157. Christ is King!

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God made the world for a king, a human king, to rule over it, to subdue it, and to bring the blessings of God to the people of God.

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And the only king worthy of that mission and that calling is Jesus. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 157, Christ is King. Welcome back to the podcast.

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I am glad that you are here, and I'm glad that you are back with our second episode in the book of Revelation, which is today going to be about the kingship of Jesus.

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Now, to those of you who have been faithfully following along with this ministry and sharing this episode, are these episodes engaging in the comments, liking the content so that it gets past all of the censors and the algorithm,

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I just want to say thank you so much. You are making a huge difference.

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Every like and share is a big old fat post -millennial thumb right in the eye of the big tech techies.

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And I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, a hearty amen to you, a hearty thank you for all that you're doing to help participate and build this community.

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And to the 15 members, subscribers who are financially supporting this show.

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God bless you. Thank you so much for all that you do. Your generosity is honestly, it's helping us get this message out to more people, more ears so that we can make the whole world post -millennial and even more than that, make the whole world

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Christian. I don't take it lightly. I'm sincerely grateful for each and every one of you.

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So thank you so much. Now, if you've not made your way over to the merch store yet, you can go to it by going to www .prodthesheep

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.com and you can find some really great post -millennial products and you can tell me what you think.

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I want to make excellent gear for Christians who are going to build the next Christendom. So whether that's a snarky t -shirt, a great hat, or a

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Martin Luther beer glass, I'm here for it and I hope you're here for it. Thank you for everyone who's already ordered.

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Now with that, I said last week that we're going to be in revelation this week.

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Like literally, we're going to actually start exegeting and going through the book of revelation. But before we do that,

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I want to do, I want to talk about one theme that is so central to everything.

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I realized this week that we couldn't actually move forward until we talk about this. This is a theme that's going to dictate the, every aspect of the book of revelation.

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It's a theme that's going to differentiate us. This is post -millennial channel from the different eschatological positions that are out there.

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It is a theme that's not only central to the book of revelation, it's central to the entire Bible. And that theme will be one of the most important interpretive keys that you and I are going to need as we make our way through this incredible, incredible book.

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And that theme, that theme is the reign of Jesus Christ as King. What kind of a reign is it?

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When is it going to begin? What does it look like? What impact is it actually going to have upon the earth? Is it a spiritual reign or a physical reign?

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These questions are questions that we're going to answer in today's episode so that we can know not only that Christ is

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King, but also what that means for the world in which we live.

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Because in the book of revelation, we are not introduced to a long haired, feathered haired, sissy

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Jesus who's just sitting up in heaven, waiting on you to accept him and to love him like some hapless teenage boy who's waiting for some girl to say yes to his prom invitation.

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We are not introduced to a lamb like loser waiting for the rapture so that he can really start to do his work.

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No, we're brought into the throne room in the book of revelation. We're brought into the into the presence of an awesome

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God where Christ is enthroned. The dragon is kicked out. Revelation 12.

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The apostate harlot is going to be crushed. Revelation 17 through 19. The devil himself is going to be destroyed and thrown into the lake of fire.

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Revelation 20. And Christ's worldwide empire as King ruling over the nations is unveiled in all of its glory upon the earth in Revelation 21 through 22.

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Revelation is not about an escape. It's about an enthronement. It's not a book of retreat.

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It's the royal triumphant finale of a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

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To try to understand revelation apart from the kingship of Jesus Christ, it's like trying to understand the ocean without water, which is why before we start really getting into the book and going into verse one and all of that,

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I want us to look at this theme and I want us to cover it well because it's going to serve us well.

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Also, one last moment or one last matter of housekeeping. Next week, there will not be a broadcast episode.

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I am going to be on vacation in Myrtle Beach. I'm probably going to be swinging a golf club next week, so this week is going to be a longer episode.

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It's going to be a detailed episode. It's going to be a dense South African bill tongue kind of episode.

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It's not going to be pudding. It's going to be built on like dense beef jerky that you can chew on for two straight weeks.

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So with that, let us jump into part one, two eschatological errors.

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Now two major errors plague modern eschatology, and again, that's the study of the end times, but two major errors are plaguing this discipline when it comes to the kingship of Jesus Christ.

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First, dispensationalists with their charts and their silly timelines and all of that, they delay the kingdom of Jesus to a future millennium.

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If they're consistent, they'll tell you that Jesus is not currently reigning now. Satan is in control of the world and Jesus is reigning maybe somehow in heaven, but definitely not on earth.

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So they take his kingship and his reign and they punt it into the future. That's one error.

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The second error is amillennialism, which in a bid to preserve the already have so spiritualized the not yet in order to point to a kingdom that really actually ends up being a little more than a spiritual kingdom that is existing in the hearts of men.

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Yes, Jesus is reigning. They would say, yes, Jesus has dominion. Yes, Jesus has the victory, but his kingdom is a spiritual kingdom.

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It's a kingdom in the hearts of men, in the souls of men, in the churches of men, not in the domain of man out in the world.

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In that sense, they see the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man is sort of a sort of different spheres and they don't really overlap very much at all.

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If you're an optimistic amillennial type, they overlap more, but really they're separate kingdoms.

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Kingdom of God, kingdom of man. Now with that, both of them are wrong. Both of them missed the mark.

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Neither of them actually account for the reality of Jesus's kingdom for the kingdom of Christ is neither a postponed future reality at some point in the distant future, but it's also not a private spiritual only realm.

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The kingdom of Jesus is present. It's powerful. It's here and it's now and it's going to bring transformation to the material world in space and time because it's not only a spiritual kingdom, but it's also a physical kingdom as well.

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In the same way that a body and a soul can't be separated is what the kingdom is.

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It's both spiritual and physical. It's going to reunite heaven back to earth. It is, it's raining on the earth now having physical effects now, but it's going to continue to grow both spiritually and physically as the world continues along.

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The kingdom is not a foreign concept on the pages of scripture, but it's the exact kind of kingdom of God that was designed in the beginning to rule over the entire world physically and spiritually.

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And then what we're going to see today is that through Jesus, the before the world has come to an end, this is the kind of kingdom that Christ is going to rot.

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The kingship and the kingdom is a central and it's a unifying theme from the beginning of the

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Bible all the way to the end. I would say it's one of the great themes of all of scripture, the kingship of God or the kingship of Christ, which means that we must know something about this theme.

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If we're going to understand the Bible rightly, if we're going to understand the Bible rightly, we need to know about the kingship of Christ.

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But also if we're going to understand the end goal of all of the

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Bible, which is revelation, we need to understand the kingship of Christ.

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So with that, we need to trace this theme from Genesis to Jude and we're going to see how it develops.

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And then in closing, we're going to apply it to the book of Revelation so that you can see the sort of overarching structure of the book of Revelation, see how this theme is at the very heart of the book that we're going to be studying, and then we'll close out with some application.

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But with that, I want us to begin by jumping into the Old Testament and I want to begin with the book of Genesis and I want to look at this theme of king and kingdom that God has been bringing from the very beginning.

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And with that, we need to jump into part two, part two, the birth and fall of kingship in Genesis.

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Now, the Old Testament isn't a collection of disconnected moral stories or disoriented ancient myths that are haphazardly strewn together with no rhyme or reason.

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Instead, the Bible is one unified story of God from beginning to end, and it's the story of God as cosmic king.

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The Bible is the grand drama of redemption and it reveals how God created a cosmos with which he was going to house his own glory and through successive creative actions, tamed and ordered that chaos in six literal days.

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And then he exerted his rule over every atom of that existence.

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And even more remarkably, God's design was not just to establish his rule over an inanimate world, but to share that reign with human beings who would extend his rule to the untamed parts.

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For instance, let me give you an example of this. God, after six days, he creates this region called

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Eden. He creates human beings and he puts them inside Eden and he gives them this ordered space.

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God tamed the chaos and he set up his rule in an ordered, beautiful zip code called

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Eden. And there he exerted his dominion and he made it a beautiful capital city for the future of the world, the ordered world.

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But one of the most important jobs that he gave to Adam was to fill the garden until it was so full that was overflowing with people so that Adam would have to go out and extend the boundaries of the garden, taking in new lands and cultivating them and extending

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God's paradigmatic dominion into the end of the world looked like the

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Edenic blueprint. Remember, God made Adam outside of Eden in the dusty parts and he put him into the garden.

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This is intentional. God made a space that Adam could replicate.

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He didn't make the whole world a garden. He could have, but he didn't. He made one region a garden and he made

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Adam to be in that garden so that he could learn it, so that he could grow in it, so that he could have children in it, so that he could figure out what it would take for him to begin moving the garden boundaries out until eventually the entire world is a garden space filled with human flourishing.

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So God's goal was to govern the visible world through a human representative, which theologians call a vice regent, who is a king who is in authority, but who gets his ultimate authority from a superior king.

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This vice regent representative that's made in his own image, crowned with his authority and honor and even given a measure of glory was meant to spread

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God's dominion everywhere. Adam was designed to spread the dominion of Yahweh to the ends of the earth.

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And in that sense, kingship is not a minor theme that shows up later with David and Saul and all of that.

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It's a theme that's right there in the very beginning. God, the king installed minor kings in order to rule over his spaces.

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For instance, God installed the kings of the sun and the moon and the stars. What to rule over the day and the night and to rule over the heavens.

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God installed kings in the sky like the like the flying beast. And he installed kings in the ocean like the huge whales and sharks to rule over the waters.

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And he also installed rulers or kings in the land.

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And that was Adam and his queen Eve. And in fact, if you look at the creation account, this is very clear.

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Day one, God makes the heavens and the earth. Day four, God fills the heavens with rulers.

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Day two, God separates the water and the dry land. Day five,

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God fills the sky and the water with these birds and fish.

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And then day three, he separates the dry land out. And then day six, he fills the dry land with Adam and with Eve.

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So what God is doing is in day one, two and three, he's making spaces. And in days four, five and six, he's making monarchs.

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Or you could say it in day one, two and three, he's making kingdoms. And in days four, five and six, he's filling it with kings.

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That's the structure. And many people will look at this and they will say, gosh, how is this possible that this is a six literal day process?

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Well, because God is God and God can do that. The Bible says that he did it. But the structure of it also points us not only to, not only to the literal 24 hour, six periods of days, it does do that.

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But it points us to the fact that God is a king. He's making kingdoms and he's filling them with his visceroy, with his vice regents and to human beings.

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He has given them the responsibility to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it and rule over and extend the dominion of Yahweh.

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This is a kingly task. And this command is very practical and it's earthly and it's hands on.

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It involves God conferring real authority over the material world, over the real world tasks that will bring this planet into alignment with his creative vision.

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The plan that God gave to Adam and Eve is what theologians call the cultural mandate, which is where God intended for humanity to expand his kingdom by raising families, cultivating fields, naming animals, building cities, establishing laws, managing resources, and shaping culture in such a way that it would have life.

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That means that the Imago Dei is not only an extrinsic characteristic of our humanity conferred to us by God, but it's also our calling and our mission that we would fulfill.

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The image of God and man is our mission in the world. It is our office. It is our duty.

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It is our delight. It is the telos and the purpose for which God made man.

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God made man to rule. God made man to be kings. God made women to be queens.

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God made us to take his creative plan and spread it to the ends of the world.

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And that plan God called very good. Now, this also reveals an essential truth that God created the world good, and he called the mission that he was calling man and woman to very good.

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He didn't call it a, it wasn't a spiritual vision. It was both a spiritual and a physical vision, and he called that very good.

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And God never intended for the physical world to be somehow lost in the midst of that.

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There's so many people today who look at Christianity as mostly a spiritual enterprise.

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Christianity is about that I pray, that I go to church, that I read my Bible, that I try to follow the

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Ten Commandments or whatever else. Like we've reduced it down to a kind of feeling or a spiritual thing.

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Like I'm doing Christian stuff when I'm in my car driving to work and I'm singing worship songs, but I'm doing physical work, worldly work.

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When I'm out in the world, we've divided the world into these sacred secular categories. We've divided body and soul to where it seems like that we get this bifurcated vision of what the world is.

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And that's not ever what God did. In Eden, heaven and earth are perfectly united.

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Body and soul are perfectly united, spiritual and material perfectly united. God meant for the world under the regency of, of his vice regent

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Adam to be ruled both spiritually and physically to the glory of God.

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Both are true. And this is why dispensationalism and amillennialism fall short because they miss this very fact about his kingship, about the kingship of God and about the kingship of Adam.

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God intended the physical world not to be abandoned, not to be escaped, not to be neglected, but he meant it to be cared for, governed, ruled by human beings who are the true descendants of Adam for God's glory, for our good and for the life of the world.

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That was the plan that God called very good. And in that we see that God's eternal purpose has always been to establish his kingdom on this earth through real human rulers who would bring genuine blessings to the world.

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That's the plan. And if God called that plan very good, why would God abandon that plan?

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Because God's not like us. He's not a quitter. And yet we don't get very far into the

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Bible before we see in Genesis three, a devastating crisis occurs.

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Humanity in their sin, they don't lose the call to rule when they fall from grace, when they follow the serpent, when they rebel against God, they don't lose their call to rule.

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But in their fall from grace, they totally corrupted their own leadership after being banished from God's realm because their sin, the wandering humans retain their desire for rule, but they no longer root and establish their rule as being under God.

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And now they act like they are gods and some as some kind of petty tyrants in their sin.

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The mandate to cultivate the earth continued after the fall.

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You can see that in Genesis nine, when God repeats it to Noah, and yet after the fall because of sin, this mandate is now distorted.

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It's perverted. It's polluted. The world is now filled with thorns and weeds and murder.

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Genesis four. So the earth becomes cursed. Labor becomes painful and humanity.

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God's ordained rulers now are challenged, thwarted, frustrated, and incapable of accomplishing the very good plan that God has given them.

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Now, from this point onward, history unfolds as a battle between two kingdoms because what happened in Eden, heaven and earth broke apart.

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Spirit material broke apart. The rule of God and the sinful kingdom of man broke apart.

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So now from Eden onward, you have this story, and this is what the biblical story is.

