...continuum of something building, from the flood, from
Noah, from the remarkable prophecies over his sons,
and then it gives chapter 10 the whole
genealogy of those nations that issue from three
sons.
The nations themselves issue from the three progenitors
of all mankind.
And then chapter 11 is the Tower of
Babel.
The nations from the beginning, evidencing a spirit
of rebellion and arrogance against God, doing their
own thing, establishing their own location, not where
God intended, but wanting to exalt themselves above
God, building a tower, not of stone, but
of bricks that they could bake and fabricate
synthetically and artificially, and put together with slime.
Boy, if that's not a formula for the
labor of men seeking to glorify that and
exalt themselves above God, I don't know what
is.
But the Lord looked down and saw it,
and was concerned.
And so what their intention was, to make
a name for themselves, and to exalt themselves
above God, and he confounded their language and
dispersed them.
So the configuration of nations today, where they
are located, and the strange language they speak,
like Danish, is altogether the judgment, as anyone
who will hear the language will readily agree,
of the nations, and dispersed.
And ever since, there's been a propensity of
the nations, again, to formulate themselves as an
entity unto themselves and for themselves, and make
a name for themselves in such enterprises as
the United Nations, the League of Nations, etc.,
etc.
So there's the whole, can you see the
progression?
The sons of Noah, the nations that issue
from them, the cryptic statement of God that
his salvation for the nations has somehow to
do with this mystical tent of Shem, but
of course the nations who are rebellious will
not heed God's provision, but seek their own.
And they sought it in the Tower of
Babel, he brings it to naught, and then,
at the end of chapter 11, we read
about Shem's, the descendants of Shem, from verse
10, of which one is Aber, from whom
the Hebrews come, and then the descendants, a
man by the name of Terah, in verse
26, the father of Abraham, and then the
genealogy of Terah getting Abraham, and so on,
and Lot, and then they took wives, and
the chapter ends with the conclusion of the
life of this Terah.
Chapter 12 then begins with a Semitic son
of Terah, named Abram, to whom comes a
distinctive call.
And that call is in response to the
rebellion of nations.
I don't know if you've ever understood, but
you need to understand.
The advent of Abraham is not just to
give rise to the church, or perform other
of the redemptive and precious purposes of God.
It has as its essential and first purpose
as to countermeasure God's antidote to the rebellion
of nations.
From this one man, he will form a
nation that will bless all the nations, and
bless all the families of the earth, and
bring them into that alignment with that Semitic
love that will heal their propensity toward rebellion,
arrogance, conceit, and self-sufficiency, which has been
the undoing of mankind, especially in our own
century.
So we need to see Abraham as God's
provision against the Tower of Babel, the rebellion
of nations.
That God would make his name great.
Let's look at the call of Abraham.
Get out of your country and from your
family.
Get out of your nation.
In order to be a father of nations,
you've got to come out of your own.
Not just physically, but in every way in
which nationality and national identity might have its
hook in you, because I'm going to do
in you something altogether unique.
You're going to represent something above and beyond
all nations.
You're going to establish a nation for all
nations, and you can't come to that possibility
of bringing anything of your own antecedents, of
your own culture and origin.
You've got to come out from your nation,
kindred, and father's house.
If you ever want the depiction of the
cross, it's right there.
This is the first powerful setting forth of
the cross in its totality.
We're called sons of Abraham?
We're sons of Abraham?
Then it's contingent upon us to have heard
that call and received it for our own,
and to come out with the same radical
totality with which Abraham was called.
We still linger in our nationality even as
Jews.
We're still not in the Abrahamic place.
So that's not my subject.
I don't want to dwell on that just
to tease you a little bit and have
you to dote upon it at your own
leisure.
And if you'll do that, that the first
principle of God is radical separation, totality.
And it comes by God taking the initiative
with one man, Abraham.
There's all kinds of speculation as to what
kind of man he might be, that he
was already chafed by the idolatry of his
own civilization or of the Chaldeans, and God
saw a potential candidate for himself.
That's all speculation.
Nobody knows.
It could just be the very sovereign choice
of God to pick a man.
Maybe not because he showed propensity, but because
he had none.
Just like the choice of Israel.
Just like the choice of us, when you
get down to it.
Not because of our distinction, but the lack
of distinction.
That he might be all in all, for
of him and through him and to him
are all things to whom be glory forever.
So probably, seeing the way God characteristically works,
Abraham probably had no distinction that would qualify
him for selection and for choice.
God begins by choosing and calling a man.
But he is a Semite.
He is a son of Shem.
He is derived from that line of descent
and genealogy, and he must be, because what
will be formed of him has got to
be a fulfillment of what Noah had already
spoken about that one son, Shem.
So you can't get away from that, folks.
We don't want to get away from it,
we want to get more deeply into it,
for it's the heart of the mystery.
So I will make you a great nation.
I will bless you and make your name
great.
You shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you.
I will curse him who curses you.
And in you, all the families of the
earth shall be blessed.
Or all the nations of the world.
God's intention from the very first, in the
great redemptive saga or drama that the Germans
call Heil's Geschichte, salvation history, is the intent
of God for the nations.
God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten son.
There's a love for the world and for
the nations, rebellious though they are, stinking and
arrogant though they are, full of conceit and
contempt for God, full of blasphemy, he's still
a lover of the nations.
For he made of one blood all nations
of men and established their bounds and habitations,
that they might seek after God, if happily
they might be found of him.
Where am I quoting?
Acts 17.
Paul's address at Athens, which the theologians say
was Paul's single boo-boo.
He didn't evangelize and was drawn off to
become philosophical and speculative and speak about the
purpose of God for the nations.
