verse says, for the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who subjected the same.
We read verses like that and they're a little difficult, so we just go on and find something we like better. That is a very important verse.
Now, let me fix it first. I'm going to show you something. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
So, when the children of God are changed in the air, now watch this. I'm going to hit a button. I can't do this at real church, but I can do this in internet church.
Boom. You see that? I changed those words to what the Greek word says, creation.
Just like this word in verse 22, which in the English says creation, they're the same Greek word. So, let's read it now.
For the earnest expectation of the whole creation of God waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, for us to be changed in the air.
For the creation was made subject to vanity. Now, that creation includes us, doesn't it? We're physical.
We're a spiritual, physical being, but we're one person, even though we're three parts. We're one person. We're very physical still.
So, it includes us. We were all subject to vanity. And that means, it's interesting, look that word up.
I should have popped it up there. But that word vanity means that it can come into existence and go out of existence quickly like our physical body does.
You get to be 65, you start to realize, wow, this body is kind of slowly going out of existence and we all groan.
See, that's part of the groaning. We don't like that, do we? We want the hair to turn back the right color and grow a little bit more.
And if you get far enough away, there's no wrinkles. That's cool. I like that. Don't like it so much up here.
But we're groaning. So, we were made subject to vanity. Now, look what it says, not willingly.
Like, we didn't want this. You say, well, Adam and Eve did. No, they didn't. They wanted the fruit, but they didn't want the result of it.
They wanted the fruit that God said, don't touch. He didn't say, don't touch. He said, don't eat it. They wanted it. They ate it.
They got the result. They didn't want that. They didn't want the wrinkles either. It took them like 900 years to get wrinkly like me, but they lived longer before the flood.
But still, they didn't like it. So, the whole creation was made subject to this, but not willingly.
Now, you think about the creation, like the rocks, trees, beautiful waterfalls, the sea, the air, the birds.
They certainly wasn't their will for sin to happen. It was man's will. So, to them, it happened not willingly.
Do you see the point? But it happened, and you say, okay, well, let's blame Adam and Eve. Well, but look, let's get beyond that, a little deeper than that.
Do you really think Adam and Eve surprised God when they fell? It says, it didn't happen to the creation willingly, but by reason of Him who has subjected the same in hope.
Who is that? That's God. So, God is sovereign. God is the one who had this plan in the first place, and it happened to us unwillingly.
In other words, it wasn't our will for things to go this way, but it was God's will. That's what that says. You may not like it.
The theology you've had in the past may not lean that way. It doesn't matter. It's what Scripture says. And I think the more you learn that God is sovereign, the more you'll love
Scripture, and the more you'll learn to love the Lord and fear Him and want to walk with Him even more and more.
So, I know Brother Otis said, Brother David, I understand the Bible teaches the will of man, but it also teaches the sovereignty of God.
And the older I get, the more I lean towards the sovereignty of God. Would you mind if I teach with that mostly in mind?
And I said, absolutely teach that way. That's how Charles Spurgeon preached. Every sermon he ever preached was that way.
So, the Prince of Preachers knew that idea. So, anyway, it goes on and says, because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption.
So, when the rapture happens and God's sons are changed, the whole creation is going to benefit and it won't be groaning anymore.
Isn't that a beautiful thing to picture? We don't have to worry about liberals polluting the earth so much as they do.
We conservatives never do that, do we? We don't do that. The liberals are heating up the earth, getting it hotter than it's supposed to be, creating all kinds of trouble, but God is going to fix all that.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, even until now when
Paul wrote this by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, that's pretty interesting stuff. Now, I want to take you just for a minute and diverge to a verse that I've taught before on a topic
I call the most misunderstood verse in the Bible, and people can't guess which one I'm talking about if I don't put the answer of the test up before I get the question, but like I do so often, but it's
John 3 .16. People so often do not understand this verse, but let's put it in the context of the passage we're in in Romans 8 where it's talking about the creation of God groaning.
John 3 .16 says, and you have to remember, God wrote the entire book of Genesis, which included the fall of man and the depravity of man and the sinful heart of man.
