Shaken

The commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” It didn’t mean, “Don’t you cut your grass on Saturday,” explains Jordan. “It didn’t mean, ‘Boy, you just need one day a week off.’ It meant every Saturday, you sit down and rehearse in your mind what my purpose in creation is and don’t forget you’re part in it.

“Of course, Israel didn’t do that. My point is God had a place He was going to dwell, but when sin came in, He couldn’t dwell there. And when the Flood came, He went in there, and that piece of ground that He had prepared for His house to come live, He broke it up; He destroyed it. Took a sledgehammer and just beat the fire out of it and broke up all that place where it isn’t compatible for His house to dwell.

“He said, ‘I created everything to live there and now I’ve messed it up so I can’t live there. Job, there’s a problem in my creation that’s got to be resolved before I can come and live there. I’ve got an enemy.’

Job 38 says, [11] And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?
[12] Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; 13] That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?

“God says Job, I got the sun all ready for it to come and shake the earth.’ And I love what He says, verse 13, did you ever read in Isaiah 24 and Luke 21 about the powers of heaven being shaken? What’s that talking about? Gravity is a power of heaven. You know what makes the tide? The movement of the moon.

“They know 10 years from now when it’s going to be high tide and low tide based on where the moon is. There’s a mathematical formula based on the gravitational pull that determines that. The powers. And He says, ‘Job, I’ve got everything ready for the sun to shake the wicked out of the earth that the high arm of my enemy could be broken. The things necessary to accomplish the day of my wrath I’ve got it ready.’

“There’s a fascinating thing in the Bible with regard to genealogies. If you take all the genealogies in Luke and Matthew together and you mesh them together, you’ll discover all the genealogies will tend to leave people out for doctrinal reasons. But it’s fascinating that when you list the genealogy of Christ, if you get the whole list, there is Chronicles 1.

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“II Timothy 1:15. Think about that; everybody Paul had been preaching and ministering to in Asia at this point had turned away from him. When Paul concluded his ministry he’s telling you, the people coming after me are going to be apostate. You know the condition you’re going to find the church fathers in?

“People say, ‘Well, let’s go back and see what the early church said,' but they don’t mean the church in Scripture; they mean the church after the close of Scripture. Well, Paul says you better watch out for those birds because they’re apostate. Our starting position is that the church fathers were apostate.

“Timothy 3:14. What are you supposed to do? ‘But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.’

“It’s the Scripture that can save you from the apostasy all these people are going out into. So the issue is, you need to go by the Book, Tim, and by the way, chapter 2, go by the Book rightly divided. Because the apostates are going to use the Scripture, but twist it.

“So when you start with the study of manuscript evidence and the history of the Bible, you have to start with a very careful understanding that the people you’re going to be dealing with, for the most part, are already departed from Paul. They didn’t depart from the Scripture, they departed from an understanding of the distinctiveness of Paul’s ministry and the message of what God’s doing today.

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“A couple of hundred years ago a man wrote an article that has circulated in which it said truth is lost in a three-step process. He was talking about history.

“First they lost the distinctive ministry of Paul. Once they lost that, and the separateness of Paul’s ministry, and the distinction between Israel and the Body of Christ, between law and grace, then they lost the distinction between the Rapture and the Second Coming.

“Because if there’s no distinction between Israel and the Body of Christ, then there wouldn’t be any need to have a conclusion to the Body of Christ program and you wouldn’t need two conclusions.

"Once they lost, then they lost the truth of justification by grace through faith alone as revealed in Paul’s epistles.

"That led basically to a long period of time in history called the Dark Ages. At the end of the Dark Ages, the truth was recovered but in the opposite order.”