So much for theologians.
Those theologians.
Actually it was a great address.
And he told men who were everyday looking
for some new thing and some novelty what
the whole purpose of life is, to be
found of God.
And that's the purpose for which God has
given of one blood all nations, their bounds,
their habitations.
We've got to understand the design of God.
He's the creator.
He has created the nations.
This world, the earth is the Lord's, and
the fullness thereof, and the nations, and those
that dwell therein.
Believest thou that?
Psalm 24.
Where else we can find it?
The world, the earth is the Lord's, and
the fullness thereof, and the nations, and those
that dwell therein.
He's the God of the nations.
The thing that's distinctive about the Old Testament
and Israel is that what is different about
them and all of the other pagan civilizations
around them in the Near East is that
their God is not a tribal deity.
Their God is not the God of fertility
for whom they can put up a phallic
symbol and have temple prostitutes in order to
placate that demonic entity and have abundant harvest.
Israel's God is different from all of the
other gods.
He's not a local deity.
He's not to be placated.
He's the God of all the earth.
He's the creator and the Lord over all
nations.
That's the flying ointment.
That's why Israel is hated and despised.
Because what she represents, even in her present
unbelief and apostasy, is a threat to all
nations who want to continue in their autonomy
and independence from God and from his rule.
So first we'll go to Psalm 96, and
we can go to many psalms, and see
how this theme is expressed by the psalmist
in many places.
And what he's singing and celebrating and commemorating
is the historic faith of Israel.
The faith of the psalmist, the faith of
the prophets, the faith of the patriarchs, of
Moses.
Psalm 96, O sing to the Lord a
new song.
Sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Mark that.
Every reference in this psalm that goes beyond
the issue of Israel itself and touches the
larger purpose of God through Israel.
Israel is not an entity unto itself or
for itself.
Nor was Abraham.
I will make you the father of many
nations.
In Romans 4 it says, He would be
made the heir of the world.
No wonder that a perverted and unregenerate mind
can take that and turn it into a
Zionist conspiracy where Jews want to take over.
Can you see?
It doesn't take much to bring a warp
to the divine intention of God and make
it a hideous kind of thing that will
excite anti-Semitic hatred.
What it is, is Satan bringing the twist
and bringing the warp.
But that God's actual intention is that the
nations would come under that tent of Shem.
Under the Semitic oversight of God through the
people appointed who are the descendants of Abraham.
So we need to understand the drama.
Why?
Because it's going on still.
And we're going to be witnesses and participants
to its final enactment.
Where the evil one knowing that his time
is short will ventilate his wrath foaming at
the mouth to seek to avert the catastrophe
of losing control over the world.
Jesus said, the prince of this world comes
but he has nothing in me.
He acknowledged that there is a prince of
this world and he wants to remain prince.
And he's got his lieutenants and subordinates and
the whole network of political influence in the
air over nations called the Principalities and Powers
of the Air.
If you want to read one of the
most incisive and broad examinations of that phenomenon
get the book Apostolic Foundations.
It's worth the price of the whole book.
I don't know anyone else who has that
comprehension and has set forth so incisively that
subject as the author of that book.
Who is the Holy Ghost?
I caught you if he was boasting there.
He was boasting in itself.
There's a war on saints and we may
not recognize it.
It seems like it's low key at least
for us here.
In other places the bombs are bursting.
Why is it that the time of Jacob's
trouble will be a greater bloodletting and a
greater annihilation of Jews than the Nazi Holocaust?
I was tempted to pipe in last night
and I didn't want any way to distract
from Reggie when somehow at the end the
question came up about what survival would there
be in Israel?
And Reggie rightly quoted two thirds will perish.
One third will remain and be brought through
the fire.
And what I say just speculatively, not thus
say the Lord, but it has everything to
commend it.
If two thirds in Israel will perish, what
will be the ratio of survival and annihilation
elsewhere in the world for Jews?
If that same ratio holds true in the
land or out of the land and there
are roughly 15 million Jews in the world,
10 million will perish in the time of
Jacob's trouble.
In a shorter period of time than the
Nazi process of the final solution that ran
from 1938 to 1945, seven years.
Half that time, a double amount, almost 12
million will be annihilated somewhere, not just confined
to Europe, but worldwide.
It's going to take some moral stamina on
our part to be present in the earth
and not hold God accountable and not be
grieved or disappointed at his failure to preserve
the state and the nation and to preserve
his people.
But he says, I will bring you out
of all nations wherein you rebels who transgress
against me and express your transgression by saying,
this shall not come upon us.
I'll bring you out of the nations wherein
you have sojourned, but I will not bring
you into the land.
There are going to be graveyards and bodies
cast out like dung over the earth.
Only a remnant will survive, called the redeemed
of the Lord, that returned to Zion with
mourning and sighing, fleeing away.
Not only for the loss of their state,
but the loss of their relatives, the loss
of their fathers, their uncles, their bubas and
their zetas, grandfathers and grandmothers.
But there'll be everlasting joy, for they shall
not again be plucked up and rooted out.
I will plant them in the land is
a remarkable...
What's the word for that?
A simile or a...
Metaphor.
Metaphor, that's the word.
Planting is so gracious, so gentle.
The great husbandman.
What would we call Zionist Israel?
Certainly not a planting, more a rude usurping,
a grasping, more like Jacob than it is
Israel.
And so how can that be the nation
that will bless all the families of the
earth?
How can it bless when it is not
itself blessed?
Jacob had to become Israel in order to
have his own altar and place of worship
before the God of his fathers.
And so must this present nation equally.
