When reprobate minds take over

Talking about the growing number of public people who mock Christians, Jordan says, “They’ve always felt that way; they just haven’t been free to say it. A guy like Bill Maher didn’t just get the attitude he has. He’s always felt that way, he just always hasn’t had an (accepting) audience.

“The influence of Christianity in our culture has diminished to the point now where all these people are free to come out of the closet. They’re not in the gutter anymore; they’re out running wild.

*****

“God didn’t establish America. After our country got to going gangbusters, there was a doctrine called ‘manifest destiny’; that it was the manifest, divinely-ordained destiny of the American colonists to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

"Out of that has come an idea that is called ‘American exceptionalism.’ You get the idea that everything that America’s ever done was God-ordained and God-blessed but it ain’t so.

“When you have a founding doctrine that says we hold these truths to be self-evident and eliminate any divine authority for saying these things, you shouldn’t be so quick to say that everything our nation’s done has been God-blessed when the nation’s founder said it was human-blessed.

“I think we live in the greatest country that’s ever existed among Gentile nations but that’s had nothing to do with us being Israel. It was the direct result of the social impact of the Protestant Reformation in recovering Pauline truth about justification, and taking God’s Word and having it have a social impact on the culture, that brought a small group of people out of that.

“When they came to this country, they came with all kinds of different religious heresy. That’s why you had to have a First Amendment that said the federal government would make no laws establishing religion. The colonies did. You remember that? But the federal government wouldn’t make one. Why? Because there was such religious heresy among the colonies that there would have been a war!

“As the verse says, ‘Righteousness exalts a nation; sin is a reproach to any people.’ The one great thing about our nation has been that the Word of God has had the freedom and liberty to be preached and it’s been preached.

“The course of a nation is set by the amount of sound doctrine resident in the populous. That’s what you learn from Israel. You learn that even the nation God established and put in the earth, if it didn’t contain and have in its populous sound doctrine, living in the identity God gave them, that even that nation would lose its glory. Now that nation is an example to every nation.

*****

“When they overthrew the Ukrainian government and sent the Russian puppet that was there packing, the guy they selected to be the new head of their government was a Baptist preacher. Now the country’s not Baptist; it’s Eastern Orthodox.

“You couldn’t have done in that in America. I say you couldn’t, but you wouldn’t do that in America today. I’m just saying.

“Israel forsook the Word of God and what happened? They got treated just like any other nation. Our nation, or any other nation does that, if you want an explanation about what’s happening to our culture, it’s because God’s Word has been kicked out, unbelieved, corrupted and disregarded. That reprobate mind that comes that doesn’t want to retain God in its knowledge takes over.

****

“In I Kings 12, Solomon’s died and his two boys are going to take over the kingdom, but two of them can’t sit on the throne so one of them goes up into the northern ten tribes and says, ‘We’ll have a kingdom up here,’ and that’s why you have the northern tribes of Israel called the nation Israel and the southern two tribes called Judah.

“Verses 25-27 says, ‘Then Jeroboam built Shechem in mount Ephraim, and dwelt therein; and went out from thence, and built Penuel.
[26] And Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David:
[27] If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah.’

“You see he knows where the king ought to be. Jerusalem is the city of the great king, as Jesus Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:35. God had a rule in Israel that three times a year every Israeli male had to go to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles and worship (Deut. 16:16).

“Israel had three tithes, not one. The first tithe supported the government and the second tithe you kept for yourself. Read Deuteronomy 14. The second tithe was called the ‘festival tithe.’ It was a tithe you used to finance your trip three times a year to Jerusalem to worship.

“I mean, if you lived a long way away, what are you going to do? Take a bunch of sheep with you? No, you’re going to take your money down there and buy some sheep, buy the lambs, buy whatever it is that you’re going to sacrifice.

“He doesn’t just say go sacrifice; God says, ‘Go, party hearty. Have a good time. It’s a celebration.’ You know where the word holiday comes from? It’s taken from the term ‘holy day.’ It’s a time where they were to go celebrate the things of the Lord.

“Jeroboam understands that if all the men go down to Jerusalem three times a year, where’s their heart going to be? They’re going to value Jerusalem. So what does he do?

"Verse 28 says, ‘Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.’

“Uh-oh. What’s the commandment say? Don’t do that. Where would he have gotten that idea? Didn’t you read that in Exodus 32 where Aaron makes them a golden calf?

“He’s quoting Aaron from Exodus 32. He’s going to try and counterfeit what God did in Israel and he’s going to try to counterfeit the lie that the religious system introduced in Israel. He set one (house of worship) up in Bethel and the other in Dan. The top of his kingdom and the bottom of his kingdom.

“Verses 32-33 say, And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made.
[33] So he offered upon the altar which he had made in Bethel the fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month which he had devised of his own heart; and ordained a feast unto the children of Israel: and he offered upon the altar, and burnt incense.

“You see what he does? He says, ‘I’ll go set up my own religious system and I’ll make it look just like what’s in Jerusalem. I’m going to have priests like they have; sacrifices like they have. I’m going to have houses of worship; in fact, I’ll have more than they have. I’ll outdo them two-to-one.’

“Israel was to have one temple, not temples plural. What they did up in the northern kingdom is they just built more and more and more places to go worship God. That was apostasy, leaving what God told them to do to go after a religion of their own making.

"But notice they made it LOOK like the real thing! Corruption of truth is always designed to look like the real thing. So Israel is corrupted into apostasy and the result is they’re taken into captivity.”

Access connection

When you “pray without ceasing,” as Paul prescribes in I Thessalonians 5:17, the idea is to have a constant inner communion with God.

“Instead of just having that internal dialogue, what we call self-talk, with yourself, you realize that God the Holy Spirit, who lives within your spirit, wants to commune with you,” said Jordan in his Sunday night study. “He wants you to talk to Him about what’s going on in your life. When you begin to do that, instead of just thinking, ‘Well, should I do this or shouldn’t I do that,’ you think, ‘Lord, should I do this or that.’ All of a sudden there’s accountability.

“When you realize every thought you have, God Himself is right there with you, hearing you say it, you don’t have to pray through the roof; He’s right there with you. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to go to some temple to pray.

“What you need is to be conscious of the fact that there’s that uninterrupted, constant, personal communion in your inner man between you and your Father. When you realize that, all of a sudden your thinking process becomes different.

“I used to work with Brother Reynolds down at the Mobile Rescue Mission, and you’d be sitting talking to Brother Reynolds and sometimes you couldn’t figure out if he was talking to you or the Lord. You’d be talking to him and he’d say, ‘Lord, now I pray you’d bless so and so,’ and then he’d say, ‘Ricky, do this.’

“Early on I got a little confused by that but then I came to appreciate it because I realized he just had that constant dialogue with the Lord and when he spoke out . . . you see, I have that dialogue in my heart, you don’t hear it, but if I speak it, if I talk audibly, then you hear what I’m saying. That’s a wonderful thing and when Paul says, ‘I would that men would pray everywhere,’ that’s the kind of praying he’s talking about.

