Foundational thinking

In English there’s a difference between the words “man” and “husband,” but not in Dutch. In both cases, they say “man,” as pointed out recently to Jordan by a student of Grace School of the Bible living in Holland.

He wrote in a note, “I love the King James Bible. So many times it helps me to understand my Dutch Bible better. I don’t understand English people saying it’s difficult to read. To me, a Dutch-speaking man not educated in the English language, it is very, very clear that the (KJV) is my greatest help in understanding my Dutch Bible.”

In reading this man’s sentiments in a recent sermon, Jordan stressed, “I say to people all the time, you shouldn’t be mad at the translators of your Bible if they know more about your language than you do. II Thessalonians 2:7 talks about, ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’

“People say, ‘Let? What’s that?’ If you look the word ‘let’ up in an English dictionary, there are six different definitions. Out in the country, Down South, for example, when you rent a piece a land out to somebody, we say, ‘We’re going to let it out.’

“If you try to hit a ball over the net and it hits the net, you say, ‘Let.’ That means it’s a hindered serve and has to be redone. In Exodus 5, Moses says to Pharaoh, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, let my people go!’ In verse 4, Pharaoh says, ‘Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works?’

“Within five verses the word’s used two ways. You say, ‘That’s confusion.’ No, that’s just somebody who knows more about English than you do. You know, one of the greatest ways to learn the language is just to read your Bible. If you read it and let it educate you, not just in what it says but how it’s given in the language you speak, it will elevate your vocabulary and capacity to speak and learn.”

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“Jesus Christ says to the leaders of Israel in Matthew 22:31, ‘Have you not read that which was spoken to you by Moses?’ and he quotes Exodus 3. That’s one of the greatest definitions of inspiration in the Bible. What’s written down there is what God spoke.
That’s what inspiration is. God picks some words, put them on paper, and the living word of the eternal God is in written form, preserved. And what Moses wrote in Exodus 3, Jesus said, ‘You birds got it to read right here,’ and by the way, they didn’t have the original manuscripts.

“They didn’t even have it in the same Hebrew dialect if they had it in Hebrew at all. The fact is most people have come to the conclusion that in the 1st Century in Israel they weren’t speaking Hebrew; they were speaking Aramaic (a language that uses the Hebrew alphabet but is a little different—like Portuguese and English).

“Did you know it’s very possible the New Testament wasn’t even written in Greek to start with? Paul writes a book to the Galatians (modern-day Turkey) and they weren’t for the most part Greek-speaking people. I’m just saying there’s all kind of stuff that gets flown into the wind out here.

“This idea that, ‘Well, they wrote it back there, but it’s been lost, and what we have over here is a dynamic equivalent of that,’ that’s just not what Jesus believed! The doctrine of preservation is a Bible doctrine.

“How can I get in Him when He’s not here? ‘I can get in the tub; I can’t get in Him!’ You say, ‘Well, it didn’t mean that.’ Well, why didn’t it say what it meant?! I’m telling you about what people tell me about where they’ve been with this stuff.

“When it says you’re baptized into Jesus Christ, that’s a supernatural activity. There’s nothing physical about that! If Jesus Christ was standing right here you couldn’t get in Him! Not physically possible; it’s a supernatural thing, though. ‘By one spirit are we all baptized into one body.’

“What it means to be ‘in Christ’ is the spirit of God takes me out of where I was, which was in Adam, and puts me into (changes my location and thus my identity) Jesus Christ and together with Him I died. I was crucified. Then I was buried with Him. He put away the ‘old man.’ Then I was raised with Him to walk in newness of life.

“Not only did I die with Him, was crucified with Him, buried with Him, raised with Him, but I ascended with Him and I sit with Him at the Father’s right hand. I share His authority with Him in the heavens. Why? Because God the Holy Spirit put me in Him. He took me out of who I was and put me into who He is. ‘For me to live is Christ.’ Everything He is is mine!

“You know why Satan doesn’t want you to see this stuff? He doesn’t want you to see THAT! I’ve been reading Ephesians 1 every day for the past six months and I’m just totally captivated by how everything focuses in Him. Verse 4 says, ‘According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.’

“Not to be IN Him; He chose you in Him. Once you’re in Him you’re part of the elect purpose of God and His Son that He established before the foundation of the world that you ‘should be holy and without blame before Him in love.’

“I Peter 1:20 says that Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world was spotless and holy. In John 17:24 He says, ‘Father you loved me before the foundation of the world.’ You know what He says about you and me?

"He says God Almighty today has put you in His Son so He could think about you the same way He thought about His Son before the world began.

“Wow! You see that?! He took you and me and blessed us according to His plan He’s had of what He’s going to accomplish in His Son, and He put you in a program where He thinks about you the same way He thought about His Son. I read that in Ephesians and I think, ‘It can’t get any better than that!’ Then I read the next verse and say, ‘Oops, wrong!’ It gets even better! Verse 5 says, ‘Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.’