It described it in great detail before he ever wrote John 3 .16. So, you have to understand the fall of man and the depravity of man or you will never understand salvation, and in churches today, a lot of modern churches, they just start right here with John 3 .16,
talk about God's love, and they never talk about man's sin or man's depravity and how this is an answer for that and how if you don't understand that, you don't understand how wonderful this answer is.
But he says, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.
Now, that's not just talking about sheep. It's not just talking about humans who are going to be saved.
It's talking about the whole world. So, Jesus didn't just die for you and me. He died for the creation of God, and what's interesting, when you look at that word world in the
Greek, it's cosmos, the orderly arrangement or creation of God, and Jesus died to put it back like it was into orderly fashion and bring it out of the chaos that Adam and Eve spun it into.
Jesus died to put it back, and so it does include our salvation, of course, but it speaks to the whole universe.
It's pretty cool. All right, now back into Romans. Look at verse 23, and not only they, that's the whole creation because that's what it's just been talking about is how the creation grows, but we ourselves also which have the first fruits of the
Spirit. Yeah, when we say I'm saved, you mean your spirit and your soul is saved. Your body is not.
God couldn't fix it. It was so bad. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things.
Who can know it? The Bible says. So He didn't try to fix the old man. He just rebirthed you.
He gave you a new man, and He placed the Holy Spirit to live in you and to dwell with that new man, and you together become one spirit when you're spirit -filled, and you can't even sin when you're in that state.
So the goal for Christians is to think about what we're thinking about and to keep holding Jesus' hand throughout the day so that we live right and do that more moments of every day.
It's a moment -by -moment decision that we make. One reason we've grown is we don't like that. We don't like the fact that it's so easy to slip back into the flesh.
Even if we're not thinking about it, our brain will go there because our brain is still part of the old man. Our new spirit should control the mind and soul and body and cause it to be useful in the
Lord's hand, but sometimes the new man gets out of control for whatever reason. The old man, the brain just takes over because it can be something that pops in front of us.
It can be a thought. Satan can put a thought in there. The world, the flesh, and the devil can all influence our brain and pull us back down in the flesh in a nanosecond, and that's why we've grown.
But we have the firstfruits of the Spirit. We know we're saved because the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we're born again already, but the body is not, and that's what the
Scripture means by the manifestation of the sons of God, where this physical body that shows to everybody will be saved also, and the
Bible says the glory of that body, even though it'll be you and I'll be me and we'll recognize each other in heaven as who we are, that the glory of that body will be like the difference between the glory of the moon versus the glory of the sun.
Right now, we're living in the moon. It's going to be like the sun when our bodies are changed in the air that day.
So we're groaning within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to with the redemption.
Now, we think that we've already been adopted, don't we? And we have been. That's the past tense of salvation, right?
But we are still being saved. There is a past, present, future tense of salvation if you look at the whole concept of salvation, but the adoption has happened to us in eternity past is when
God knew us as his own children. Ephesians chapter 1, Romans chapter 8 talks about it, and then we've been redeemed because Jesus died for us, and we were actually in him when he died.
We were in him when he was buried. We were in him when he came out of the grave, and that's why we're born again. God did all of that.
It's a miracle of God. And so all of that has happened in the past, but here it speaks of these two items as if they're future.
This item of adoption and redemption, it says we're waiting to be redeemed. We're waiting to be adopted.
So that is just a specific reference to the physical body kind of catching up with our soul and spirit.
That's what this is. So it says, for we are saved by hope. Now, hope is a very similar word in Greek to pistio or pistis, which means faith.
Hope is very similar. It's a little different color of a very similar word. We know we're saved by faith.
We're saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. I mean, if you could just see it, it's not faith anymore.
It's fact, right? So we're still this part that we can't see. Now, part of this is the redemption of our body.
We just can't see that yet. We have to believe in it. We have to hope. Remember now, I'm going to show you this in a second, but the word hope in the
Bible doesn't mean what it does in English today. I'll show you that in a second. But we're saved by that faith that we will, that the whole body will be saved.
We're the same faith that saves our spirit and soul now is what makes us look forward to that time when the body catches up.
But hope that is seen is not hope for what a man seeth. Why does he yet hope for it?
