Boundaryless possibilities

Referring to the unrest in the Middle East today, Jordan commented in his Wednesday night study, “If you want to really think about what’s going on over there, all those national boundaries in the Middle East will be changed in order for the Antichrist to rise to power. There have to be 10 nations that run that territory over there. There are way too many now.

“Until the last few years, the boundary changes that will be necessary you would have never thought about anybody changing,because in your lifetime, and my lifetime and in our parents’ lifetime, the edict was, ‘We don’t change boundaries.’

“Now you can see how, just like that, they can evaporate and new ones show up, and all that does is tell you that God’s Word can come through right on the money, quicker than people think that it can.

“All those changes that have to take place in the Middle East, you just look at it and you say, ‘Wow, that’s not so hard to understand how some of these passages in the Prophets can come to pass,’ because the boundaries are really artificial anyway. God’s going to devour all those enemies.

*****

 “After World War I, the French, the British and the Allies drew up national boundaries in the Middle East and that’s why you have a funny-looking country like Saudi Arabia, where the border lines go up through the dessert, and countries like Jordan and Iraq that have their own funny-looking boundaries.

“Iraq was really three different countries and they made one country out of it and gave military sanction to it.

“After World War II, one of the things the Allies decided was that the all of the national boundaries that were there at the beginning of the war would be respected; that no one would change any of the national boundaries. In other words, one nation wasn’t going to absorb another nation.

“After the Berlin Wall, all of a sudden that rule kind of went away because when the Communists fell, Yugoslavia, for example, was a whole bunch of little countries held together—Tito held it together with a gun.

“It was the Clinton Administration that did the first boundary changing in Europe. Now, Putin in Russia wants to change the boundaries up there to what they were and everybody says, ‘Ooh, you can’t do that,’ and he says, ‘Well, you did it 20 years ago.’

“Now the Arab and Persian world are saying, ‘Hey, those boundaries; we didn’t set them up. We didn’t agree to them,’ and they’re going up in flames."

*****

In the same study, Jordan talked about how healing in the Bible has nothing to do with what you hear and see talked about with the faith healers.

“Did you know that the largest faith healing outfit on the planet is the Roman Catholic Church? You think of Benny Hinn, Oral Roberts, A.A. Allen, Peter Popoff and all that crowd of wackos, but the biggest bunch of ‘healers’ is Romanism. People make pilgrimages to Lourdes and that kind of thing.

"I remember years ago reading about a Catholic priest in New Jersey who had the gift of healing people’s heart disease and then when he died. They cut his heart out, put it in a big pickle jar, put stuff in it and it’s sitting on an altar for people with heart disease to come and pray. You know the old saying, ‘High pay, high mass; low pay, low mass; no pay, no mass’? That’s where that came from.

“You go into the mission in San Juan Capistrano and go to the back of it and there’s this little alcove with a board that has 30-some names on it. At the top it says, ‘People who’ve been prayed for and healed in our Mission.’ The idea was is if you came, prayed, got healed, they’d add your name to it.

“By the way, they teach that the healing is in the atonement and that Jesus is going to heal your body if you take Him and take the mass and that kind of stuff.

“In the Bible, the healing program is at the Second Coming of Christ when He removes the curse of sin on creation and then He heals His people from the diseases that sin had brought and gives them the blessings of health and wealth that He promised them.”

God tells His story through lineage definitions!

In the Bible, Hebrew names have meanings and sometimes they’re like sentences. In the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ starting in Luke 3, the names go from Adam to Mary. In Matthew, the names start with Abraham and go all the way through to Joseph.

“Some months ago a guy sent me a (written passage) of what you get if you put together the definitions of the names in order,” explains Jordan. “When I first read it, I thought, ‘That can’t be true.’ So I spot-checked probably a third of the definitions I knew off the top of my head, and I spot-checked about 20 of the rest of them, and I found it’s right.

“Starting with Adam, God orchestrated the identity of people in the lineage of the Lord Jesus Christ to tell a story.

“One of the most fascinating things to me is the name Mary is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Miriam (Moses’ sister). Anybody know what Miriam means? It means ‘the rebellious one.’ You remember the rebellion of Miriam in Numbers 12? Her name represents all of us.

“You know what God did? He took that divine seed and placed it into ‘the rebellious one’ and it produced life. I read that and I see this (passage) and I just say, ‘What a magnificent God we serve. What a staggeringly awesome Book we read.’

*****

Here it is:

“The last Adam, standing redemptively in the place of another (Seth), the people of this earth (Enos) are His possession (Canaan), and for the praise of God He shall come down to make a way.

