176. The Jews On Trial

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This is episode 176, the Jews on trial. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the broadcast.

We are a show that we're trying to build up Christians who stand firm in an age of collapse and advance

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Now, today's episode is our second episode in the introduction to Revelation two through three.

That's the letters to the seven churches where we're gonna be considering today some critical things about these chapters before diving in.

And in the weeks ahead, we are gonna dive in. We're gonna be looking at each of the seven churches and we're gonna be jumping back into their world so that we can understand the situation that they were going through under the tyrant

Nero, under the heavy laden Jewish persecutions, but also under the promise that Jesus has not forgotten them and has not abandoned them and will not forsaken them.

And he is going to come soon from their perspective to crush their enemies.

Now, they were suffering back in those days between the colliding of two worlds, the world of the old covenant, the types and shadows, and the dawning of a new creation kingdom that was wrought in Jesus Christ.

That suffering, according to Jesus in Revelation one would be over soon, quickly, for the time was near.

So the suffering was almost over by the time that John penned the words of Jesus.

And I'm saying somewhere around 80, 64 to 80, 65. Now, because in Revelation chapter one, we meet

Jesus as this royal transfigured judge, a judge who's ready to actually sit down on his courtroom bench and make his pronouncements.

That's what we see. We see a royal judge in Revelation one who's getting ready to drop the gavel.

But before he does that, in Revelation two through three, we see Jesus calling the courtroom witnesses together to prepare them for the trial.

We see Jesus calling them together. In Revelation two through three, we see him ministering to them, caring for them, and being very gracious to them before the trial actually opens up.

And that's gonna be in Revelation four through 18, where we see the courtroom case, the covenant lawsuit against the apostate

Jews. And it's in Revelation 19 through 20, where we not only witness their sentencing, but their execution, their covenant removal, which we'll talk more about next week.

So in this way, Revelation two through three marks a turning point, not only in redemptive history, but also in the book of Revelation itself.

The courtroom of heaven has been opened, and the judge is no longer being tried in a sham court in Jerusalem where he was murdered on Calvary.

No, now the judge is risen. Now the judge is holding the gavel, and now the judge is gonna bring justice upon his enemies.

This is the moment where Jesus puts the Jews on trial. And in order to understand that, there's a few matters that we need to talk about first before we get into Revelation two through three so that we can understand what this trial is and how we're interpreting it that way.

What we're about to see, I've said this many times before, but I'll say it again. What we're about to see is not the end of the cosmos.

It's not the end of the world. It's not the end of human history. It's the end of the Jewish covenant world.

It's the end of the types and shadows, and it happened for a variety of reasons. Why were the

Jews so strongly punished by God? Well, they broke the Mosaic covenant time and time and time again.

And in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, read it. Go and read it. Pause this video and read it.

In that, those two chapters, it says exactly what's gonna happen to them when they break covenant with Yahweh.

And they'd been breaking covenant for 1 ,000 years. From 930

BC, from the time of Rehoboam, when the Jews became the Jews, when the southern kingdom became its own independent nation all the way until AD 70, which is exactly 1 ,000 years, they had been breaking covenant with God.

There was a few bright spots here and there. There was a couple blips in an otherwise downward trend.

It was a bear market in the Old Testament, if you follow my drift. But they broke covenant over and over and over again.

And that's not the only reason that God is punishing them because they also were punished in the

Old Testament when God sent them in the exile, which was a 70 -year -long hickory switch that God was using to try to get them to repent.

And in their nonconformity to covenant normity, they killed the prophets, they killed, by the time we get to the

New Testament, God's one and only son. And then on top of that, they murdered and maimed and martyred

Jesus's holy bride, the church. And that last offense was actually the most heinous of them all.

And that leads us, my friends, to part one, the trial of the synagogue of Satan.

Now, by the time we get to the book of Revelation, you're in a situation, you're in what scholars call a sitz in Leban, which is the situation on the ground, where Rome is beginning to become suspicious of Christians.

Around the 50s, and there's starting to be some widespread persecution by Rome. And a lot of that was because the

Jews were provoking the Romans. The Romans didn't have it out for the Christians necessarily, but the

Jews did. And their voices were being heard louder and louder and louder, just like they were before Pilate, when they condemned

Christ by saying, we have no king but Caesar. So that confession, and along with many others, shouted in religious fervor, actually sealed their doom.

They were calling down upon themselves a covenant curse. They said, his blood be on us and our children.

And it was. It was on that generation and their children's generation, 40 years.

The blood of Christ was a noose around their neck. They traded rightful worship of Yahweh for the idolatrous veneration of Caesar.

And when Jesus came and fulfilled every aspect of the old covenant, revealing himself as the grand point of Genesis through Malachi, the temple at that moment, the moment

Jesus rose from the dead, the temple lost its place. It lost its legitimacy because the shadows finally had met their substance.

From the resurrection onward, that old dusty temple in Jerusalem was no longer valid.

And if you continue to refuse to worship Christ and instead continue to worship in that temple, you are blaspheming

God. You're denying that Jesus Christ is the true temple, the true high priest, the true feast, the true sacrifice, the true prophet and the true king.