Right? That's just good logic. Okay, so, but if we hope for what we see not, then do we with patience, wait for it.
So we're in that stage where we still grown. We're not perfect. We make mistakes. We don't like it when we make mistakes.
We hate apologizing, but we have to, you know, you know what it is. And yet we shall have the body catch up with that in the future when the
Lord comes back for us in the air and raptures us and changes us in the air to be with him.
But living in this state was God's will. And look what verse 25 says.
It brings some really great products, really great things in our lives that God loves to see happening.
And one of those is that our faith grows stronger. The other one is our patience grows stronger and this idea of waiting.
Now, let's look at some of these terms. Look up here where it says we grown. That's in the present active indicative, which means right now in time and space, this is happening.
Indicative just means it's a simple statement of fact. We are groaning now in the present tense. This is the state we live in.
Okay, now what's interesting when it says here for we are saved by hope, this is more interesting because all of a sudden you got this in a different tense in Greek that English doesn't even have.
It's called the aorist tense. And the aorist means without regard to time. It's not present, past or future.
It's not peasant either. Okay, and one time I asked my dear friend,
Dr. Raj Kripalani. He's got two PhDs in theology. I asked him, you know, help me out with the
Greek a little bit here. Explain aorist. And we had some other guys at coffee that day and he thought about it.
He said, you know, Brother David, we asked our professor in seminary that question. He had trouble answering it too.
And he thought and he thought a minute and all of a sudden he just slapped the desk. Pow. And he said, that's what it means.
It just, it just happened. It just is. It's like, it's not a matter of time. And that's what the best way to describe it is the way
Raj described it that morning. So this particular word here in verse 24 where it says we are saved.
It's aorist passive indicative. Now passive means someone bigger and greater than you did it to you.
It's not present active. You see up there with the word grown active means it's something you do. Passive means someone else did it to you.
So who is it that saved us? God. Salvation is of God. It's the blood of Jesus plus nothing.
It would have to be active tense if we did it. If we had any part in it, it would have to be active in the Greek. It's not.
It's aorist and it's not active. It's aorist passive. Now indicative is interesting because indicative means a simple statement of fact.
So you put that together. It's like with regard to our salvation, it's like boom. It just was.
It's part of eternity past. God already knew his children before he made anything, the Bible says in Ephesians 1 and all throughout the scripture.
So boom, it's just a fact. You are his child because you've always been his child. There comes a point in time when he notifies you of that and when you receive
Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior and all the things on the end time side. But those are effects of the cause.
The cause is the Holy Spirit woke you up and quickened you and gave you life. And by the way, you already had the quickening because it says while we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us?
The Holy Spirit had already brought you from death to life before you ever believed, repented, got baptized, served the
Lord or any of that. All of those are effects, not causes. And the great Charles Spurgeon said this once in a sermon.
I love it because I took logic in college. All of you guys should get online and take a logic course, I think. But he said an effect can never be the cause of the cause.
So none of those things caused you to get saved. It was God's Son, Jesus, who died for us and gave his blood.
And God, the Holy Spirit of God, who turned on our mind, our eyes, our want to.
Everything about us changed in a nanosecond. He took our chin and pointed it up and said, look at that. There's the
Lamb of God. He's got all the food and you're a sheep. You didn't know you were a sheep. You thought you were a goat. You were a lost sheep.
Now you're a saved sheep. Are you hungry? He's got the food. Boy, we jumped in and changed, didn't we?
Because we wanted to. But who made us want to? The Holy Spirit. That's how the Bible teaches salvation works. It's called the calling, the effectual calling.
The Holy Spirit has to light on you and call you to God or you won't want him yet. If you don't believe that, why didn't you get saved the day before you got saved?
You see what I mean? And this is all Bible. This is how it always used to be preached. So now we look at this salvation.
Errorist, boom. It just happened. It's an eternal concept. It's passive, which means someone did it to us.
We didn't do it to ourselves. And it's in the indicative, which means it's a simple statement of fact.
You can't change it. It's just how God did it. And so, boom. It's a fact without regard to time.
The boom happened in the past, in our past. With God, it just always is.
