Here is a summary of another of David Pawson’s great sermons,
“God Keeps His Promises.” Before that, a word of caution:
As a Christian, you may not feel the Jews are relevant, or
you may not like to study them, even when their journeys through life are ¾ of
our Bible. God has these stories for a
reason. They are not just for your
children to build moral character; they could have a like effect on you,
too. But they tell the truth about their
failings, and how God relates to their failings. We are, after all, a sinning people, and no
better source than the Bible to tell us the absolute truth about how God reacts
to our wayfaring behavior.
The worst mistake we could make is to assume God has changed
in the New Testament, and is merciful, compared to His angry shedding of blood
in the Old. Keep one thing in mind: Jesus, our New Testament model, is God. God has the same personality in all three
Persons of the Trinity. He is the same
in the Old and the New. Pastors are
giving us the happy side to keep us from showing discomfort and leaving, taking
our tithes to another church. They never
talk about hell, but Jesus is the only source for the truth about hell, and talks
greatly about it, and what we need to do to escape it. Too many people assume the merciful God of
the New T could not send them to hell, that the Gospel is “believe it, I’m
saved.” You need to read the sermons in Acts. People
who take the easy believism route given by pastors, their lives change
little. There are excessive warnings in
the NEW testament about how many people will be shocked about God judging them
to hell. Only a small percentage will be
saved, according to the CLEAR word of a New Testament book, Matthew 7:13-14. We must develop a loving relationship with
God in life, or we are sent to hell. Per
a New Testament book, John 15:5-6. These
are not hyperboles. These are the cold
facts. Do you want to know how God
demands that you examine whether you have the faith, demands that you strive
for holiness, without which we will not see God, or how bad sin is to God? You won’t hear it from pastors. Ignorance of
the Bible is no excuse. You must in fear
seek the real God in Scripture. Now Mr.
Pawson, in this sermon, will relate how God reacted to the Jews, but first one
more thing: He made a covenant with
them, it was not unconditional, it was bilateral, and was broken by sin—which meant
curses would come to God’s people. Despite
the covenant, their behavior meant God agreed that the covenant for their deliverance
was off. God treats us the same
way. Keep that in focus. Now let’s do
the very educational sermon.
About 200 years ago, Frederick the Fifth, the king of
Prussia, asked his philosopher friend, “Give me one proof of the existence of
God.” The answer he got: “Your majesty,
the Jews.” Considering how the Jews were
scattered on the face of the earth at the time, and in danger of assimilation,
that was an amazing answer—but the Jews still exist today, a proof of the
existence of their God. Given their history,
historians expected they would have died out.
After all, they began with an old man of 90 who left a place that was,
according to archaeologists, made of brick, had running water, central heating,
and there were two story houses in abundance.
He left there and lived in a tent the rest of his life because he
believed God. God promised him a nation,
countless descendants, including kings, and blessings for the whole world as
his inheritance. Yet his wife was barren,
a shame in that society, and it looked like the family line would come to a
dead end anyway. The land God told him
to go was less than fertile, and subject to famines too frequently. But he
went.
At times he had to travel to the breadbasket of the area,
Egypt, to assuage hunger. Yet as a
result of his faith in God’s promises, he became great in the eyes of God, so
much so that He even presented His name in Scripture as “the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.” In a miracle, his
wife bore a child at age 90, and he ultimately became the father of
millions. Years later, God provided another
blessing for this tribe—Joseph, one of his great-grandsons, was sold into
slavery by the brothers who hated him.
He even spent time in prison on a false charge, yet he became prime
minister of Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh. Egyptologists have found
Joseph’s home and his burial plot. It
had been broken into, and the body moved.
Which makes sense, as Joseph was a Jew, and directed his brothers to move
his bones back to Canaan, their future homeland, since he wanted to be in the
land God promised. Scripture, you see,
is not telling fables—it’s telling history.