*****

“When Paul talks about ‘lifting up holy hands,’ he’s not talking about just the physical posture you’re in, and when you get caught up in the physical posture, thinking that’s making prayer more prayer, you’ve missed it.

“There’s something Paul had in mind when he talks about holy hands because there’s a thing in Scripture where your hands aren’t holy. He’s not talking about physical cleanliness; he’s talking about spiritual cleanliness.

“Isaiah 1: 15-16 says, And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
[16] Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;

“He’s talking about the fact the nation has been corrupted with the false religions; the Baal worship. They’re in complete spiritual revolt against God’s Word. Their hands are full of blood.

“You see, when Paul talks about ‘lifting up holy hands,’ he’s talking about having a prayer life that is not connected with apostasy. He’s talking about being sound in the truth; he’s not just talking about swaying to the music.

“You watch people on TV who say, ‘Lift up your hands and worship God,’ and they make that an issue! And you begin to check their doctrine and see they are corrupters. That’s doing to the church exactly what Israel had done to the Word of God back in the Book of Isaiah!

*****

“In your prayer life and talking to God, you don’t talk to Him doubting His grace to you. If you talk to God wrong (wrongly dividing the Word), He doesn’t come along and go, “Ah-ha-ha, I caught you!’

“What happens is if you talk to Him about it, you begin to learn the Scripture and the Scripture begins to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if I’m trying to confess my sins to get God to forgive me, and I read over in Romans that God doesn’t impute sin to me, how does that work?’

“You see what the Scripture will do? It will eventually cause some dissonance. In order for someone to change their mind about something, you first have to create a situation of confusion where they question what they’ve been believing and another passage will bring dissonance and then you have to go and start learning.

“I talk to people all the time who come to that. And that’s when you begin to understand something about right division and you begin on your own, able to find out what the answers are.

*****

“Prayer’s not something you use as a way to get what you want from God. It’s not a ritual to make you more spiritual. God’s not some vending machine up in the sky.

“Paul says in Romans 8, ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. [27] And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’

“The Spirit of God is going to take the Word of God, and with the sound doctrine out of the Word, He’s going to guide your life. How? Through the application of sound doctrine out of the Word of God rightly divided. That’s how the Holy Spirit guides our intercession to the real needs.

“You see, the Holy Spirit can get right down to the deepest real need in the issue. Not the surface need but the REAL issue; the spiritual issue underneath the surface.

“ ‘With groanings that can’t be uttered.’ You remember the Lord Jesus Christ stood at the grave of Lazarus in John 11:35? Every kid in a Scripture-quoting contest knows the verse; it's the shortest one in the Bible: ‘Jesus wept.’

"Tears are called “agony in solution.” There came a point where there wasn’t anything to say; He just wept. He couldn’t utter the sorrow but He expressed it.

“Paul says ‘we know that all things work together for good.’ That verse has a context. We know that all this application of sound doctrine to the details of our life works good and what is the good? It’s that we would be conformed to the image of Christ.

*****

“I think Ephesians 3:12 is one of the great prayer passages in Paul’s epistles that’s overlooked most of the time. He writes, ‘In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.’

“You understand you can come to God that way? Look back at chapter 2:18: ‘For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.’ We have access right into the hearing of the Father ‘by the faith OF him.’

"Talking to Peter in Galatians 15, Paul refers to the faith OF Jesus Christ. He reasons, 'Even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.'

“It’s not your performance, it’s HIS performance! Our justification before God is not based upon what we do; it’s based upon HIS trustworthiness—what He’s done. We’re justified by HIS faith in God’s Word. Christ’s faithfulness is our resting place. He’s who God trusts and we can trust Him too. There’s a lot of comfort and peace in that.

*****

“When we pray ‘in the name of Jesus’ (Paul, in Ephesians 5, says that’s how we are to pray), that’s not a formula that you add at the end of your prayers. That’s the attitude with which you approach God.

“It’s an expression of our knowledge that we have no righteousness of our own; no right of our own to approach God, but Jesus Christ has given us His right, His righteousness and we come boldly with confidence by the faith of Him.

"You see, the purpose of Christ in redemption, in saving us, is to give us a personal relationship with God and that’s the basis of prayer; it’s not trying to get something from God.

“It’s not getting material or financial gain from God. Paul says ‘having food and raiment let us therewith be content.’ If ‘godliness with contentment is great gain,’ what does God consider to be great gain? I mean, what do you really need anyway?

*****

"Our faith resting in the truth of God’s Word to us allows the Holy Spirit the liberty to take that truth of who we are in Christ and bring it into our experience, and we have access with confidence by the faithfulness OF Him; by His trustworthiness.

“Paul writes in Philippians 3, ‘Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.’

“The guy’s been saved 35 years and he’s still saying, ‘All I want is to know Him.’ “You see how HE'S the object?!”

Seriously cursed and scattered

Among the curses God promises disobedient Israel in Deuteronomy 28 is, "Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity."

“When you get to Hosea, he talks about their births, and their wombs and how even conceiving is going to be taken away from them,” explains Jordan. “They’re going to lose the ability to bear children. With children in the womb, they’re going to be aborted, and there’s going to be sterility where He’s going to cut the nation down and that’s just part of the judgments He’s given them back here.

“Verses 45-46 says, ‘Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee. [46] And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever.’

“So when they come upon them, it’s a sign; it’s something that demonstrates, ‘Look, I told you it was going to happen; I told you what would happen if you broke the covenant and now here it comes!’ It’s a sign of God keeping His Word. They’re going to SEE the judgment.

"In verses 34-35, God says, ‘So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.
[35] The LORD shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head.’

“A sign is something you can see and God’s literally going to bring that judgment on them just as He told them He would.

“Verse 47-51 says, ‘Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;
[48] Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.
[49] The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;
[50] A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:
[51] And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.’

“You read that and you say, ‘Whoa, that sounds pretty serious!’ That’s what Hosea is talking to them about coming to pass.

“Hosea 9 says, [2] The floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail in her.
[3] They shall not dwell in the LORD's land; but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean things in Assyria.

“Notice they’re going to be scattered among the Gentiles and they’ll no longer be in ‘the Lord’s land.’ This is one of those verses that helps you to see God’s attitude about the land of Israel.

*****

“We call it the land of Palestine sometime because the Roman Empire gave the name ‘the land of Palestine’ to the land of Israel. Over 200 times in your Bible, the God of the Bible is called the God of Israel. The land of Israel is ‘the Lord’s land.’

“The name Palestine got attached to the land in the 2^nd Century. The Romans were so frustrated with the rebellious Israelis in the land of Israel in 70 A.D. that when Titus came in and destroyed the temple and so forth, he didn’t deport the Jews; he just tried to bring them under control.