And indicative means it's an eternal fact and so forth. So there you have it. So now it's funny because the groaning happens only in the present tense and it's us doing it.
The salvation happened. It's eternal and it's God doing it. All right. So we are saved by hope.
Now, you think about the fact of saved by hope, or you could say saved by faith.
There's a lot of scripture you can go look at when you understand that that faith that you have was a gift that he gave you when he raised your chin up.
One of the 33 things he did at the moment, he brought you from death to life. And you were already alive at that point, was he gave you the faith of Christ.
Check it out. You might want to check it out in the King James. The modern versions don't have it correctly interpreted in the
Greek. It says faith of Christ. And so he gave you his faith, saving faith.
Jesus' faith, by the way, can walk on water. Yours can't. So God gave you his faith as part of the things he gave you when he saved you.
It's equipment. It's equipment we needed not only for our salvation, but for us to continue to grow and be everything
God wants us to be. So we're saved by faith. Whose faith? Jesus' faith. But hope, it doesn't mean we don't believe.
That's also something that happened. Like when God gave us Jesus' faith, it's like a tuning fork. And our little faith, it's on again, off again.
We doubt and we believe. We doubt, we believe. That faith just got in line with it. And the Holy Spirit struck that one and put it in us,
Jesus' faith. And then ours began to vibrate with it. So our faith is important too, but it's not what saved us.
Now that'll blow your mind. Go study it. Check me out. See if I'm right. All right. I don't care if it takes you a month. Go check me out because I'm not here to teach you something.
I'm here to get you to study. All right. But that's how it works. Charles Spurgeon taught it that way. The whole world 150 years ago pretty much taught salvation that way.
Now we're a little bit off on it. But anyway, it's all in the Greek. Greek's like math. You can't change these. You can't change the
Greek. It just shows about time and space and all that stuff. So we hope, hope that is not seen is not hope and so forth.
And we've looked at those already. So let's go to the next spot here. Oh, I did want to say this.
The word hope in English has changed since the King James was written. It used to match even in English what it means in Greek.
Now it's changed. I believe Satan loves to change language because it makes it harder for us to communicate. Hope today say, well,
I hope the Cowboys win next year. It means I hope they do, but they probably won't. Right? That's what hope means now.
Didn't used to be that way. What the Greek word means is joyful expectation of a certain future event.
That's totally different. So that's what hope actually means here. This is the kind of hope that's talking about.
It's like the hope that we know we're going to meet together with each other with the Lord in the air someday. We know that's going to happen.
It's a fact. God placed that knowledge in our hearts. It's in the Word of God. He gave us the
Holy Spirit, which causes us to read and study and understand the Word of God. And it's based on that hope.
Remember, it's almost bad to use the word hope because our brain can't hardly translate it into the right meaning anymore.
So we should just get rid of the word hope and just say, read it this way. For we are saved by joyful expectation of a certain future event called the rapture.
The fact that we're saved by the joyful expectation that we can trust Jesus completely to save this body part of us too, and that he is going to.
And God put that faith in us, and it's Jesus' faith. Jesus had that same faith as a man. He said, if you tear down this temple,
I will raise it again in three days. Did he not? That was hope. But it's the right kind of hope. I don't even like using the word.
It messes it up now. It was the joyful expectation of what Jesus Christ knew was a fact.
On the third day, he would rise out of that grave in and of his own power. And that resurrection power, dunamis in the
Greek, God put that same power in us when he saved us. We can live a resurrected life now because we were in Christ when he came out of the grave spiritually.
There we have it. There's lots of sermons in these few little words and verses. Patience down here.
You know what? The fact that we have to have hope and wait for the body to be changed and just know that's going to happen, but we groan while it's happening.
We don't like this existence totally, but we love the fact we exist. God's only method for creating us was this method.
He wasn't going to do it a different day. He was going to bring us into this world, time, space, continuum, pass us through this world, send his son to give us the message of salvation, send his spirit to awaken us where we would hear it with ears that hear and eyes that see.
Couldn't do that on your own. Salvation is only and totally of God. It's a miracle, just like the creation of the world was a miracle.