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The story of how a good world, that heaven and earth were literally united, overlapping, connected spaces breaks.

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And now you have the story of how heaven and earth are going to come back together again.

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And how the kingdom of man and the kingdom of rebellion and the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of Satan and the kingdom of lies and the kingdom of murder is going to be crushed by God as he reunites heaven and earth back together again.

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And how he by himself, by his own will and by sending his own son is going to bring the kingdom of God back to earth.

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Rather than God throwing the world in the trash and saying, I'm done, which is essentially,

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I mean, it's a little bit of an overstatement, but essentially a dispensational view that God is going to throw this old world away, set it on fire, burn it up, and he's going to start all over with a new world.

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Instead of that, the story of the Bible is richer, sweeter and more beautiful. God is going to take the world in its fall and he's going to transform it.

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He's going to take heaven and weave it back to earth again. He's going to take spirit and combine it back to flesh again.

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He's going to do this work by not Adam and not children of Adam, but a son of Eve named

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Jesus Christ, who's going to be the true Adam, the true king. And all of that is super important for us to understand because even in the middle of Adam's judgment, even in the middle of Adam's sin and his curse and his fall and his failure, he,

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God didn't abandon that original good plan. He's still going to set up his king in Adam's place, who's not only going to rule from heaven and have a spiritual reign who only rules in our hearts.

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No, he's going to set up his king on earth and he's going to reign for an everlasting reign.

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He's going to have a kingdom that spreads his dominion to the ends of the earth, like Adam should have done, but Adam couldn't do.

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God is going to do it through Jesus. And while Adam could not accomplish this,

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Jesus was going to come in the future and he was going to redeem everything that was lost.

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In Genesis 3, 15, God gives the promise that a descendant, a descendant of the woman is going to come and he's going to crush the serpent's head.

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He's going to end the devil's rival insurrection. The very first gospel, which theologians call the proto -evangelium, was not a pipe dream or wishful thinking.

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It was, it was God declaring from the very beginning in Genesis 3, 15, he declared war on Satan, war on sin, war on death, war on that rival kingdom, and he was going to accomplish it through his own son.

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The language given to Eve, the mother of all the living is vivid and it's earthly.

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It's a flesh and blood savior. It's not a Thanos up in heaven, snapping his fingers and making it all come to pass.

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No, he's going to come through her womb. He was going to suffer injury. He was going to be fatally murdered by this enemy.

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And yet he was going to triumph over this enemy. His victory in his resurrection was going to come over the dragon, which is a theme that you find it's yes and amen to in the book of Revelation, especially chapter 12 and chapter 20.

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But I don't want to skip ahead so far, just in Genesis one through three, we've seen that God made the world to be a realm for his glory.

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He's the great King. He's the King overall. And he also established both spiritual and physical rulers that would rule over soul and body that would bring life to both the immaterial and the material bits of the world.

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And he did this through Adam. But because of Adam's fall, God did not abandon that plan.

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And God is not going to forsake that plan. He's actually going to bring that plan to completion through a new and a better Adam named

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Jesus. And if you're a Christian, then you, my friend, are no longer under the ranks as a child of Adam.

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But now you're a citizen of the kingdom of God through Christ. If you belong to Christ, you're in his kingdom.

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You're not waiting for a kingdom. Your King has come. He's right now transforming you spiritually and you physically.

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He's right now transforming your space physically and spiritually. Your King right now is transforming this broken world back into its original state.

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But it's just happening so slow in human lifespans that you can't see it very clearly.

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You have to you have to look at you have to look at the world in five hundred year chunks and see, my goodness,

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Jesus is redeeming the world. Jesus is he's not throwing it away. He's transforming it.

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And if you zoom out, you can see it. He saved the world in order to redeem the world, both souls and cities, both hearts and hamlets, both spirit and flesh.

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He died to claim the world. He says all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.

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So therefore, all authority in the spiritual realms belong to Jesus. All authority in the physical realms belong to Jesus.

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And from the moment that he resurrected from the dead and onward, the hope of redemption and the expectation of this coming

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King became the same hope. Because in this one man, Jesus, both realities are going to come physical and spiritual, the salvation of souls and the transformation of the world back into a garden paradise called

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Eden. And that's just Genesis one through three. But we also see this hope outside of Eden with the patriarchs, because when you get outside of Eden, the promise of a man king who's going to rule the world and is going to bring

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God's blessings into the physical dimensions doesn't fade. The theme continues.

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You could you could say once you get outside of Eden, well, maybe the theme that theme dies out or it's or it fades out or it's forgotten.

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No, it becomes even sharper that God's going to send this king, that God's going to send Jesus. The promises are all over the patriarchal material.

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For instance, the seed promise to Eve is preserved through the line of Noah. There it's repeated. It's also passed down through Shem.

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And then it's further clarified through Abraham. That means that the promise has now went from Eve all the way to Abraham, who's one day through his tribe, through his people, through his family, is going to have the son, the seed of Abraham, who's going to come as a returning king and who's going to bring blessings to all the nations.

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That's Genesis twelve, three, that through the seed of Abraham, all the families of the earth are going to be blessed.

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The true Adam and the true child of Abraham is going to bring his unstoppable kingdom of God back to the earth and all of the blessings that that entails.

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And that's why God explicitly promises Abraham in Genesis seventeen six that kings shall come from you, from your own body.

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Which I don't let us know that God is not finished with his plan to bring a king who's going to bring his dominion to the world, even as early as Genesis seventeen six.

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And this promise goes beyond having just a bunch of descendants. It even goes beyond one of his descendants,

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David or Rehoboam or Asa or Hezekiah or any of those.

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It points directly to the fact. That a future ruler, a future dynasty, a future monarchy is going to come out of the body of Abraham's loins, and it's not

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Isaac, it's not Jacob, it's not Judah, it's not even eventually King David, it's

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Jesus. Paul tells us that he, Jesus, is the seed of Abraham.

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And we know that because Jesus is the only one who could fulfill the promises made to the patriarchs.

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Think about David. Yeah, David united the empires together so that Judah and Israel were back together again.

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OK, great. But what did he do for China? What did he do for Chile? What did he do for the

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Northwest Territories in Canada? Nothing. Think about Solomon. It says that that was the height of the

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Israelite empire where the nations were streaming to Solomon. But yet Solomon didn't own the nations.

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In order for this promise of God bringing his blessings to all the nations of earth to happen, it must be through Jesus Christ.

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That's why Paul says that Jesus is the seed of promise. He is the seed of Abraham. He is the one who will make the world into the

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Israel of God. Not just Palestine, not just that track of land in the Middle East.

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No, Jesus is going to make Israel the whole world through his church.

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And we see that promise given to Jacob, who's Abraham's grandson. And he receives the promise as well.

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It says a nation and a company of nations shall come from you and kings shall come forth from you.

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Genesis 35 11. So, of course, this had an initial fulfillment that was bound up in the future.

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The Israelite people who 400, 500 years later were going to have a king, actually maybe even 600 years later, they're going to have a king starting with Saul.

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But the promise given to Jacob's not Saul. The promise given to Jacob is not David. The promise given to him is not

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Solomon. It's not Rehoboam. It's not any of those men. The promise is bigger than that.

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It goes so much deeper than the Hebrew people, because through Christ, all the companies of nations, all the world is eventually going to come into his kingdom through him.

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That's why Jesus says in Matthew 28 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Because why? Because he's the one, as was promised to Jacob, will have the company of nations that are going to come from him.

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As scripture continues, the promise becomes increasingly more and more clear. It doesn't become less clear.

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It comes more. Genesis 49, Jacob is prophetically blessing his fourth son,

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Judah, and he's setting the stage for the future messianic hope and to Judah at the end of Jacob's life.

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He, he knows that God has given his grandfather, Abraham, the promise that kings are going to come out of him.

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He knows that his dad, Isaac, had that promise. He knows that he has that promise. Now he looks at his fourth son,

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Judah, and he blesses Judah. And he says that the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler's staff from between his feet until Shiloh comes and to him shall be the obedience of the nations.

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Genesis 49 10. This is a powerful verse, brothers and sisters, because Judah is promised that his little tribe was going to be the ruling tribe of the

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Israelite nation until the king shows up until the Shiloh comes.

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Yeah. He's going to hold the earthly scepter for a little while until God in the flesh comes and, and that, and that man, the

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God man is going to make the nations obey him once more, just like Adam should have done.

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He's going to bring the reign of God, both physical and spiritual back to earth once more, not just in Canaan, not just in Palestine.

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Not just in this little geographical territory today that we know is modern day Israel, but the

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Shiloh is going to make the nations of earth obey him. We cannot spiritualize this passage.

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The Shiloh will eventually make all the nations on earth, his servants, which is showing us that this theme of kingship is so central to the hopes and the expectations for the coming

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Christ. He's going to be the king that came from the line of Abraham. He's going to be the, the king who inherits the company of nations from Jacob.

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He's going to be the king. That's going to come and take the ruler staff from Judah, which he did in AD 70 and now rule over all the nations and make all the nations obey him.

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Make all the nations be baptized into him. That is why, that's why the book of revelation says of Jesus that he's the king of all the kings of the earth.

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Revelation one five, because he's the one who is going to make all the nations subservient to him and his mission on this earth will not be complete.

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So long as the nations are still disobeying him, so long as the nations are still in rebellion against him, he's not finished yet.

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The rain began in 2000 years ago when Jesus rose from the grave and ascended into heaven and sat down on the, on the true throne of new

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Jerusalem. Yeah. He is the Shiloh he's raining, but brothers and sisters that rains far from complete because why the nations are still raging foolish kings are still plotting in vain, but if you believe the

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Bible, if you trust God that he sent his own son to save you, you should also trust

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God that he's going to fulfill the promise that he made to Jesus, that all the nations would obey him in Genesis 49.

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And you should look around and say, we've got a lot of work left to do. And we've got a lot of, of time left before God returns.

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Why would God send Jesus back to in the world? If the nations don't yet obey him, why would

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God send Jesus back to the world? If what he promised hasn't come true yet, that would make

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God a liar. So if you're watching this and you're thinking that your whole life, you've been taught that, that we're just waiting on Jesus to zap us out of here.

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Forget that godless theology. Be in, I call it godless because it makes

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God a liar. Either God is going to finish what he started. He's going to fulfill his promises or he's not either.

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His kingdom is going to inherit all the nations and make all the nations obey him or all the ones who don't, he will crush

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Psalm 110 or he lied. That's the only option that you have.

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And that's what we see in the book of Genesis. God established the world as his king. He installed a human ruler named

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Adam, Adam failed. And then from that moment forward, the focus is on the coming

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Christ. We see that in Genesis. And now I want us to look at part three, the mosaic need for a true king.

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Now the anticipation for this royal rumor from Adam and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah doesn't slow down when you leave the book of Genesis, it even grows stronger during the time of Moses.

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Now that Israel has become a nation and a, and the tribe of Judah has actually been prophetically identified as the royal line and set up as the leading tribe in the way that even she goes to war.

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It's an important question begins to emerge in the Israelite camp.

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When is this king going to finally appear? Well, remarkably, one of the earliest in the clearest prophecies about this coming king,

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Jesus doesn't come from Moses. It doesn't come from Joshua or Caleb or any of those.

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It actually comes from a pagan prophet who was trying to curse the people of Israel named

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Balaam in numbers, 24, 17 Balaam, who's a pagan seer hired by Balaam to bring witchery on top of the heads of Israel.

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Instead of being able to do that, he finds himself compelled by the spirit of God to bless this nation.

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And this is what he says. A star shall come forth from Jacob. A scepter shall rise from Israel.

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Now this prophecy is powerful for a couple of reasons because it, it uses two very potent images for what kind of king this king is going to be.

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He, he, it's the image of a star because he's going to be a heavenly ruler, but it's also the image of a scepter because he's going to be a human ruler showing early on in numbers that this coming king, it's going to be both divine and man.

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In other words, he's going to be, he's going to be both heavenly and earthly. He's going to be the God man.

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It's going to be the king who is going to be God in human flesh, in perfect union, ruling over the people of God, which is, which is amazing that you have the hypostatic union already there in the book of numbers.

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Now, furthermore, the timing of the prophecy is also incredibly intentional because remember the

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Israelites have not gone into the land yet. They haven't taken possession of the land yet. God doesn't give the promise to them when they're in the land and they're in charge and they're thinking,

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Oh, okay, this is what it means. Let me, the promise equals the land. It doesn't. They're still wandering in the wilderness.

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At this point, they're still standing at the doorstep of the promised land, a nomadic people with no place, no power, nothing really going for them other than the promise of God and a wing and a prayer.

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And by doing this, by God giving this most beautiful blessing to them in that space and in that time,

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God is showing them that, that the promise isn't contingent on the land.

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God is sending a message to them that inheriting the physical and geographical land of, of, of Israel is not the ultimate goal.

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The it's a starting point, like, like the garden of Eden was a starting point so that the whole world could become a garden in the same way.

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Israel or Canaan is a starting point. It's a launching point for the whole world.

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The end goal is the entire world. The end goal, this is the terminus of, of God's kingdom is not so that the

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Jews could have a land. Like it, it blows my mind that dispensationalists believe that that's like the end goal of history, that the

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Jews could have their land, one country and small country at that fact. It's not big that, that one tiny little track of land is the goal of history.

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That is, that's silly. God always starts with a small piece of land so that he can have the whole, he's starting with a small piece of land so that he can win the entire world back to him so he can make the whole world a land flowing with milk and honey so that he can make the whole world a garden.

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But that true inheritance, that true earthly mission is stalled because of the sin of this country.

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And it's not going to really be invigorated into the rival of the true king, the star that rises out of Judah, the scepter of Israel.

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It's also, this is very interesting. I think that, that Jesus is going to reunite Israel and Judah back together again.

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How does he do that? Well, Jesus comes, he, he comes to Judah. There were many of the

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Jews who came to Jesus, bowed the knee to Jesus. And then what happened? He brought the world to himself.