There's going to be very great nutrition.
That's why Jesus said, if this time were
not cut short, no flesh would survive.
But for the elect's sake, this time will
be cut short.
He said, this is going to be a
greater trouble than the nation has ever known
from its inception and will not again know.
And I'm disputing with men who have reputations
that are international, who say that that is
past tense, that's already taken place.
That was the Nazi Holocaust.
And that present Israel need not fear another
catastrophe of that kind.
Well, then how come Jesus says it has
to begin in Jerusalem with the abomination of
desolation.
Let those who read understand and flee to
the mountains of Judah, pray that it doesn't
come on the Sabbath.
Every indication is that it has its inception
in the land.
Nazi Holocaust had its inception in Europe.
So this is yet future and a greater
trouble than the nation has ever known.
It must then exceed the Nazi Holocaust.
That's why they're going to come to us
so beat up, so completely demoralized, so suddenly
uprooted, so disheveled.
They'll not be on their best behavior.
They'll not be cute.
They'll be loathsome.
They'll be bitter.
They'll be spitting out their vexations because they'll
think that the whole thing is the fault
of Christianity.
That's how they interpret the Holocaust past.
They're issued out of Lutheran Germany out of
Luther's own incitement.
How will we receive them?
With what grace?
When God says the whole issue is that
in the wilderness of the nations they will
meet with me face to face and there
come under the rod of my under the
bond of my covenant, the rod of my
authority.
That they might return as redeemed of the
Lord but they didn't leave in that condition.
The whole issue is what kind of face
greets them in the wilderness of the nations.
Who's in the wilderness with them?
In Isaiah 35 when it says the wilderness
will be glad for them.
But will we be glad for them?
And they will be dispirited and broken and
desolate.
Have you ever been in a wilderness where
you've never been before?
I've only recently come from it in Mexico.
We spent the night in the wilderness and
I'll tell you what, it's not too cheery.
Frightening.
But I was with a Mexican brother who
knew the location so I wasn't rattled.
But if I was there in ignorance not
knowing what tomorrow would bring or where to
go and everything is desolate there's no water
and stifling fierce heat this is what Jews
will be going through.
But someone in Isaiah 35 is addressed who
is not Israel and says say to them
your God will come.
And when they hear that the blind eyes
are opened and the lame weep and water
breaks out of dry ground.
Praise God there's someone there who can speak
a prophetic word your God will come.
When there's no evidence of his coming it's
got to take prophetic faith to believe for
that according to the scripture and our own
prophetic experience with God who has come for
us at times of our own desolation in
our wilderness experience.
Mark that statement.
Okay.
Sing to the Lord all the earth blessing
to the Lord bless his name proclaim the
good news of his salvation from day to
day declare his glory among the nations his
wonders among all peoples.
How inclusive that is.
For the Lord is great and greatly to
be praised he is to be feared above
all gods.
Small g for all the gods of the
peoples are idols but the Lord made the
heavens and we can add the earth honor
and majesty are before him strength and beauty
are in his sanctuary.
God's right to rule is predicated upon God
being creator.
The earth is the Lord's and therefore what
he created and what is his he has
every right to govern.
The basis for his authority and his rule
is his creatorship.
That's why we see references to God as
creator in psalm after psalm after psalm.
Israel knows that.
Its God is not a local tribal deity.
Its God is the God of all creation
the very creator himself.
Do we know it?
Have you realized what an assault there has
been in our generation upon God as creator?
What do you think evolution is all about?
That is taught in the schools as if
its science.
That anyone who dares to suggest that there's
another way of understanding the world that's been
created that guy is out.
And so what has become conventional wisdom and
they're looking for the the pilt-bound man
and some other missing link that will show
that man has evolved from lower primates and
prove their theory.
Somehow they're never able to come up with
a final proof.
Of course they've got the carbon dating system
that they can show that what they have
found goes back millions of years and so
there can't be said that man has only
a 6,000 year history.
But they're forgetting that God can create old.
Is anything impossible to him?
Even to stupefy the wisdom of men.
And he'll give them all the evidence they
want to confirm their atheism until they'll stand
before the creator one day and their knees
will turn to jelly.
All their hot shot assumptions will go up
in a puff and they'll stand before the
creator and king at his throne who is
a lone judge.
But we need to know, dear saints, there's
been an erosion for us.
We don't subscribe to evolution but it's in
the air.
Our kids bring it home from school.
We read it in magazines.
It's the unspoken premise and assumption of our
generation.
So we have, to the degree that that
has had a corrosive effect upon us, we
have lost the sense of God as creator.
It needs to be restored.
It's foundational to the issue of his rulership.
He rules because he creates.
And he judges because he rules.
All of those three things are in tandem.
But if we lose the first, we lose
the rest.
If we have not an abiding and deep
and profound sense of God the creator of
the heavens and the earth and all that
in them is, the rest is not followed.
Except verbally.
It's not really with deepest conviction as the
psalmists knew it, as the prophets knew it,
as all Israel once knew it and needs
to know it again.
And we'll not know it except the church
teaches it.
He is to be feared above all gods
for all the gods of the people are
idols but the Lord made or created the
heavens.
Honor and majesty are before him.
Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
Give to the Lord, oh families of the
peoples, give to the Lord glory and strength.
Give to the Lord the glory through his
name.
Bring an offering, come into his courts.
Of course, where will you have to come
to do that?
You're not going to do it in Geneva
or New York City.
You have to come to his courts.
You have to come to his location, to
the house that was intended, a house of
prayer for all nations which is only another
statement of the tent of Shem.
You have to come to the place where
he has designated for he is in that
place alone.