That covenant nation that was once betrothed to God now had yoked itself with the empire's beast.

The very people who should have hailed Christ as the Lion of Judah, the fulfillment of Genesis 49, 10, instead were crooning like alley cats against him.

And in that act, that act of apostate allegiance to Caesar, they crossed an invisible line.

They ceased to be the true Israel from that point forward, and they became the whore of Babylon who was dressed in Jewish robes.

Now, twice in Revelation 2, Christ names them for what they have become. And I just wanna pause for a second here and just remind us all that Jesus is

Lord, that Jesus is God, that Jesus has omniscient, perfect knowledge of everything in conceivable reality.

He knows everything that ever has been, is, or will be. So whatever Jesus says about the

Jews ought to be our view about them as well. Now, at the time,

I want you to remember that they were worshiping at the same old temple that they'd always been worshiping at.

They were doing the same old sacrifice that they'd always been doing, and they were presenting their offerings to the exact same priest as they always had.

And yet, in the days before Jesus, that was a perfectly faithful thing to do.

But after Jesus came, by refusing to put away the temple, the types, the shadows, they were refusing to receive the substance of the covenant and instead clung to the shadows.

I've used this analogy before, but I love it. I think it's so good. It would be like me deploying to war and my wife clinging to a picture that she had of me while I was gone.

And then I come home and I come in the house and I say hello to my family and everybody is not really that excited to see me.

And they basically say, you know what? We've got the picture. Why don't you go and live in a different home?

We've got the picture. We are all set. That is exactly what the Jews were doing to Christ.

They were saying, we've got the picture. We've got the type. We've got the shadow. We've got the temple. We don't need you.

And in so doing, they were rejecting God. They were rejecting their covenant

Lord and their covenant God. And because of that, Jesus gives some of the most scathing words in the entire

New Testament about who they really are. This is what he says. He says, those who say they are

Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan.

Jesus was saying that from that moment forward, after his coming and his resurrection and after their refusal to see him as the point of the entire

Mosaic system, they're not any longer worthy or qualified to even be called

Jews because Jesus tells them in John chapter eight that they're not actually from the line of Abraham, that they're from the line of Satan.

They're from the line of the devil. And in this sense, Jesus himself is defining the title

Jew as not an ethnic designation because it never was an ethnic designation.

You remember the Egyptians that came out of the Red Sea crossing with the Israelites because they saw

God's mighty ways. Caleb was not an Israelite. Abraham technically was not an

Israelite. You can think of Rahab. You can think of Ruth. You can think of Bathsheba. You can think of Uriah the

Hittite. All of these different people were not Jews because Jewishness was never about an ethnic designation.

It was always about the rightful worship of Yahweh. And they, the

Jews in the first century, pitted themselves forever on the outside of this covenant status and being known as Jews by rejecting

Jesus. Let me say it more bluntly so you're picking up what I'm throwing down. Because the Jews today, modern day

Jews, do not worship the Lord Jesus Christ, they cannot be called Jews. Because Jesus said, they say they're

Jews, but they're not. Which means he's calling the title that they're applying to themselves fake because if they believed in him, they would be true

Jews. And because they don't believe in him, he has called them the synagogue of Satan.

Jesus is saying that they have to be called something else. They can't be called Jews because they don't love me, they don't worship me, they cannot be called

Jews. Jesus calls them the synagogue of Satan.

Which, by the way, if Jesus were alive today, he would be crucified for anti -Semitism.

He would be crucified for speaking out against the Jews. And he very well may be if he were walking around today and preaching today and telling the

Jews that they are whitewashed tombs for rejecting Yahweh and for rejecting covenant. He would be known as a disturber of our peace as well, our

American peace, especially among the Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, neocon types, for comparing the untouchable modern day

Jews to the synagogue of Satan. If Jesus did that today, there would be the same kind of ire that there was back then with their ancestors long ago.

The title itself, however, does certainly fit today. The modern day

Jews, like their ancestors, are of the synagogue of Satan. Why? Because they do not worship

Jesus. And you need to understand that and what Jesus is saying here if you're gonna understand what that term means and before you pick up stones to throw at me.

You have to understand that the title fits, even for modern day Jews being the synagogue of Satan, but that title synagogue of Satan fits because they're holding to a form of religion where Yahweh is not at the head of it.

And the reason Yahweh is not the God of the Jewish faith is because they denounce and decry and reject

Jesus Christ. If you reject Jesus Christ, you do not know God. You say you know

Yahweh, but you do not know Yahweh. And because of that, ancient

Jews, modern Jews, it doesn't matter. If you do not bow the knee to Jesus Christ, you are not a

Jew. Not according to Jesus's definition. You say you're a Jew, but you're not. You're of the synagogue of Satan.

You're from the family line of the devil. That is Jesus's definitions, not mine.

Because when you reject Jesus Christ, you are blaspheming. You are lying about the nature of the triune

God and how he has chosen to reveal himself to the world, Hebrews 1, one through two.