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If you remember the nation of Israel, which is the Northern 10 tribes, they were genocided by the

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Assyrians. They were intermarried into the nation so that now the nations became apostate Israel.

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So when Jesus comes, he saves the Jews. And when Paul and the early church took the gospel to the

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Gentiles, they're going to apostate Israel in the world, intermixed in with all the nations.

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And then through Christ, the dividing wall has been broken. Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

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That's why Paul can look at what's happening in the early church, the saving of Jews and the saving of Gentiles and say, this is the

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Israel of God. So that while the

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Israel of old could not fulfill the promises of God, they could not begin with their little track of land and extend to the ends of the earth.

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God through Christ does it. And now he's making the entire world his

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Israel. He's making his descendant of Adam, the one who ushers in the kingdom that is going to spread his glory to the entire world.

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Jesus is the true son of Adam and the true Israel of God is the one that was promised, that was going to come through the oracles of Balaam.

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And he fulfills this role perfectly. And in addition to this, Moses tells us that, that he's going to be a good king.

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He tells us what kind of king that this king is going to be in Deuteronomy 17, 14 through 20, because contrary to what many people believed at that time, that it was going to be a human king.

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No, God was saying that he was going to send his own son. So it was going to be a divine God, man, king.

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And unlike all of the selfish and godless kings that were in the world at that time, and unlike all of the selfish and godless kings that Israel and Judah would produce and put on their throne, this king was not going to rule according to his own desires.

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He wasn't meant to be an independent ruler who is, who is serving for his own ends. No, he was one who was completely submitted to the will of God.

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This king is one who was going to, who was going to do God's will perfectly as Adam should have done.

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That's precisely what Jesus did. Jesus tells us that he didn't even do anything or say anything unless the father told him because why he's the true

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Adam. He listens to what God says and he does it. He hears what God says and he obeys it.

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That's what Adam should have done. That's what this king that Moses is prophesying will do because he's the true and better Adam.

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Jesus Moses tells us that the true king would not be allowed to multiply horses, which is relying too much on his military might.

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He's not going to be able to multiply wives, which is relying on broken political alliances instead of trusting in the

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Lord. He's not going to be able to multiply silver and gold, putting his trust in economic possessions. He's Moses is telling us that this true king's duty was to hand copy

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God's law, this Deuteronomy 17 and to read it and study it and to live by it day and night.

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That's what Adam was supposed to do. Adam, the first king of the world was supposed to know

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God's word, obey God's word and live faithfully by it day and night. And the true king of Israel would do that.

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He would be appointed to be Israel's chief example of obedience to God's law, not someone who breaks it at every turn.

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He was meant to rule God's people with God's authority, which is a description that doesn't match any of the kings of Judah or any of the kings of Israel.

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It only matches Christ who uniquely fulfilled every requirement by living a life perfectly submitted under the law of God.

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This understanding of kingship is important because no one in the Torah, no one in the

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Torah fulfills it. No one in the Torah anticipates a king who merely rules from heaven.

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No one in the Torah expects that this king is going to be up in heaven, somewhere far away with no impact on the earth.

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The expectation is from the scripture that God is going to send a divine human king who's going to reunite heaven and earth back together again, who's going to extend

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God's dominion to the ends of the world, not just in the spiritual realms, not just in church services, not just in our hearts, but, but both in the physical and in the spiritual, both

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Balaam's prophecy and Moses' teaching confirm that the true king of Israel, the one who was always intended to come is going to be a real world governor, a flesh and blood king who is going to bring real hope, real blessings to the real spaces on earth.

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He's going to bring God's authority and God's law. He's going to bring real life and real tangible blessings to real people who are underneath his rule.

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The idea that Jesus' kingdom is not going to transform this world into a better space and he's going to heal the curse and he's going to heal everything that was broken, even down to the obedience of the pagan nations is not a concept that is rooted in scripture, but it comes from a priori assumptions from dispensational and even amillennial pastors whose systems don't align with what we're seeing in the first five books of the

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Bible. But in addition to that, we also see that when the kings come,

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God is going to make a covenant with them and it's going to give us even more understanding of what this king is going to look like, which takes us to part four.

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The kingship was made for the king. Now after the original generation of Israelites, along with Moses who died in the wilderness for their sin,

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Joshua led them into the land of promise and he began to conquest it.

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Now it's at this time, at the end of his life that a big question was on everyone's mind, especially as you're reading through this, will they be faithful?

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Will they finish the conquest? Will they put down the enemies of God and spread his dominion in the land like Adam was supposed to do?

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Or will they be just like their father Adam and die outside of the land?

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And while this is their conquest, as it were, it was far from perfect and while the people stumbled through this period of time, stumbled is maybe a little too light of a word.

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Read the book of judges. But while they stumbled and they bumbled their way all the way until their very first and glorious king, whose name was

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Saul, they finally, after a long period of time, got a man on the throne who cared about these things and who cared about reigning in a way that was godly.

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And that man was David and he united the empire, which means that all the 12 tribes came, came under a unified reign under this man named

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David. He's the man who chased out the pagans. He dealt with the Philistines from even his earliest age.

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He purged the land of idolatry. He brought the ark of the covenant back into the city of Jerusalem.

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He amassed a fairly successful empire by being in the favor of God.

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And it's here to this man, David, that God promised and God, God connected

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David to his promises of old. He connected David to the promise of Judah and to Jacob and to Isaac and to Abraham.

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And then all the way back to Adam that he would through his line, through his biological seed, through his people, through David's offspring, that God would bring a

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King. And we know this today was not just about David's children.

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It wasn't just about a biological ethnic Jew ruling from downtown Jerusalem on the throne.

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Now in a way it was, but that wasn't the end of it.

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There was so much deeper than that because God was going to find a way through the line of David to enter into human history.

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He was going to bring a King. He was going to, he was going to bring himself. He was going to write himself into the story of failed

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Israel as its true King who was going to rule and his rule was never going to end. It was going to begin in space and time in the first century, like every other

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King before begins in space and time. But unlike them, it wasn't going to stop in space and time.

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Like most Kings, most Kings live and they die. David lived and he died. Solomon lived and he died.

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Asa Hezekiah, all of them lived and they died. But this King, when he died, came back to life.

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This King hit when he rises from the dead. Death has no more power over him, which means his rule never ends.

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His rule never lapses. His reign is not going to be left with a break in it, which means that he's going to be an eternal

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King and everlasting King. His reign is never going to be finished. What this tells us is that if you look at the world and if you look at all of the things out there which are an offense to Jesus, then you can ask yourself the question, is

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Jesus going to stop his reign before he deals with it? Because think about it. David, David united the empire together, but his reign ended and then he had to hand it off to Solomon who would go and take it the next step further.

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Solomon took it a next step further so that, so that it's really the height of the empire under Solomon.

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The nations are streaming and they're coming, but it still at that point was not anything more than a piece of land in the

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Levant called Israel. Solomon never took over modern day China.

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He never took over Chile. He never took over Greenland. He never took over Czechoslovakia.

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His reign was encapsulated in this small little territory and he died.

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And then when he died, his son Rehoboam came to the throne and instead of pushing it forward, Rehoboam actually broke the empire into two different small little rival factional nations.

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One was Israel in the North called Ephraim. That's the 10 Northern tribes. One was Judah, the two Southern tribes.

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And from that moment forward, there is no progress that's made on conquering the nations.

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And yet when you look at Jesus, who is the true son of David, the true seed of Abraham, the true and better Adam.

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When you look at Jesus, Jesus doesn't just confine his reign to Judah, to Palestine, to Canaan.

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Jesus starts there. Jesus conquers there. He took his disciples to all the towns of Israel.

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He took his disciples and sent his apostles out to, in pairs of two to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come.

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He went and reclaimed it. He brought Jews from every town into his kingdom before the end of Judah in 8070.

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But it didn't stop there because eventually it spread outside of there to the Roman world and eventually toppled the

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Roman empire. Now his kingdom is spread to every time zone, latitude and every longitude.

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There's a church and literally in every latitude and longitude on earth. So when you look at the world today, that's my point.

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And you see that there's still people in rebellion to Jesus. I think we could, we could agree with that.

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There's presidents, there's Kings, there's empires, there's nations, there's mayors, there's governors, there's local school teachers.

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There's Hollywood people, there's education people, there's media people, there's plumbers, there's grandmas.

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Everywhere you look, you can find people who are in rebellion against Jesus, who hate him, who mock him, who spurn him, who disobey him.

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And the question you have to ask yourself is, is Jesus going to be like all the other

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Kings of old and stop short? Is he, is he going to choose to stop short of the plan that he promised that he was going to do?

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Is he going to do like David and die or end his reign before it's finished? Is he going to do like Solomon and end his reign before it's finished?

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Or is he going to be the true son of Adam who doesn't stop, who doesn't end, who his kingdom does spread to every tribe, tongue and nation on earth.

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And it does make the world into a garden paradise again. And it does make his Genesis 49 says all the nations of the world obey him.

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Is he going to stop short of that? Or is he going to continue on to that? This idea that that the rapture is going to come and rescue us out of here is an indictment on the faithfulness of Jesus.

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Because if we, the church are raptured out of here before Jesus makes all the nations obey him, then he lied to us in his promise and he's derelict in his reign.

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He's just like David, just like Judah, just like Ahab, just like Ahaz, just like all of them.

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He didn't do what a king was supposed to do. God made the world for a king, a human king to rule over it, to subdue it and to bring the blessings of God to the people of God.

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And the only king worthy of that mission and that calling is Jesus. So when you look at the world and you look at the state of the world, it's an invitation for you to either panic and freak out and say,

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I bet Jesus is getting ready to return. Or you can say, you know what? Why would he do that?

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He spent 2000 years conquering the church is bigger today than it's ever been. The world is more submitted to Christ today than it was 2000 years ago.

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Why would he stop short? You know what? Think about it. I don't think he would. So I'm going to trust him and I'm going to not panic when the world looks crazy.

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I'm going to keep working. I'm going to keep moving. I'm going to keep doing the things that he told me to do. I'm going to be like the faithful slave whose master went on a long journey and when panic sets in my heart,

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Oh no, the master's not coming back. Oh no. What do I do? I'm just going to keep working. I'm going to keep my head to the plow.

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I'm going to keep my mind focused on the mission and I'm going to keep doing that until he returns.

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And I think because what the Bible says, he's not going to return until he's finished the job.

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I mean, if I hired you to come build my fence and you stopped when only a third of it was built,

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I would call you a derelict worker. I would probably want my money back because you lied to me.

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You didn't come and finish my fence. Well, why would Jesus, if, if this metaphor makes sense to you, why would

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Jesus build a third of the kingdom? Cause roughly about a third of the world is Christian at this point.

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Why would he build a third of the kingdom and then stop? He would be no better than the foolish worker who built a third of my fence that I would want my money back.

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And you would, you could rightly look at Jesus in the Bible and say, Oh, well you, you didn't do what you said you were going to do.

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How can I trust you? How can you be my savior and Lord? That's, that's the subtle implication of dispensational thinking that Jesus doesn't do what he said he's going to do.

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Yeah, of course they say, no, no, no, that's heaven. That's eternal state. They punt that into the future. But my point is the

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Bible doesn't do that. The Bible talks about Jesus having his kingdom now, which we're going to get into and I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

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But my point is when you look around at the world, it gives us evidence that Jesus is not finished yet because he's a faithful king.

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He is going to finish what he started and that means bringing every tribe, every tongue, every nation under his perfect rule.

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That means the obedience of the nations. That means that he's going to inherit the collection of the nations. That means that that he is going to be the king from which all other kings submit and bow their knee until the world obeys him.

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His job and our job is not finished. And God's covenant with David and all of the early promises that came before it offspring, kingship, dominion and blessings are repeated.

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They're brought together in one man in one royal line.

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And that is Christ coming from the line of David. He's the, he's going to bring the promised kingdom that has a real physical temple, not just a building in Jerusalem.

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David is a type of Christ and that he, and that he gathered all the material for the temple. Jesus is the foundation of the true end time temple.

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He's bringing the real temple. He's the one who's going to bring God's name, Yahweh to the nations. He's the one who is going to sit down on a throne and never stand up again.

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He's going to rule forever. His kingdom is going to last forever. All the realities that are promised in the, in the

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Adamic Noahic Abrahamic mosaic and Davidic covenant come true in Christ.

01:00:00

And all of these realities crescendo in the book of revelation, which is why I'm doing this theme, because I want you to see that he is these things.

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For instance, he is the true temple revelation 21 22 he bears the name that is above all names.

01:00:15

He brings the name of Yahweh to the nations revelation, 1913 he's the one who sits on David's throne, revelation three 21 he's the one who reigns on that throne forever and ever and ever revelation, 1115 he's the king.

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He's the king who brings the temple, makes Yahweh's name known rules over the nations.

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And he's the one who will reign forever in the line of David. All these themes crescendo climax and conclude in the book of revelation.

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All of this should point us to one very simple conclusion from Genesis onward.

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God is setting up a kingdom for his son to be the king over the cosmos so that he may rule over it to the ends of the earth so that he may bring

01:00:58

God's glory to the ends of the earth so that he may bring God's blessings to God's people to the ends of the earth and so that everyone who follows after the serpent will be crushed underneath his sandal.

01:01:09

And when we see the promises of the old Testament connected to the kingship of Jesus, we understand the point of eschatology.

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The point of eschatology is not escape. It's enthronement. The point of eschatology is not run away.

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The point of eschatology is advanced because we are under the great king

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Jesus. And when we see that and when we see that all of the kings on earth and the kingdoms on earth are just types and shadows of what he will be, then we see very clearly that all of this points to him.

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And we see that even more clearly as we move forward out of the era of David and out of the era of the kings.

01:01:54

We actually see this in the songs of Israel in the Psalms. The Psalms, if you remember, is the hymn book of the ancient

01:02:01

Israelites. David wrote a lot of them, not all of them, but but we see that this theme continues on even in the book of Psalms, which we're going to talk about now in part five, the songs anticipate the

01:02:16

King. The Psalms take the powerful truths of the Noahic Abrahamic Adamic Mosaic and Davidic covenant and they transform them into music.

