What is the day in which God declares
the decree, Thou art my son, and this
day I have begotten you, and I have
set you on the holy hill of Zion?
What day is that?
By the way, the day of his resurrection.
As we read in Romans chapter 1, verse
4, the sonship has come through an obedience
unto death, and the father, in the approval
of that sacrifice, has exalted the son, not
only to raise him from the death, but
to give him a place on high, in
rulership from the throne of heaven, and to
set him in the time of Israel's return
upon the holy hill of Zion.
Thou art my son, your sonship is attested
by your sacrifice, and my approval for resurrection
is the qualification to rule for which I
give you the nations as your inheritance.
If that's required for that son, what's required
for the sons to which we are called?
How shall we be fitted into the theocratic
purposes of God, except also by the decree
of a sacrifice of death, resurrection?
And it's only in the resurrection reality that
the governmental purposes of God are established.
Who shall rule and reign with him but
overcomers who count not their life as dear
unto themselves?
So the father was pleased by how Jesus's
ministry commenced, by going down into a watery
grave, in identification with a sinful nation.
When he came up, the Holy Spirit, as
a dove, came upon him that John the
Baptist could recognize, this is the Messiah of
Israel.
Though he's my cousin, I don't know him
by anything natural, because God has said to
me, you will recognize him when the Holy
Spirit shall abide upon him, which is the
statement of God and his approval of a
son going down into death.
It's kind of a paradigm for all sons.
We have to ask the question, whether our
baptism constituted that?
Was it getting wet?
Was it an ordinance?
Was it a religious requirement?
Something that people said we needed?
Or was it a conscious bringing our humanity,
not its worst, but its best, into the
waters of death that we might be raised
up into newness of life?
Because only sons of an overcoming kind shall
rule and reign with him.
The issue of government, the issue of rule
is the issue of resurrection.
And the issue of resurrection is the issue
of death.
I don't want to belabor that.
But here in the German commentator on this
point, you are my son, I myself have
begotten you, reveals itself as a creative word,
one that originates a new existence.
What's the new existence?
King on the Holy Hill.
The chosen king is drawn to the side
of God.
He becomes the heir and representative of his
rule.
Thus, in the Old Testament, the king was
not by nature son of God, nor did
he enter the sphere by the natural things,
but at the accession to his kingship, he
was declared to be the son by the
definitive will of the God of Israel.
That's a mouthful.
This is not, this is my son, I
declare the decree by any natural reckoning, but
by a supernatural reckoning that issues from an
obedience unto death and a resurrection from death.
That is the qualification for the king and
his rule.
Here he speaks again about the significance of
resurrection.
The message of the Old Testament now for
the first time really shines forth because the
crucified one is the resurrected one.
To him has been given all authority in
heaven and in earth.
He's the son and heir.
He's the true son of the father.
I can almost say a son of Shem,
the true son of Shem.
In Jesus Christ, the New Testament sees the
king of God, who in the comprehensive sense
has approached and fulfilled the kingdom of office
as the anointed one of the Old Testament.
He's the true son given all authority in
heaven.
I wonder if that requires a death, that
God can entrust his authority for the rule
over creation to a son in whom there's
no threat of taking to himself any self
aggrandizement as politicians do.
What may be a politician or a ruler
who has not used his office for his
own self aggrandizement?
God is waiting for a son who is
completely free of any prospect of taking advantage
of his place of authority for his own
self exaltation.
Jesus is that son and death is the
testimony of any such impulse that would ever
rise up out of his humanity.
The resurrected one can be entrusted with the
father's authority to rule.
How then also those who shall rule and
reign with him, which is the privilege of
overcoming sons.
Jesus is the paradigm son.
He's the pattern son, but we can examine
his sonship as the key to rule as
being also our own.
It's a privilege to rule and reign with
Christ.
Who will replace the fallen angelic powers who
have been usurping their place in the heavenlies
that God intended as an accompaniment to his
governmental benevolence over the earth.
The original purpose of those angels created by
God was to aid and abet in his
governance over creation.
But what had they become in their rebellion?
The gods of this age.
And instead of facilitating God's rule and turning
the attention of men to himself and to
worship, they become the gods of this world.
Not only turning men away from the God
who is God, but turning them to themselves.
They should be worshiped in turn as the
gods of this world.
They have to be ousted and cast out
from their original place.
This has got to do with the fullness
of the Gentiles being come in, in many
ways.
A number, I believe, proportionate to the number
of fallen angels who constitute the principalities and
powers, occupying governmental places, but using them illicitly
for their own self aggrandizement, even to the
manipulation of nations.
When they are cast out, who will occupy
those places of rule?
Who will be in agreement with God and
not opposed to God?