Other religions in this way misspeak about what they don't know. They talk about what they don't know in ignorance, but Judaism is the one particular religion on earth who slanders the one that it actually claims to know.

They're the ones who had the law, had the 10 commandments, had the Mosaic covenant, and yet now they slander the

God who they say they worship because they rejected Jesus. And that, brothers and sisters, is what is particularly and peculiarly demonic about Judaism because it lies about God in the same way that Satan does and as its ancestors did in trading

Christ for a man -made religion. All of this is why Jesus could look at the

Jews in the first century and call their religion Satanism because Satan in the original language is accuser or slanderer.

And by definition, the accuser and the slanderer always operates within a covenantal context.

Let me say that differently so that you understand what I'm saying. You cannot be an accuser and you cannot be accused in a very general sense apart from the law of God because the law of God sets up the standards.

So you are accused when you break the covenant terms and that is who Satan is.

Remember in the book of Job, he's standing before the throne of God accusing the saints. You'll go to Revelation 12 and it says, woe to the earth for the accuser has been thrown down because in Christ, he can no longer accuse the saints.

The point that Jesus is saying and the reason he says that at yourancestry .com

DNA chart says Satan on it and because you're from the synagogue of Satan is because you do not worship

Jesus Christ. That is the accusation that they are hurling at Jesus just like Satan saying he is not

God. And by blaspheming against the name of God, they're violating the law of God and the punishment for that should be death.

That's why Jesus in Revelation is gonna pronounce a death sentence on Israel or on Judah because they've blasphemed the name of God in rejecting

Jesus Christ. I mean, every pagan on earth sure is gonna be accused under the natural law where the truth about reality of God is plain to them and they've rejected it and we get it.

We've seen that in Romans chapter one and that is true but the Jews are under a more severe gradation of accusation because when they reject the

Christ who perfectly fulfills their law, their law of Moses, their types and shadows and they reject him, they are being just like their father, the devil.

They're joining the chorus of the demons in accusing Christ and also for accusing his saints for rightly worshiping

God. This means that instead of repenting for their

Satanism, rejecting Jesus, they joined in with Satan in the first century to turn against Jesus and his people, his saints.

They informed on their brethren, they turned them in. They cooperated with the Caesar's courts and persecution campaigns.

They murdered the people of God out in the open streets and in this way, the ancient Jews became the apostles of Satan with him being the object of their synagogical worship.

That's, I mean, the fact that he says you are the synagogue of Satan means that they are worshiping

Satan. That's what Jesus is saying because when you go to the synagogue, you go there to worship and if I were a faithful Jew, I would wanna go to the synagogue of God.

Jesus is saying, no, that's not who you're worshiping. You are worshiping Satan and you need to repent before it's too late and that's not what

Kendall Lankford said. That's what Jesus Christ has said and we ought to be ashamed if we're too squeamish and cowardly to believe it.

James Jordan calls this the true frame of Revelation because the whole book of Revelation is this covenant lawsuit from the law giver against the law breakers who are about to be destroyed for their rebellion, who are about to go down with Satan and his downfall.

The judge of heaven has convened his court and the witnesses are the martyrs. The plaintiff is the lamb, the defendant is the unfaithful harlot city of Jerusalem and Revelation two through three, therefore is the back room in the courthouse where the lead attorney is preparing the witnesses before walking them into the trial.

Jesus is walking among his lampstands, he's trimming their wicks, he's strengthening the church and he is conducting a kind of preliminary hearing to inspect his witnesses before the trial begins, before the judge of all the earth sits upon his throne and Christ condemns them for their crimes.

His word, remember, is a sword. His eyes are blazing fire and his verdict is only going to be delayed long enough to prepare his seven churches and his churches in general on how to stand firm in a very short window of time before these punishments are poured out on them.

And that is why the trial was needed because the first century Jews had serially broken the covenant with God, they had serially murdered the

Lord and they had serially murdered his bride and now all of those crimes against him would now be coming home to roost and Jesus would be giving them the death penalty, which we will explore in part two, the crimes that warranted the death penalty.

Now, the Romans hated the Christians because they refused to worship a man, Caesar, but the

Jews hated Jesus' bride because she did worship a man, namely Jesus. And just as any righteous man will know down in the marrow of his bones,

I don't even really even have to say it, you know it, you can feel it, you can permit a fool to attack you and out of mercy, you can stay your hand.

You can let any fool say whatever they want and you don't have to respond. A real man, a strong man, a man who's bridled and under self -control can allow someone to speak foolishly about him and not respond.

But let that same fool attack your bride and there's all different kind of hell to pay for that.

And that's literally what's happening in Revelation. Jesus is the faithful bridegroom who was able out of mercy to not destroy the

Jews when they murdered him, which he could have. But after 40 years of murdering, maiming and martyring his bride,

Jesus is the faithful bridegroom was gathering his armies against them.

The pagan Romans would become the instrument of his wrath and he would eviscerate and annihilate them for their crimes against his bride because they not only unjustly murdered him, but they also took their bloodstained hands and murdered her.