01:02:29

They turn the promises into poetry. They turn the doctrines of God into four part harmonies.

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And these are not individualistic ditties or Jesus is my boyfriend ballad that you would hear at Hillsong or Bethel or whatever else.

01:02:45

They're Royal anthems. They're crafted to shape the worship and the liturgical perspective of God's people on earth through songs and through rhythms and through hymns.

01:02:57

The covenant is celebrated, rehearsed, cherished, and advanced rather than sentimentalism or overly sappy ballads with boys and skinny jeans.

01:03:12

The Psalms provide a rich, robust and gorgeous theology of kingship in lyrical form.

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They extol the beauties and the glories of the coming King that had been prophesied ever since Genesis three.

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And these songs include hymns that point to his coronation and anthem celebrating his enthronement and battle songs declaring his war against his enemies.

01:03:36

Some of the songs, Psalms magnify his glory. Others plead for his arrival while still others declare his universal dominion a thousand years before he was born.

01:03:48

The Psalms are singing about him and honestly it's the church who has in the modern world chosen to sing seven, 11 anthems, the same seven words 11 times in mindless repetition.

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It's that kind of singing and abandoning the book of Psalms that has caused us to be so weak and worthless as a church.

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Worthless in the sense of we have no power, we have no authority, we have no backbone, we have no, we have no unction even to do the mission of God because and David Chilton argues this in his book

01:04:30

Paradise Lost. Great book by the way. He argues that when the church abandoned the Psalms, they lost their post millennial zeal and it's true.

01:04:40

The Psalms reveal the messianic fervor of the King of Glory coming out of the kingdom on earth and taking over everything.

01:04:50

They talk about his, the Messiah's reign and collectively they, they kind of cultivate this longing in our hearts for his reign, that God's people are going to be under the reign of this greater son of David who's going to send to his throne.

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He's going to govern the nations and perfect justice and righteousness on the earth. For example, there's so, there's so many

01:05:10

Psalms that we could talk about, but we're not going to be able to talk about all of them. I'm just going to pick out a few Psalm two for instance.

01:05:16

It's widely regarded in an inaugural Royal Psalm. It's a messianic hymn.

01:05:23

It makes this staggering claim about, about God and about Christ. This is what it says.

01:05:28

It says that God himself is going to establish his anointed King.

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This is David writing it. So David is like the anointed King. He's the

01:05:39

King that was anointed to serve in Israel and yet he says that God is going to establish another, a better, a greater anointed

01:05:46

King, not just to reign in heaven, but on earth as well. And this coronation takes place on Mount Zion, Psalm two, six, which by the way, if you're confused about what

01:05:58

Zion is, Zion is not just a hill in Jerusalem. It is eschatological Jerusalem.

01:06:04

It is in time Jerusalem. It is the eschatological symbol for the fulfillment of the kingdom of God.

01:06:10

Mount Zion is Mount Sinai transfigured. It's where the law becomes the gospel.

01:06:16

It's where the thunder becomes joy. It's where fear becomes glory. It is the new

01:06:21

Jerusalem in Hebrews 12 22 and it is the center of this great King's empire that is going to take over the world.

01:06:28

Mount Zion in the Psalms and in the prophets represents the in breaking of the kingdom of God into the kingdom of man.

01:06:36

It is the God man who will exalt his people as the most honored, treasured nation on earth and he will extend his reign until every single rebel is either crushed underneath his feet or elected, regenerated and brought in as a citizen of his kingdom.

01:06:53

Though the nations are going to rage and though the rulers are going to plot in vain, their conspiracies are laughable in light of Yahweh's decree.

01:07:01

This is what God says. I have installed my King on Zion. My holy mountain.

01:07:07

Psalm two six. That's not David. David was installed in Jerusalem.

01:07:15

Jesus is installed in Zion in the Psalms. The father invites the son, the royal son, the

01:07:25

God man after he's been installed upon his throne. The father invites him to ask for the nations.

01:07:34

This is why, by the way, that when Satan offers Jesus the nations, he says no, not because Jesus doesn't want the nations.

01:07:42

No, no, no. He's going to have the nations, but he's not going to have the nations from the hand of Satan. He's going to get the nations when he sits down on his throne and his father as a reward for his faithfulness gives him the nations as his possession to the ends of the earth.

01:08:00

Psalm two eight. This is not a prophetic flourish or a vague spiritual ideal.

01:08:10

This is, this is what God promises to his son. God the father promised that all the nations of the earth were going to belong to Jesus Christ.

01:08:21

So how in the world could his kingdom remain this kind of invisible internal private spiritual affair?

01:08:30

Why do people still in the church continue believing that Christ's reign is only a spiritual reign that's detached from earthly history?

01:08:38

That's like insisting that Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky makes more sense than the clear meaning of Psalm two where God promises his son total victory, not just over the hearts of individuals, not just over the church, but over the structures, the powers, the peoples of the world.

01:08:57

The sun is going to rule everything. The future of the world is the sun being in charge, ruling with a rod of iron.

01:09:05

Psalm two nine, a phrase that revelation picks up and applies directly to Jesus.

01:09:10

Revelation two 27 revelation, 12 five revelation, 1915. This is not a metaphor.

01:09:16

This is not a, it's not an allegory. This is the language of Jesus being given by his faithfulness on the cross and faithfulness to in his resurrection and ascension.

01:09:27

Him being given a kingdom, that kingdom will be unbreakable. It will be comprehensive. It will bring his dominion in real space and time.

01:09:35

It's not just a spiritual kingdom. It is a physical kingdom. Psalm two prophetically anticipates

01:09:41

Jesus's enthronement, his global inheritance, his unstoppable authority and revelation shows us that fulfillment not in heaven alone, but breaking out into the earth where the nations are not just spectators, but they are his prize for his faithfulness.

01:09:58

They are his field where he's performing his conquest and ultimately they will become his worshipers who will fill the earth with the glory of God as the water covers the sea.

01:10:09

That's what Psalm two is about. So if you read that, you either have to take it for what it says or you have to misinterpret it and say, well, we're still waiting on the world to get worse.

01:10:23

We're still waiting on the effect of Jesus's kingdom to diminish so badly.

01:10:28

In fact, that, that, uh, God has to zap us out of here like a tractor beam from a, uh, alien spaceship.

01:10:36

It makes no sense. That's just one Psalm. That's just one Psalm. There's, there's so many more that we could talk about.

01:10:43

But maybe, you know, maybe a couple more just because I want to make the point that I don't want to exhaust the point. Let me give you another one.

01:10:49

For instance, Psalm 72, Psalm 72 amplifies this vision even further. The King in that passage is promised that he's going to govern.

01:10:58

And by the way, let me just say this before we get started. Everybody thinks that Psalm 72 is about Jesus. So I'm not saying anything controversial here.

01:11:06

We all think it's about Jesus. Well, what does Psalm 72 say? It says that he's going to rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.

01:11:17

So if you think about like, I know the earth is round, but you lay it out flat on a map and you say, okay, over here's the

01:11:24

Pacific. And over here is the Pacific. And in the middle, sort of the Atlantic and the Indian and all in the

01:11:30

Mediterranean, he's going to rule from sea to sea. He's going to rule from one side of the earth to the other. He's going to rule from the river, which

01:11:37

I think is a reference to the garden of Eden to the ends of the entire earth. And that makes perfect sense because Eden was the place where life began, but not the place where life ends.

01:11:48

It's supposed to flow out into all the world. This King will begin his mission and he will not stop his mission until he's won the entire world.

01:12:00

God is not promising that a future Messiah will only reign in heaven, that he's only going to have a spiritual reign that affects the hearts of men, that he's only going to preside over salvations and sacraments.

01:12:13

God is promising that every molecular combination of two hydrogens and one oxygen on earth, every river, every sea from sea to sea, from river to the ends of the earth.

01:12:25

He's saying that all the water on earth is going to come under the sovereign control of Jesus.

01:12:31

And if you want to know how much more that means, it doesn't just mean that Jesus is going to be the ruler of the water in the ancient times.

01:12:39

The water was a figure for chaos. It was the spirit of God that hovered over the untamable waters and he was the only one who could tame them.

01:12:47

Well, in those days, in those times you got in a boat and you go on the water and a storm comes and tears your little boat apart.

01:12:56

You realize that every time you get on the water in the ancient world, you are taking your own life in your hands.

01:13:03

Even in the modern world, in the modern world, you think about the Titanic, this great

01:13:08

Colossus, literally that's what the word Titan means. And yet it crashed and it fell to the bottom of the ocean.

01:13:16

You think about the fact that we technically know more about, about the solar system than we do about the bottoms of the ocean.

01:13:26

It's because the waters are dangerous. They've always, in every culture, especially in the ancient world, been a symbol of chaos.

01:13:35

And the Bible says that God puts his throne over top of the waters. He puts his throne over them because he reigns over them.

01:13:42

He's the only one who can bring order to the chaos. And when Psalm 72 says that this

01:13:47

King is going to reign over sea to sea, the middle of the ocean, over the North sea, over the most, over the, over the seas that are the most turbulent and the most dangerous.

01:13:57

He puts his throne there and it's from one river to the ends of the earth. What it's saying is not just that he's the

01:14:04

Lord of water, but he's the Lord over all that. He's the Lord who can tame anything.

01:14:09

If he can tame the water, he can tame the atoms. He can tame your cancer. He can tame every, everything is going to be brought under his dominion from the wild and unruly waters to every rogue molecule that turns into a disease that kills you.

01:14:24

He is going to have dominion everywhere. His kingdom is going to invade everywhere.

01:14:30

As far as the curse is found, he's going to rescue the poor out of their poverty. He's going to defeat the oppressor so that there's no more martyrdom.

01:14:37

He's going to receive homage from the foreign King so that churches no longer have to meet in, in, uh, in cheap, flimsy aluminum buildings.

01:14:46

So that now he, I believe that he's going to establish the churches cathedrals on every hill stone, beautiful cathedrals.

01:14:53

He's going to ensure the flourishing of the righteous. He's going to do this because Psalm 72 promises.

01:14:58

It's not exaggerated. Psalm 72 and Psalm two is not like Donald Trump giving a press conference.

01:15:06

If you can imagine like Messiah, just a true heir of David. He's going to usher in justice at every nation and he's going to establish peace in the world.

01:15:14

It's going to be a kingdom. It's going to be so big. It's going to be so beautiful. You never seen a kingdom like this before. No one's ever heard about a kingdom like this before.

01:15:21

It's not like that. And if Donald Trump said that it would be true. But the point is that it's going to be bigger and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.

01:15:32

This idea of defeatism is satanic because it's counter he's going to make, he's under Jesus's kingdom.

01:15:40

He's going to make the Sahara desert bloom with flowers in Genesis 49.

01:15:46

We didn't even talk about this, but I want to talk about it. Now it says that there's going to be so much milk in his kingdom, which was precious commodity at that time.

01:15:55

And it even says that there's going to be so many vines and vineyards that you can tie your donkey up to a vine, which is crazy because if you've ever seen a donkey tied up to a vine, it eats it and destroys it.

01:16:10

The promise to Judah in Genesis 49 is that the Messiah Shiloh is going to bring so much wealth and so much prosperity and so much victory and so much of all of this flourishing into his kingdom that you could tie a donkey up to a vine and be like, man, does it matter?

01:16:28

I've got a million other ones. Let the donkey eat because there's no waste because there's so much abundance.

01:16:36

That's, that's the kind of kingdom that the Bible describes that this King is going to bring.

01:16:43

The Bible is not about a bunch of hyperbolic blowhards who are over promising and under delivering.

01:16:51

The Bible cast this kingdom in physical and tangible and tactile ways because it's going to take over the earth.

01:17:01

The Psalms don't daydream about a metaphorical kingdom somewhere up in the metaphysical stratosphere.

01:17:07

They lay out metrical tune tunes so that you and I can sing about how his dominion is going to come in heaven and on earth and how those are going to come back together again.

01:17:18

Again, there's other Psalms that we can speak of like Psalm 45, Psalm 89, Psalm 110,

01:17:24

Psalm 132, and there's many others, but the point is clear Jesus will reign over the entire earth before he's finished.

01:17:34

That's a biblical point. Whether your eschatology agrees with it or not. And now that brings us to part six.

01:17:43

Isaiah announces his coming now in the same way that the Torah and the history of Israel and the monarchy of Israel and the

01:17:52

Psalms of Israel all point to the same reality, the coming kingship of Jesus who's going to restore the

01:18:00

Adamic throne, who's going to restore the world back to Eden. That's the theme that I've been saying is the central theme of the

01:18:07

Bible. Well, in the same way, the prophets also pick up this theme, especially in the book of Isaiah.

01:18:14

And again, I'm not going to cover this exhaustively. I'm really just going to cover a few passages just to point out or just to prove out the point.

01:18:22

But Isaiah in particular provides remarkably detailed and an expansive vision of what this coming king is going to do.

01:18:32

His portrayal of this, of the Messiah's reign goes well beyond the geographical borders of Israel, which no king actually ever got past.

01:18:42

David didn't. Solomon didn't. All of them were sort of inside the geographical boundaries of Israel.

01:18:47

But Isaiah doesn't do that. He talks about the boundaries being the entire earth. He talks about this coming king is not only going to have a heavenly reign, but he's also going to have a physical reign.

01:18:58

And that physical reign is going to blanket the world with his glory. The vision that Isaiah paints encompasses every aspect of life and it reaches universally across all of creation, not just salvation, but creation will be redeemed by Jesus.

01:19:15

For instance, this king will be born miraculously of a virgin womb, Isaiah 7, 14.

01:19:21

Of course, that's amazing. And of course that proves his divinity. But I also think it shouldn't be forgotten that the king of heaven, decided to enter into the world through a human organ.

01:19:36

He didn't come in his chariots. He didn't come with his horses. He didn't come in pomp and circumstance. He came in the most human way possible, stepping into the world through a virgin's birth canal, which says something.

01:19:52

It says a lot actually about our Lord's commitment to redeem material space, starting even with his own mother's womb.