And if you're paying homage to him, oblation
and sacrifice to him, that's the place where
you'll come.
And there's a priestly people there to receive
you and receive your offerings whose skirts you
will clutch because they know your God and
will take you to him.
Bring an offering and come into his courts.
Oh, worship the Lord and the beautiful and
tremble before him all the earth.
The psalmists are always crying out that his
praise might be sounded to the ends of
the earth.
We have to travel a little bit to
the ends of the earth to understand Hebraic
faith.
The most degraded places of the earth full
of pagans and idols and Hindu temples and
every demoralizing thing that can rise up out
of depraved man.
God says, in that place my praise will
be sounded.
And the psalmists believed that.
The prophets believed that.
And understood how much that will be contended
against by the powers of the air that
want to keep men in bondage to false
gods for they are the gods of this
age.
What will they do then to pick up
where left off before?
To avert the threat of their loss of
governmental influence and rule?
You say, ah, don't tell me that some
invisible spirit phenomenon called the principals and powers
of the air can actually affect government and
society and the earth?
Of course, you silly sap.
What do you think, they're just hoping?
They are the most profound influence.
They're jerking and dangling entire nations and societies
by strings.
You can't understand present-day genocide in Africa,
Rwanda, and this one and that one, and
what took place with Serbia, the ethnic cleansing,
that destructive pride, national pride that sees the
enemy to be eliminated and it's women and
girls raped as an instrument of warfare without
understanding the influence of those powers.
You can't understand pop, punk rock culture or
any of the idolatries of our age without
understanding their influence.
They are powerful.
Paul himself said, if the rulers of this
world knew, they would not have crucified the
Lord of Glory.
He's not talking about Pontius Pilate.
The rulers of this world are the invisible
spectral realm of fallen angels whose prince is
saved.
And they want to remain in control.
You say, ah, they may influence, but they
certainly can't take over.
What do you call Nazi Germany?
That's the land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Wagner.
Come on, you can help me with composers,
with philosophers, with writers, with the genius of
culture and Western civilization honed to its finest
edge.
And boom!
Within the space of months, some gutter snipe,
some despicable occultic jerk who couldn't get beyond
the corporal's stripes and failed to enter into
art school and is just a kind of
cast off of society became chancellor and ruler
over the entire nation and set in motion
a series of edicts by which demonic tyranny
settled upon a whole people who is the
nation of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche.
How long will it take in America?
That's our culture of the civilization, that it
was thousands of years in the making, deep.
That's why Jews didn't want to leave.
They said, how could this scummy guy succeed?
The nation will come to its senses.
There's no place for a man like that
in rulership.
We'll hold tight.
After all, Uncle so-and-so fought in
World War I and received the Iron Cross.
We Jews are loyal Germans.
In fact, we're more German than we are
Jew.
Those same ones went up the smokestack.
And evil prevailed over those powers.
Because the only agency in the world and
in nations given of God both to recognize
that demonic entity and to combat it and
to defeat it is the church.
But the church of what kind?
The church that is steeped in the scriptures,
steeped in the psalms, steeped in the understanding
of God as creator, king, and ruler over
all and knows the fierce contest going on
between two princes and that this is the
whole parameter and context of our faith.
If we don't know that, we're condemned to
a series of Sunday services.
Our whole Christian life becomes provincial, narrow, selfish,
an issue of enjoyment.
But when the structure of the faith is
cosmically established, a struggle, that will have its
final culmination in our generation, then are we
alerted, then are we brought into the context
by which everything is made clear.
The Holy Spirit then is no longer a
luxury or a denominational distinctive.
It's God's profound gift to function and to
serve in an age of ultimate conflict, where
we need the gift of prophecy and wisdom,
knowledge, to guide us where we've not been
heretofore.
We need to come into the context of
the faith that God intended as normative and
which we have lost in modern times.
For which reason God raises up this pathetic
little thing called School of the Prophets.
Not to make them, but to bring us
back again into the prophetic understanding of the
context of life and reality.
And given the wisdom of these powers, which
is destructive and chaotic, they understand the Jews
to be a greater threat to their false
usurping continuance than we know.
Yes, you can explain anti-Semitism to a
degree, sociologically, culturally, historically, but you'll not understand
it fully and deeply until you understand the
bitterness and the hatred against a people who,
if they are redeemed and returned to the
Lord and to the land in covenantal faithfulness,
bring their king and his rule and the
end of their false usurping power.
How do you get rid of that threat?
You annihilate it.
And that's how we're going to see all
of the unregenerate elements available to those powers
after Jews were the venom.
And they'll say about Jews what Paul's enemy
said about him, they're not fit to live.
Read this literature.
See the venom against men who are just
acting civilly and being called Jew-lovers.
And we'll hang you from the nearest lamppost.
You're despicable.
You want to preserve a people we want
to annihilate.
So in verse 10, say among the nations,
the Lord reigns, even now when it doesn't
give that appearance.
The world also is firmly established, it shall
not be moved.
He shall judge the peoples righteously.
A king who rules and a king who
judges.
Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth
be glad.
Let the sea roar in all its fullness.
The sea is always symbolic of the nations.
The rage of the seas and the tumult
and the noise, the crashing waves to power.
It helps to be on a liberty ship
as a 16-year-old kid standing at
the bow watching for mines yet remaining from
World War II and feel like a little
cork popping up and down in tumultuous seas
to know the power of the seas and
why they represent the nations and the rage
and the fury of the nations against God.