However, genocide came to the Jews while they were in Egypt,
the first of many. Later pharaohs made the
Jews slaves. When the Pharaoh worried
about their growing population, he commanded that boy babies should be slaughtered
at birth. Here’s a proof-fact: A professor of London has found a cemetery in
Goshen, Egypt, where all the skeletons are female. The only one of its kind in the entire
world. Why? Almost all the boy infants were killed; many
were thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile.
But not Moses, God’s deliverer.
Just like our own slaves in the South, the Egyptian economy
was so dependent on the Jews, that they would fight and never release
them. In addition, the Jews had no
weapons to get free. But God found a way,
through Moses, to obtain their freedom without a single battle. When, after a series of devastating plagues,
the Jews were set free, God steered them away from the most accommodative
route—fleeing up the eastern border of Egypt.
Canaan was so very close that way.
God knew, though, if they went that way, that Egypt had a line of
fortifications on the eastern border of the Mediterranean, to guard against
invaders—and to keep slaves from escaping. There was no way that their three million Jews
could sneak away. So God sent them south! But then they went between the deep Red Sea
and the uninhabitable Saharan desert; He seemed to want them trapped. Close on their trail were the chariots of the
biggest army in their world. Egypt was
all set to recapture these slaves. Yet
despite the unreality of their placement, Moses didn’t blink an eye. He knew God was good for it. He knew the promises God made to the Jews,
despite living in Egypt most of his life. His mother had given him faith when
he was young. So God again acted on his
faith, opened up a path in the Red Sea, closed it at the right time—and it was
the Egyptian army at the bottom of the sea, not the Jewish slaves.
Then they were wandering in the desert for 40 years, without
food and little access to water. It was a miracle that any of them
survived. Did you know that in 1973,
when Egypt went into war with Israel, they had to travel by that desert in the
Sinai peninsula to pull a surprise attack? Within three days on the desert they
were dying of thirst, and some surrendered.
Israel took pity and released them.
So it was a miracle that many Jews survived. God kept the apple of His eye, and His
promises, alive; and He was present in a tall pillar of cloud or fire, leading
their paths. He did a miracle by never
allowing their clothes to become unusable.
He provided for this huge refugee population at every step. No one else could have done it, especially
with corrupt enemies all around who saw them as a threat, even giants
(descendants of the Nephilim, see another blog). They
were, indeed, attacked. But God gave
them the victory. When they hit the
Jordan river, 12 spies were sent to suss out the promised land on the other
side, and 10 of them returned with a bad report; the walls of the cities were
too high, and there were too many giants.
But two of the spies said, as it were, “we will go in on God’s shoulders,
so we will be taller than they are.” But
the people lost faith. Now think how God
could be upset, after He had done many miracles right in front of them, to get
them right to the edge of the land He promised.
So, in His disappointment, God turned them back, and made sure that their
travel to the outskirts of Canaan took 40 years instead of the usual 1; it could
have been a short straight distance, but He made sure all the unfaithful would
die and their bones ended up in the wilderness, not in the promised land of
Canaan. The kids were spared, though, and
grew up hardy, and ready to fight. God told them He would give them the victory. When they finally arrived, their very first challenge
across the Jordan was the large city of Jericho; it was huge and had high
walls. God took down the walls—another
miracle--and they won that battle, the first one in Canaan. They had their
land—for awhile.
Speaking of survival against odds, did you know that Israel
is in an earthquake zone? It’s on the biggest crack in the earth’s surface,
called the Great Rift Valley. Agriculture
was chancy, there, too: they were
totally dependent on a westerly wind—that is the only thing that brings rain. The
vines depend on the dew that rolls off Mr. Hermon, coming off the snow and down
the valley where it misted on the vines.
Locust swarms, the kind that makes the sky truly black, occasionally strip
all green from the land, even eating bark.