01:20:01

Furthermore, Christ didn't come merely just to patch up the old world. He actually came to inaugurate a new world, a new creation to put away the old and to bring the new.

01:20:12

His mission was not reform. It was replacement. His mission was to bring down the rebellious kingdoms of men and to establish a new kind of government on earth, which was his government on earth.

01:20:24

Up until Jesus came, the governments of earth were entirely led by sinful men. Now because of Jesus, his government, the government of heaven, the government of God, the government of the

01:20:35

God man is going to come to the world, which makes it a brand new world. That's what Isaiah is talking about in Isaiah nine, six through seven, where it says that the, his government, that the government of the nations rests squarely on him and it signifies not abstract, metaphorical, allegorical rule, but concrete judicial authority over the kings of men and over the nations of men.

01:21:03

His throne is not a figure of speech. It's the center of cosmic sovereignty. The Royal titles that are given to him.

01:21:10

Wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace are all saying something and they're saying that he is the only one who has the absolute ability and authority and sovereignty to accomplish the

01:21:25

Adamic mission. He will be the king that Adam should have been and because he's wonderful counselor and mighty

01:21:33

God and prince of peace, he's the only one who could ever possibly do it anyway. He's the one who's going to bring peace and on earth.

01:21:40

It says for unto us, a child is born unto us. The son is given and the government shall be upon his shoulders and of the increase of his peace, there will be no end, which means that he's going to end war.

01:21:53

He's going to end violence. He's going to end all rebellion wherever it is found. It means the world is going to be brought back into its

01:22:00

Edenic, tranquil shalomic peace. Again, that's just Isaiah nine.

01:22:06

Isaiah 11 is where the prophet extends this vision even more vividly from, from, he, he talks about the stump of Jesse, which is basically the fallen

01:22:18

Davidic empire, the fallen Davidic monarchy. David was promised he would always have a king upon his throne, but by the time

01:22:24

Isaiah was writing, that tree was now a stump. And yet Isaiah says that there's going to be something that appears stirring out of that stump of Jesse, a tender branch is going to emerge.

01:22:36

It's going to bring new life. That's going to nourish the world. A tree that's going to be the tree of all trees grows out of the stump of Jesse.

01:22:45

That's what Isaiah 11 is saying. And that life, that tree, that little sapling that comes up is

01:22:51

Jesus Christ, the King of glory, who's going to be the one who judges the nations fairly, who protects the weak and the vulnerable, who will decisively confront evil in every sphere with his limitless authority, power, and dominion.

01:23:04

His strength is not only manifested in the destruction of evil, but also in how he renews and restores his people renews and restores his creation under his governance.

01:23:16

All creation is going to be harmonized. Look at the analogies that are given in Isaiah 11. The wolf is going to dwell with the lamb, which means that the predatory instincts that exist in the animal kingdom are going to vanish so that foxes no longer chase hens and that wolves no longer chase lambs.

01:23:35

You can look at that and you can say that that's hyperbolic. You can look at that and spiritualize it, but don't look at me and say that I'm not the one taking the

01:23:44

Bible. Literally Jesus is going to bring peace on earth, not just among men, but among wolves and lambs among sheep and wolves among mountain lions and gazelles and all of it.

01:24:00

He is going to bring a kingdom on earth just like he promised, not blood moons, not marks of the beast, not antichrist and not a loser kingdom that crashes and defeat.

01:24:13

Furthermore, Isaiah 22, this king possesses the key of David, Isaiah 22, 22, which symbolizes that he has complete access, that he has unmatched authority, that he has ultimate governance, that he is the inheritor of the promises of David, that he's the one that was promised.

01:24:32

Who's going to come and rule with sovereignty. Who's who's without, uh, he's not going to have shared authority.

01:24:37

He's not going to have to compromise through diplomatic solutions like Solomon and others did when he's the one who, when he opens doors, no one's going to be able to close them.

01:24:47

When he closes doors, no one's going to be able to open them. His decrees are going to be absolute. His sovereignty is going to be indisputable.

01:24:54

His reign is going to be characterized by righteousness. Isaiah 31, one, his glory is not going to remain hidden because it's going to be fully manifested on earth because Isaiah says the

01:25:04

Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem and his glory will be before his elders.

01:25:10

Isaiah 24, 23. I mean, Isaiah is proclaiming that all of this is going to happen on earth, not just in heaven.

01:25:18

It's going to happen on earth. As a matter of certainty, there's no way to get around this point.

01:25:25

His reign is not just about salvation, sacraments and sacred church services.

01:25:31

His reign is going to bring the natural world into conformity with God, the father's will and pleasure, which means that he's going to overturn the curse.

01:25:42

That means that by him dying scandalously in our place and as a seed going down into the earth, he's going to heal the earth.

01:25:50

Isaiah 52 through 53 so that he is going to be the one who brings heaven and earth back together again.

01:25:56

Isaiah 65 through 66. I mean, that's what the Isaiah, the book of Isaiah is all about.

01:26:02

That's what it's pointing to that this king is going to weave heaven and earth back together again.

01:26:08

That's why Isaiah ends with a new heaven and a new earth, not because God nuclear bombs this world and has to remake another one, but because through Christ it's already been made new and being made new and this earth will eventually bow its knee to the sovereign will and pleasure of Jesus Christ.

01:26:29

That's what the book of Isaiah is about. And it's not just, he's not just the only prophet because we're also going to see in part seven, the major prophets expect him.

01:26:44

Now Jeremiah continues where Isaiah left off with the promise of David's kingship precisely when the hope of that kingship seemed the most lost at Jeremiah's time,

01:26:56

Jerusalem stood on the brink of disaster and destruction and ruin. He was actually an eyewitness to the collapse of Jerusalem.

01:27:04

The Davidic dynasty was breaking apart at the seams and exile was looming ever closely as Jeremiah was prophesying and preaching and telling the people to repent.

01:27:17

The kingdom that they once knew was crumbling right before their very eyes.

01:27:22

And yet amid all of that despair, Jeremiah boldly proclaims a future that is even more secure than the throne that existed in the city of Jerusalem.

01:27:33

This is what Jeremiah says. Behold, the days are coming declares the Lord when

01:27:39

I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land.

01:27:49

Jeremiah 23 five. Did you hear that? He said that he is not going to do righteousness in the heart and the soul alone.

01:28:00

He's going to do righteousness in the land. That's what he says. His work is going to be tangible and tactile and territorial and historical.

01:28:08

Jeremiah is insisting that the Messiah's reign isn't going to be occupying just emotions and minds and spirits and mental synapse.

01:28:16

It's going to transform societies and homes and institutions and governments and policies and poverties and politics and more.

01:28:24

His government is going to be wise. His justice is going to be tangible. His righteousness is going to be visible throughout the world.

01:28:33

This prophecy isn't about the privatization of spirituality, but about a public monarch named

01:28:41

Jesus who is going to set up his world blessing and his reign on earth as it is in heaven.

01:28:49

Jeremiah reinforces this promise in 33 17 through 21 where he emphatically declares that David's throne is never going to lack an air and you can say, how is that?

01:29:00

Well, not because of the frail kings of men, not because they're going to uphold it, but because the true king is going to occupy it.

01:29:09

Jeremiah who's quoting God himself says this, if you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, which is the daily rising in the setting of the sun, then my covenant with David, my servant may also be broken.

01:29:26

In other words, as long as the sun comes up and sets in the

01:29:32

West, as long as day transitions into night, God is ensuring that his

01:29:39

Davidic promise will last, which means that the one to whom it was promised will last, which is we've already covered is

01:29:46

Jesus. So God is promising that just as sure and even more sure than the rising and the setting of the sun is

01:29:53

Jesus's kingdom and it's going to last forever and it will not end in calamity. It will not end in disaster.

01:29:58

It will not end in a rapture. It will continue to spread his dominion until there's nowhere left for it to spread.

01:30:05

And that brings us to a moment of choice, either

01:30:12

Jeremiah is exaggerating on the level of Donald J. Trump or God is going to fulfill his word in Christ.

01:30:21

You can't, you can only have one option. The new Testament affirms that, that he, that Jesus is the son of David, which means that Jeremiah is saying his kingdom is going to last forever, that he's the risen son, that he occupies the eternal throne.

01:30:34

Now his reign is beginning. Now it's increasing. Now that's where the new Testament says that his rule is taking back more territory.

01:30:42

So you either have to believe in that and trust in that, or you have to believe that Jeremiah was embellishing, that he was over promising and under delivering, or he was just straight up lying or he was a crazy person.

01:30:56

Any, any, his book is the rantings of a fool. But if you say that about Jeremiah, you have to say it about Isaiah and you have to say it about the

01:31:03

Psalms and you have to say it about the histories and you have to say it about the Torah and you have to say it about the whole Bible because it's all telling us the same message.

01:31:12

I would say it this way. God commanded Christians in Christ following Christ in league with Christ to make the world entirely and totally

01:31:24

Christian by discipling the nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, son, and the

01:31:30

Holy spirit, teaching them how to obey everything that our King Jesus has taught us. And if we do that, which is what

01:31:38

Jesus told us to do, he's King. We're not, we were slaves. He's master. We listen.

01:31:43

He gives the commands. If we do that, then what's going to happen. Think about that.

01:31:49

If we make disciples of all the nations and we baptize them into the kingdom and we teach them how to obey our

01:31:56

King, what's going to be left other than a world filled with worshipers?

01:32:03

There's going to be no one left who doesn't believe because we've already taught them about Christ. We've baptized them into Christ and we've discipled them so that they will obey

01:32:11

Christ. If the great commission happens, the entire world is Christian. That's the future of the world that the

01:32:19

Bible is talking about. And that tells me that the future of our world that we live in is more

01:32:27

Jesus, not less, more submitted, not less, more Holy, not less.

01:32:32

And Jeremiah affirms that, but it's not just him. Ezekiel does the exact same thing.

01:32:38

Like Jeremiah, he adds depth to it. He has prophetic expectation to it, especially during a time when

01:32:45

Jerusalem was laying in ruins and the Davidic lineage was severed and broken. Ezekiel tells us things like, for instance, he tells us, and he prophesies that not only

01:32:55

Israel as a people are going to be specifically brought back to life, but it's monarchy and it's thrown are going to be brought back to life.

01:33:03

Ezekiel 17 22 through 24 talks about God planting a small little shoot out of David's fallen dynasty.

01:33:08

And it's going to grow into a towering mountain, which is going to blossom into a mighty

01:33:14

Cedar. That's going to shelter the birds of heaven from every nation. This passage, when you look at it, can mean nothing other than God is going to resurrect the fallen line of David.

01:33:28

He's going to install his one and only son as King on his Holy mountain. And then on top of that Holy mountain, he's going to plant his kingdom, which is going to let all the birds or all the peoples from all the places and all the tribes and all the tongues and all the nations rest in its branches.

01:33:49

The point is that God's blessings are going to come to the world, not just to the souls, not just to disembodied spirits, not just to church members, to all the governments, to all the town halls, to all the city councils, to all the presidential cabinets, to all the ambassadors, to all the, to everyone.

01:34:10

The vision we are seeing is that God incrementally and in his own time is going to transform the world into a place that obeys him, loves him, and follows him.

01:34:20

That means that that this world that is filled right now with atheism, abortion and transgenderism and everything else has an expiration sticker.

01:34:29

Those things are like milk left out on the counter. They're eventually going to curdle and die because the

01:34:36

Lord does not have room in his earth for them much longer.

01:34:42

And while there's so much more that we can say about the book of Ezekiel, the point I think is clear.

01:34:48

The point is it's the same point that we've been making in the rest of Holy Scripture that Jesus is the

01:34:54

King that is coming from our perspective. Looking back at it, he is the

01:34:59

King that has come and he will have and does have universal authority, rule, dominion, and power.

01:35:07

And like the rest of the scriptures are saying, he will restore the majesty of Eden once more.

01:35:14

And the same way, the book of Daniel, which is the final minor prophet, he writes in the midst of the

01:35:21

Babylonian exile. He writes in a time where the Davidic dynasty was done.

01:35:26

He writes in a time where they're not even living in the land, but they're living in Babylon. And he writes telling us of the same exact thing.

01:35:34

In fact, he compares Jesus to a small little pebble that is cut without human hands, which means that his origin is, is eternal and from old and that he's going to be the one who comes in crushes the feet of this great statue, which in Daniel chapter two represents the kingdoms of men,

01:35:55

Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. And if you'll remember in Daniel two, it is Rome.

01:36:00

That's the feet of this great statue. So Jesus comes at the time of the

01:36:06

Roman empire, crushes the feet of that statue. And he becomes through him, his kingdom becomes a pebble that turns into a rock that turns into a boulder, that turns into a mountain that fills the entire earth.

01:36:22

That's what Daniel saying. He's not saying that Jesus has gone up to heaven to wait so that he can one day begin his rule.

01:36:30

He began his rule then 2000 years ago when he died on the cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven.

01:36:36

That's his reign starting. And it lets us know that all of the power of heaven is going to be invading every nook and cranny of the physical world.

01:36:49

It's the rock cut out with not with human hands. It's of divine origin and yet it invades the physical world.

01:36:56

It's a stone that demolishes the colossal statue, which represents human might, power and pride and hubris and it tells us that God is going to overthrow the power structures of man and he's going to set up a kingdom that brings his righteous rule into all the nations.

01:37:16

He's going to conquer Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Britain, America, Australia, all of them.

01:37:24

And unlike the fragile human empires of old and of, of late, which rise up out of the ashes and return back into the flames, this kingdom, this kingdom led by Jesus is never going to end.

01:37:40

It's going to confront the wicked, crush the evil and outlast all earthly dominions until it is the only rule and only authority left.

01:37:52

And if that were the only passage in Daniel, Daniel two, especially 44 and 45, but if that were the only passage we'd have enough.

01:38:00

And yet we've just been quoting from the entire Bible. But Daniel seven takes this even further because he takes the statue and turns it into a new vision of beasts, of beasts like bears and leopards and goats.

01:38:17

And also this creature that he doesn't even have words for that.