Where under the havoc of those waves the
ship listing to such a degree that we
took water into our smokestack and they sent
up this Jewish idealistic kid who wrote poetry
and wanted adventure to travel in the world
to tie up the block and tackle that
had broken loose from the mast that weighs
about at least two tons with a rope
hoping that I would fall off and into
the sea because the bosun's mate which is
the master sergeant was a Swedish alcoholic and
anti-Semite who hated my guts as a
Jewish kid looking for adventure.
That I'm here with you today is only
by the grace of God who knew me
and that I was elect before I had
dreamed of his existence for I was an
atheist in those days.
I'm being reminded of the sense that I
had as a cork bobbing on the sea.
Those liberty ships were built by Kaiser factories.
You guys already know there was a Kaiser
Frazer car that came out right after the
war and now it's extinct.
They built these liberty ships with women velvets.
And it was not unusual for them to
pop their rivets and sink into the deep.
I'm not blaming the women, God bless them.
But God never intended them to be riveters
and velvets.
So you feel absolutely defenseless and at the
mercy of the elements and raging seas.
And that's what the psalmist is saying.
Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be
glad, let the sea roar it's all vain
that they make a lot of noise but
that shall not threaten the purposes of God.
Let the field be joyful and all that
is in it.
Then all the trees of the woods will
rejoice before the Lord.
For he is coming, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He shall judge the world with righteousness and
the peoples with his truth.
So from where will he judge them?
And when will he judge them?
When he comes as king.
In the very same place where he was
crucified.
Where over his head in three languages was
the taunting mocking sign, Jesus of Nazareth, king
of the Jews.
Ha, ha, ha.
And they put a purple robe on him
and they braided a crown of thorns and
they gave him a staff.
Everything to mock any reference to himself as
king.
He bore that with complete equanimity, patience and
grace.
For he knew that that was indeed his
call.
That's what the word Mashiach means, his anointed
king.
Came to his own in his own name
and received him.
Is the father going to allow that to
be the last statement in history?
Or if you know anything about God and
how he vindicates his sons, will he not
give him in the place of his greatest
humility, the place of his greatest glory?
Yes.
In the place where he was defamed and
mocked, will he not in fact be king
in that place?
Yes.
And not only to his own people, but
to all nations?
Yes.
That's right.
We've got to know the end from the
beginning.
We've got to know where all things are
attending.
And how it will be mightily resisted by
every power of darkness who dread this conclusion.
That's why they crucified him.
They wanted to crucify the king and get
Israel to say, we have no king but
Caesar.
Give us Barabbas.
We'd rather have a thief than a murderer.
We'll not have that man to rule over
us.
Oh yeah?
We'll see what that's going to cost you.
If you'll not have that man to rule
over you, you'll have a greater tyrant.
He'll extract and that king will wait to
hear from you.
Blessed is he who comes in the name
of the Lord.
So pray for the best expression of our
contemporary Jewish life.
The Lubavitcher Hasidim, the ultra-orthodox of Brooklyn,
waiting for the resurrection of Rabbi Schneerson.
They think he's the king.
There are big billboards in Israel and in
New York with his face and white beard
in Hebrew and in English saying the Messiah
King.
And when I was with them on one
recent occasion, I said how can a man
be Messiah and king?
There's only one king.
It's the Lord of Glory.
It's the God of Israel.
It's the one king.
How can you say a man is king?
Well, what I didn't know is that under
their breath, they believe he is deity.
So deranged, so wanting, sound, Biblical messianic understanding,
so exalting a man that they're willing to
ascribe to him deity.
This is the people to whom I'm coming.
Because if that man can be exalted, then
they can be exalted in their humanity.
So let's look at the great song that
establishes the king that is altogether eschatological.
That is God's statement against the fury and
rage of nations of what he will and
has established.
And that song is Psalm 2.
An American theologian that some of us had
the privilege of hearing recently in my old
seminary there in St. Paul, Walter Brueggemann, also
of German descent.
He's an Old Testament commentator, theologian of the
Old Testament.
This is his classic work.
And he says, over the long haul of
the Enlightenment, Western Christianity has been progressively privatized
in terms of individual families and domestic communities.
By and large, out of bewilderment and embarrassment,
the ecclesial community's church have forgotten how to
speak about national and international matters, except in
times of war, to mobilize God for the
war effort.
The inevitable outcome of this privatization is to
give up or relinquish geopolitics to practical technical
analysis of the cynical kind that Stalin commented
about.
How many divisions does the Pope have?
Like, what does religion have to do or
Christianity have to do with earthly matters of
rule or governments or nations?
Their Christianity is a Sunday matter.
That has come with the whole privatized Christianity
and the faith that has been domesticated and
lost all sense that we're in a world
and there are purposes of God in the
world.
In fact, the faith is given for those
purposes from Abraham in answer to the resignment
of the nations to the establishment of a
king in the holy hill of Zion that
we'll be reading in Psalm 2.
And we're going to be reading a lot
out of this, and he speaks fancy, he
speaks theologically, so I'm going to try and
interpret that the church has forgotten how to
speak about national and international matters except in
times of war to mobilize God for the
war effort.
That if the theological dimension drops out of
international purview and with it any credible, critical
moral dimension then the world becomes one in
which might makes right.
That's fancy language to say if the church
loses this consciousness and relinquishes its influence that
God intends for it in the world and
in the nations, and the nations take it
over and completely secularize the issues of politics
and government and rule then in the last
analysis the world becomes one in which might
makes right.
It's only the church that has a moral
dimension to bring to the consideration of nations.
And if you've not read the newsletter available
at the table there it's the message given
in Israel to a messianic congregation about the
role of the church, the prophetic function of
the church to the state.