“In 115 A.D. they rebelled again and in 135 A.D. they rebelled again, and the last time the Romans literally took the Jews and uprooted them, and deported them out of the land, and renamed the land after Israel’s enemies on the northern coast; the Philistines. That’s where the land of Palestine got its name.

“Now, that means the original inhabitants of the land of Palestine were Israelis. When you hear about the Palestinians in our day, that is a political term that developed in the mid-1960s and ’70s.

“Yasser Arafat is actually the one who made that a real popular thing, talking about the Palestinian people and a homeland for them and all that stuff.

“All of that is the result of the meddling of the Europeans who won World War II. They went into the Middle East and gave so many square acres to each one of these different countries and drew these (border) lines arbitrarily. The land of Iraq, for example, is really ethnically, and historically, three different nations of people in there.

“After World War II, by the way, Yugoslavia, if you remember Tito, they drew it so you had the Serbs and the Albanians and all. You have people who HATE each other and that’s why we wound up with Bill Clinton as president bombing some of them dudes, trying to make them not kill each other.

“Tito, a communist dictator, ran Yugoslavia for years because he had the gun. But there’s a lot of politically artificial things going on, and they actually had the land and stuff for the Palestinians to be in but Jordan wouldn’t give it to them.

“You see, all this political stuff you read about now has nothing to do with what you read in the Bible. When you read Joel 3 about the Palestinians, you’re not reading about the same Palestinians you’re thinking about from the news today, who are trying to get people to be anti-Israel. You’re reading about things in the land of Israel.

“The reason he uses the title in Hosea about ‘the Lord’s land’ is you go back to Leviticus 25:21, when you’re looking at the Levitical laws and regulations, and God says, ‘Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years.
[22] And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store.
[23] The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.
[24] And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant redemption for the land.’

“Israel had to tend to the land. They were in possession of God’s land, and the way they treated that land, and the reason they’re cast out of that land so the land can enjoy its Sabbaths, is because they they were His stewards and possessors (the ones through whom He was going to inherit that land) but were violating God’s land.

*****

“II Chronicles 7:20 says, ‘Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations.’

“You need to think about that. Because when all the nations of the earth, here it is 2,000 years after the time of Christ, and the nation Israel is still a curse word, a byword, in the tongues of the nations.

“You know, there’s a sense in which Israel is a miraculous nation. The 'burning bush' is the symbol in the nation; they’re burned but they’re not consumed.

“I’m trying to think of the guy’s name but one of the apologetics he used for proving the Bible is the Word of God is the nation Israel; the Jew. Because God said they would never cease to exist and there’s every reason in the world for that nation not to exist.

“There’s been 3,500 years of people trying to destroy Israel off the face of the earth and they’ve never gotten them destroyed. Why? Because God said He’s going to preserve them, but He didn’t say He was always going to preserve them in their land.

“He’s telling them, ‘If you don’t worship me, I’ll put you out of MY land which I’ve given you.’ And that’s exactly what’s happened.

*****

“Ezekiel 36:6 says, ‘Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen.’

“He tells them, ‘Go prophesy to the mountains and the rivers.’ In essence, God says, ‘Go explain to the land why I’m going to do what I’m going to do.’ Because He’s going to send judgment in there and the enemy’s going to wipe out the land. He’s going to make the land not bring forth fruit, the land’s designed to be harvested. He’s going to stop it from doing its job!

“He says, ‘Go explain why that’s happening and how long it’s going to be.’ Verse 16 says, 'Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
[17] Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman.’

“To understand that, you’ve got to go back to Leviticus 15. When a woman had an issue of blood, she was to be removed out of the camp and was to be unclean for a period of time. In order for her to come back in, she had to do some things. There was a ritual for her to be purified. She had to be baptized; she had to be washed.

“He says, ‘I’m going to remove Israel out of the land because they’ve defiled the land with blood.’ Verse 18 says, ‘Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and for their idols wherewith they had polluted it.’

“When He talks about the blood, He’s not talking about warfare. He’s talking about the thing of shedding the blood of the innocent; the idolatry. They’ve defiled themselves and the land by shedding the blood of the offerings that they’ve made to these idols.

“It turned out they're offering the blood of their own children it gets to be so bad! But instead of offering the blood of the Levitical offerings, they’re offering this defiling blood.

“So he says in verse 19, ‘And I scattered them among the heathen, and they were dispersed through the countries: according to their way and according to their doings I judged them.’

“The Lord’s saying, ‘I’ve literally gotten them out of the land so they could quit defiling the land.’ ”

Behind the curtain . . .

The "middle wall of partition" between Jew and Gentile, the circumcision and the uncircumcision, is literally the marker whereby you can identify where you are dispensationally.

“But there’s another wall,” says Jordan. “Even on Israel’s side, on the right side of the wall of blessing of the middle wall of partition, there was a wall beyond the middle wall of partition. God made it abundantly clear that it was impossible for sinful man just to come into the presence of Him, the Holy One of Israel.

“Even though they lived on the right side, and were not excluded as the uncircumcision were, they couldn’t just walk in to the presence of God because they, too, were sons of Adam.

A great illustration of that is in Exodus 33: [18] And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.
[19] And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.
[20] And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

“Moses says, ‘Show me your presence, show me your glory,’ and God says, ‘Okay, I’m going to take my glory and let it pass right in front of you; I’m going to let you see it.’

“It’s, ‘Boy, I just got all those blessings but wait, there’s a wall. I can get so much, but I can’t see His face.’ God put up a wall, even between Him and Israel.

*****

“When God gave the tabernacle and is going to live in it (later on in the temple), He gives Moses the dimensions of it. It’s going to be a tent. There’s going to be an opening and there’s going to be an altar. Then there’s a laver to wash. There’s another little building inside and in that is the table of shewbread and the altar of incense and the candlestick.

“The priests would make the sacrifice, put the blood upon the altar, and they’d go in there and wash and come and minister, but there’s another wall. There’s the Ark of the Covenant, the ‘mercy seat,’ but there’s a wall inside.

“He called the outer part the ‘court’ and the inside the ‘holy place,’ and then there was the Holiest of Holies. And He says, ‘My presence is going to manifest itself right there. My glory is going to dwell right there.’ But when it does, He puts up a curtain that keeps them out!

“There’s another wall where they can’t go in. In fact, the only time the priests go in here, they work in here all year long, but they don’t go in there. Only one man in Israel can go in there and he can only go in there one time a year and he has to go in with blood.

“The reason he’s going in there is to put blood on the mercy seat. He’s not going in there just to say, ‘Woo, I went in and saw God today!’ He’s going in there to apply the blood on the mercy seat. That mercy seat, that Ark of the Covenant, was a little box. It had a lid on it. It’s sort of like a cedar chest.

“You know, your grandma had a cedar chest at the end of the bed where she had all the blankets and stuff in.