And in that action, they were supremely mistaken. They were messing with the wrong guy.

In their complete hubris and pride, they clung to the mosaic forms instead of falling down and worshiping the substance.

And because they were so deluded in their thinking, they thought that they could bring merciless blows against his wife, the church.

Those who once carried the beacon of biblical fidelity and faithfulness, they're the ones now who are hurling their blood -soaked hands at the bride of Christ.

They're the ones who received the oracles of God in the Old Testament. Now they're becoming the accusers of the saints.

And the book of Revelation tears back the veil on this tragedy. And it makes it really clear that the covenant people of old have rejected their covenant

Lord. And in so doing, they've become the greatest enemies of God and his people.

And they are primed for crushing. 1 Corinthians 15 .25.

Now, by the time John wrote from the island of Patmos, the enmity between the

Jews and the bride of Christ was pretty well complete. For decades,

Rome had actually tolerated Christians beneath the broad protection of Judaism's legal status.

You see, the empire itself respected old things and the gods of Israel from their perspective were ancient.

And while that was strange to the Romans to believe in a monotheistic God, the customs of the

Jews were lawful to them so that they could maintain the peace because Rome wanted nothing more than to maintain their

Pax Romana. So long as the Jews didn't cause too much of a ruckus, which they were prone to doing, and as so long as the

Christians were counted among the various denominations or sects of Judaism, which they were by the

Romans, then the Christians were safe. It's sort of like the Romans looked at Christians and Jews in those days as different denominations.

Well, the Christians are Presbyterians and the Jews are Baptist or the Christians are the

Reformed and the Jews are the Armenian. They looked at it sort of like that.

They're like, they're both in the same camp. They both get legal protection because they were trying to maintain the peace.

But while the Christians got to hide in the shadow of their older brother in the legal protections that Rome were affording to the

Jews, the Jews turned on them like some evil sick older brothers do.

And they were bent on making their younger brother suffer. The more the church proclaimed that the crucified

Jesus was the only Lord, the Lord of all creation, the living God, the more they proclaim that, the more that the synagogues actually shook with fury and salivated for her destruction.

The Jews rejected the logic of Rome. This is really important. The Jews rejected the logic of Rome and said, these

Christians are not among us. They're not a part of our denomination. We do not share the same

Mount Sinaitic origins. In fact, the

Jews so clearly disavowed the Christians to the Romans as Galilean heretics, and they so clearly denounced them to their governors and in their synagogues that even the

Romans who were trying to maintain the peace eventually turned on them too because they did not want to forfeit this great peace that they had achieved through Octavian all the way through Nero, because there's about a hundred years where there was no war and the

Romans didn't wanna forfeit that. So they tag teamed with the Jews to destroy the church.

That is what happened. And just to give you a little preview, that's why

John describes the Jews as the bloodthirsty harlot dressed like a priest who's riding on the back of the beast because the one who's dressed like a priest is the

Jews. They're the ones who had the priesthood. The one who is a beast with seven heads.

What does that mean? Well, we'll talk more about it maybe in a thousand years when we get there. Sorry, stupid joke.

But we'll talk more about the seven heads represent the seven mountains. And in that day, the city of Rome was known as the city on seven hills.

It's a scarlet beast. Nero was the only emperor in the Judeo -Claudian line that had red hair.

I mean, there's all these different things that point to the fact that the beast is Rome, especially if you go back to Daniel seven and you see that the beast there is

Rome and John is certainly using Daniel seven. But what's so fascinating is not the beast.

It's not the beast. That's the one who's the problem, the big problem. They're a problem, but they're not the big problem.

The big problem is the one who's riding the beast. The big problem is the one who has the reins in her hand moving the beast.

And that is the bloodthirsty whore because why is that analogy being used there?

Is it just because Jesus was authoring a book where he was trying to be mean? Not at all.

The Jews were the bride in the Old Testament. They were God's bride. They were married to the

Lord through covenant faithfulness. And yet all throughout the Old Testament, whenever they sinned against God, whenever they bowed down to idols, they were called a whore.

Look at the book of Hosea. So here, John, by the spirit, is saying that the

Jews have become the whore of Babylon. And by sitting on the back of the beast, what that means is that the

Jews are using the Romans to destroy the Christians because of her bloodthirsty lust for their death.

And because it's very likely that Nero in the first century during his reign was attempting very carefully to pacify the very large population of Jews that were living in the city of Rome, it's almost inevitable that he blamed the

Christians for the fires in Rome and began wide -scale persecutions and murdering

Christians in order to pacify the very highly rambunctious and riotous

Jews. To ensure the peace of the city of Rome and to ensure his newly minted building projects got off the ground without a hitch, he killed the

Christians, the beast, killed the believers to pacify the bloodthirsty whore who was writing him.

Now, the case for this, while not airtight, I will admit that to you, is not only plausible,

I think it's most likely, and it could be made in seven points. So I'm gonna make the case really quickly.

There's so much more information that I could share and you're gonna have to hold on and wait for me to get to that chapter, but I'm gonna give you seven things, seven reasons why the

Jews in the first century partnered with Rome to destroy the church and why that earned them the death penalty.