And so all of that was God's plan. And so while we're in this state, it creates patience.
Now, this word patience means cheerful endurance. That's what it means in Greek.
In English, the word's been changed. Patience now means I'm trying to be patient.
Wait, that's the kind of patience I have most of the time. Charlotte's laughing right now. I'm sure in some living room up with my mom or in my living room listening to this.
Yeah, he's not the most patient person, but guess what? I'm more patient than I was when I was 20. Okay, so she knew me then too.
Patience, I love it. Joyful, cheerful endurance, and that's what this life creates within us.
It creates that attitude which God loves, and he put us through this life on purpose, and then it says it will cause us to wait for it.
Look at that word, to expect fully. So now think about this.
We're saved by the joyful expectation of a certain future event, and when we have that joyful expectation of a certain future event, which is called the rapture, meeting with the
Lord, and he saved our body too and all that, then for that which we can't see it now, so now we hope for it with the right term of hope, then do we with joyful expectation and cheerful endurance, then do we expect it fully.
Now that's how that reads in Greek, and isn't it beautiful? So Paul can use the
Aorist tense with the nature of Christian hope.
Now I want to give you something beautiful here, and I didn't get it to pop in right, unfortunately. I popped this in late last night.
I asked my dear friend Raj Kripalani, I want you to check out my Greek on this, and I was referring to that undersaved over there on your right -hand side, my little definition of the
Aorist and all that. Check that out. Make sure you like my description, and here's what Raj wrote.
Just forget about this stuff. We'll get it to in a minute. Didn't pop in right, but here's what Raj wrote. He said,
Paul can use the Aorist because of the nature of Christian hope as firm confidence in God's purpose and power.
This is no weak statement when we say we hope to be saved. It's not the current modern meaning of the word hope.
It's not a weak statement. The Aorist gives certainty and assurance.
It is a done deal. This is Raj Kripalani's words. Aorist because salvation has already happened.
That's why God chose Aorist in the Greek to give us this New Testament scripture.
It's already happened. Yet even though the Aorist gives this assurance, the complete redemption, which is mentioned in verse 23 where it talks about the redemption of the body, is still outstanding.
So far as hope is concerned, we're already saved, but hope itself is not the completion of salvation.
The realization of this glory is still a future, although certain, prospect for believers.
The balance is beautiful. Indicative, it's a fact. Aorist, it's done.
Passive, by God. Raj, that was so beautiful. It needs to be in a book somewhere, brother.
So I hope you don't mind I shared it. I asked for your permission, didn't get it back, but I shared it anyway. Even though the full salvation has not yet happened in time,
Raj says, there is an element of incompleteness in our salvation, and we must be content, that's the groaning, to hope for the completion of the process.
Hope is inseparable from salvation. This hope is confidence about a future reality,
Dr. Raj Kripalani. Isn't that awesome? Yes, it is. Thank you, brother Raj. All right.
Now, I see the clock. I can't see your faces. So to me, it looks like all of you are perked up and just going, all right, sick them, brother
David. Keep going. That's what I think I'm seeing. So I'm going to keep going a little bit here. The beautiful thing is you can hit the end button and you're out of here, right?
So that's cool. 2 Corinthians 4, 6. Wow, I just saw those numbers drop down to 14 people left.
No, I'm kidding. All right. So God, I want to give you a parallel passage. Now, look at this. For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Does that not tell us that the salvation of our soul was just as majestic, just as big of a creation event as the creation of the universe?
Because the first part of verse 6 is talking about the creation of the universe. God spoke the worlds into existence.
God commanded the light to shine out of darkness. And then it relates it to our salvation. He has shined in our heart to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.
But how? Only through the face of Jesus Christ. The only way you ever know God the Father. He's an invisible being. He's an eternal, invisible being who's not even in a place.
He's outside of time and space. You'd never have known him without Jesus Christ. Ever, ever, ever.
So in the face of Jesus, we see God. As my wonderful mentor, Dr. Erwin Freeman, we call him
Rocky Freeman, said, Jesus is God seen. So God who did this amazing miracle when he saved us, he turned the light on, folks.
But we have this treasure. What treasure? This born -again -ed -ness. I like that. I just made that up.