And if the church does not function, does
not take on this responsibility, what shall you
expect the state to perform?
It will always do the expedient thing the
thing that will accomplish its ends it doesn't
allow moral consideration to interfere with what they
consider to be necessary and functional.
Only a church can bring a moral dimension
to the consideration of nations.
And if the moral dimension is lost to
the nations what do the nations necessarily become
but battlefields and gross places of sin and
darkness.
So he's saying in keeping with this other
commentator that the loss of this awareness and
the spiritualizing of scripture and the way in
which our Christianity has become privatistic and personal
has meant a critical loss in our comprehension
of all the faith and the kind of
role that God intends for the church in
the world.
If the characteristic urging of Israel's prophets that
arrogant nations which overreach and imagine self-sufficiency
operate autonomously at their own peril Yahweh in
this rhetoric is a critical principle of restraint
which arrests both self-aggrandizement and brutality.
Don't get scared.
I'm going to paraphrase because it's worth hearing
what's on this man's mind.
It is the characteristic urging of Israel's prophets
that arrogant nations which overreach themselves because they
distance themselves from God and think themselves self
-sufficient and operate autonomously do so at their
own peril.
When the Lord comes as judge what does
he judge?
He judges the nations in their sinfulness, in
their bestiality, in their arrogance, in their power,
in their criminality.
Now the world is first trying to bring
to judgment this Serbian ruler in the international
court of law in The Hague but I
don't think they're going to succeed very well.
We're going to have to wait for the
justice and judgment that comes from God when
he judges the nations and the principle judgment
is the forsaking of him.
Therefore acting in their own arrogance, in their
own self-sufficiency and justifying themselves on national
grounds have steeped the world in bloodshed and
ruined entire generations as well as the earth
itself.
But it was Israel's prophets that urged this
consideration that God intends a principle of restraint.
What is my statement about the Tent of
Shem?
That the Japheth nations bowing to enter would
receive something in that tent that is not
available to them anywhere else.
The spirit of restraint, the spirit of governance,
the moral quotient that makes the difference between
a nation that becomes bestial and a nation
which is civilized and is concerned about and
takes into consideration the rights of men, the
helpless, the orphans, the broken.
That's God's provision for Japheth nations who are
enlarged.
The name of Japheth enlarged, powerful, commercial, military,
left to their own arrogance.
That's a formula for disaster.
That's what history has taught us.
What's God's answer?
That they should come up to Jerusalem.
That they should hang on to the skirt
of a Jew who will teach them the
ways of the Lord.
Let's just look quickly in Isaiah chapter 2.
Who's speaking this?
The prophets.
Who's speaking it now?
The prophets.
This is prophetic concern and prophetic urgency.
But what have we done with Isaiah 2?
The same that we've done with Psalm 2.
We have spiritualized its literal meaning away.
The word that Isaiah the son of Amos
saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, it shall come
to pass in the latter days, in the
last days, that the mountain of the Lord's
house, the word mountain is always symbolic of
government and rule, shall be established on the
top of the mountains and shall be exalted
above the hills.
That is to say, Zion and Jerusalem shall
be the pervading rule over not only Judah,
but over all nations.
It will be above the mountains and the
hills of human governments.
And all nations shall flow to it.
The same theme as in Psalm 96.
All nations to the ends of the earth.
This must come into our consciousness as the
prophetic church, that the whole intention of God's
salvation history is all nations.
The world He so loved the world He
called the man Abram out of a nation
and through him all the nations and the
families of the earth shall be blessed.
How shall they be blessed?
They shall come up to Jerusalem.
They shall come into the tent of Shem.
They shall learn of God and of His
ways.
Come, let us go up to the mountain
of the Lord, to the house of the
God of Jacob.
Interesting, the identification?
Not some abstract deity, but Israel's specific literal
God.
And this is where the fly is in
the ointment.
Where men don't mind some general reference to
God, but when it gets this close to
Jews, the God of Jacob, they get a
little edgy.
And that's exactly the point.
This is the stumbling stone in Zion for
Gentiles who don't want to acknowledge the specificity
of God in the choosing of a people
and a nation and a location, a Zion,
a tent, a Shem.
And in order to receive the benefit, they
cannot enter except they bow.
And that's exactly what they refuse to do.
For arrogance characterizes Japheth nations from the Tower
of Babel to this present day, even when
they're saved.
All nations shall flow to it.
Many people shall come and say, come, let
us go up to the mountain of the
Lord, to the house of the God of
Jacob.
He will teach us His ways.
And that means Torah.
Torah is not a code of legal requirement.
Torah is the all-inclusive word for teaching,
for the revelation of God's way.
For out of Zion shall go forth the
law, the Torah, not dictates.
The Lord is not going to become a
dictator.
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,
He shall judge between the nations.
We're not going to have any more catastrophes
like Rwanda or Serbia and Croatia and I
always forget the name of this other people.
Albania?
The Albanians in Kosovo.
It's a bloodletting, this ethnic cleansing, this national
ambition to root out the enemy.
The remarkable thing is that ethnically they are
the same Slavic people.
But historically they had become Muslims in the
invasion four centuries ago and retained that character.
And so there's been warfare, bloodshed, enmity, rape,
and vengeance until the Lord Himself shall judge
between the nations.
When we say come Lord Jesus, this is
what we ought to be thinking and meaning.
And rebuke many people.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their
spears into pruning hooks.
Nations shall not lift up sword against nation.
Neither shall they learn war anymore.
There's no commentator who can do that justice.
And hint at what that will mean to
the world economy, to what has been diverted
to instruments of death will be diverted now
to those things that forward life and not
death.