And can rule in the character of God.
Ruling is not just shuffling papers.
It's not bureaucracy.
It's bringing the wisdom and the way of
God to men.
Can you picture what the millennium is?
Israel restored to its governmental role as the
locus of God's kingdom and going out to
the Gentile nations, as well as receiving the
representative of nations.
And from the heavenly place, now, not just
a realm of principalities and powers opposed to
God, but sons who have been formed and
been brought to maturity in this life to
rule and reign from that place in concert
with redeemed Israel.
No wonder that the trees will clap their
hands.
No wonder that nature itself, creation, groans and
travails till now, waiting for the showing forth
the manifestation of the sons of God.
When we lose this context and still celebrate
sonship, we're on the ground of deception.
And that's why the whole concept of sonship
has fallen into a suspicious kind of elitism
of men who think that they'll never see
death.
They'll never die, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They have extracted the word and taken it
out of the governmental context of God and
the kingdom of God and celebrate it as
a thing in itself, as being their own
personal distinctive and looking upon others as being
in Babylon, as if they are an elite.
How can you rule and reign with Christ
being an elite having an elitist mentality?
Because the rule of God has got to
be in the character of God, selfless, humble,
meek.
Your king shall come to you lowly and
meek.
When he came down on the back of
that ass upon which never men sat, they
shouted hallelujah.
They shouted Hosanna for the coming of the
king.
What shall they shout for the kingdom that
comes in the same character?
If we're elitist or superior in our spirituality,
we're ipso facto nullified as any candidates to
rule and reign with him.
Where is this character of the son formed
and shaped?
That we shall rule and reign with him,
not as self aggrandizing hotshots who occupy an
elitist place, but humbled by the privilege of
ruling and reigning with him.
What is the parousia and the Lord's coming
when we shall, as they say, be raptured
but meeting the coming king and being with
him forever and accompanying him to his place
of honor and rule at Zion?
That's why we need glorified bodies to greet
him in the air, to accompany him to
his, that's what the Greek word means, and
to see him receive the honor due him
who suffered and died in shame, now to
occupy the role of king from the place
where he was crucified.
And thereby to rule and reign with him,
ascending and descending upon the son of man.
Remember when Jesus saw Nathanael, he said, you're
impressed that I show you standing under the
tree?
I'll show you a greater thing, angels ascending
and descending upon the son of man.
It's a shaded allusion to the consummation of
the ages, that this is a greater thing.
In fact, the Lord would not have gone
too far to say, it's the greatest thing,
that those who are taking off of dunkeeps
shall sit with princes and be among the
princes of my people.
Those drug addicts and guys that were sexually
deranged and immoral and in the world and
out of prisons, the lowest, the scum, we
all are that.
He has taken off of the dunkeep and
made to sit with the princes of his
people.
The word prince is an indication of rule.
Why did the young ruler come?
What must I do to inherit life, to
inherit eternal life, to enter the kingdom?
He wasn't just talking about prolonged existence.
He wasn't just talking about endless life.
He was talking about the privilege of participation
in the kingdom of God forever.
We have lost that Hebraic sense of what
the destiny of our faith means.
And for that reason, we're unwilling now to
submit to the conditions by which our character
will be formed for that.
Rule and reign is not something that we're
going to magically obtain in the day of
the Lord's appearing if we have not been
progressively fitted and formed to rule in keeping
with the character of God and bring the
moral dimension of God the Semitic character of
God into the Japheth nations because they have
not seen the issue of sonship in the
context of kingdom rule.
They have divorced the issue of sonship that
comes through death and resurrection that we might
rule impartially and well with justice and righteousness
and without any corruption that would come by
the self-interest that has avoided the cross.
Now, where is the ultimate?
Ooh, I'm really going off the gangplank now.
Where does the ultimate crucifixion and ultimate death
to the last vestiges of the subtlety of
self take place that would have cast a
shadow over our ability to rule righteously and
well with Christ in keeping with his own
character?
When we will bow to enter the tent
of Shem.
The last thing that identifies the issue of
Japheth rebellion and self-will that has characterized
the nations from the time of the Tower
of Babel and yet resides in most even
Christian hearts is met at that place of
ultimate humbling when we will bow in the
place where we would least desire before a
specific people who are the Semitic tent themselves
transformed but we need to bow to enter.
And someone said to me last night talking
about our class, how many of us have
so bowed?
Why do I say I'm going off the
deep plank?
Because I can't say it, I'll say it
for the Lord.
Because I'll tell you what, dear saints, I
spent hours yesterday after our session and I
picked every book out of my bookcase of
commentaries on Genesis.
I read the Anchor series on Genesis.