“There are 12 blessings Paul lists between verses 4 and 14. When he says, ‘You’re accepted in the beloved,’ what does that make you think of? Where do you go in the Bible to find that Jesus is the Father’s beloved? In Matthew 3, Jesus is coming to begin His earthly ministry and it says, ‘And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’

“He didn’t say ‘in whom I am pleased.’ He said ‘in whom I am PLENTY pleased.’ ‘I’m ecstatic! I’m pushing it to the wall. I can’t get any more pleased than I’m pleased with Him. He’s my beloved!’ He’s the ‘apple of my eye,’ the Old Testament says.

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“In the Bible, when you read a passage about the end of the world and then one that says “world without end,” obviously these are contradictory terms that make you stop and think.

Isaiah 45:17 says, “But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”

“You can see that even in the prophetic program, not just in Paul, the Bible talks about and expects the world to not end but to go on,” says Jordan. “We use the term world in several different ways. Sometimes we refer to the planet we live on. Sometimes you talk about the ‘Wide World of Sports.’ We use that word world in the sense of an organized system of activity were involved in.

“We talk about the world tomorrow. We talk about an age—like the Iron Age. Every time the word ‘world’ appears in the Bible it’s not talking about the earth; most of the time it’s not. In Isa. 23:17, for one example, when it talks about ‘the kingdoms of the world,’ the term is talking about the organization of the affairs that are taking place on the planet.

“So when you go back over to Paul and he talks about a ‘world without end,’ he’s talking about this organized system going on that’s never going to end. But when Jesus talks about the end of the world, He says there is an organized system that IS going to end. Paul talks about this present evil world. How long do you think that’s going to last? Not forever.

“II Peter 4 says, ‘For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;
[5] And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.’

“There was a way things were organized before the Flood that’s different from the way things are organized after the Flood, but not only that, Rev. 11:15 says, ‘And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.’

“The way things were organized with Satan as the prince of the world, and the one in control of the world system, is all going to give way into a new world order headed up by the Lord Jesus Christ.”

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Jordan continues, “Nostradamus. You still reading that outdated guy?! Somebody says, ‘Well, don’t you know about the Planet X that’s out there?’ It doesn’t exist—that’s just bad, bogus science! People say, ‘Well, there’s going to be the pole shift; the solar flares.’ All of that is just debunked bad science! It’s myths, lies; it’s just stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And you compare that with the historically, validatable, predictive prophecy of the Bible and you say, ‘I can trust what the Bible says.’

“Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that all the world had to be taxed. In order to fulfill that prophecy, Joseph had to take Mary and move her from Nazareth to Bethlehem a week before she’s going to deliver. That isn’t a normal kind of a thing that happened and he used the pagan emperor of Rome to instigate the mechanics to get them moved so that the boy was born in exactly the place God, seven hundred years before, said He would be born!

“Some people will say, ‘Well, Micah couldn’t have known that 700 years before so it had to have been written later.’ Listen to me, something that is historically validatable to have happened in predictive prophecy like that, and it comes to pass, is mathematically, statistically evidence of the validity of the statement and the source it came from.

“You’re familiar today with the science of DNA. DNA validation is simply the use of the statistical probability. When they say it’s ‘a certainty that this is your DNA, not anybody else’s, and we can take your life, convict you and put you in prison forever because we know that it’s an absurdity not to believe this is your DNA,’ they’re saying there’s a mathematical, statistical probability that the code that comes from your DNA is yours and not anybody else’s. And when something is considered to be in statistical probability of ten to the 47th power, it is an absurdity not to believe it’s true.

“When you take a predictive prophecy like where He’s going to be born 700 years before the historical certainty of that, it gives you a mathematical . . . people say you can’t prove the Bible scientifically but here you can! There’s a mathematically, statistically, scientifically demonstrative proof of the historic reliability of God’s Word.

“Do you know if you took eight prophecies like that . . . could you find eight pre-statements about Jesus Christ that were fulfilled in His life? I bet you could find 16. I’ve got a list of almost 300. If you got eight of them you’d have a statistical probability of ten to something like the 27th power, and if you had 16, it would be 10th to the 54th power, and if you’ve got 10th to the 54th power, it would be an absolute scientific absurdity not to believe it’s true!

“Isaiah 41 said, ‘You know how you know I’m God? Because I can tell you the future and make it come to pass and it comes to pass just exactly the way I said it and that’s the way I prove myself.’ The Bible is a demonstratively, validatable proof.

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“History’s greatest secular historians (like Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’) talk to you about the translation of the Old Testament into Greek called the Septuagint, and everybody will tell you that 200 years before the time of Christ the Septuagint was available. It is historically accurate to say the Bible was translated into Greek several hundred years before Christ.

“You know what that Greek translation of the Septuagint had in it? Malachi 5:2. The same thing your Bible says. Every historian that ever lived who talked about this acknowledges that that prophecy lived at least 250 years before Christ in the text there. Go look at Encyclopedia Britannica or look at Wikipedia, they’ll all tell you that.

“There is written into the fabric of Scripture some of the most fascinating patterns that demonstrate to you that the person who wrote the Scripture back in Genesis and Exodus knew what was going to happen over here in our day.

“And he wrote those passages back there to give you a prophetic picture of future events down to details that are inexplicable other than the fact that the person who wrote back there knew what was going to happen over here. We call that typology.”