There are children dying by the carload every
moment for want of nutrition, for disease, for
the most elemental things that nations cannot afford,
but they can afford the implements of warfare.
We often talk about my privileged visit to
the Douglas Aircraft Plant in Fort Worth, Texas
nearby, where they make the F-16 fighter
bombers.
Never forget the experience of seeing what this
means, beating swords into plowshares.
And each one is like a billion dollars
to 25 million, I don't know what.
Some astronomical sum.
And men who did not look human working
overtime and making were splendid salaries in order
to fit these things together.
They lost...
I was stunned.
The Lord gave me the word gnomes, G
-N-O-M-E-S.
I had never ever spoken of that word.
It's a stunted humanity because when you invest
your life to produce death, it's going to
affect your person.
And I'm pleading with this brother who works
there as an engineer to find some other
source of employment.
But the security and the benefits are overwhelming.
The world is predicated on death and profits
that issue from it.
And I'm looking at the planes and it
says Burma, or whatever Burma's new name now
is, and some other Pakistan and nations that
don't even have a pot to urinate in
and a window to throw it out of,
are buying these $25 million planes for prestige.
Because their neighbor has one, they have to
have one.
It's a system predicated upon death.
And the only thing that will ever alleviate
and alter it is the coming of the
king.
He will mediate between nations.
There will be no need to study war.
He will arbitrate in righteousness and in justice.
This is not poetry, you dear saints.
If we continue to hold this as poetry,
as the commentator warned us in Psalms, we
lose not only the meaning of Psalm 2,
but the whole faith is integral to it.
We need to have restored to us the
theocratic intention of God through the restoration of
Israel, through the mercy expressed through this church,
in the latter days it shall come to
pass.
It will not come to pass if we
don't believe it, don't expect it, and are
unwilling to sacrifice for it.
So let's look now at the Psalm itself.
I've got in italics under the designation Psalm
2, this statement the Messiah's triumphant kingdom.
What do you have in italics?
Do you look at that when you read
the Psalms?
In every edition it's a little different.
We rarely think of Messiah as king.
We rarely think of Messiah politically.
We rarely think of Messiah as the Israel
rule.
But that's what Messiah is, an anointed king.
And so it begins, why do the nations
rage?
I'll tell you why.
Because they don't want him to succeed in
his theocratic intention.
They want to remain autonomous, independent, arrogant, and
self-sufficient, doing their own thing as if
their turf is theirs.
Hey, this is our country, we own this
land, we got it through victory, through warfare,
the earth is the Lord's.
It's not your playground, it's not your place
of exploitation, it belongs to him.
And you're unwilling to acknowledge that.
In your arrogance, you think it's yours.
You've got to be reminded, the earth is
the Lord's.
Why do the nations rage?
And what is rage?
It's an uttermost emotion.
It's not, why are the nations irritated?
Or even, why are the nations vexed?
Why do the nations rage?
Rage is ultimate anger, hatred, foaming over at
the mouth.
This word is not arbitrarily inserted.
This is by the Holy Spirit, putting the
divine finger on the condition of the nations
against God in their inveterate hatred of him
and their independence from him.
That anything that will threaten them and bring
them into an alliance of having to come
into his tent, whew, hatred, anger of the
kind that I glimpsed in Canada.
We'll come back to this at a later
time and say, well Art, it's all your
fault.
Because had you listened to what the man
said, you wouldn't have then taken the microphone
back and said, my invitation still stands.
You probably would have removed the invitation because
that's what bugged him so much that he
had to strike you with his Bible and
call you Jewish pride, Jewish flesh.
Well, possibly.
Or is it that something even beyond the
man's own cognizance, something in his deeps as
a Gentile and a man of the nations,
particularly Anglo-Saxon British Commonwealth nations, was pricked
of the kind that is expressed in the
very first statement of Psalm 2, the rage.
I don't have a word saying it.
This is prophetic intuition.
There's the deepest inveterate anger against God.
Rage is when you are frightened and terrified
that something that is of the profoundest vested
interest for you, your self-interest, is being
seriously threatened.
You don't react to that lightly.
You react to that with the fiercest anger
even to the point of rage.
Rage is almost uncontrollable.
What would you call the motivation to destroy
the two trade towers in the Pentagon?
It was calibrated.
It was coldly and cruelly deliberated.
But the animus to bring that destruction even
at the loss of the lives who affected
it is rage.
What are we seeing with the suicide bombers?
Rage.
What do we see when the missiles came
over in the Iraqi war and fell on
Tel Aviv and Palestinians were dancing on the
rooftops?
What happened when the bomb exploded at the
Hebrew University and five of the seven killed
were Americans and that the devastation came in
a place where it was least expected?
It was celebration.
Palestinians were giving out candy.
We can't plumb the depths of this rage
because the root of this rage is satanic.
As God is love, Satan is hatred.
And hatred against the people of God, hatred
against God himself, hatred against the purposes of
God, let alone those purposes that will once
and for all and finally end the false
usurping reign of these powers that prevail right
now even as we speak.
The only thing that will end it is
the Lord ruling from Zion.
Why do the nations rage and the people
plot a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves and
the rulers take council together against the Lord,
against his anointed saying, let us break their
bonds in pieces and cast away, shred them,
shred their courts from us.
But he who sits in the heavens shall
laugh, the Lord shall hold them in derision.
Then he shall speak to them in his
wrath and distress them in his deepest pleasure.
Yet I have set my king on my
holy hill of Zion.
I've got that in yellow underlined asterisk verse
6 speaking as if it's already accomplished.
Yet I have set my king on my
holy hill of Zion.