“In that box, there were the Ten Commandments; the stones that Moses got on the mountain from God. There was the ‘little pot of manna’ and then there was Aaron’s rod. This is why it’s called the Ark of the Testimony.

“The problem with that thing is what have they done with the commandments? They broke them because this is the copy.

“Here’s the glory of God up here. The glory of God is simply the manifestation of the character of God. It’s in a blazing light. In Ezekiel 1, He says the appearance of that glory is like a bow in the day that it rains.

“The light was like a rainbow. You know who had the original coat of many colors? The Lord Jesus Christ did when He walked in the Garden with Adam. Adam had on a garment of light and that refracted light of colors, and the glory of God, shone out of there from that place. But the problem was there’s the broken law in here, and by the law is the knowledge of sin.

“So, once a year they would go in and put that blood on that mercy seat and you’ve got the blood covering over as an atonement, a covering for their souls, that stood between the glory of God and the sinfulness of man.

“That thing is in that little room where God’s glory is and God puts everybody else out. Exodus 40: [20] And he took and put the testimony into the ark, and set the staves on the ark, and put the mercy seat above upon the ark:
[21] And he brought the ark into the tabernacle, and set up the vail of the covering, and covered the ark of the testimony; as the LORD commanded Moses.
[22] And he put the table in the tent of the congregation, upon the side of the tabernacle northward, without the vail.

“That’s talking about where He puts the furniture. Within the veil He puts the ark. That thing was about a foot thick and it’s made out of animal skins and it took, according to history books, 300 people because it was so heavy. I can’t imagine 300  people getting in that little space, but the idea was it was big, heavy and bulky and it was designed to keep out any light and any people. And it separated the priests.

“Exodus 30:10 says, ‘And Aaron shall make an atonement upon the horns of it once in a year with the blood of the sin offering of atonements: once in the year shall he make atonement upon it throughout your generations: it is most holy unto the LORD.’

“Only one time a year could one man, the high priest, go in there. The only one that ever went in that room that wasn’t a high priest was Moses. God let Moses go in but after Aaron starts it was nobody but the high priest.

“If you went in there and you weren’t supposed to, you know what happened to you? Yeah, he said ‘thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.’ You could lose your life!

“The reason the two sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, got killed is they put strange fire on the altar. Strange fire meant fire God didn’t light. They got there one day, they got up late, they didn’t have the fire burning, and they went over and said, ‘The fire’s out here, we’ll fix it,’ and took their Bic lighters out (I’m embellishing, you understand) and lit it themselves and they dropped dead. God killed them. He didn’t want strange, inappropriate fire. He had to be the one who started it.

“You see, you couldn’t go in there all the time. He could only go in there once a year and Leviticus 16 is ‘the day of atonement’ in Israel where that one time a year they sent the scapegoat away, they slew the goat, and he, the high priest, would take the blood and put it in and cover up.

"He did it once a year because one day the Lord Jesus Christ is going to come and fulfill the picture and once for all make the sacrifice.”

Nothing superfluous about sun standing still

Joshua 9:27 says, “And Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation, and for the altar of the LORD, even unto this day, in the place which he should choose.”

Jordan explains, “Joshua literally brought the Gibeonites out of paganism, out of the darkness of heathenism and the power of the Adversary, and taught them the oracles, the truth, the worship of Jehovah. The Gibeonites have a long history in Israel; you’ll find them in Ezra, Chronicles and so forth; their descendants serving in the temple.

“Joshua 10 goes on, ‘Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
[13] And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
[14] And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for Israel.’

“Joshua’s saying to God, ‘We need more time to kill everybody, so stop the time and let us go get them.’ When you read it, that’s what it sounds like, but people don’t like that and say, ‘How in the world could you do that?!’

Jeremiah 33 says, ‘And the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah, saying,
[20] Thus saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season;
[21] Then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers.’

“God says, ‘If you can break the covenant that I have with Creation, then my integrity is at stake,’ and when He says, ‘That there should not be day and night in their season,’ that is, 'The way they’re supposed to happen, if you can break that . . .'

“So people say, ‘If God extended the day back here, made it stand still and it didn’t work like it’s supposed to normally work, then God’s integrity is at stake.'

"If that’s the case, and I personally don’t think it is, what would it mean that the sun stood still? Well, if you tell a kid, ‘Stand still, boy!’ what do you mean by that? ‘STOP!’

“What does the sun do? The sun shines. So when He said that the sun would stop, He’s telling the sun to stop shining; stop doing what it does. Well, how would you stop the sun from shining?

“When it says Joshua spake to the Lord, the implication is if you’re going to talk to God, you have to have some revelation from God to do it. Joshua would have had to have had some reason to believe this was something God would or could do and be consistent with Himself.

“Elihu says in Job 36, ‘Suffer me a little, and I will shew thee that I have yet to speak on God's behalf.
[3] I will fetch my knowledge from afar, and will ascribe righteousness to my Maker.
[4] For truly my words shall not be false: he that is perfect in knowledge is with thee.’

“Back in Exodus 10:22, when God made darkness fall upon Egypt for three days, it says, “And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days:
[23] They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days: but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.”

“In Acts 27, when Paul says we didn’t see the sun for these many days, it doesn’t mean the sun wasn’t there. It means God put a thick canopy between it so the light couldn’t get through.

“In Ezekiel 32, you’ll notice that in the tribulation period, when it talks about the sun being darkened and the moon turning into blood, that’s the mechanics of how He’s going to do that.

“Deuteronomy 31:15 says ‘the LORD appeared in the tabernacle in a pillar of a cloud: and the pillar of the cloud stood over the door of the tabernacle.’ How’s He going to do it? He’s going to do it with a cloud cover.

“Job 9:6, talking about what God can do, says, ‘Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.
[7] Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.’ That’s past tense. Job says this is something God has done in the past.

“Joshua would have understood that God could do these things and that the Book of Job, when he talks about doing it, he could have understood it to be that God would put a cloud cover over the sun; stop the sunshine.

“Why would that be what He would want? Joshua 10 says 'the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.’

“If you’re in the midst of something, you’re in the middle of it. It’s high noon and high noon is hot. His troops marched all night, they fought all morning; now you’re in the heat of the day and he’s saying, ‘Give us some relief from the heat of the day so we can finish killing everybody.’

"Now, that’s the idea when people say it wasn’t a miracle that he was asking for; it was that God would give them relief from the sun.

“If you want to believe that you’re welcome to, and I know a lot of good people who believe that, but the verse doesn’t say the sun quit shining. If the Bible had wanted to say, ‘Sun, don’t shine,’ it could have said it when it says, ‘Sun, stand thou still,’ and it says to the moon, ‘Be stayed.’ Well, the moon doesn’t shine. What relief would the moon staying where it was . . .

“The interesting thing here is he says ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’ The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia has a long article about this passage where they’ve actually identified this day, through the charts of the planets and the rotation and the planetary movements, as July 22 because that’s when the sun would be overhead and the moon would be rising over here on the horizon.