So number one, you need to follow the crowd. You need to start with a number. Cicero, which is one of Rome's greatest orators, once complained in open court, this is what he said, you know how large the

Jewish crowd is and how they stick together and how influential they are in the assemblies.

Cicero is saying that the Jews in Rome were influential because they were so large and because they stuck together and if they rioted, the city might fall.

So the Caesars were placating them. That's what Cicero's saying. Then 66, that was in 66

BC. Then Cassius Dio, who told us about a century later that the

Jews had again increased greatly, so much that Claudius had to order them not to hold their meetings in order not to risk a citywide brawl.

Tiberius deported 4 ,000 of them to Sardinia. Claudius expelled them for tumults investigated by Crestus, which is a perversion of the name

Christ because they were so angry at believers for believing in Christ, they were stirring up the city and Claudius expelled them for it.

Over and over and over again in history, we see emperors tiptoeing around this community.

We see Roman leaders like Pilate. Read the narrative. He's tiptoeing around the

Jews because they're threatening to riot and if they riot, Rome will hear about it and if Rome hears that Pilate let the city out of control, then off goes his head.

Now, like I said, the emperors are tiptoeing around this community because it was big, because it was loud and because it was capable of setting

Rome on fire without even lighting a match. That's point number one. You gotta look at the numbers. It tells a story.

Number two, the emperor's new allies. You need to pay attention to this. Nero is barely 30 years old when he's married to Poppaea, Sabina, a woman that Josephus calls a

God -fearing woman, which is not a random term. That's a word that's applied to Gentiles who believed in the

Jewish God. You think about the God -fearing centurion, for instance. Gentile believes in God.

Gentile who goes to the temple. Gentile who worships there. So here you have Poppaea, the emperor's wife, who is sympathetic to the

Jews. Josephus tells us that on one occasion, she personally arranged the release of Jewish priests all through a

Jewish actor named Al Auturius, who was much beloved by Nero, is what

Josephus tells us. Now, in modern terms, what this means is the Jews had access. The Jewish lobby of the first century, which is the first century version of the

USAID, was in the bed with Rome. And Rome, it wasn't an underground secret.

They had the emperor's ear because they were in the emperor's bedroom. So the Jews had influence and they had numbers.

Number three, they had the perfect alibi for the scapegoat, or at least the perfect victim.

In AD 64, Rome is set on fire. 10 out of the 14 districts are scorched to ash.

Apparently their fire department wasn't very developed at this point, but rumors began beginning to swirl.

Nero did it. It's what people were saying. They were saying it in the marketplaces, in the agoras. They were saying it in the senatorial chambers.

They were saying that he did it to clear space for his new golden palace, the Domus Aurea. Tacitus even says, to get rid of the report.

What report? The report that he set fire to the city. To get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt on a class hated for their abominations called

Christians. Suetonius even agrees, saying that punishment fell upon those given to a new and mischievous superstition.

I want you to ask yourself the obvious here. Nero must have asked himself, how do

I get my building projects off the ground? And how do I do it with my hands clean and someone else taking the fall for it?

Who can I blame for igniting this city? And who can I keep from igniting another riot?

How can I bring all of these twisted threads together? So this is what he does.

He sets fire to the city. And then he blames the Christians, which curried favor with the

Jews, which meant that he now has peace in his city. He now has widespread public approval for his building project, and he has someone to blame.

He couldn't touch the Jews because they were too numerous, they were too volatile, and they were too close to Poppaea, his wife.

So the Christians now, they were the perfect target because they were small at the time, they were despised, they were already disowned in the synagogue.

It says that they were committing crimes against humanity. What does that mean? It means that they weren't worshiping the imperial cult, like we talked about last week.

If you missed it, go back and watch. So in one stroke, Nero shifted the blame for the fire.

He appeased the Jews and he brought peace to his city and approval for his construction projects.

That is point number three. It was politically expedient for Nero to do so. Number four, it was a political calculus.

This wasn't just a random act of cruelty where Nero is punishing Christians for whatever. He didn't wake up on the right side of the bed.

This was politics. Every emperor before him had placated the Jews.

They had played the exact same game. Tiberius contained the Jews. Claudius managed the

Jews. Nero courted the Jews. And when the city cried for vengeance, he fed the

Christians to lions instead. It was a cynical masterclass on crowd control in very early identity forms of politics.

I want you to think about it like this. By AD 64, Christian and Jew were now distinct labels. Tacitus even uses

Christiani to explain. Suetonius uses the word crestus to differentiate between these two groups.

So by the 60s, no one's mistaking Jews for Christians. No one's thinking that Christians have legal status because they're

Jews. No one's thinking that. And because of that distinction that the

Jews were able to produce in the minds of the Romans, especially

Nero, Nero was able to weaponize that divide in order to accomplish his purposes.

The Jews had distance from the Christians and Nero had a scapegoat. And this is all very interesting because Nero, from a very savvy political standpoint, actually made a very calculating decision.

If it would have been any other group of people, he probably would have gotten away with it because they were a small minority.