“When He dies there will be an outpouring. He is brought low that He may prove powerful. He would bring rest and will be a resting place. His name will be famous among those who have been cut off from the beast and bound in the enemy stronghold, for He calls them His possession.

“He will enter this earth as a tender shoot; as one from the heavenly region. He will divide even the closest friends. He will be a branch burning with resolve when He takes up residence here. He will be the Father of multitudes, the chief of a mighty host.

“He laughs at the deceiver and supplanter and overcomes. He shall be praised. The breach He will fortify and close and wall in. He is exalted, the royal seed who will crush the head of the hissing enchanter.”

*****

“Now, when you get that far, the line splits,” explains Jordan. "Matthew goes one way and Luke another." Matthew, the royal lineage, reads:

“He will be a covering, a garment, and in Him is strength. He will come serving to make wealthy His beloved and bring peace and enlarge for Himself a people. He will say, ‘Jehovah is my Father.’ He will be harmed but then healed; hurt but then made whole.

“It will be said that He, God, has judged and He, God, is exalted. He will prove the strength of God and the perfection of God. He will possess in His hand the power of God, and though He be forgotten of His people, He will prove the master builder and divinely heal them and He, God, will set and make strong.

“Those who ask God, those born in captivity, He will say, ‘My Father is majesty.’ He will be raised up by God to be a helper, to be the righteous one. God will raise Him up for God’s praise, majesty and splendor. He will be the help of God; a gift. And to Jacob He will, Joseph, and prove Jesus.”

*****

“In other words, to the heel grabber and supplanter, Jacob, He will exchange out of life for death Joseph and bring God's salvation,” explains Jordan.

“If you go through Luke, instead of Matthew, you go back to David and come through Nathan." The passage reads:

“He will be a covering, a garment. In Him is strength. He will come serving to make wealthy His beloved and give the gift of God. He declares to those under the enchantment that they are His dearest object of care and that He will raise them up.

“He will be the giver of grace; life in exchange for death. They will praise God who hearken unto Him and join to Him a covenant. Those who receive the gift of God, the one whom God hath exalted, will find the help and salvation of God. They will be sustained by God; be quickened, made alive, made awake.

“He will be measured according to the king’s divine oracle. He will be adored as king. He will be a heavenly light unto all who ask of God. And those born in captivity will He heal and give grace. He shall be praised for He gives life in exchange for death. To those who hearken the good tidings, He gives the gift of God unto the small.

“He is a bright light unto those whose eyes are fixed on God, and He is a consolation and comfort unto the burdened. The gift of God is life in exchange for death. It’s the violent action of the king in order to join in covenant. The gift of God raised up to heavenly heights, and gives life and liberty in exchange for death and rebellion, and brings us God’s salvation.”

*****

Jordan summarizes, “When I see this kind of a thing, it makes it ever so easy for me to trust Him, to trust His Word and to do it with a delight, not a drudgery, knowing that every page I turn and study, there are hidden treasures laid out there. Not hidden like, ‘I don’t want you to find them,’ but like Proverbs says, they’re treasures and people who search for them discover them.

“By the way, you can do this same thing in a number of places in Scripture. My point to you is simply, it just blows me away. I can’t say it any other way.  It blows me away with excitement.

“I’m going to tell you that when I get to heaven, I’m not going to think it’s over. I think I’m going to spend all of eternity uncovering more things like this in God Himself and in His Word. It’s just too big for you and me, but I’m glad we can get what we can now.”

Stomp, spit and snort all you want to . . .

There are 203 times the Bible calls the God of the Bible the “God of Israel.”

“It never says He’s the god of Islam, never says He’s the god of the Gentiles; that’s why people don’t like the God of the Bible and that’s why they don’t like the nation Israel,” says Jordan.

“People have a spiritual thing against the Bible because it’s God’s Word. People understand right away the Bible is negative toward man. You’re a sinner. You’re going to spend eternity in hell and the lake of fire. That’s kind of negative. 'Let’s sweeten that thing up a little bit.' But that’s the message of the Bible.

*****

“For centuries, Bibles were black. Black books. I learned years ago, preaching on the street, one of the best things you could have is a big, black Bible. Not a red one, or green one, or white one. A black one. And the idea is there’s an authority.

“I had a guy one time, I had been in downtown Chicago passing out tracts and preaching in Skid Row. A guy came came up to me right out front of WKRG Channel 5 TV station. He pulled a gun and stuck it out at me and said, ‘Give me your money.’ I turned around and I started laughing. He said, ‘I’m serious! Give me your money!’