01:38:22

He just calls a beast. He depicts the human empires as beasts that are violent, chaotic, and oppressive.

01:38:31

But, but in the middle of that, in the Roman empire, again, this is, this is almost mirror with chapter two.

01:38:38

In the middle of that, Daniel says that one like the son of man comes and he comes up to heaven.

01:38:45

That's ascension. And he comes with the clouds in judgment. That's 80 70 that this is

01:38:52

Daniel 700 years before it happened telling us that that the one that has been prophesied all along the king, the dignified human, the divinely authoritative man, the

01:39:04

God man is going to come and he's going to defeat his enemies, which turns out to be apostate Israel.

01:39:09

And he's going to bring his dominion. He's going to bring his glory and he's going to grant this kingdom to every people in every nation under heaven.

01:39:18

It says that he's going to set up a kingdom that he gives to the saints of the most high. That's the church.

01:39:26

He's giving a kingdom that is everlasting and indestructible to you and I. And that kingdom is going to keep pressing and keep pushing and keep moving and keep expanding until there's nothing left.

01:39:41

This is none other than Jesus Christ being king of the world. And Daniel intentionally highlights the stark contrast between Jesus's kingdom and the kingdom of man.

01:39:52

For instance, the beast they destroy the son of man redeems.

01:39:59

His reign is not postponed as the dispute downers say, and it's not just some abstract spiritual

01:40:05

Sha Kumbaya, like the Amal Nila say his kingdom is either going to crush you or convert you.

01:40:16

It's either going to march with you and you join the ranks or it's going to march over you as it steps on you in route to eternity to think otherwise, to think that Jesus is waiting for a kingdom or that his kingdom is just for your heart and not for your body and not for your world to think otherwise is to pit your view against the entirety of special revelation.

01:40:43

Daniel's visions in just these two, again, we could cover more, but I'm just going to give a couple of examples here.

01:40:51

Daniel's visions present a very clear picture of the kingship of Christ being active, being spiritual, being physical and beginning in the first century where Jesus's kingdom was inaugurated during the

01:41:04

Roman empire and it continues against all opposing rule, authority and power until every knee bows to him.

01:41:11

That's the future of the world that Jesus is in charge of. Not more calamity, not more destruction, not more, but less.

01:41:18

He must become greater as everything else becomes less. That is what the major prophets are majoring on and talking about, but it's not just them.

01:41:26

It's also the minor prophets, which takes us to part eight.

01:41:32

The minor prophets herald his coming. Now the minor prophets may be short on words, but they are certainly big on the mission.

01:41:43

They may be minor in size, but they are major in their themes and they also pick up this theme of kingship.

01:41:51

Again, we can spend hours and hours and hours on the minor prophets, just like every other section, but I'm only going to highlight a few key ideas to show you that this theme of the kingship of Jesus is central to everything in the

01:42:06

Bible. These minor prophets are not little side characters whispering private piety or just talking about esoteric ramblings because they're difficult to understand.

01:42:16

No, these are talking about a coming King, a King who's going to arrive on the surface of the earth and transform the earth and transform the land and transform the law and transform the nations from Hosea to Malachi.

01:42:30

These spirit filled preachers of righteousness aren't painting abstract pictures of ethereal hope, but they're telling us that the reign of King Jesus is coming.

01:42:42

And they're doing it in the midst of time periods where the kingdom is in collapse.

01:42:48

Their voices are raising over the rubble of exile and they're announcing a kingdom that is coming that's real, that's physical, that's tangible, that's tactile, that is ruled by the great

01:43:00

Davidic King Jesus, who's going to dwell among his people, who's going to govern the nations and he's going to bring the world back right again, back to Eden.

01:43:07

For instance, Hosea calls a whoring nation of Israel back in a covenant faithfulness saying the sons of Israel will return and seek the

01:43:18

Lord, their God, and David, their King Hosea three, five, that did not happen to national

01:43:23

Israel. Hosea gives a third, I think 13 chapter, forgive me if I'm wrong, 13 chapter diatribe that they are whoring with the other nations.

01:43:35

We know that in seven 21 BC, a Syria came in and decimated

01:43:42

Israel. They destroyed Israel. They broke husbands and wives apart from each other.

01:43:48

They killed children. They intermarried peoples in different groups so that they ethnically genocided the 10 tribes of Israel so that when you get to the new

01:43:58

Testament, there's only two tribes left, Benjamin and Judah and Levi, which was not a tribe, at least not a tribal, a lot of tribe.

01:44:07

So when Hosea looks at the people of Israel who hate

01:44:12

God and who are whoring with these other nations, and he says this prophecy that the sons of Israel will return and seek the

01:44:19

Lord, their God, and David, their King, he either got that wrong or God is talking about a different kind of Israel.

01:44:28

And that's the point because when Israel was intermarried with the nations and became essentially

01:44:35

Gentile, when Jesus comes and he saves the Jews, there are many

01:44:41

Jews that came to Jesus in the first century. There was some that persisted and died in their rebellion for sure, but he came and he came first to the house of Judah.

01:44:52

He saved many of among the Jews and then Paul and the early apostles start taking the ministry to the

01:44:59

Gentiles. I want you to remember, where does the DNA of Israel exist?

01:45:05

There is no Israelites. They died. They were massacred. So where does their DNA exist?

01:45:11

It exists in the Gentiles. They were the ones that were intermarried with the Assyrians, the

01:45:16

Babylonians and the Persians and all of these. They intermarried with the nations. So when

01:45:22

Paul says that that the dividing line between Judah and the Greeks has been eliminated, he, what, what he's doing

01:45:32

I think is he's looking back at Ezekiel 37 and 38 and he's saying that,

01:45:39

Hey, this Davidic King that Ezekiel prophesized is going to reunite Judah and Israel together is Jesus and Jesus who went first to the

01:45:47

Jews and then sent his apostles to the Gentiles is actually making of one flesh again, the

01:45:54

Jew and Israel into one people called that Paul calls the Israel of God because he's going to resurrect the nation of Israel, which was never about their biological and genetic makeup.

01:46:08

It was always about wrestling with God. That's when Jacob was called Israel was with wrestling. So the nations, the

01:46:14

Gentiles, the collection of nations are being made into Israel through faith in Christ, whether you're

01:46:22

Jew or Greek slave or free male or female, all are one in Christ. That's the point that Jose is getting after is that this great

01:46:28

David is going to resurrect Israel. And the most beautiful part about it is it's not going to be national

01:46:36

Israel that totally, that totally turned their back on God. It's going to be a new

01:46:42

Israel and Israel of God and Israel brought in by Jesus Christ, Jew and Gentile, slave and free male and female, all of it.

01:46:52

That's what Hosea is promising and it's going to come through Christ. He's going to be the one who reunifies the

01:46:59

Jews and the Greeks. He's going to be the one who brings the world under his rule. That's what

01:47:04

Hosea is saying. But Amos joins the chorus. He says in that day, in what day?

01:47:10

In the day that Jesus comes, I will raise up the fallen booth of David. Amos 9 11. He sees the

01:47:16

Davidic monarchy is this sagging, battered, bruised, and ruined tent. It had fallen.

01:47:21

It was in shambles. But God promises not just to restore the line of David, but to resurrect the nation.

01:47:30

The dynasty is going to be rebuilt. The nation's going to be rebuilt. The throne is going to stand again.

01:47:35

Not metaphorically, literally. It's not just Hosea and Amos. Micah drills into this, giving us the exact birthplace of where this is going to happen.

01:47:44

He says, from you, Bethlehem, one will go forth from me to be ruler in Israel.

01:47:52

Israel doesn't exist biologically in a hereditary way.

01:47:58

And yet, and yet in Bethlehem, the one who would resurrect a true

01:48:03

Israel for God, Jew and Greek was born. The one in Bethlehem was born.

01:48:09

The one who now has made the ruler, the King, the King of all the Kings, the one who will be the ruler in Israel, the

01:48:15

Israel of God. That's Christ. He didn't come from Rome. He didn't come from Athens. Didn't come from Boston. Didn't come from Shanghai.

01:48:22

He came from Bethlehem from the dusty backwater town from David.

01:48:28

Why? Because he's the true son of David. He's the true Adam King. Who's here to bring us back into an

01:48:35

Eden again. But with the authority now that Adam never had to shepherd his people in strength and to bring a kind of peace on earth that can never be shaken.

01:48:51

Micah also paints a picture that's so powerful that it would shatter any pacifist delusions.

01:48:57

He says that the Lord is going to raise up a mountain and on top of that mountain, the nations are going to stream to it and weapons are going to be turned into, into worship items and war colleges are going to be turned into seminaries.

01:49:09

That's Micah four, one through three. That's not idealism. That's not Pollyanna pie in the sky ism.

01:49:16

That's reality under the King Jesus, a world where he rules and where his rule is going to end all rebellion and where the nations are going to learn peace and no longer violence.

01:49:27

And Zion's laws, Jesus's laws, the laws of the nations are going to be righteous again. And it's not just them.

01:49:33

Again, Oh, it's, we're just a stone skipping across the water here. There's so much more we could say. Zechariah, for instance, he grabs the baton, he carries it forward and he says the famous verse, you've heard the verse, behold, your

01:49:46

King is coming to you humble and mounted on a donkey. No one disagrees with who this is.

01:49:53

This is Jesus. He's the one who wrote it in the city of Jerusalem on a donkey. He's the one humble mounted on the

01:49:59

Colt of the fold of the Colt. That's Jesus. And yet we miss the fact that the very next verse tells us what he's doing.

01:50:09

He's not prancing around on a donkey flanked by armed guard or any or not, nor he's not just coming in some lowly form.

01:50:16

No, the next verse says that he's going to spread his dominion from sea to sea.

01:50:26

Zechariah nine, 10, he's going to take the war, the war bow from Ephraim.

01:50:34

He may have ridden into the city like a pauper, but he comes out of the city, resurrected like a conqueror, ascended like a

01:50:44

King to sit down and bring his rule on earth. Like Zechariah says from sea to sea, whereas peace covers the totality of the earth.

01:50:55

And then Zechariah tells us in chapter six, something more staggering.

01:51:01

Even he says that this King is also going to be a priest. He's the true prophet, priest, and King Zechariah six, 12 through 13 and he's the one who's going to build the temple again.

01:51:12

Well, when Zechariah is prophesying, the temple was already built. So what's he saying? He's saying that that old building in Jerusalem is not the temple.

01:51:21

It's the type and the shadow of the temple. And when Jesus came, Jesus looked at that temple and said,

01:51:27

I'm going to tear that temple down and I'm going to rebuild it in three days. I'm going to fulfill

01:51:33

Zechariah's prophecy. I'm going to build the temple. I'm going to wear the crown. I'm going to be the prophet priest and King and I'm not going to preside over a divided church and state like you are

01:51:43

Israel. Remember Israel was being ran by the enemy and King Herod under the sovereignty of the

01:51:49

Roman empire. And they had no autonomy. They had their little temple, but they didn't have their state.

01:51:56

Jesus is not saying I'm coming to, uh, to rule over the church, but not the state. He's ruling over everything.

01:52:02

He's ruling them both. I mean, he doesn't intercede from the altar.

01:52:08

He also governs from the, from the throne room. And by the end of the book of Zechariah, there's no ambiguity left.

01:52:16

I mean, Zechariah says that the Lord will be King overall, over all the earth.

01:52:23

And that day the Lord will be the only one and his name will be the only one. This King who rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey is going to be

01:52:31

Lord over all the earth. His reign is going to be total, exclusive, undeniable, no rivals, no comp, no competition, no shared room,

01:52:39

Christ alone, exalted alone, worshiped alone to the glory of God alone.

01:52:44

And that's how Zechariah ends. And that's not the end. I mean, goodness, we could do more.

01:52:51

Malachi ends the old Testament with a boom. He says, this is quoting

01:52:56

God. I am, I am a great King God declares and my name will be feared among the nations.

01:53:02

Malachi 1 14. How's that going to happen? Well, not with Christian sentimentalism, but with sovereignty because Malachi goes on in chapter three and chapter four to talk about this

01:53:16

God whom they've rejected, showing up at their temple and with his fire, either setting some of them literally on fire or with his fire spiritually and physically purifying them by the power of the spirit.

01:53:33

He calls it a refiners fire that burns some and purifies others.

01:53:38

This is what he's doing. He's the King that that Adam should have been returning back to the earth to set up his kingdom.

01:53:49

And it begins in Judah, but it doesn't stop in Judah. That's what

01:53:55

Malachi is talking about. And that's what Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the minor prophets. That's what the histories, that's what the

01:54:02

Kings, that's what the Psalms, that's what the Torah, that's what all of it is saying. He's not coming to set up a

01:54:10

Sunday only event. I mean, just think if Jesus came and lived and died so that we would have a one hour event on Sunday.

01:54:19

I mean, it seems pretty trivial. Instead, Jesus is coming to be

01:54:26

King to reign over a real people in a real time over a real earth.

01:54:33

And it's in his kingdom is going to have an effect upon the cities of this earth. Fields are going to be restored.

01:54:39

Justice is going to be enforced. Worship is going to be purified. Nations are going to be transformed. Their vision, the vision of the minor prophets is not symbolic.

01:54:50

It's going to affect geography, economy, liturgy, politics, and the global, the global assortment of nations.

01:55:02

The minor prophets prophesy about Eden being restored and the curse being reversed where families thrive, where markets are honest, where the courts are actually just, where worship is actually true, where peace is not postponed, where it's implemented under the authority of the only one who could bring it.

01:55:27

You see the kingdom that the minor prophets, major prophets in the whole old Testament is foreseeing isn't floating on a spiritual cloud.

01:55:37

It's crashing down to earth. It's intersecting with human history.

01:55:43

It's the covenant of redemption taking root in the earth, in the soil, sanctifying stones, streets, temples, town squares.

01:55:52

And so every square inch of this earth bows the knee to Jesus. And when all the dust settles and when all the redemption has happened, then he will come, then he will return.

01:56:04

But before we get to that, we've just completed our view of the old

01:56:09

Testament. Now I want us to look at the new Testament. I want us to begin with the gospels where we see that part nine, the king has come in the gospels.