“I read that and I think, ‘You know, as soon as you start that, then what else isn’t real?’ And so for me, I prefer just to leave it as it is. I know that people misunderstand these things often.

“There’s another one of these with Hezekiah when the sun dial went back 10 degrees. Well, it was the shadow that went back, not the sun. It was the sunlight; the sun wasn’t rolling around on the dial there. The passage isn’t saying the sun went back; it’s saying the shadow on the dial went back. It was a miracle that happened in the land of Israel to tell something to Hezekiah.

“The ordinances of heaven that operate the universe, God established them. He can control them, and in Revelation 8, He shortens a day. You say, ‘Well, that isn’t real!’ but if that isn’t real, what else isn’t real?

“I don’t feel the compulsion that some people feel to try to defend the Scripture against things that I don’t understand. Folks, miracles are miracles. A miracle is supernatural, not natural. I know it couldn’t naturally happen, but supernaturally is what a miracle is, and the point of this passage (about ‘the great slaughter’ in Joshua 10) is it’s a picture of what happens at the battle of Armageddon.

“He goes out and gets these five kings; they go and hide in a cave (down in verses 16-18) like the kings of the earth do in Revelation 6. He goes and takes them, has them brought before Him and then He destroys them as they will be destroyed. Some of His people escape just like some of the nations are going to get into the kingdom, so there’s a tremendous picture going on down through here of what’s going to happen in those last days.

“You need to study this history back here thinking about how it fits as a rehearsal; as a speaking again of the things in prophecy. None of this stuff is superfluous. There’s not one story in the Bible, not one account in the Scripture, there for no reason.

“Isaiah 28:21 says, ‘For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.’

“He’s talking about His coming to destroy the Antichrist (verses 16-18). Now that’s II Samuel 5, when David hears the goings in the tops of the mulberry trees. There’s some aerial stuff going on over his head. ‘As in the valley of Gibeon.’ That’s what we’re reading in Joshua 10 where he fights with the hailstones; with the phenomena with the sun and the moon and ‘the great slaughter’ against the kings of the earth, that He may do his strange work.”

Headed underground again

Patrick was a Protestant, not a Roman Catholic, and Ireland in his day wasn’t Catholic. Patrick’s name wasn’t even Patrick; it was Maewyn Succat. Succat was born in Scotland (372 AD), not Ireland.

“His granddad was an elder in the Celtic church, his dad was a deacon and his mother raised him to be a Believer but (in his teens) he rebelled against it,” informed Jordan in his Sunday sermon yesterday. “He and his two sisters were playing on the beach one day and some Irish pirates came along and scooped them up, took them to Ireland and sold them into slavery.

“He lived there for a number of days, and it was while he was tending to some sheep and cattle as a slave, that his mother’s preaching of the gospel came back to his mind.

“The point came when he trusted Christ and wrote a testimony that is published in Miller’s Church History. He said his sins came before him and he realized what was going on, and like the Prodigal, he trusted Christ and came to know the joys of his sins forgiven.

“He began to preach the gospel across the country and was set free from slavery, taken back to Scotland. He was there awhile but his heart yearned for the folks in Ireland who were in such darkness and paganism.

“That’s why they talk about how he got the Leprechauns and all the screwball stuff, but what he really did was not those make-believe things; he went in and preached the gospel about light in the darkness.

“He became known as the ‘Apostle of Ireland,’ spreading the gospel all around. He began to start local churches and those local churches began to train people to preach the gospel, and when he died there was a guy named Columba who he had trained, and literally between 350-400 and 900 AD, they took the gospel all across Ireland and Britain and over into the continent through France and Germany and down into northern Italy.

“They met up with a group of people called the Pauliceans who had been run out of Armenia, north of Turkey, and were pushed up into Europe. The Pauliceans, after Patrick’s group began to wane away, spread the gospel through the Dark Ages until the 1300s when they were finally slaughtered.

“It was in the 9^th Century that the pope finally decided to canonize Patrick who, by the way, was buried in a Protestant churchyard in Dublin. The pope canonized him, made him the patron saint of Rome, saying anywhere the name of Christ is, Rome deserves to rule it and he ceded the island of Ireland to King Henry II and got control over it.

*****

“There’s a cycle historians recognize that runs through these kinds of things. First, you start with paganism. Then you have evangelism where you preach the gospel. Patrick did that. He went into a pagan land, preached the gospel, saw people getting saved, saw churches established, and then he begins to teach them, instills God’s Word into them, and they begin to go out and do evangelism all over Europe, in fact.

“There’s a little island, Iona, that was one of their mainstays. Did you ever read the book, ‘How the Irish Saved History’? The guy who wrote it is a lost guy but what he says is when the Visigoths and the Vandals took over Europe and just destroyed the Roman Empire, they got to the ocean, looked out and jumped over to invade England, and when they got to the edge of England, they looked over to Ireland and said, ‘There’s nothing on that God-forsaken piece of rock over there anybody would want!’

"And so they didn’t invade Ireland because of the inhospitable climate and inaccessibleness. While much of the history books of European history were destroyed, they were preserved in Ireland. That’s how the Irish preserved history.

“That was one of the ways they couldn’t destroy the evangelism centers that were there. And Columba had on Iona an advanced school of the Bible that was sending preachers all over.

“The teaching ministry grows, but once it gets to be big enough that the culture notices it, it then begins to get cultured. It begins to want to be like everybody else. You remember Israel: ‘We want a king like everybody else.’

“When that happens, apostasy comes in and it’s followed by paganism again and now you’ve gone full circle.

*****

“The paganism that began in the 5^th and 6^th centuries lasted for a thousand years and was called the Dark Ages. During the Dark Ages, Bible-believing Christianity became an underground movement.

“That apostasy that resulted in the destruction of the ministry that Patrick and his followers had as Rome came on and assimilated it into the culture, and corrupted it by making it just a corrupted form of Judaism (just as Jeroboam had done with Israel), made Christianity an underground thing and you just had sporadic, disconnected efforts of individual Christians to win people to Christ. Bible-teaching fell to individuals; people considered heretics for the most part.

“The administration and the propagation of the local assemblies came to be the task of local pastors. You know what it looked like? It looked a lot like where we are today.

“You think about the culture we live in as its re-paganizing itself, listen, that cycle . . . what’s going to happen to the Bible-believing church is we’re going to become an underground movement again, maybe for centuries.

“A thousand years between these guys back in the 5^th Century and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s and yet you’ve got a great example of it in Brother Barlow’s ministry in Communist China.

“In Communist China, before the communists took over, there was a hundred years of China inland preaching, taking the gospel to the Chinese. C. R. Stam’s brother, John, and his wife, Betty, were some of the first martyrs in China. Her dad was the head of China Inland Mission and they took the gospel all over China. When the Chi-coms came in and began to run them off, they could put out the foreign missionaries, but they couldn’t put out the Chinese Believers.