Even buzzing through at 10 miles
an hour, it took an hour-and-a-half for millions to leave and you could see the
sun again. So Israel is a very precarious country to live in. It’s also a dangerous crossroads. They were a narrow corridor between the
Mediterranean and the desert. It links
Africa to Europe, and Europe to Asia; everybody traveling from one continent to
another, or sending an army against an enemy, had to travel through Israel, most
likely through a singular gap in the mountains to get to the Sea. That gap goes through a hill called Megiddo,
or Har Megiddo—which is also a crux in the future. It is known famously in Bible prophecy as
Armageddon—the last battle before God’s Final Judgment. Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors,
and it has been invaded and occupied and attacked, almost without relief, for
centuries. When the Jews first took over
the land, they had two superpowers nearby; each of them had generous supplies
of water—the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates (Assyria). When any nation wanted the
water of either, Israel was right in the middle. Collateral damage was the guaranteed
result. Plus, Solomon’s sons began a
civil war, which usually wipes out a nation.
But they realized they had to stick together to preserve the Jewish line
that God gave them. They decided to have
an armistice. They lived, uneasily, side
by side, and let live—though they had different objectives. One probable result
of that is, Israel now has over 60 political parties, and no singular group or
individual can rule alone, but must join a coalition with a party that has different
goals. Which means few new laws get done, even when urgency calls for it. All
of this seemed perfectly designed to have a short life as a nation.
When the Jews were conquered and exiled by the Assyrians and
the Babylonians (about 600 BC), it should have been the end. But Medo-Persia later
defeated the Babylonians, and were kind enough that for 200 years they allowed
the Jews to set up a province in Israel if they wanted to return home. But only
a few thousand returned to the land; their faith in God was dying out. They were later occupied by Syria, Egypt, Greeks,
and Romans. Of these, the Greeks tried
to assimilate them the most, which would obliterate Jewish identity and culture.
Antiochus Epiphanes was the worst; among other things, he banned their
language, forcing them to learn Greek.
As it turned out, that was a huge blessing to mankind; Jews later wrote the
New Testament in Greek, a perfect language for communicating the Gospel. Every
advanced nation could read it. Many of
the Jews were willing to be “Hellenized.” But not enough of them to obliterate
their identity. God wanted them to be
different, to bear God’s testimony and His Word for the world to see. Keep in
mind, there were many gods. There was
always the question, which god was real, and could protect his worshipping
nation? Ideally, if the Jews copied His
character, and became prosperous through His blessing, they would be a showcase
of their God, and other nations would want Him as their god too.
Then came the visit of God in the flesh, Jesus the
Christ. The Jews were given an
opportunity to recognize Him as God, and be saved—but they killed Him instead. They began rejecting God 100 years before,
and had lost freedom in their land as a result. Now, by rejecting His Son, curses would begin
raining down.
When the Jews did too many insurrections, the Romans, in 70
AD, were tired of it, and wiped out Jerusalem, killing perhaps a million, and they
destroyed the Temple. But the Jews, despite
the loss of their culture’s greatest icons, still did not give up their
identity. Persecution by Nero and others
also drove them out. Their land was, in 135AD, renamed “Palestinia.” (There are anti-Semitic preachers today that
say Jesus was a palestinian. False,
since the name postdated Christ). Some
of the Jews, though, held onto 3 things that stood out in their identity: circumcision, the Sabbath, and a kosher
diet. But they lost their language.
But they hung onto hope, even when the Crusades, ostensibly
to win holy sites back from the Muslims, killed every Jew they saw on the way,
especially through France and Germany, who wouldn’t protect them. In Spain the Inquisition forced the Jews
either to convert to Christianity or be tortured to death. Spain finally kicked them out in 1492; they
had to flee to remain Jewish and stay alive.