Born -again -ed -ness. That treasure. The fact that our spirit and the Holy Spirit are one spirit inside of us, in our brain somewhere, wherever in our body he dwells, in our soul, in our spirit.
We're one with him. That treasure is in earthen vessels.
It's in a body that is still lost. A brain that still will go out there and do hateful things.
An old man who's still hanging around. It's an earthen vessel. And guess what?
It's on purpose. Look who's responsible. Look at the next phrase. That the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.
So think about it. When you do get it right, and you do something for the Lord, and it helps another person,
God gets the glory. Because your old man was not able to do it. It had to be the treasure inside of you.
The new man connected with Jesus, holding his hand that did it, so God gets the glory. So this whole fact that we're groaning, back to the reference in Romans 8, is referred to here in 2
Corinthians 4. We are groaning because we are treasure in an earthen vessel, but someday that earthen vessel is going to drop off and be changed to a glorious, like the glory of the sun compared to the moon, a glorious vessel that will never pull against God again.
All right. Romans 8, 20. I'm going to go back to the one we were looking at. It says, for the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly.
Now, do you see that same thing echoed in verse 7? That we have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the excellency of the power of God may show through?
So God did this. It wasn't our will to be this way. It was our will to eat the fruit, right?
But it wasn't our will to get this result. But God knew it was best for us to pass through this and to enter the kingdom of heaven only by suffering, groaning.
He saw it was best. It builds within us this beautiful thing he loves called patience. And I often wonder why are we going to need that in the next world?
But apparently we need to have that character. We are troubled. Now, you look at us in this state, and let's go to the coronavirus thing right now.
We're huddled into our house. I kind of like it because I've got several of my grown kids that are huddled in with me, and we're kind of in the
Mitchell compound here. We're not leaving. HB Ranch is where we're staying for a while. I like it because I get to be around them every day.
I wish I had all of them here. I don't have them all here. But while we're kind of going through this process of things changing around us in the world, this is very serious what's going on.
If you don't think the virus is serious, I guarantee you the panic is serious. The things that can happen in the world because of it are very serious.
We're troubled on every side. But because we have this treasure in our earthen vessels, we are born again.
The real me is the new man. The real you is the new man or woman. But we can be troubled on every side.
But because we know the Lord, we are not distressed. We are perplexed at this, aren't we?
But we're not in despair. We are persecuted sometimes by people that don't understand our belief system because God gave it to us as a gift.
They don't have it. We think they should. It's logical to us now. To them, they're blind to it. They persecute us.
But guess what? We're never forsaken because we have the Lord and we have each other. And we are sometimes cast down, but we can't be destroyed.
Rocky Freeman said, David, you are invincible until your mission is complete on this earth.
Nobody can kill you. Nothing can kill you. God has you in his hand and the Father and Jesus has his hand on top.
And until your mission is finished, you're immortal on this earth. And I thought, that's cool stuff. It's true, isn't it?
We can be cast down. We can't be destroyed. We're in the Lord's hand. We can never be truly destroyed.
We're always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. What does that mean? We're groaning.
He suffered in this body as a man. We are suffering. Not like he did, thank the
Lord. But we're suffering in our different ways. And that, in a sense, this is a sort of an allegorical way of saying that we suffer too.
We carry about the dying of the Lord. Another way that we carry about the dying of the Lord is that our old man is dead.
And we can say hallelujah to that. He might try to raise up, but he's actually dead. We need to count him that way.
Count him as dead. Why do we bear this body, this dying of the
Lord Jesus? So that the life of Jesus might be made manifest in this body. Now, it can be during moments that we're spirit -filled now in space and time.
People can see Jesus in us. But when the rapture happens, we're going to be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
Our body will match too. Isn't that amazing to think about? For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake.
That the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.
So we're delivered through suffering. God's will is for us to go through suffering. People say, how can a good
God let bad things happen to good people? First place, there are no good people biblically. The heart is deceitful, desperately wicked above all things.
Who can know it? That's the state man enters the earth in. And then when the Holy Spirit saves us, now we can be good because we have
Christ in us, the hope of glory, the hope of being good is in us. But still, we still have the old man.