He thought, ah, who cares? No one's gonna miss them anyway. Everybody hates them. So let's just sacrifice them and everybody gets along.

That's sort of the calculus that he's working with. But Nero had no idea whose people he was messing with because while he thought he was

Lord, he was messing with the people of the one true Lord. And Nero's end is pretty ugly because God does not forget when people mistreat his people.

That's number four. Number five is the biblical evidence for the bloodthirsty whores we talked about earlier.

And this is where history and scripture converge with a perfect, perfect precision.

Revelation 17 describes a great harlot, the woman clothed in purple and scarlet, drunk with the blood of the saints, riding on the scarlet beast with seven heads and 10 horns, the beast.

Now, in this sense, Rome is unmistakably the beast. It is the same empire that John tells us is the city on seven mountains.

It's the city that reigns over the kings of the earth. So in that sense, it is Rome. And we, ah,

I want to so bad, but we will get into why in very great detail why this is

Rome. But the woman is even more unmistakable as we said earlier.

She's not Rome. She's seated atop Rome. She's riding Rome. She's steering

Rome. She's using her manipulation in order to execute her murderous will.

And if you'll grant me the grace that I'll preview these things and talk about these in more detail later.

And if you'll give me the grace to just say that, yes, this is the woman, the bloodthirsty whore is the

Jews. The whore of Babylon is apostate Jerusalem. Then what you have is the once faithful bride now turned adulteress.

The covenant nation who shed the blood of the prophets rejected her Messiah and now is conspiring with a beast to destroy his bride.

She rode the beast, not as a victim, but as a drunk driver, drunk with power, drunk with vengeance, drunk with the blood of the saints.

And she demanded that Rome keeps spilling it. Revelation 17 is not a distant poetic apocalyptic image of something that's going to happen in the future.

It's a first century event. It's a people who were in bed with Rome to destroy the church, which is exactly what happened.

And in this, Revelation 17 reveals the unholy alliance between the

Jews and the Romans, the harlot and the beast, each serving the other's bloodlust, the Jews desired the

Christian's blood and Rome desired order or there would be blood. Together, they made war against the lamb and his people.

Now that leads us to point six, the smoking gun, as it were. We don't have to have Nero on tape saying,

I did it for the Jews. I killed the Christians because I was trying to make the Jews happy. We don't actually need Nero in a public statement to say that.

We don't need an ancient version of CNN recording it. We don't even need a statement written by one of the historians because we have the fingerprints in place.

We have a vast Jewish population that we have already seen controlled the Caesars.

And if they threw the city into an uproar, the Caesars would have a big mess to clean up and they didn't want to do that.

We've also seen that there was imperial sensitivity to this. Tacitus tells us,

Suetonius tells us all of that. We've seen that Pope Pia is in bed with Nero literally because she's his wife and she is a

God -fearer, meaning that she is favorable to the Jews. We've seen that she lobbies

Nero in order to let some Jews be rescued. So there's already precedent here and Josephus tells us about it.

And we've also seen that the Christians were chosen as a scapegoat in order so that Nero could explain the fire in Rome and that's

Tacitus and Suetonius who reveal that. So all those facts fit together in a particular way.

When you build a puzzle, it actually builds a picture. And the picture that this puzzle is building is that the

Jews were in bed with Rome, which is exactly what Revelation 17 says.

That leads us to point seven, the verdict. Now, if you're in a courtroom, you get to a point when the evidence has all been shared and the verdict now comes down.

And in this court of history, the verdict is not circumstantial, but it is compelling that Nero protected the peace by protecting the

Jews and he torched the Christians to do so. He saved his own skin by burning their skin to pacify this resistant, influential block of Jews in the city of Rome.

Revelation calls Jerusalem the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt.

She's in bed with the beast. She's the whore of Babylon. And the evidence suggests that none of this is poetic hyperbole, but it was the actual events on the ground and she was left with the smoking gun.

If you've been looking for the evidence, it's all over the place. But this is the evidence for why

Jesus, the judge over all the earth, could pronounce capital punishment on the Jews in AD 70.

Because they killed the prophets, they killed God's son, they called Jesus a liar when he said that he was

God. They announced their religious loyalty to a fake God named Caesar when they said we have no king but Caesar, violating the covenant terms that only

Yahweh was their God. And then they exploited their political alliance as I've shown.

At least it's compelling to me. As a whore riding the beast to murder Jesus's bride, all of this evidence compiled together had the almighty judge righteously enraged and judgment ready to fall on top of them.

And in that sense, Revelation two through three is the procedural moments before the trial begins.

The plaintiffs are being called into the courtroom. The victims of the crimes are being announced as the seven

Asiatic churches before the gavel drops and pulverizes the city. And that leads us to part three, why this matters.

Well, the reason it matters is because theology is not just theoretical. When Jesus put the

Jews on trial, he wasn't just arbitrating some misunderstanding.