I’m sure it was “circumstance” that in that same year, Columbus
discovered the New World, which later became a refuge for the Jews to flee to. They
were even killed in England; in 1291, at York, when the remaining Jews were
trapped gathered in a castle, they committed suicide rather than being run
through by English soldiers. Later there were Russian pogroms, severe
persecution in Poland (that’s why Hitler put most of his death camps
there). And we can “understand” why
Hitler wanted to kill them all; the Jews had their brightest people running
banks, the theater and the arts, while Hitler was asserting the Aryans were a superior
race.
But they’re here today, after a series of miracles; and every
year, at Passover, the few religious Jews celebrate how their nation began with
a miracle. They could see Acts of God, but the faithful people played their
part too. Since their new nation in 1948, they have defended many times against
Muslim onslaught and hatred, funded by Russian money and weapons. One of the many scenes of bravery was their
capture of the Golan Heights in 1967 from the Syrians. Russian artillery controlled the top of the
mountainous Heights, and were in a militarily impregnable position, aiming down
to fire at the Israelis, whose every move was open. Fish in a barrel. But they
built a road up the side of the steep hills, foot by foot, under heavy gunfire--with
the help of many soldiers who gave their lives to simply run the bulldozer up
the tall hill another hundred yards before he would be shot. They knew they would die, and still
volunteered. Then they could march up
and overwhelm the enemy
The Jews will still be around at the end time, not only in
their nation, but in rebuilding a temple (Mark 13:14). There will be a huge revival; God will open
their eyes to see Jesus in a new way; many of them will be saved.
But here’s another question, whose answer we don’t want to
know: why has God allowed them to be
defeated and persecuted? He hasn’t done
a great job of protecting them. This is a
side of God that gets ignored by most modern pastors and observers. It comes down to a hard fact: God loves
people, but He also hates people. He not
only heals, but He kills. He blesses,
and He curses. We should ask people, not
just, “do you believe in God,” but “what kind of God do you believe in?” His written Word—Old as well as New Testament,
give His character and response to our actions and thoughts in great detail;
and, frankly, in certain circumstances, He is harsh. But we have been brought
up on a sentimental, not a Scriptural, understanding of Him.
The following remarks are God dealing with nations. He deals with people differently.
Thinking back, His “marriage” to the Jews in Exodus was a
bilateral covenant. He said “I will” to
many blessings He named—then He asked the Jews (at Sinai), “now it is for you
to say, that you decide if you will keep all My commandments through your
lives”? They said “we will.” That response
completed the covenant as bilateral, and could be broken; it was not unconditional.
Well, Israel broke it; they became an adulteress, as it were, to God,
worshipping other gods and defying His rules.
God had simply wanted a people who would demonstrate to the world how to
love Him and be obedient to Him, and how, as a result, they could be blessed more
than anybody. But the agreement also specified:
If they broke the covenant, and ignored a relationship with Him, and
went the ways of other corrupt cultures, He would curse them more than any
other people. As you can see by their
history, you know which way they went. This
is a new way of saying, “God has kept His promises,” because cursing them was
also keeping His promises too. He would
do this even though He loved them.
Deuteronomy 28 has many of those blessings in vv1-14; and
the curses in vv15-68. (A note for
future sermonizers: God spends 4 times
as much listing curses as He does the blessings. He knew that everyone assumes innocence, that
they will be blessed; it takes a repeated knock on the head, lots more verses,
to make them see the possibility of curses too). When you read the curses (see more in
Leviticus 26), it’s a description of the holocaust, actually. If the Jews knew God, they would see that that
was the ultimate of curses for their 3000 years of disobedience—capped by doing
their part in killing their Messiah.
As reminders, Moses asked the people that for the next
several days, and on occasion thereafter, go to two mountains named in advance with
good acoustics. From one mountain, the
Levites would shout the blessings. From
the other, they would shout the curses. The
people should hear that God is both love and holy. Speaking of the holocaust
again, that horrible disaster was the reason why they re-obtained their
nation. The blessing would not have come
without the extreme persecution preceding it.
Because the compassion of the world after the holocaust turned the
world’s hearts into granting permission.