“When the country got opened up about 20 years ago, you know what you found out? Instead of there being hundreds of thousands of Christians in China today, there are hundreds of millions! You don’t kill the Body of Christ. It might be all underground, but it’s there and that might be where we wind up.”

What they call 'progressive thinking'

Hosea 8:8 says, “Israel is swallowed up: now shall they be among the Gentiles as a vessel wherein is no pleasure.”

Jordan explains, “That’s a great figure of speech there. Israel is not supposed to be swallowed up by the nations; they’re supposed be out there among the nations. They’re to be the head of the nations, leading them; they’re not to be assimilated into them.

“By the way, you remember what the great fish did to Jonah? This a verse that will help you understand the symbolism of what happens to Jonah when the fish swallows him and he’s cast out among the nations. Jonah is a picture of the nation Israel who refused to do their job in being God’s witness before the nations.

“Israel has gone to Assyria (the Antichrist's native country) rather than turning to the Lord. They turn to the king of the Gentiles to get protection.

“Verse 9 says, ‘For they are gone up to Assyria, a wild ass alone by himself: Ephraim hath hired lovers.’ When you read that, you’re not sure if he’s talking about the Assyrian or if he's talking about Israel gone to Assyria as a wild ass.

“Either way you do it, in the Bible, the ass, or the donkey, is a picture of the rebellious nature of fallen man. You’re just that stubborn and brute: ‘I’m going to do it my way no matter what!’

“Just as Israel was designed by God, created by God, to be His representative nation in the earth, they turn into a representative of what it is to be in total rebellion against God. They turn into exactly the opposite of what they were supposed to be.

*****

“Job 11:12 says, ‘For vain man would be wise, though man be born like a wild ass's colt.’

“Notice in the passage, Zophar asks, [7] Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
[8] It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?
[9] The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.

“Those four measures—the height, the depth, the length and the breadth; he says you can’t know God. That’s the first book in the Bible and they acknowledge that on your own, seeking and finding God is too big a job.

“The fascinating thing about that passage is how it matches up with Ephesians 3:18, because when you come to Paul and he talks about the Father having made known the mystery of His will, God the Father reveals His thinking to us, and Paul uses those four terms to describe what we now know based upon the revelation of the Father’s will to us.

“We now know all the things that humanly speaking you couldn’t know (in time past). So in the beginning of the Bible, it says you can’t know it, and when you come to Paul, with the final revelation of information, he says, ‘Now you got it.' You get what humanly speaking you could never get.

“Verse 10 says, ‘If he cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder him?’ You can’t know God, and you can’t stop God from doing what He wants to do. I’ve always appreciated that; ‘He knoweth vain men.’

“You know, the first book in the Bible tells you God knows dudes like you; there ain’t nothing you’re going to do that’s going to surprise Him. He knows how empty we are.

“What he says in verse 12, I mean, that’s not even a wild ass! That’s the baby of a wild ass! He’s saying, ‘You’re double wild!’

*****

“You remember in Matthew 21 and John 12 and so forth how Jesus enters Jerusalem just a few days before He dies; He comes down off that mountain. Zachariah 9:9 says the Lord Jesus Christ came riding in on, not just the donkey, but the baby of the ass. Now that’s a strange situation. And that’s a picture of the Jesus Christ being able to TAME the rebellious nature of man. That’s a picture of the condition Israel was in.

“That was a picture of Israel that started back here in Hosea 8:8 when he goes out on a wild ass alone, trusting his own wisdom instead of God’s.

*****

“Exodus 13:13 says, ‘And every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem.’

“Now if you’ve got 13:13, what does that tell you? Well, you probably ought to pay attention to it because the great majority of chapter 13, verse 13s in the Bible have a very negative lesson associated with them.

“The only animal God made provisions for them to redeem is that one right there. You notice that you redeem two things—the ass’ colt and man. The connection between the two is pretty obvious in Scripture.

“One represents stubborn rebellion and the other is man. What a rebellious creation needs is a lamb to redeem it. What sinful man needs is the blood of a lamb to redeem, and if you don’t redeem it, what do you do? You break its neck. There’s Genesis 3:15 and the Curse.

“Isaiah 1 says, ‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. 3] The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.
[4] Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.’

“Isaiah is going to do that over and over. He says, ‘I got something to say about Israel that everybody in the heaven and the earth needs to listen to.’ In one place he’ll say, ‘O earth, earth, earth, here the word of the Lord.’

*****

“You should never say there aren’t messages in Israel’s program to the Gentiles. Sometime He’ll speak directly to them. He sent Jonah to them. He sent Nahum and Obadiah right to them with messages of God’s judgment. But it’s all connected with Israel’s program going out.

“In other words, they’re dumber than a bunch of animals. A sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters.

"You see what’s happening in Israel? They’re sinful, they’re burdened down with iniquity; they are a seed of evildoers and their children are corrupters. They’re not just corrupt; they’re out corrupting other people.

“By that verse, write down Romans 1:32, and see the depths of where Israel has sunk. They’ve become in exactly the same condition the Gentiles are in. If you wanted one verse in the whole Bible to describe the depths to which sin can take a person, I believe this is the verse.

“I used to do a teaching on the verse in Revelation 2 where it talks about the depths of Satan. And then the other teaching would be on the depths of sin and this was the text.

“He talks about in verse 29 them being filled with all unrighteousness, then he lists 23 different things that they are FILLED with; the kind of things that come when you exchange the truth of God for the lie.

“Then he describes the people in verse 32: ‘Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’

“They’re not just a bunch of sadists, saying, ‘We’re going to do it, and you can do just what you want to!’ They become a bunch of masochists, having pleasure in people doing what they’re going to do, knowing they're going to get what they got for doing it! That’s how sin goes down, down, down, down.

“That’s why when you see things in our culture where they are, they don’t get where they are today without a LONG process of evil thinking. Because when you start out, as Isaiah 5 says, ‘Calling evil good and good evil,’ this is where you wind up.

“The world calls it sophistication; the world calls it progressive thinking. The Bible says you’re a fool. Israel had become that foolish nation.

 *****

“Hosea 8:10 says, ‘Yea, though they have hired among the nations, now will I gather them, and they shall sorrow a little for the burden of the king of princes.’

“That’s an interesting title; the king of princes. That’s not the ‘king of kings.’ Princes are littler guys than kings. They’re going to try to make the Assyrian, the Antichrist, Satan’s man, God’s man.

“There’s a point in the career of the Antichrist where literally what Israel tries to do with the Antichrist is give him the name ‘Jehovah.’

“He says that for what they’re doing, to do that, they’re going to sorrow. Verse 11 says, ‘Because Ephraim hath made many altars to sin, altars shall be unto him to sin.’