“I said, ‘I don’t have any money.’ I said, ‘I’m the preacher from the (Pacific Garden) Rescue Mission. You picked on the wrong guy.’ I didn’t have three dollars to my name at the time. I then took my Bible out and said, ‘But I got this.’

“I started preaching to him and you know what—the gun disappeared. In fact, the dude disappeared, too, and I had told him, ‘If you need something to eat or a place to stay, I’ll take you to the mission, but I got something better for you. I got something that will get you out of that.’

*****

“When I first came to Chicago, Ed Erickson, the guy who had the kids at the Chicago Gospel Mission,  took me down one time to visit some people in Cabrini-Green. He had gotten 30 of the kids out of one of the buildings into being the ‘Scripture Kids,’ and he told me, ‘You come down here into public housing you got to understand two things. When those people see you, a white guy, all they see is anger and hatred. It’s been schooled into them.’

“He said, ‘I’ve never had a problem down here, but it’s not because they are sympathetic to me,’ and he pulled a Bible out bigger than mine and explained, ‘It’s because I carry this right under my arm.’

“So I got mine out and stuck it under my arm and we went in and at that time, gangs ran each one of those buildings. The elevators didn’t work and in order to get up the stairs, you had to pay a toll to get in.

“A guy said, ‘Hey man, give me something,’ and Ed responded, ‘I’ll give you something,’ and he started quoting Scripture to him.

“Ed could quote probably 1,500 verses just like that and he just started quoting Scripture to him. Usually he’d start in Romans 3:10 and go down. You know what those bangers would do? In a minute they’re (docile). There is just something about that Book. People know it’s that way.

“The Word of God is powerful that way. People don’t like it. And they don’t like it and then when the Bible says the God of the Bible is the God of Israel, they attach to Israel what they attach to the God of the Bible.

*****

 Jeremiah 31: 33 says, “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

 “How’s he going to write it in their hearts?” says Jordan. “He’s going to put His Spirit in them and the Spirit of God literally is going to regenerate them and the spirit of God’s going to empower them internally and CAUSE them to keep His commandments.

“In the Mosaic Covenant, He said, ‘Here’s the law; do it. See how you do.’ How’d they do? They didn’t. There was no enablement, just a command.

“There’s going to be a divine enablement in the New Covenant where God Himself comes and does for them what they could not do for themselves.

“When you write the law in your heart, the heart is the mentality of your soul. Out of the heart are the issues of life. As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. They’re going to be able to think exactly like God thinks because He wrote His word in their heart.

“The psalmist said, ‘Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.’

*****

“Verse 34 in Jeremiah 31 says, ‘And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’

 “They’re not just going to know Him in the sense of, ‘Hey, how are you? This is the Lord.’

“To know somebody in the Scripture is not just to be acquainted with them; it’s to understand them--to have a capacity to think and understand what they’re about.

“He’s saying, ‘There’s going to be an intimate relationship between me and them; I’m going to be their God, they’re going to be my people and we’re going to work in tandem together. They’re going to delight themselves in this intimate fellowship that we have together.’

“I’ve said to you before, that verse in Jeremiah 9 where He says, ‘If a man glories, don’t let him glory in his riches and his wisdom. Let him glory in this: that he knows me and he knows that I delight in these things.’

“To know the Lord is to delight in what He delights in. When Jesus said, ‘The zeal of the Lord of hosts hath eaten me up,’ He was saying, ‘I’m zealous about what God’s zealous about. I understand what the Father’s thinking.’

“In the kingdom, they’re going to have an understanding of what He’s doing to the place they literally can say what Christ said: ‘I delight to do thy will, O God.’

“You see, this isn’t going to be imposed on them against their wills and make them autotrons. They’re going to be delighting in this because they’re going to realize the fullness of God’s plan and purpose and their privilege to be part of it.

*****

“Matthew 4: 23 says, ‘And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.’

“There’s a book in our bookstore called ‘The Two Gospels.’  Sometime you’ll hear people say, ‘There’s only one gospel in the Bible.’ Well, I don’t know what Bible you been reading, but there’s a whole bunch of gospels in the Bible I read. They’re preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

“When somebody says there’s only one gospel in the Bible, they meant to say there’s only one gospel today, and that’s dead right. That’s what they meant to say; they just didn’t know how to say it.

“They thought there was only one message all the way through the Bible. They don’t know anything about ‘rightly dividing the Word.’ (II Tim. 2:15)

“You can have a preacher stomp and spit and snort all he wants to about how there’s only one gospel in the Bible, but just the humblest Believer who will read the verses in the Bible will know he’s wrong.