He was redrawing the borders of reality and of history moving forward. Because when

Jesus put the Jews on trial, he was cutting them out of their covenant status, which again is what we're gonna discuss next week when

I give you a full argument for why I believe the Jews are no longer the chosen people of God, why they're not in covenant status with God and why they do not have a future as the covenant people of God.

But again, you'll have to wait until next week for me to make that case. In this sense, the covenantal courtroom that crushed

Jerusalem didn't just close when the stones fell. That verdict has echoed throughout history and it matters on who we think the people of God are.

To misunderstand the judgment that's happening in Revelation is not merely to err in our interpretation, it's to lose our bearings in the world.

You see, if the Jews still hold a special covenant status with God, then Jesus's verdict in AD 70 was a mistrial.

If national Israel remains God's chosen people, then the cross was only a plea bargain for the

Gentiles temporarily until the Jews come back to temple worship. And the resurrection would only be a stay on the execution.

The modern church is sentimental attachment to the nation of Israel, a nation that still is living in rejection to her

King. That's not compassion, that's treason. When Christians kneel at the altar of modern day

Zionism and spend billions and billions and billions of dollars to fund a

Christ hating state that blasphemes his name and spits on his believers even still today, they're not supporting biblical prophecy and they're certainly not fulfilling

Genesis 12, one through three, where if you bless Israel, you're blessed and if you cursed Israel, you're cursed. No, they're funding rebellion against God.

That passage, by the way, Revelation 12, I'm sorry, Genesis 12, one through three, it's about Jesus.

It says the seed of Abraham is gonna be the one who inherits the covenant promises.

Paul tells us that the seed of Abraham is Christ, which means that if you bless Christ, then you will be blessed.

And if you curse Christ, you will be cursed. This is why the Jews and their religion is particularly odious to God because they curse his son.

They started with, we have no King but Caesar and that same sentiment is echoing in the houses, in the halls of Congress, where politicians wrap the star of David with the flag of Christendom and they call it faithfulness and they call our country a

Judeo -Christian country. What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? We're not a

Judeo -Christian country because the roots of Judaism, as Jesus described it, is

Satanism. And our country was founded as a Christian nation, not as a satanic cult that refuses to bow to Christ.

You can't pair Jesus with Satan in the same way Judeo -Christian can't really exist.

When people who say that and who do this are just, they're defending, they're not defending Israel, they're actually denying the gospel, that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the

Father except through him. Not through a temple, not through sacrificial system, none of that. And the future is not that because Jesus isn't gonna reinstall the temple and the sacrificial system.

He's not gonna go back to the picture when the fulfillment has come. That's why

Hebrews says that there is no more sacrifices. It's been done, it's fulfilled. And in this sense, if we misunderstand revelation, we misunderstand so much about who we even are.

Because the true Israel is not a strip of sand in the Middle East, it's the body of Jesus Christ stretched across the earth over 20 centuries, covered by his blood and indwelled by his

Holy Spirit. That's what Israel is. And this is why it matters so much.

Because once you forget who the true Israel is, you'll forget who you are and who the real enemy is.

You'll mistake the synagogue of Satan for the bride of Christ and the bride of Christ for the temporary whore.

You'll trade courage for cowardice, why? Because the world's just gonna continue to get worse and worse.

It's gonna continue to get worse until Jesus returns and zaps us out of here. And then he's gonna hand it back over to the temple and the

Jews and the red heifers and all of that. If you believe that, what hope do you actually have of making this world a better place?

All you're doing is you're just making Jesus delay. I mean, think about that literally.

If the world must get worse in order for Jesus to be expedited in his return, then why do anything?

Why evangelize? Why worship? Why not just let the world idiomatically go to hell in a handbasket and do nothing?

Oh, wait, that is what we did. That is what we did. That's what the Christian church did in America.

We forfeited the greatest Christian nation that has ever been. And we handed it over to sickos and pedophiles because we believed that it wasn't worth fighting for and it was all gonna be burned up in a moment.

So who cares? If you believe that vision of revelation, you'll start believing the church's role is to hunker down in your bunker, defend

Israel at all costs, instead of building Jesus's kingdom. You will spend more of your time blessing

Christ deniers instead of confronting them with the gospel, which is the only thing that can save them.

That's why Paul says in Romans 1 16, for the gospel is the power of God, for the

Jew first and for the Gentile. The gospel of Jesus is the only way that anyone gets into heaven.

And that's how we arrived at this moment that we're in right now. The modern evangelical world has become a spiritual pawn of a dispensational delusion, a theology that neuters kingship, emasculates the church and makes

Jesus look like a polygamist. It paints him as a husband who divorced his bride for a 2000 year long fling with the

Gentiles while waiting for his wife to get her act together and return. It's not only false, but it's blasphemous.

It insults the faithfulness of Christ and it slanders the purity of his bride and it misunderstands who

Israel even is. Israel is past, present and future, all who belong to Jesus.

It's Moses, it's Elijah, it's all the faithful Jews from the Old Testament who looked forward to the death of Christ and whose death looks backwards to justify them.

We are a part of the same nation with Moses and with Abraham and with Noah and with Adam.