01:56:22

The long awaited king has finally stepped into history. He's landed on the enemy shores, ready to reclaim and restore everything that was broken.

01:56:30

But the gospels announced Jesus as far more than just a invading conquering ruler.

01:56:39

They declare him to be the ultimate king. The one that was promised to Eve, the one that was, that was promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Moses, the one prophesied by Balaam, the true heir of David, the culmination of every ancient promise, the hope of every

01:56:55

Psalm, the fulfillment of every prophecy, the realization of all of God's people's dreams for centuries.

01:57:04

And from the very beginning of the new Testament, when Matthew carefully opens up with Jesus being the true son of David and Abraham to at the very end of his gospel, where it hangs over his head on the cross, the title, the king of the

01:57:19

Jews, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all going out of their way to make it abundantly clear that Jesus was the king that was born, that through his resurrection and ascension will eternally reign that he's the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth,

01:57:40

Matthew 28, 18. But it is also the gospels that so clearly tell us what kind of kingdom that this king is going to have.

01:57:50

If you, let me, for instance, if you follow the dispensational logic, Jesus dies for the souls of men, the church, and then he retried and then he retires for a few thousand years where he plays pickup sticks in heaven by himself, waiting for him to come back and be a king, like a real king.

01:58:10

If you follow the amillennial vision, he comes down and he lives the most physical human life.

01:58:18

He weeps real tears. He eats food, he drinks, he ministers, he heals people of their physical sickness.

01:58:25

He goes through two of the most human events possible, which is birth and death that everybody go through.

01:58:31

If you're here, you were born and if you are born, you're one day going to die. And yet he does all of this physical stuff to depart from the world in a kind of Gnostic paradise where, where he goes to be about the spiritual but not the physical.

01:58:49

He actually resurrects in a brand new glorified body wide to use it, not apparently here on earth.

01:58:59

You see neither of these views actually make any sense of the Jesus that we see in the gospels.

01:59:05

The one who stands with for and beside of humanity in flesh and blood. Physically Israel's long awaited

01:59:14

Messiah enters human history, breathing air, weeping, genuine tears, coming in through a human womb, crafting new eyes for the blind, enduring physical suffering, hunger, pains, and thirst, experiencing bodily death, rising in a glorified body to rule supremely on a physical redeemed earth in history.

01:59:34

I mean far from retreating to heaven to enjoy a break from physicality. He's bringing true physicality back.

01:59:41

He's bringing the life of heaven back into the rod of earth. He's putting the batteries back in the flashlight.

01:59:46

He's reuniting soul and body together. He's working so that he can transform the physical.

01:59:53

And we see this all over the place. Like if you think that Jesus is just interested in, in the spirit, well the gospels disprove that, but he's interested in more than just the human body.

02:00:04

He, his voice even affects creation. For instance, he speaks in fig tree withers.

02:00:10

He speaks in storms are calm. He speaks in water immediately converts itself into the greatest wine.

02:00:16

He speaks in dead bodies, come back to life and animate again. And cells come back to life again. Why? Because Jesus is going to redeem the earth.

02:00:25

He's going to redeem everything that was broken, everything that was lost. He lives an earthly life. He healed earthly people.

02:00:32

He died an earthly death so that he could redeem the earth so that he could redeem everything where the curse was left until it is no longer found.

02:00:44

When he announces at the very beginning of his ministry that the kingdom of God is at hand,

02:00:51

Mark one 15, he was telling them that heaven had now invaded earth and that the physical material world was about to get a taste of heaven again.

02:01:02

That means that for example, that in his kingdom, dad are going to come back to life.

02:01:09

Ears are going to be unloosed. Eyes are going to be made to see that. That means that diseases are going to be healed.

02:01:15

Infant mortality is going to be reversed. Wealth and prosperity are going to be increased, which by the way has happened over the last 2000 years.

02:01:22

Think about this. When I say that infant mortality is going to be decreased, it has been look at the percentage of babies that died in the first century and you're looking at somewhere up of 30 40 maybe even 50 % and yet how many babies die in pregnancy today?

02:01:46

We've almost eliminated infant mortality except for abortion and that is an enemy that Christ will kill.

02:01:54

Okay, that's one. Uh, what life expectancy, life expectancy in the old

02:02:00

Testament was about 30 to 40 years old. Now life expectancy is double that. Okay.

02:02:06

Poverty at the time of Jesus, when Jesus was walking the earth, it was not surprising or out of bounds for 40 50 60 % of the people to have to skip meals because they didn't have enough money to buy them.

02:02:22

Today every homeless person under a bridge can go to a local shelter and can get food.

02:02:28

What about the population density in those in the biblical time period?

02:02:36

I think I could be wrong on this, but I think the world supported about 200 million people in the first century.

02:02:45

I think that was how much the world could actually support because of the technologies that have come in mostly through Christian inventions.

02:02:53

The world now can feed 8 billion people. So you ask yourself, how many poor people are there?

02:03:02

How many hungry people are there in a, in a world of 8 billion people? There's a lot. But the percentage of people who are poor and who are hungry and who have to and who, and who almost never get good nutrition is lower today than at any point in the last 2000 years.

02:03:20

And you ask yourself, why? Is it a coincidence? Is it, is it the humanist dream that we're just so smart and we figured it out?

02:03:28

No. What pulled the world out of antiquity, what pulled the world out of its poverty, what pulled the world out of its certainty that you would die almost before you reach 50 was that it's under now new management.

02:03:47

You, you, you maybe you've seen a restaurant in your town that is known for being kind of sketchy.

02:03:53

There's roaches in it, bad food, bad quality, kind of like kitchen nightmares with Gordon Ramsey, that type of show.

02:04:02

And when that restaurant closes down, you see the sign on the outside that says closed down will reopen under new management.

02:04:12

That's what happened when Jesus rose from the dead. He closed down the old world and he reopened it under new management and now it's better.

02:04:22

Now infants don't die like they used to. There are some times that it happens, but it is vastly limited compared to what it was.

02:04:32

People are not as poor as they used to be. The world is filled with more people than it used to be in almost every conceivable metric.

02:04:39

Look at education, literacy, look at health, look at nutrition. Let me look in almost every conceivable metric.

02:04:47

The world is not just marginally but vastly better than it was in the first century because it turns out that the world under the rulership of Satan does far worse than the world under the rulership of Christ.

02:05:05

You and I are not living in Satan's grotto. We are living in the reign of Jesus. We are living in a world where Jesus is in control and Jesus is bringing flourishing and life and and productivity and prospering in a way that's never been heard of in human history.

02:05:23

And while I'll admit to you that the world is far from being finished, that the transformation is far from over the, the ancient world of, of ghettos, grotto slums of antiquity that's gone for the most part.

02:05:42

Much of the world today is suburban and urban metropolises that all scream that Jesus is king and the parts that that are not yet under his redemption.

02:05:54

They're coming. The gospels themselves are the story, not of Jesus's escape to heaven, but his enthronement as king of everything.

02:06:04

And they're not even the conclusion because the resurrected king whose kingdom broke into history 2000 years ago gave a charge and a commission to his church.

02:06:14

He breathed out the Holy Spirit upon them and he said that you're going to go in power to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, bringing the kingdom.

02:06:21

Do you understand what that means? That Jesus gave them his power, his authority and his spirit to take the gospel to the ends of the earth.

02:06:30

Why do we believe that we're going to lose down here? Why do we believe that the church is going to fail down here when

02:06:36

Jesus told his disciples, go to the ends of the earth, baptize them in the name of the father, son, and the

02:06:41

Holy spirit, teach them to obey everything I've commanded. And I will be with you always even to the end.

02:06:49

What we see in the gospels is that Christ is king. And now for a brief moment, what we're going to look at is what we see in the church.

02:06:57

And I'm talking acts through the book of Jude, that Christ is king.

02:07:02

And then we're going to close with in revelation, how Christ is king so that you will see that in all of scripture,

02:07:09

Christ is king. And with that, let us turn to part 10, the church as ambassadors of the king.

02:07:18

Now while we could spend a ton of time on this section as well, I do want to highlight a couple of truths to support.

02:07:23

We've already been seeing in the rest of scripture. The early church did not tiptoe into the world with soft songs and seeker -sensitive platitudes.

02:07:31

They kicked down the gates of hell with a singular declaration that Jesus is king from the very first sermon in the book of Acts, all the way to when

02:07:40

Paul is murdered for his faith. The resurrection is not just portrayed as, as merely defeating some sort of spiritual death, but the enthronement of Jesus and the inauguration of his kingdom at Pentecost.

02:07:55

For instance, this is right at the very beginning. Peter shouts that God raised

02:08:01

Jesus and sat him on the throne of his father, David, fulfilling the

02:08:06

Davidic covenant that we've been talking about. He even says that God made him both Lord and Christ, this

02:08:12

Jesus, whom you crucified Acts two 30 through 36. Do you know what that means? To be made

02:08:17

Christ is to be made the Jewish Messiah, the anointed one, the one who came as the true king, true prophet, true priest, all of that.

02:08:25

But to make him Lord, that means something entirely bigger, greater.

02:08:31

It's an incredible thing because at that time, if you were to go to the market and you were to buy anything, you would have to carry money on every coin.

02:08:40

It said, Caesar is Lord. So when the disciples and the apostles were going around saying Christ is

02:08:46

Lord, they were making a political statement more than they were making a religious statement. They were saying that Caesar's not

02:08:52

Lord. The Lord of the universe doesn't live there. Our King, our resurrected

02:08:57

Messiah is Lord. And whether it has it written on the names of the currency or not, doesn't matter.

02:09:03

Christ is King. That was a political statement that they were making all throughout the Roman world.

02:09:09

That's why in fact, that the Jews right in front of pilot accused them of, of having another

02:09:15

King. And they said, Oh, we have no King, but Caesar. But they, they think Jesus is a King. That was the charge.

02:09:21

Pilot says, do you think you're a King? He was looking to see if Jesus was starting a resurrection and insurrection.

02:09:28

And he was, Jesus said, you spoke rightly that I'm a King. Jesus didn't deny it.

02:09:34

The apostles are going throughout the Roman world saying Christ is King. They were getting murdered because they were saying

02:09:40

Christ is King. The Romans and the Jews were killing them because they were saying

02:09:45

Caesar is not Lord. Jesus is. I mean, Paul doubles down on this fact in acts 13 when he's preaching.

02:09:52

And he says that Jesus is the Davidic air in acts 17. The apostles are branded as treasonous radicals because they, it says they are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar saying that there's another

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King acts 17 seven. That was not a misunderstanding.

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The Romans weren't misunderstanding. They, they weren't thinking, huh? You know, I just don't like this

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Christian message. I don't like this Jesus fella. No, they heard it for what it was. It was rebellion.

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It was insurrection. It was a takeover. This kingdom

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Romans that you think is going to stand the test of time will in a couple hundred years be left in ruins.

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And my King and our church is going to continue to stand for 2000 years.

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Where's Rome? It's gone. Where's Persia? Where's Babylon? Where's Greece gone?

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And yet the kingdom of Jesus Christ stands forever. The early church didn't misunderstand that message.

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They knew it. They proclaimed it. They weren't offering private salvation. They weren't. Listen, the church wasn't going around saying, you know, close your eyes, bow your heads.

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I want to, I don't want anyone to open their eyes and I just want you to slip your hand up into the air. If you accept

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Jesus into your heart, there's one in the back, there's one over there. They weren't doing that kind of crazy, stupid gimmicky mockery stuff.

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They were going around the world saying Christ is King. Christ is Lord. Repent or you're going to perish.

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The way we've a feminized and the way that we've watered down that gospel, that political pungency of the gospel is sickening.

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No one on earth is Lord save Jesus Christ. He's King. And either, as we've said before, you will convert or you will be crushed.

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That is what is going to happen to this world. His kingdom will continue to advance until there is no enemy left.

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And that shows up all throughout the book of Acts. Paul's epistle drives this even deeper.

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Romans one, three through four, he announces that Jesus is the descendant of David. He's declared the son of God with power by the resurrection.

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It wasn't just a label slapped on Jesus after the fact. It was this public coronation.

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First Corinthians 15, 24 through 25. Paul says plainly he must reign. Well, let's ask ourself the question, who reigns?

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Does the cupcake bakery lady who makes the pretty cupcakes, does she reign?

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No. Does the mailman who delivers your mail reign? No. Does, does, does the guy who walks his dog reign?

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No. But a King does. A King reigns. So when Paul says that he must reign, he's saying he is

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King and he must reign until every last enemy is crushed beneath his feet. So Jesus is not waiting to reign.

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He's reigning now and a part of his reign, the two part of his reign is he's going to crush his enemies under his feet.

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He's going to, he's going to save and he's going to regenerate and he's going to welcome into his family, his elect, and he's going to continue doing that two part work, crushing his enemies, raising up his covenant people until the entire world is transformed and the whole world is filled with the glory of God as the water covers the sea.

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That's what Paul's saying. Ephesians one shouts this truth at the top of his lungs.

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Christ reigns from the father's right hand. Paul says above every rule, every authority, and until he's put everything under his feet,

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Ephesians one, two or 20 through 22 so you look around who has authority on earth.

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Okay. You look at the president, you look at the Senate, you look at the house, you look at the governors of every state, you look at all these people, look at your boss, look at everybody who has authority.

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And Jesus is saying that he is going to put all of that authority either under his feet because it's been misused and misapplied because it actually belongs to him and it's on lease to everyone else or he's going to use that authority to spread his kingdom.

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That's it. There's only two outcomes. Colossians one 13 says that believers have already been transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

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You can't have a kingdom of light if you don't have a king. There's no such thing as a kingdom without a king, which means that the king reigns now it's here.

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Philippians two adds even more fire on top of this because yes, Christ came and he humbled himself. Yes, he came in the form of a slave, but God exalted him above every name so that at the name of Jesus, every knee is going to bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

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Every knee is going to bow. Every tongue is going to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. That is not just something that's going to happen at the end of human history at the great white throne of judgment where either people are going to bow willingly or be made to bow.