So the Lord's will was for us to continue to go through suffering because every time we go through suffering, we get on our knees and we pray and we get closer to God and we become more like Jesus every single time.
That is a symptom of salvation. That's what saved people do. Why? That makes the life also of Jesus to be made manifest in this world as they look at us.
Pretty neat stuff. So we will suffer in this life. It's God's sovereign will. It is what makes us more
Christ -like. But Romans 8, 18 says, for I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.
All right, let's see. 12, 15. I think we're pretty much out of time.
I'm going to do one thing, though. I'm going to pop up one verse that I want you to see.
So let me stop my video just for a second. And I'm going to put the verse and we'll just pick up where we left off next time.
That's what we do in our church. And we'll pick up right there when we come back together.
I just want to take this thing, go out and just pop up something right here at the end.
That'll be a good enough place. All right, let's see if I can get my technology to work here. It's all over the place.
The software we use has some limits. It's just kind of not real user -friendly. Okay, I'm going to start my video again.
I'm going to share again. Okay, all right.
Now, Ben, can you see my slide? Yep, looks good. Okay, so let's continue.
1 Thessalonians 5, 1 through 11. We're not going to do all those. I just wanted to put my ending thought up here for you because I know we're out of time.
I can sense it. But 1 Thessalonians 5, 7, they that sleep, sleep in the night.
Now, this is in the context of where Paul had just spoken of the rapture. We'll have to get to that next Sunday. But take my word for it.
That's the context. He says, for they that sleep in the night and they that be drunken are drunken in the night.
But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and hope and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.
Now, he's telling us how to live in the end times when all of these troublous things begin to happen.
We're living in the midst of one now. Troubles times when all these things begin to happen. By the way,
I'm not going to get to it till next week. So let me just say this. The key in Matthew 24 to understanding the signs that Jesus gives, and it's going to be,
I wanted to get to it today so badly, but we'll do it next time, is that some of the things that I once considered to be signs,
I don't think are actually signs. The signs are right below those in the passage in Matthew 24.
So I'm going to show you the difference next time, help you see it by asking you some interesting questions, let you answer them.
But we'll do that next time. But in that passage, Jesus himself says, the key is to understand that these are the beginning of sorrows.
And that is an idiomatic expression in the East that means birth pangs. So it's not that we haven't always had earthquakes and pestilences, diseases and wars and rumors of wars and all these things.
But Jesus says, here's the key, like birth pangs with a woman as they're having a baby, they get more and more frequent and closer together and harder, and then the baby's born.
And that's how these signs will be. So it's a matter of them closer together, more difficult, perhaps harming more people than ever before, and bad things happening in a bigger, harder way, getting closer and closer to the second coming.
And that's how we know, not because they haven't always happened, but how they start to happen, how they coalesce together, and how more often they are and stronger.
And now there's a whole list of things that never happened before until from about the time of the 1990s till now.
We'll talk about those next time too. And I'm going to get you to identify them. Did you ever know when this happened before this certain date?
And those are more likely the signs. Those are things that never happened before that have to happen before he comes back, and they're happening.
Pretty cool. Get to that next time. So now you got to show up next time. All right. So this is telling us how to live, be sober, putting on a breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of the hope of salvation.
That is something on your head, the hope of salvation. If you look at that little word formula, it's the rapture.
So as you go through life and trouble, and the tribulation gets worse and worse as we lead up to this beautiful effect, it's like we teach in the stock market all the time, risk -return trade -off in business.
And in the stock market, you have to take a risk or you'll never have the return. The risk is the tribulation, and the return is the rapture.
What great return is there that you are part of a generation that will never die physically as long as you live up to a point when the rapture happens.
You never have to suffer death. You'll be changed in the air. That's great return, right? You can't get that in the stock market.
But Jesus gives us that hope of that happening. And so if we have to go through some suffering to get there, that's the risk.
And it's worth it. I love to put stuff in business terms. The Bible does it all the time. But here we have to have this helmet of the hope of salvation.
So as your mind gets a little bit worrisome, you start to worry about these things that are happening on the face of the earth and with your family and things out in the world around your family, put on that helmet of the hope of salvation.