I pulled out Klaus Westermann, one of the
great German authorities, Von Raad, another German authority,
everything that I have access to.
I read Karl Barth.
I looked up the index of any reference
in the Genesis 9 of the statement of
Noah in blessing his sons that would give
me some inkling of what this Tent of
Shem meant.
You want to know something?
Zero.
By the greatest commentators of Scripture, non-compassment
is blank.
And they acknowledge that, well, no one could
really say.
It's hard to say.
There's an air here of mystery that no
one seems to be able to understand.
So, kid cats, Brooklyn boy makes good.
He's suggesting something of the kind that I
spoke in Canada and I'm putting before you.
This is ultimate mystery.
And there's something about my 73 years on
this earth as a Jew, my 38 years
in the church, and what happened, in fact,
in Canada with, shall I almost say, the
rage, the anger disproportionate to the event itself,
suggesting that what was touched here lies too
deep for words and even beyond the consciousness
of those who exploded and reacted with that
depth of vehemence and emotion, calling it Jewish.
And so I'm suggesting that the cross, the
death, has not had its final and deepest
working.
And it waits for this.
And not just for Gentiles, the Jews themselves,
who are not Semitic by virtue of our
birth, because Semitic is not ultimately a generic
or racial or ethnic thing.
It's the spiritual condition that this son himself
attained by his own obedience to the father
unto death, both in his baptism and in
his crucifixion.
And therefore, I have exalted you.
I've raised you up from the abysmal depths
of the death to which you submitted yourself
freely.
And I have exalted you by giving you
a name above every name.
And to you, every knee shall bow and
every mouth confess, I'm giving you a status
and a stature and a name equal to
my own.
Talk about the father deferring to the son.
That very deferring is the revelation of the
character of God.
And I'm putting you on the Holy Hill
of Zion.
I've declared the decree this day.
Thou art my son, and I have set
you on the Holy Hill of Zion and
given you the nations as your inheritance.
Remember the first statements that I read from
both of my sources, that the church has
lost this understanding, has romanticized, has spiritualized away
the literal, specific, hard fact and truth that
the whole of redemption history from the beginning,
even the lamb slain from the foundations of
the earth, is the issue of God's rule
over his own creation.
That's what we see in the book of
beginnings, Genesis.
The flood, God's judgment, one family saved, three
sons, a remarkable episode of a man getting
drunk inadvertently, tasting for the first time the
fruit of the vine and being taken advantage
of by one son in particular to shame
him.
Maybe tomorrow I'll bring another source of the
one book that I found that had some
deep insight is not any of the classic
theologians, but it's a man I've never heard
of before.
And he suggests that this ham took delight
in the embarrassment of his father's failure and
told the other brothers sharing the gossip in
a malicious way so as to denigrate and
to demean the father although God says thou
shalt honor thy father and thy mother.
And so he could not induce the other
brothers to share with him a taking advantage
of the father in his fallenness, but they
having something of the integrity of God himself,
walked backwards with a cloak and draped it
over the naked father and avoiding having to
look upon him in that condition and therefore
enjoyed the blessing spoken prophetically by the prophetic
father Noah that the blessing for Japheth is
that he would be enlarged.
And indeed he has been as we can
see in the history of nations.
But that's Shem.
Now Reedward says and God bless and bless
the God of Shem.
Blessed be the Lord.
Verse 26.
Here's the prophet.
Well, it begins with 25.
Then he said, waking from his wine, waking
from his drunkenness, cursed be Canaan, a servant
of servants, he shall be to his brethren.
And he said, blessed be the Lord, the
God of Shem.
Not blessed be Shem.
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem.
And the word God there is different from
the next sentence.
And they came to be his servant.
May God enlarge Japheth and may he dwell
in the tents of Shem.
The word God in verse 27 is not
the same as the word God in verse
26.
Very interesting that the word God in 26
is Yahweh, Jehovah, the distinct God of Israel.
But the God of enlarging Japheth, may God
enlarge.
That is Elohim, the God of creation, the
God of all mankind.
So God uses one designation of himself in
blessing Shem and another in blessing Japheth.
And that is not accidental.
I tell you, dear saints, this is so
deep.
It's a mystery.
We're walking on eggshells not to offend against
the Lord, but neither to ignore the Lord
and miss something that is set at the
very foundation of the whole Heilsgeschichte, of the
whole salvation history of God, going back to
this inadvertent episode of a man drunk and
waking from it to curse and to bless.
Blessing the God, what would you make of
that?
Why didn't he bless Shem directly?
And many of the translations say, bless Shem.
Why do other translations show that the blessing
is bless the God, the Lord God of
Shem?
Because even the translators could not figure it
out and thought that, how do you bless
God?
You bless Shem, but how do you bless
God?