*****

“When you’re reading the Minor Prophets, you have to be very cognizant of the fact a lot of these guys are downright sarcastic. These guys, especially the little guys, can be quite sarcastic. One of the most sarcastic things you’ll read is Amos 4:

“He says, ‘Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years:
[5] And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord GOD.’

“You think God would tell somebody, ‘Come on over here and sin’?! He’s mocking them.

“You remember what Bethel was? I Kings 12. They set up alternate temples. Bethel is the house of God. That’s where Jacob slept on the pillow and saw the gate of God. He said, ‘This is the gate of heaven,’ and he called it Beth-el. House of Elohim. They turned it into a den of iniquity.

“I love that thing with Elijah on Mount Carmel. He’s got the prophets of Baal, all the guys dressed up in their long robes with the collars backward and their icons, and he said, ‘C’mon, sacrifice to your God! See if he’ll answer!’ They get nothing. They start cutting, and they’re praying until noon and Elijah, standing over there, says, ‘Hey, he must be asleep! Talk a little louder! Maybe he’s off on a journey!’

"The same verse in the Living Bible put out by Tyndale years ago, actually says, ‘Maybe he’s off in the bathroom’!

“I used to show that verse to people who thought, ‘Ooh, we’ve got this beautiful Living Bible.’ I remember my aunt, she’d just got the bible and she was so proud of that thing, she showed it to me, and I said, ‘Can I show you two verses?’

“I showed her that verse and she kind of clouded up. Then I showed the verse in Samuel about where Saul calls David an S.O.B. and she, splat, closed that thing. That was a little too liberal for her.

*****

“God says in Hosea 8:12, ‘I have written to him the great things of my law but they were counted as a strange thing.’ ‘I wrote my law, I gave him my word, I wrote it.’ He doesn’t even say Moses wrote it. He says, ‘I wrote it,’ because God through Moses wrote it.

“Imagine having God write you a book. You see they thought He did; He thought He did. We’re people of a book, folks. And God wrote the Book.

“ ‘And they were counted a strange thing.’ You know when he talks in Nehemiah about marrying ‘outlandish women’? That’s not some lady with a big fancy hairdo and funny-looking clothes. Outlandish means they lived outside the land. They weren’t Israelites.

“You remember when He said you and I were strangers? We’re outside? When He says they were counted as a strange thing, He said, ‘I wrote my word to them. I gave them my word, wrote it, preserved it for them, and they looked at it like it was a thing that was outlandish, outside, unconnected to them.’

“It was a thing that they didn’t have any concern for. It was a thing they didn’t want to have any part with. They were disconnected from it. They would’ve said, ‘Let’s don’t read it in our schools. Let’s have a separation.’ But God said, ‘You’re my people; I gave it to you.’

“Verse 14 is one of the scariest verses you’ll read in this connection: ‘For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples.’ Moses said that’s what would happen. Here they are! It’s not saying they went off and became atheists. He’s saying what they did is they went off and became religious. They lost God in the building program.

*****

“One the greatest Achilles Heel of evangelical fundamentalism in the last century, and by that I mean the last 100 years or so, has been doing what that verse says. Because when you start making the buildings and the systems and the machinery the issue, it’s because you’ve forgotten what God wrote in the Book and you’ve made the system the issue.

“Let me show you the verse in II Corinthians just so you know this didn’t just happen in Israel’s day. II Corinthians 11: 18-19 says, Seeing that many glory after the flesh, I will glory also.
[19] For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.
[20] For ye suffer, if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour you, if a man take of you, if a man exalt himself, if a man smite you on the face.

“Paul was talking to some people who knew about being in the clutches of religious tyranny. You know what you’ll learn about religion? People enjoy the bondage of religion. It’s weird. But they think, ‘If I do this, God’s going to be happy with me, and I’m happy to be able to do this to make God happy.’ Your flesh loves to work and religion is designed to satisfy the lust of your flesh (Gal. 6: 12-13).

“You ought to think about that passage some time on what it would take to do all of those things. The one that really gets me is that last one: ‘if a man smite you on the face.’

“What part of your anatomy is connected with your identification? Now, you have some strange and uniquely designed parts in your body. I had a friend years ago who liked to watch people’s feet and I never thought much about it until he started doing it. You know, people’s feet are really weird-looking.

“When they smite you in the face, it represents who you are. All this stuff happens only when you don’t realize your real identity in Christ, and the only way to get someone free of all that bondage is for them to see who they really are.

*****

“Jeremiah 7:3 says, ‘Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.’

“Notice what the liars are saying: ‘Here’s God’s temple, Here’s God’s temple, Here’s God’s temple.’ What are they doing? They’re multiplying temples. ‘Got one in Dan, got one down in Bethel, one over here.’ They’re just building temples everywhere.

“But look at II Chronicles 7:12. When Solomon is dedicating the temple in Jerusalem it says, ‘And the LORD appeared to Solomon by night, and said unto him, I have heard thy prayer, and have chosen this place to myself for an house of sacrifice.’

“Look at 6:6: ‘But I have chosen Jerusalem, that my name might be there; and have chosen David to be over my people Israel.’ They were to go to Jerusalem to worship in one temple, and when Hosea talks about them forsaking God and building temples, what he’s saying is they’re just erecting all this false religious system; total apostasy in Israel and it’s spread everywhere.”

Our manna true

The parallels made in the Bible are innumerable and there’s no human who could ever unearth them all in all their intricacies.

In answer to a question about Revelation 12 and the “little flock’s” wilderness survival during the Tribulation, Jordan reminded that those believing Jews will know from their Old Testament exactly where to find the hidden manna God will make available to them for their sustenance in the mountains.

Jeremiah 50:19 says, “And I will bring Israel again to his habitation, and he shall feed on Carmel and Bashan, and his soul shall be satisfied upon mount Ephraim and Gilead.”

Micah 7: 14-15 says, “Feed thy people with thy rod, the flock of thine heritage, which dwell solitarily in the wood, in the midst of Carmel: let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old.
[15] According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will I shew unto him marvellous things.”

Bashan is on the extreme northeast of Israel. Gilead is to the southwest. Carmel is on the northwest of Israel near the Mediterranean Sea.

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While manna is mentioned in nine different books in the Bible, there are two Old Testament chapters—Exodus 16 and Numbers 11--where manna is set forth for its enduring “bread of life” message, serving as both a picture and type of the Lord Jesus Christ in His incarnation and the Word of God.

In John 6, for example, when the skeptical Jews ask Christ to give them a sign that they might believe, reasoning that “our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat,” Jesus responds, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven . . . I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

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Jordan explains, “Just like they weren’t going to hunger back there (in Exodus) if they ate the manna, the message was whatever they needed, the provision was going to fulfill the need.

"Christ said, ‘I am the bread of life. He that believeth on me shall never hunger, never thirst.’ It won’t be the temporary provision the manna was—this is going to be the power for them to become the sons of God . . .