The same blood of Jesus that saved our Old Testament brothers and sisters saves us. We are the

Israel of God. Dispensationalism doesn't just distort a few little end times prophecies here and there, it desecrates the marriage between Jesus and his bride.

And yet, all of this theological blubbery bleeds out into our politics as well.

You can see it in the hollow eyes of the neocon men who would rather virtue signal for Israel and send our sons to die in their endless forever wars in order to protect

Israeli soil rather than fight for the salvation of our own people. We forfeited our country and we believe we're blessed because we virtue signaled

Israel when we don't have a clue who Israel really is, it's the people of God. These are the men who wrap their cowardice in their conservatism and they compromise in their strategy and their unbelief and their patriotism and they will not lift a finger to try to rebuild the ruins of Western civilization that they presided over, but they'll gladly send your tax dollars to fund the rebellion of a nation who hates your king and says that he's in hell boiling in his own feces.

That's what the Talmud says. And by God, that foreign policy and that stupidity has to end.

Christians built the greatest civilization in the history of the world in America.

And then in a fit of sentimental stupidity, we handed it over to pedophiles, profiteers and politicians who fear

Israel more than Christ. We let our pulpits grow silent, we let our schools grow corrupt, we let our legislators grow demonic and now we weep at the ruins of our civilization as if it wasn't inevitable, but it was.

We are in the logical consequence of our cowardice for decades.

When the church forgets that she is the Israel of God, she loses her right to rule, she loses her optimism, she loses her gumption and her nerve.

And we are in the situation we're in because we do not know who we are. That's why this episode matters so much because theology dictates our practice.

You cannot preach a Christ who reigns over heaven, but yet he trembles in front of Jerusalem.

You can't claim to love his kingdom while cheering for his enemies. Jesus, either

Jesus is the covenant -keeping Lord who fulfilled every promise to Israel, his true bride, or he's a liar.

Either the church is his bride, and by the church, I mean everyone who's saved by Jesus, both

Testaments, Old and New. Either the church is his bride or she's his mistress.

There is no other option. So that's where we stand, 2 ,000 years after Revelation was written, between the synagogue and the kingdom, between the cowardice and the conquest, between Christ's heavenly courtroom, and by trying to dictate our own terms.

The gavel was in his hand 2 ,000 years ago, and the verdict was clear.

Judgment began with the household of God in Revelation two through three, and judgment fell upon Jerusalem for their crimes against God, and if we don't understand that, if we don't understand that he tore down their temple, he tore down their sacrificial system, and he will never rebuild it again, if we don't understand that, we will misunderstand who we are and what we're called to do, and that, brothers and sisters, leads us to our conclusion.

Men and women of God, I want you to hear what I'm saying. If the judge of heaven did not spare the natural branches because of covenant infidelity, then he's not gonna spare us if we shirk our responsibilities as Christians.

Do not, please, do not mistake Jesus's patience with permission to continue being slothful if you are.

If Israel fell for her unbelief, how much more will we fall for ours and for our apathy as a country?

If they were broken off for their infidelity, we will be too if we refuse the same call and refuse to bear fruit for him.

So my challenge to you, as we think about these very serious and sobering things, is to be faithful, be steadfast, be immovable, and build.

Be the generation that builds Christendom again. Be the generation that builds it in your marriage by loving your spouse with sacrificial love.

Build it in your children by catechizing their minds and baptizing their imaginations in the scripture.

Build it in your homes by making them little churches and little cathedrals for the glory of God. Build it in your congregations by refusing compromise and cowardice and comfort over Jesus.

Build it in your neighborhoods by living like the light in the ruins. Build it like you're actually the candle flame that's gonna chase the dark away.

Build it in your cities, in your towns, in your boroughs, in your politics, and in every sphere of life where the crown rights of Jesus Christ are currently being denied.

Wherever Jesus is not named Lord, let your life be a part, making him named so that the world may know by your faithfulness that the king is not dead and his kingdom is not finished and you are his servant.

Your life matters because Christendom needs to still be built, not by celebrities and influencers, not by cynics, but by builders, by you and by me.

You don't have to change the world in a day, but you do have to take up your oar and row.

And my challenge to you is to row for Christ, row for his kingdom, row when you're weary, row when the waves are crashing all around you, row when the world is mocking you because every inch that you pull forward brings the kingdom forward with you.

One inch, just one inch of faithfulness, one inch of courage is still courage and still faithfulness.

If all you ever do in your life, brother or sister, is move the kingdom one inch farther than it was when you were handed it, then your life matters.

I remember this poem by C .T. Studd. It haunts me every day. I think about it all the time.

All things will soon be past. Only what is done for Christ will last.

So brother and sister, take the post. Be a soldier of Christ. Rip the oar and pull it tight and pull it with all your might because the captain of your salvation is in the boat with you.

And he walks among his lampstands and he still cares for his people and his kingdom is still needing to be built.

And that's what I pray that you will do, that you will build for your king, that you will build for your children, that you will build for your legacy, that you will build for the kingdom of God and that you will do it in the ways that Christ has taught us in his word.

And with that, see you next time on the broadcast. Now get out of here.