And you want to hear my opinion?
Yeah.
Yes.
God is blessed when he is glorified by
the fulfillment of his redemptive purpose through the
election that he chooses out of his own
freedom, a people, a place, a Zion, a
nation, a tent.
He's glorified.
He will be blessed by the fulfillment of
the mystery of that which he has chosen
and by which all nations shall be blessed
when they shall be broken in their arrogance
and self-sufficiency and independence and accede to
the means by which God has provided in
one place only and through one people only,
that they might dwell in that tent of
Shem and in dwelling, lose their Japheth character
and become themselves a Semitic people with Shem.
So blessing all the families of the earth.
Started with Abraham, but it ends with all
nations.
Oh, the depth of the riches, both of
the wisdom and knowledge of God who has
been his counselor.
You see why we couldn't sing it before?
We didn't have the dimensions of the glory
of God's intention and the specificity of his
choosing because I am that I am and
I will be who I will be and
I will elect whom I will elect and
I will have mercy whom I will have
mercy.
Eat your heart out.
You would have preferred Germans.
You would have preferred Americans.
Eat your heart out.
I have chosen Shem and I blessed him
from the beginning because it says that it's
implied in the language and the grammar of
these verses that when they took the cloak
and put it on their shoulders, it is
singular and the Hebrew commentator says it's because
Shem, the firstborn son initiated the action to
which Japheth lent himself, but it was really
Shem's design to honor the father by walking
backwards and covering his nakedness.
That's why he received the greater blessing and
the greater honor.
He'll not be enlarged in terms of commerce,
trade, power, military might, but he will render
a service to bless all the families of
the earth.
But the great irony is that present day
Israel is not Shem.
Present day Israel is not Israel.
It's yet Jacob.
And that's where the true sons of Shem,
despite their ethnic origin, will reveal to Israel
what its own calling is by making her
jealous when they see in us what is
their own call to be the Shem tent
for the world.
They have to hang on to our skirts
before the nations will hang on to theirs.
It's a foreshadowing and a completion.
Zechariah ends with the Feast of Fabernacles and
all nations coming up to obey it and
also implying clearly a curse on those nations
that are yet reluctant and unwilling to break
into Baal.
They don't want to enter, to come up
to the Feast of Fabernacles, to Jerusalem, not
only to acknowledge God, but the people whom
he has redeemed is to bring upon yourself
a curse.
The fact that that threat is made indicates
how deep is the intransigence in Gentile hearts,
even after Israel's restoration, yet to acknowledge it
and to come up.
They will not.
They're chafed.
There's something in their gut, in the very
depths of their humanity that will not accede
to God's things.
You can't tell you how deep and how
stubborn that is and how it resides yet
in the church.
And we're not even conscious of it until
the issue is put before us about our
own point of entry.
Isn't it interesting that Orthodox Jews to avoid
the use of the word God, use the
word Hashem, the name.
What is the tenth of Shem?
It's the tenth of God.
It's the character of God.
Shall we break and pray a little bit?
I think I can easily take another session
tomorrow.
I have hardly got into some of the
riches of the things in which the Lord
had my notice this morning.
But I think he's done good groundwork to
prepare us.
Let's thank the Lord and apologize for the
church and for ourselves of having idealized these
scriptures, romanticized them, having lost the rudimentary intention
of God in his salvation history is the
rule of his own creation.
That men will not study war.
If they'll not study it, they'll not practice
it.
Right now they have 13, 12, 11, 10,
11, 12, 13-year-old kids bearing arms
in Africa and in other nations.
And in Afghanistan, everything is death.
So Lord, when we say thy kingdom come,
we say it with a new comprehension.
Your kingdom is your rule.
And we pray my God for its soon
coming.
And you're waiting both for Israel and for
the church.
You're contained in the heavens.
Waiting for the restoration of all things spoken
about us since the world began.
We bless you Lord.
Help us Lord.
Give us an understanding.
Open up considerations my God that have been
lost to us.
Bring us to the myth and grit of
redemptive history and the mystery spoken by Noah
and carried on through the descendants of Shem
out of which Abraham came, who was called
out of his nation to become a new
nation and to bless all the nations of
the earth.
So my God, we bless you.
Let nothing fall to the ground my God.
Let it find a deep place in our
hearts and our understanding.
Continue on with us Lord if there's more
yet to say, to understand and to be
defined.
Help us to be the sons my God
who shall rule and reign with you in
that kingdom.
God forbid there should be anything that keeps
us from that overcoming.
Thank you Lord.
Find us out and bring us my God
to an ultimate place of submission and breaking
even in the place that you've designated.
And we thank and give you praise for
your so great wisdom and your so great
way.
In Jesus name.