“You see, what God’s telling them (in the wilderness) is, ‘Whatever you need, I’m going to provide it for you. I got this thing planned out ahead of time; you just trust me and go where I take you, and when you go where I take you, and do what I tell you to do, you’ll find that the provision for Israel, for you, is already there.’

“Now, had they learned that they would have been far better off. You get to Exodus 19, though, and you learn they didn’t learn anything about it! But what God’s demonstrating is His grace to them.”

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Exodus 16: 1-2 reports, “And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness:”

Jordan says, “Notice they took their journey and all the congregation ‘came unto the wilderness of Sin.’ Now how about that for a name?! Does that sound like that’s going to be a good place to be?! Well, a wilderness is a homeless place and it’s a wilderness of sin.

“So, the setting in which God’s going to give the manna is a rather dark background of man’s rebellion. When God brings them out of Egypt, He provides the healing for the water at Marah, takes them to Elim where there’s all kind of special provisions for them and then when God picks them up and moves them what do you think faith should have said?

“ ‘Wherever He leads me I’ll go; wherever He wants me to go I can trust Him!’ Because why? ‘Because He can take care of me!’ He just took care of the thirst issue, the water issue, the healing issue.

“But they didn’t learn that. They murmured, and they said, ‘You brought us out here to starve us to death! We remember being in Egypt. Where we had the flesh pots. And we could eat ’til we were full!’ (Exodus 16:3)

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“Now, when they were in Egypt they were slaves. So they had a slave’s diet. Well, maybe that’s better than having nothing to eat at all. That is what they’re saying.

“Right then the Lord could have smote them, but watch what God does: ‘Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.’ (Exodus 16:4)

“God’s saying, ‘Look what I’m going to do for you, Moses. I’m going to rain it down from heaven, but I’m not going to rain fire and brimstone and wrath and judgment.’

“You remember Genesis 18 and 19? Sodom and Gomorrah? He rained fire and brimstone from heaven? He could do it—they knew He could do it—but he said, ‘I’m going to rain bread from heaven.’ He didn’t call it manna there.

“He said, ‘I’m going to send you some food that will satisfy your hunger that’s good for everybody, that anybody can eat, and you can go out and get it.’ When He says there that it’s food from heaven, that means it’s of divine origin: ‘God’s going to send this.’

“It’s not something man’s going to produce; God’s going to do it. And by the way, when He says it’s going to rain . . . When something rains, it rains on the just and the unjust alike. When something rains, it’s a visible thing and it’s abundant—everybody gets some of it.

“And boy, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen statistics but, in a good rain storm, there are literally millions of gallons of water that fall out of the sky. It’s staggering. There’s this abundance that’s going to be given Israel!

“You see in verse 5 where it says you can gather the manna at a certain rate? The rate you gather at is in verse 16: ‘According to the number of your persons . . .’

“In other words, they were to go out and whatever—one was how many ever people you had in your house and two was whatever your appetite was.

“Some people have big appetites; they need more. Some people have little appetites; they don’t need so much. No matter what your appetite was, or how many people you had, what you gathered was exactly what you needed to satisfy the appetite that you had. The rate was according to the eating.

“It says there was ‘an omer for every man’ and an omer is a tenth part of an ephod. The Scofield Reference Bible tells us an ephod is a bushel and three pints, and an omer is 6.7 pints.

“Now, the estimate here is there are about two million Israelis at this time. You get that because Numbers 1 says that when they numbered them, there were 600,000 men ready to go to war.

“So, if you’ve conservatively got 2 million people and they’re all going to pick up six pints, that’s 12 million pints, which would translate into 9 million pounds!

“Every day they went out and collected four and a half tons of this manna! Can you imagine how many box cars that is? How many 18-wheelers it would take to load that four and a half tons of stuff? I mean, this is a humongous supply and it showed up every day!

“And if they didn’t go out and get it, verse 20 says ‘it bred worms and stank.’ I mean, if you leave the stuff out and don’t pick it up, ‘P-U, what a mess!’

“And, by the way, when it landed, wherever the people were they could just go outside of their house and there it was! They didn’t have to go to six blocks away to find it—it was there available for them immediately. The provision was there every morning.

“They went out in the morning to get it but it showed up at night. Again, they’re asleep; they’re not doing anything. God sends it.

“The end of verse 15 says, ‘This is the bread which the Lord hath given you.’ Manna was a gift from God. He rained it down from heaven. It’s everywhere and it was abundant. And it satisfied any of their needs.

“All they had to do was go out and gather it. By the way, they had to go out each person and gather it for themselves, but if it’s on the ground, what did they have to do to get it? You had to stoop over. You had to bow down. A stiff-necked person who wouldn’t bow down wound up hungry.”

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A passage that always cracks me up is in Numbers 11 when the children of Israel weep to Moses about the manna, rattling off for him a certain grocery list of foods they miss, namely fish, cucumbers, melon, leeks, onions and garlic.

They bitterly complain that their “soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes,” causing Moses to just completely lose it. He prays to God, in essence, “JUST KILL ME NOW!”

The classic chapter reads in part, “And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it.
[10] Then Moses heard the people weep throughout their families, every man in the door of his tent: and the anger of the LORD was kindled greatly; Moses also was displeased.
[11] And Moses said unto the LORD, Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in thy sight, that thou layest the burden of all this people upon me?
[12] Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?
[13] Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people? for they weep unto me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat.
[14] I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.
[15] And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness.”

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As Jordan explains the scene, “Moses parts the Red Sea and God delivers Israel from a violent, terrible death. What He did for them is He literally delivered them from satanic activity. The reason there were 10 plagues is there were 10 false Gods that Egypt worshipped that held the (people) in captivity.

“So when they complain, ‘We had all that wonderful diet back there and now our soul’s dried away from all the manna,’ you see how this is a heart issue?

“They say they’re bored with the stuff. Well, the passage tells us ‘manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium.’ It says, ‘And the people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil.’

“Bdellium is a white crystal that really is translucent. It’s sort of like mother-of-pearl color and every way you look at it you can see another depth or dimension to it like it’s three-dimensional. Now is that boring?!

“It says they ground it and beat it. You see why it’s a type of Christ? Exodus says it was sweet. Oil is a type of the Holy Spirit.

 

"This was not a monotonous type of food. You could make lots of different (entrees) from it. Go to Deuteronomy 32 and you see they were able to make lots of different recipes. This was a wonderful stuff to eat.

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“It says the manna fell upon the dew. It was so precious that God wouldn’t make it land on the earth. He made it land on the dew.

“From Psalm 133 we know dew is a symbol. It’s like the precious ointment. Verse 3 says, ‘As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.’

“Dew represents that blessing that God gave to Israel for the world. And the manna rested on God’s plan and purpose for the nation Israel. That’s why He gave the manna TO Israel.

"It was so the life could be given to Israel as a nation and they could then go be in the earth God’s nation and take His blessings to the world through them.”