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I've heard, I've heard pastors like Matt Chandler say you're either going to bow or he's going to make you bow. That's not what it is.

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It's meaning that his kingdom is going to continue to grow and advance until literally every knee bows until the world is filled with bowing people, worshiping people, tongue confessing people, not just spiritually, but he's going to do it until where all politics are

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Christian. All policy is Christian. All education is Christian. All businesses are

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Christian. Every art, every movie, every entertainment, every technology, every law, every family is under the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ, all of life for all of Christ under the reign of King Jesus.

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And it'll continue until it's finished. Paul calls him the blessed and the only sovereign, the

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King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. First Timothy six 15. Why do we spiritualize that when we think,

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Oh, he's the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. When we think about that in our minds, what do we think? Is he really

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King over the Kings? Is he really in charge of the president of the United States or Mexico or, or the

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King of England or the, or the prime minister of Australia? Do we really believe that he owns them, that his authority is bigger than them, that they report to him.

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The author of Hebrews says that, that his throne is forever. Hebrews one eight. It even says in Hebrews one two that his kingdoms already began in these last days.

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God is talking to us through Jesus and that kingdom is forever. He's seated at the right hand of majesty.

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Now, Hebrews one, three Hebrews 12, two, his reign is an ethereal, metaphorical, metaphysical, symbolic allegorical.

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It is, it is those things in types, but it's also here. It's now it's present. It's eternal.

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It's unstoppable. It's universal. It's tangible. The lamb is not waiting for permission to reign.

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He has dominion now in heaven and on earth. And then you ask yourself then what is the church in all of this?

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Well, the church is his bride. The church is not a building, but what is the church?

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What do we do when we gather? Well, for far too long, we've treated the church like it's a bunker. If you think about war right in the middle of a battle, bullets are flying, bombs are exploding.

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Mortar rounds are landing whistling in the background. See smoke and you see fire and you see flames and you've probably seen one of these movies where the guy who thought he was tough is sitting down in the fetal position in the bunker.

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His battle buddies are beside of him and they're saying, they're trying to encourage him. They're trying to get him into the fight and he's hiding.

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He's got his helmet down. He's, he's sitting there weeping because he's afraid to die. Brothers and sisters, that's what modern

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American Christianity looks like, like that coward in the bunker, but that's not what

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Jesus died to give us. He didn't die to give us a bunker. He came to gave us an embassy.

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The church is the embassy. The church is the place where we start and we go out to win the world, not to run away from the world, hide from the world and crying like little girls in our bunkers.

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Because of the world, the church is Christ boots on the ground.

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It's his operation. It's his extending of his reign through the word, through the sacrament, through the spirit driven mission to the ends of the earth.

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The great commission is not as great suggestion. It's a Royal command because all authority in heaven on earth belongs to him.

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Now we go, now we disciple, we baptize. We don't make converts. Our job is not to go into all the world and make converts of all the nations.

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We train cultures. We train people. We train families. We train souls. We train societies.

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We train them into obedience of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, not to flee, not, not to run, but to fight, not to blend in, but to build.

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Our mission is not escapism. It's dominion. Through preaching the gospel, baptizing disciples, teaching

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Christ commands, family worship, and all of that. We're bringing everything that's in rebellion under the

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Lordship of Jesus. The church is bringing every sphere, the home, the school, the government, the economy, the art, the science, the sexes under the reign of Christ.

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The kingdom advances not by bombs or ballots or bureaucrats, but by truth, power, prayer, courage, and the unstoppable power of his people submitting under his

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Lordship. And yet for all of this clarity that we see, we've far too often spiritualized these passages and we acted as if they only apply to the heart and to the mind and to the emotion and to the

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Sunday morning worship service. And it's not true. Jesus is not just King over our private feelings and invisible faith.

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That's not how Kings rule. Kings do rule over your emotions.

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They do rule over your thoughts. Especially if they are a sovereign King, but they also reign over your land and they reign over your home.

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So they reign over your physicality. They hold the scepter. They enforce the laws. They will, they wield the authority.

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They possess the dominion over real people in real places. Jesus is not just a sentimental sovereign.

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He's a cosmic King. He reigns over the earth. He bought it. He paid for it. He's ruling over it now.

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And the church should no longer cower or apologize for that fact. But we should walk with a

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Holy swagger and word that was invented by Shakespeare. Actually, by the way, we should walk with a

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Holy swagger that Jesus Christ is King. Don't let the pagans look at you like you're out of place in their world.

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They're out of place in God's world. This world belongs to Christ. Let the church rise up and proclaim that like the people did in the book of Acts that Christ is

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King, not woke as I'm not defeatism, not all the crap that's, that's peddled by our secular world.

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That's not King. Jesus is King. And this King is not going to return until his kingdom has come on earth as it is in heaven until he brings every square inch of creation under his righteous reign.

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And now that we've worked our way basically through the whole Bible Genesis to Jude, I want to end our time today by looking at how this theme works itself out in the book of Revelation.

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And we're going to do that in part 11 how revelation unveils our

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King. Revelation is the grand triumphant finale of all of biblical literature and history.

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It's the majestic unveiling of Jesus Christ's absolute kingship and Lordship.

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This means that if the kingship of Jesus is a theme from Genesis to Jude, then it finds his crescendo and its climax in revelation.

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And while a much larger treatment of these themes is going to be coming in the weeks ahead, especially as we interact with these individual passages,

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I just want to briefly sketch out how this theme plays out in the book so that you can know unmistakably.

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So what the book is all about, because I'm arguing that the entire structure of the book of Revelation is defined by his kingship.

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You can look and I've made the argument that revelation is John's Olivet discourse. That's true. Revelation is also a massively tied in with the book of Ezekiel.

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That's true. Revelation is also a liturgical worship service in many ways. Go listen to James Jordan.

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He talks about all different kinds of these themes. Go listen to Ken Gentry. He does the same thing, but I'm impressed by the fact that revelation is about not just the divorce of Israel, which is

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Ken Gentry's book, but it's actually about the kingship of Christ. His kingship is announced in revelation one.

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His citizenry is listed in revelation two through three. His enemies are defeated the apostate

02:23:21

Jews and they're crushed underneath his feet. Revelation four through 19 the greatest enemy of humanity.

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The great foe of all of scripture is defeated partially in revelation 12 and totally in revelation 20 and his church, his bride, his new

02:23:38

Jerusalem, his new covenant people are given the earth as a wedding gift in order for in order for them to take the earth like a bride would take a home and retrofit it for their husband.

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Why was the church given the world? What role does the church play in the world? Is she a loser?

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Is she a beaten and battered victim? No, she's the wife of Jesus Christ and she makes his mission a reality on earth.

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Like a wife takes a paycheck and turns it into a home. Like, like a wife takes all of the little souls that her husband brings into the home and she feeds them at her table.

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This is what the church does. And there it is. That's the whole ballgame. That's the book of revelation.

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It's about the King who came to end the old world and in marrying his new bride, the church, he will win the world unto himself.

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He will feed it, nurture it, care for it and make the whole world his house. And when you read the book that way, it makes so much more sense of what is happening.

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All the plagues, all the wrath, all the smoke are not aimed at you. They're aimed at the enemies of God.

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The ones that are persecuted, the ones who were killed for their faith, the ones who are the saints, the ones who clung to Jesus.

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Well, the good news of the book is there for you. The ones who persecuted and killed his saints, the ones who clung to the temple, the ones who, who wanted the living temple or one of the old dead temple instead of the living temple that had come, the ones that had preferred the blood of bulls and goats over the blood of the lamb of God.

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For them, the judgments, the bulls, the seals, the trumpets are for them.

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The first century apostate Jews became the enemies of God. And all of the most bitter passages in the book of revelation are for them.

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And all of the sweetest passages where Jesus heals and strengthens and encourages and Buffett's and builds up and protects.

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And all of that is for you, his bride. And you think about as a man, like I'm a man, maybe you're not a man, maybe you're a woman, maybe you're a child, but I'm a man.

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I think about this. When I am being a true husband, the sweetest words that I have to give go to my wife and the strongest words and the most harsh punishment that I could ever muster would go to anyone that threatens her.

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That's exactly what Jesus does. That's why he uses the image of a bride because he's a true husband.

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His sweetest, most tender, most affectionate words are for his church, who he will use to build the world into his house.

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His most harsh criticisms, punishments and plagues are for those who threaten his bride.

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Now, 2000 years later, us, the bride of Christ are still receiving those tender words of affection from our king.

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Because every Sunday when we come into the presence of Jesus, he feeds us at his table.

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Every Lord's day, we welcome all the little orphans that he's saving into his home. One lost soul at a time, one disciple at a time, one conversion at a time, one person who's now being conformed to the image of Christ at a time.

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The church is taking the mission of her bridegroom, husband, Jesus, and she's taking it and she's feeding the world with it.

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She's bringing life with it. She's doing what a wife does. She's setting the table. She's feeding the nation.

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She's feeding it with the tree of life in revelation 22. So that, so that the whole world will come into the house of Jesus, our head.

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She's working to make this fallen world, a place that is fit for his dominion.

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And in the same way that a wife decorates her home, the church is decorating the world with the glory of God.

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And we, the bride of Christ are to do that work until there's no more work to do.

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We're to do that work until the entire world belongs to him. That's what the book of revelation is about, that he came, that he made his wife, his bride, that he crushed the ones who were accosting her and that he elevated her to the supreme position of feeding and nurturing the nations.

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Just like a wife would be made a mother. The church has been made the mother of all living. And now she with the tree of life and with her bridegroom at her side is feeding the nations with the gospel of Jesus.

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That is a thread that permeates this entire book. It's a thread we're going to continue to be pulling on in the next weeks and months and maybe years ahead as we consider this book.

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And all of that leads us to now finally our conclusion.

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Brothers and sisters, our King reigns, the tomb is empty. The throne is not.

02:29:08

The war is already being won. Jesus Christ isn't pacing the halls of heaven, wringing his hands about the state of the world and wondering when he's going to return to fix it.

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He's enthroned now. He's exalted. Now he's executing his dominion. Now in space and time, his crown's not collecting dust.

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His scepter is not symbolic. His throne is not distant. The lion has roared.

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The dragon is bound. The kingdom is advancing. And what does that look like? What does that look like?

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Well, it doesn't look like a world ending in defeat. Now does it? It doesn't look like the church being broken and losing and beaten and bruised.

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Now, does it? If the lamb is reigning and the church is his bride, well, it looks like bread broken every week.

02:29:53

Wine poured out. It looks like every Lord's day, his church sitting at the table, not as refugees awaiting rescue, but as Royal citizens at a kingdom banquet.

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It looks like baptismal water splashing down on top of baby's heads. It looks like sinners and sons and rebels coming to worship.

02:30:11

The King looks like fathers growing in their discipleship and learning how to discipline their children in righteousness.

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It looks like men raising up the next generation of dragon slayers and dominion makers.

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It looks like mothers building their homes to that are going to actually build up kingdom citizens that are going to come out and shape the world.

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It looks like mother's nourishing hearts that are one day going to rebuild cities. It looks like children learning catechisms before they can even spell their own name.

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It looks like Christ being Lord and being declared Lord before they can even write ABC. It looks like churches refusing to cower like we saw during the

02:30:48

COVID crap. It looks like neighborhoods filled with Psalm singing saints, towns governed by men who fear the

02:30:55

Lord. It looks like school boards trembling before the scriptures and saying, what does

02:31:01

God say about this? It looks like city councils ruled by wisdom and righteousness. We don't run from the

02:31:08

Babylon that we're living in. We convert it brick by brick until it bows the knee to Jesus.

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Just like Nebuchadnezzar. It may run around like a wild beast for a few years, but our goal is that it would declare that our

02:31:21

God reigns. This kingdom looks like disciples being made. It looks like nations being taught.

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It looks like kingdoms being shaken. It looks like it looks like the cradle is the battlefield and the tomb is the victory.

02:31:35

It looks like Christian parents who are, who are bringing up troops for the war to take over the world.

02:31:42

It looks like saints stealing up their spines. Churches roaring like lions. Christians not surviving the culture war, but storming the gates of hell with blood bought authority and unshakable joy.

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Brothers and sisters, Jesus didn't die to rescue you from the world. He died for you to reclaim the world in his name, in hoax signal.

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And he's doing it not by bureaucratic measures, not by bullets, bombs and whatever else.

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He's doing it with bread and wine by the spirit and the word by the saints and the sacraments by the households of faith and churches who refuse to retreat.

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That's not metaphorical. That's Daniel's vision. That's David's promise.

02:32:29

That's Genesis through revelation. That's the stone cut without hands.

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That's filling the earth with his glory. That's the mountain of the Lord that is rising. That's the water from the temple of Ezekiel that's flowing to the ends of the earth.

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That's everywhere that it flows. It's bringing life. The kingdom is not beginning in the future.

02:32:48

It began in the past. It's raining in the present. We're not waiting for collapse. We are, we need to wake up to the conquest for about a generation.

02:33:00

The soldiers in the army have been asleep and we need to wake them up and channels like this and messages like this are, that's what the purpose is.

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Because the destiny of the world is not ruin. It's resurrection and restoration.

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That's the post millennial hope. That's revelations refrain. That's the gospel crescendo.

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That's what the church is for. So brother and sister, as the church,

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I want you to rise and I want you to reign. I want you to proclaim the gospel boldly baptized often.

02:33:39

If you're a pastor, I want you to disciple without compromise. I want you to sing the Psalms like heaven depends upon it.

02:33:46

I want you to build your home in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Build up a home that'll last for centuries instead of for decades.

02:33:53

Plant churches that will outlive empires. Raise your sons to kill dragons, your daughters to build

02:33:58

Christendom, speak the truth in the public square, demand righteousness in the halls of power.

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Take over neighborhoods, take over cities, take over nations, take over the world in the name of Jesus. And the future belongs to us, not the tyrants, not the forces of darkness, not the devil and not death.

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The future belongs to Jesus Christ and his church. And until next time, go do that.