And it keeps us keep a good mental health, all right? Always think about the helmet.
So obviously, Paul is preparing us for this time period. But he's showing us also that we still have work to do.
We don't just get up on the house, on the rooftop, put on a white sheet, and wait for Jesus to come back.
We continue to be witnesses in this world. We continue to try to prosper our families financially.
That's where the stock market stuff can come in. And the businesses that each of you do are both. That comes in because we need to prosper so that we can prepare for these days that are coming.
This shows us right now we got caught a little unprepared, didn't we? So now we're preparing.
And God has given us a wake -up call saying, you need to be prepared. Because if you come to church next
Sunday, you might see why David Mitchell now thinks, contrary to what I grew up believing, I now think we're going to be here for some or all of this tribulation.
And I'll show you why next week, maybe get you studying a little bit more on that issue. But anyway, here's how we live now, all right?
For God has not appointed us under wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Let me tell you something. That is specific. What it's talking about is hell. That's not talking about saying that God didn't appoint us to go through tribulation.
That would be a ridiculous interpretation. And I say that strongly because read Fox's Book of Martyrs at what
Christians have already gone through in the first century, the second century, every century for the last 2 ,000 years.
God lets us go through suffering. So that's not talking about suffering. That's talking about hell. And God has not appointed us to hell, but to obtain salvation.
There's the proof of what the word means in the context. It's talking about salvation or lack of it, right? It's talking about heaven or hell.
God did not appoint His children to end up in hell, but to be saved by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, tells who
He died for right there. He died for those of us who are not appointed to hell. He died for us that whether we wake, in other words, whether we're living or whether we sleep, whether we suffer physical death before the rapture, we should still live together with Him.
Isn't that awesome? Now, look at this. Wherefore, comfort yourselves together and edify one another even as also you do.
So He ends up with this great comforting remark, and even though we may go through times like this, we need to comfort one another.
Now, I'm going to end with this beautiful little parallel passage. I'm going to go to the Matthew 24 passage next
Sunday, but Luke 21 is parallel. It says, there will be signs in the sun and in the moon, and this happens later on in the latter part of the tribulation period, where there'll be more and more things that come on the earth, tribulation.
Signs in the sun and the moon and in the stars and upon the earth, distress of nations, and I wanted to show you this to you with perplexity.
This shows us that the leaders of the very nations of the world will be perplexed because they won't have the wherewithal to take care of all the people.
Look at it now. Aren't you thinking they're playing catch up? U .S. government's even playing catch up.
Italy is so far behind. They have a higher death rate now than China because they weren't ready for this.
The leaders of these nations probably do want to help, but they're perplexed, and they don't have the answers.
It's going to get worse. Is that part of it's going to get worse? The sea and the waves are roaring.
That is a word picture of the peoples of the world. The peoples of the world are roaring. They're upset. They're distressed.
They're panicking, and the governments cannot handle it, and this is all looking into the future, but maybe not so far from us now.
Man's hearts are failing them because of fear. See, we don't let that happen as a Christian, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth, everyone's trying to go fix the problem, and it's too late.
We weren't prepared. You have to already have been prepared, and so they're fearful, and they're looking how to fix it, and they can't fix it, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken, and then, look at this, then when you see these things, so there's the risk, right?
There's the risk, so let me show you the reward. God put that in the universe like the principle of gravity.
You can't escape risk -reward after the fall. That's part of how we live, and then they see the
Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory, and guess what? If they had not received him yet, they're going to wish they had because they're going to see with their eye rather than the vision of hope on that given day, and they will see him coming in a cloud.
Now, there is the reward for his people. Now, for the lost world, that's still higher risk even.
They went through the tribulation period, and now they're going to ask for the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the face of the
Lamb. Isn't that amazing? You think it says from the line, but he is the Lion of Jesse, but he's also the Lamb, but we will be drawn to him.
We will just go to him, and it'll be the rapture of the church, and so look at this.
The last verse says, and when you see when these things begin to come to pass, well,
I think they've already begun to come to pass, look up and lift up your heads for your redemption draweth near.