Standing on a bough

I Thessalonians 5 starts out with Paul assuring, “But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. [2] For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.”

Jordan explains, “The reason they didn’t need Paul to write to them is they understood him. He’s saying, ‘You already understand all this stuff. I taught it to you while I was there!’

“If you study II Thessalonians 2 it’s quite clear that one of the ways that, if you ever wanted to know what Paul did in Acts 17 when he went to Thessalonica and ‘as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures,
[3] Opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ.’

“In II Thessalonians 2: 3-5, Paul talks about the Antichrist, the son of perdition and the ‘sitting in the temple of God shewing himself to be God.’ He says, ‘It’s just like I taught you when I was there!’ Well, that tells you what he taught. He went through Daniel 9 and then drew time past, but now, the ages to come and laid that thing out there. He skinned that cat right away and proved that when Jesus Christ came, He came right on God’s time table and He was exactly who the Bible said He was and Israel rejected Him just like God said they were going to do.

“It’s interesting how you get truth from a remoter context. Everybody talks about the ‘first mention’ principle, and that works sometimes and sometimes doesn’t, but one principle that will always work is truth from a remoter context. You know, you use the Scripture over here to shed light on a Scripture over there and, ‘Wow, look how interesting it is to enlighten you!’ The prophetic program works on a time schedule and that’s why it works that way.

“Leviticus 23, for example, gives the redemption calendar of Israel. Every year they went through those seven feasts and what they did is lay out God’s calendar of redemption for the nation--something they recycled every year and it was designed to teach them some doctrine. It’s historically being fulfilled and they should have been able to recognize and say, ‘This is that,' and see it. Unfortunately, most of the time they were blind and didn’t.

“Just as there’s a pattern of divine edification in Paul’s epistles and the Hebrew epistles and the four gospels, there’s also a pattern to the history of the nation Israel and Moses standing on the bough of Israel’s history as a nation he lays it out and prophecies in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28-32.

“The history of Israel is identified in seasons of judgments and cycles of chastisement. In Lev. 26, you have the cycles of sevens over and over in the Bible. That’s what Daniel’s 70th week is all about. It’s the cycles of sevens and 49s and the 490s--all these different cycles prophecy goes through.

“But we don’t live in the prophetic program today, and the prophetic cycles God put in the nation Israel and put them through in their history, those have been interrupted.

“Today, God has set Israel aside and interrupted the prophetic program and introduced the dispensation of grace and the prophetic times and seasons are not available to us to be able to look out at the world and identify.

“In Luke 21, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘When you see these things happen—specific identifiable events--earthquakes, for example,’ that’s specific, identifiable things where you could say, ‘This is it and this isn’t it.’

“Jesus says, ‘When you see those things look up; your redemption draws nigh. The Second Advent’s not very far.’ They lived by signs and seasons. We don’t have those today. There are no signs of the times today because these aren’t the times of the signs.”