So this is future and yet spoken of
as if it's already taking place, which is
a typical prophetic thing that is beyond time.
But before we dwell on that, we mustn't
miss verse 2, the kings of the earth
set themselves and the rulers take council together.
Is this an unnecessary repetition?
What is called a redundancy?
The kings of the earth and the rulers?
Is that like saying the kings and the
kings?
Or is the psalmist indicating two levels of
rule?
One is the kings of the earth, the
visible magistrates, and the other is a realm
of rulership that is invisible but potent.
In fact, actually influences the visible kings, the
monarchs and the rulers.
And they take council together showing that what
is the nexus of opposition to the rule
of God?
The powers of the air in concert with
those that are operating in the earth.
You can't understand Hitler without that.
Hitler had an experience listening to a Wagnerian
opera that affected all of his subsequent life
and gave motivation for his dictatorship and his
vengeance and vehemence against the Jew and precipitating
a great world war.
Almost the end of civilization.
Well, Hitler was influenced by Wagner.
Something came into him listening to that pagan
triumphant music that draws upon pagan heroes and
heroines.
It's another celebration that is anti-Hebraic and
anti-biblical that celebrates pagan deities and classic
conflicts of these mythological figures that came into
Hitler's whole spirit and consciousness and influenced his
whole subsequent conduct.
So, we cannot understand Nazism.
We can't understand evil.
We can't understand mass destruction.
We can't understand our own generation if we
exempt the influence of these powers who rage
and rule and influence governments and societies now.
This is the context of our faith.
As I said, there's only one agency given
by God by which they can be recognized
and combated.
It's the church.
But a church of what kind?
A church that is not under any of
their influence, who do not in any way
allow their influences to permeate their own conduct
because they rule by fear, by intimidation, by
threat, by ambition, by appeals to lust, appeals
to power, appeals to all the kinds of
things for which men are motivated in the
world.
Where is there a church that has understood
this and consciously has refused and rejected it
and is not marching by that beat but
by another, that celebrates humility, trust, faith, love,
peace, quiet, and is not in fear and
insecurity for its life no matter what happens
in the world?
That church can oppose the powers of the
earth.
Its very presence is an opposition.
Its very presence is a freeing influence in
the community where it has its life.
So we'll not come to that condition unless
we come to it together and know that
there's a battle.
There are two wisdoms contending for dominance.
And that's why Paul says in Ephesians 3
that God has created all things of that
order through the church.
The manifold wisdom of God might be demonstrated
to the principalities and powers of the earth.
We'll not be conscious of that unless we
understand Psalm 2, unless we understand the whole
context in which we are called as the
church.
We're saved for this.
We often tease congregations when I'm on this
subject by reminding them what these powers say.
Jesus we know and Paul we know, but
who are you?
We're not obliged to know you until you
exhibit to us who recognize what is authentic,
what we saw in Jesus and what we
saw in Paul.
Until you exhibit that, we scorn you.
What, you're going to take cities for Christ
by worship and by shouting?
Ha ha ha.
Until we see the character of God in
you, the total submittedness to the purposes of
God where your life is not held as
dear unto yourself, you live as sacrificially as
Jesus and Paul.
We're not obliged to consider you.
So this is the moral struggle that is
taking place.
Amen.
Okay.
So they take counsel against the Lord and
against his anointed.
Let us break their bonds and pieces, cast
away the courts from us.
But God enthroned in the heavens laughs and
holds them in derision.
He shall speak to them in his wrath,
distress them in his deep displeasure because God's
answer is, I have set my king on
my holy hill of Zion.
And of course, that's the whole tent of
Shem.
Zion is that place.
That's where the nation shall come, as we
read in Isaiah chapter two, to learn of
the ways of the Lord and be domesticated,
which means be tempered.
Though we are enlarged, our very coming and
submitting and bowing to come annually into that
place will have a redemptive effect upon our
character and life.
Otherwise, we will continue to be high, arrogant,
violently disposed, nationalistically minded nations that have brought
woe to the world since time immemorial.
This is the provision by which not only
will we be tempered, but become changed and
become ourselves Shem-like, that all nations shall
become Hebraicized, including Israel itself, and then shall
peace prevail and righteousness in the earth because
he set his king on his holy hill.
It says in Acts 3.21, Jesus is
retained in the heavens waiting for the restoration
of all things spoken by the prophets since
the world began.
He cannot come and occupy the throne of
David, though he is a descendant of the
son of David and has every legal right
and qualification to be king until all that
has been spoken by the prophets of restoration
shall be fulfilled.
And that is the restoration of Israel herself.
I will declare the decree the Lord has
said to me, you are my son.
Today I have begotten you, ask of me
I will give you the nations for your
inheritance and the ends of the earth for
your possession.
You shall dash them to pieces like a
potter's vessel.
And then the warning, be wise, O kings,
and be instructed, you judges of the earth,
serve the Lord with fear, rejoice with troubling.
Kiss the son, lest he be angry.
Blessed are all those who put their trust
in him.
So the privilege of the king and his
right is the nations for his inheritance and
the ends of the earth, the same phrase
used in Psalm 96 for his possession.
The issue of Zion is the issue of
the nations to the ends of the earth
that the rule of God shall go forth
from the holy hill of Zion.
Is that hill holy now?
No.
Anyone who goes to Israel has got to
be pained at the political cultural condition that
now prevails and that's why Isaiah 4 talks
about Jerusalem being submitted to a spirit of
burning and a spirit of purging.
It is not fit for the king.
I go reluctantly on the occasions when I'm
required by the Lord to go.
I would never go of myself.