Such are the ways of God.
So the reason for their change of fortunes is not because
God is capricious. That’s Allah. Our God has a plan for our good, always. He can be trusted to stick to His word. One of the main messages of the Prophet books
of the Bible to the wayward kings of Israel and Judah was, “Go on like this,
and you’ll qualify for the curses.” His response, as always, was based on their
decisions to obey or disobey.
Their prophet Jeremiah told them of the potter and the
clay. A lump was started for a beautiful
vase. But the clay was inflexible and
would not respond under the potter’s hands.
The potter was forced to make the clay into an unattractive pot for the
kitchen. Who decided its destiny? The clay.
God then told Jeremiah, “If that nation will repent and turn
from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” (Jeremiah 18-19) But there was another
lesson. When the clay could not be used
for a better purpose, the potter smashed the crude pots into pieces, and threw
them into Hinnom (a trash pit where fires burn continuously). Hinnom is the word source later picked by
Jesus for the word Gehenna, which is properly translated Hell. Jesus told many stories of hell. No one in
Scripture talked about it more than He. Consider
that when you see the next sentimental painting of Jesus; that’s not the whole
picture of Our Lord and King whom we are to fear and love.
God wants to see a nation worshipping Him, having people like
Him, full of His mercy, eager to abide and enjoy relationship with Him. When you sin or forget Him, you should feel
the relationship’s loss, and are eager to ask His forgiveness, and truly repent,
because you are desirous of knowing Him more.
By reading His Word, you also find out about His character, His glory,
what it means to fear Him--and you want to put His character in your own lives
too. You want to be more like Him. But curses
come upon you, and hell at the end, if you rebel against Him, think only of
getting ahead in the world, or if you have no desire to know Him better. Either way that your choice goes, you will
still demonstrate that He is God, the Keeper of blessing and curse promises.
Remember that (after initial salvation) relationship with Him
is demanded to enter our promised land--heaven.
That is His abundant blessing. But few make it there (Matthew 7:13-14),
because few love Him enough to even think about knowing Him or staying away
from the things He hates. Look at history as proof. His blessings to people came
in Genesis 1, but His curses came as early as Genesis 3. That’s how fast mankind learned to sin and
rebel. It pleased God to make Creation; He called it “good.” Man was the height of God’s creation. But men quickly divided up into two groups,
godly and godless. Such a division even happened to Adam and Eve’s two sons,
Cain and Abel. Murder was early in the human race. A disgusted God wiped out mankind, except
eight righteous, and He started over. How can He do that to a people He loves? It’s
the curse side of God. “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews
12:14). When we are initially saved, we
have a new nature; but the old sinful nature doesn’t want to give up the throne
of our lives. Which nature we feed tells
us if we see heaven at the end of our time.
Many readers of Genesis, especially, do not like God of the
Old Testament. They think that mass
drowning of the Flood is the peak of barbarism, and it must be a fable, He
couldn’t kill everyone through the whole world—that can’t be God. So, you think that some of His Word is a
myth? Or that there are really two gods, one capricious and eager to strike
people dead, the other merciful and forgiving?
Or do you think God mellows out between Old and New? Or that the Old Testament should be ejected
from the Bible, that it teaches fairy tales and is only good for moralistic
teaching for children? (many pastors believe that today). There is a saying that you may doubt,
but you should agree by objectively reading Scripture: “God loves righteousness
more than people.” If you feel its
opposite is true, you don’t truly understand the two sides of God, or the
Cross. If God loved people more than
righteousness, He never would have allowed His Son to experience the horrors of
substitutionary death. He would have
just forgiven and forgotten, without the Cross.
But righteousness demanded a payment for sin; His blood was the price
for our sinful lives. (Ed: I disagree with Pawson in his Anselm argument
for atonement, see my other blog). For
proof, read Romans 1; its summary is, when men give God up, God gives man up. Romans tells of the increase in unnatural
sex, the breakup of families, the breakdown of law and order in society. Curses are coming in our nation when we disobey
His laws. We should have learned that
lesson by reading in Scripture about Israel. As an example, God loves us all to
provide food to feed all the people in the world. But wars, genocides, corrupt politics, and
greedy, or obese people, or people unwilling to share their wealth prevent that
from happening. That’s not His
fault—it’s ours. This is the most
effective argument against cynical atheists who want to blame God for
everything. They make these charges
assuming we are all innocent, good people, so God must be guilty of hurting the
innocents. Your response could be, do
you think you don’t deserve premature, violent death? Well, we caused Jesus’ death on the Cross; a
premature, violent death--that was the claim on us for our sin, until Jesus
substituted for us. God is holy. We
deserve hell; we should thank God Who gives any mercy at all towards us. Jesus was equally blunt when discussing the towers
of Siloam, which fell and 18 died. In Luke 13:4-5, He speaks:
….those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed
them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men
who dwelt in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise
perish.”
I am not speculating on this aspect of God. He can be harsh. We all need to repent of our sins, not just
once at initial salvation. The disasters
are reminders of how unpredictable our time on earth is, and we should always be
ready to meet Him. Even the uneducated
cannot doubt God’s active existence. Even though they know nothing of Jesus, He
has given us Creation and our conscience.
So we know He exists and pretty much what’s right. Though we know right from wrong, most still
choose wrong too often. All who have
lived are accountable to Him for sin.
But Jesus’ blood can free a repentant sinner—if they want to form a
continuing relationship with Him, obeying Him, wanting to learn more about Him
from His Word, and cease the worldly continued practice of sin.
God is dealing with the nations, even today, on the same
basis as He dealt with ancient Israel; did you know that there are interesting parallels
between the two? One-third of the Jews died in the holocaust. Likewise, according to Revelation 9:18, 1/3
of the people will die in that great persecution. Today, few of the Jews have turned to
God. In Revelation, likewise, few in
that future time will repent. In fact, when the worst plagues are upon those
living at that future time, most people will curse God (Rev. 16:9). In another
comparison, God’s curses rained upon the Jews in 1940s. But in the same decade, they went from bad
fortune to good fortune; they also obtained future safety in their own new
nation. Likewise, as Revelation predicts,
God curses the earth with shaking and devastation, and many martyrs, that has
never been seen—but this will be followed by the just reign of Jesus in His
kingdom, and peace on the earth.
As I have proved, He is the same God in Old and New
Testaments—a God to fear and to love, defining “love” in proper Greek. Our Christian Bible is ¾ Jewish, and ¼
New. The Old Testament dominates for a
reason; it should still be studied; we learn about the other side of God,
active even today. We also learn from
the Jews’ history, how they were brave and heroic occasionally, they were close
to Him, and so they were blessed; and also how they ignored God and took on the
ways of the world’s corrupt culture. And were cursed. We learn that He is good,
and He is righteous, and demands holiness. He never breaks a promise. Israel, despite its stiff neck, can still be
forgiven by God in the future. They are God’s
chosen people—because they will choose Him in the end times. Many of them will be saved, many become
righteous. In parallel once again, the
church, which is now weak, with a weak gospel and testimony, and often compared
to lukewarm Laodicea, and is lazy about God.
With God’s help, many Gentiles will revive; many will be saved, and be
courageous in their testimony in the last days.
Like Israel of old, our duty as God’s “church” (we’re not speaking of a
building or denomination; it means “called out ones”) is to demonstrate what
God is really like, that if we obey Him, He can forgive despite our past. Like
the Jews. All saved at any time are the
visible body of Christ (I Corinthians 12) to the world. Our acts, not just our words, should be
patience and mercy, and compassion on those lesser than us. We should bless, we
should heal by forgiving. God help us to
learn through history, and know Him, and demonstrate His character traits.
No comments:
Post a Comment