“Listen, you don’t have to know anything about Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic;  you don’t have to have a college education, you don’t have to have a seminary-trained preacher, all you got to have is a King James Bible and spend a little time reading it and believing it and you’ll know.

“What the preacher was expending his energy and anger about; what he meant to say but didn’t have the sense to say it, because he didn’t know enough about the Bible to say it, is that there’s only one gospel today in the dispensation of grace. But if you ask him, he probably couldn’t tell you what that gospel is or explain it to you.

“What is the gospel today? I Corinthians 15:4 says, ‘And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.’

“The gospel today is that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried and rose again for your justification.

*****

“Luke 18:31 says, ‘Then he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.’

“Jesus is talking to His Apostles right before He goes to the Cross. You need to look at verse 34: ‘And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.’ Three times He says, ‘They understood none of these things.’

“They’re right out here before the Cross and don’t even know that He’s going to die! That’s the 12. They’ve been preaching the gospel of the kingdom for the better part of three years. In the parallel passage in Matthew 16, when Jesus tells them He’s going to do it, Peter says, ‘Not so Lord! Nobody’s going to touch you. They got to get through me to get to you!’

“How in the world can Peter preach the gospel of the kingdom, not even know that Jesus Christ is going to die, and be preaching the death, burial and resurrection of Christ? He can’t! Folks, if you can’t understand this, you’re going to wind up in the shackles of religious bondage. There’s no other place to be.

“You know why the gospel of the kingdom was preached that way? Because it’s ‘time past.’ It’s that earthly program about what God’s doing with Israel.

*****

“Matthew 10:1 says, ‘And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.’

“By the way, back in Matthew 4 when He preached the gospel of the kingdom, He did two things. He healed all manner of diseases and cast out demons. Those are the two great signs of the kingdom.

“In Exodus, when Moses said, ‘Lord, they won’t believe me,’ He said, ‘I’ll give you two signs to go show them.’ One was healing and the other was, ‘Take your rod, throw it down,’ and it became a snake; pick it up and you’re handling serpents.

“In that kingdom, Isaiah says, ‘They’ll no more say I’m sick.’ He’s going to lift the curse off of creation. Also, what is He going to do with Satan? Cast him in the bottomless pit. Zechariah 13 says there won’t be an evil spirit in the land.

“So what does Jesus do? He comes and gives them a foretaste of that. He cast out the devil and heals the sick. Luke 8 says He preached and showed the kingdom of God. He proclaimed it and then He showed, ‘Look, I can do what I said. I can heal people. I can bind the strong man.’

“That’s why He did that. He wasn’t doing that to give Benny Hinn a job. He was doing that because those were the signs of this future kingdom. It was a foretaste of the powers of the world to come, Hebrews says.

“Matthew 10 says, ‘These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not:
[6] But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
[7] And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
[8] Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

“You see a problem with that? ‘Go not into the way of the Gentiles.’ You know what that means? They couldn’t have come and preached in Ohio.

“You get the idea, you know, reading the introduction to the ‘Good News to Modern Man,’ you got Jesus going around blessing everybody and healing everybody, making no distinctions between anybody. That’s not what you read in the Bible, though.

“You say, ‘Why? Didn’t He love everybody? I thought God so loved the world’ . . . you’re in ‘time past!’ You know where you are in the Book of Matthew? You’re in ‘time past.’ How do I know? I can read.  Matthew 10 tells me the commission He gives them fits back here.

“By the way, that commission He gave them; that’s what people call the ‘Great Commission.’ That term was developed by a missionary in India in the mid-1800s to raise money to support his mission. Did you know before the mid-1800s nobody ever used that term?”

Iraq always on the map

About a year after the Iraq War began, an anonymous chain e-mail circulated around the nation about out how "no other nation, except Israel, has more history and prophecy associated with it than Iraq."

There were these 19 examples given in the email showing Iraq's tremendous biblical significance:

1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq.

2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the
cradle of civilization!

3. Noah built the ark in Iraq.

4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq.

5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in
Southern Iraq!

6. Isaac's wife Rebekah is from Nahor,
which is in Iraq.

7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq.

8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which
is in Iraq.

9. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered
the ten tribes of Israel.

10. Amos cried out in Iraq!

11. Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed
Jerusalem.

12. Daniel was in the lion's den in Iraq!

13. The three Hebrew children were
in the fire in Iraq (Jesus had been in
Iraq also as the fourth person in
the fiery furnace!)

14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon
saw the "writing on the wall" in Iraq.

15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon,
carried the Jews captive into Iraq.

16. Ezekiel preached in Iraq.

17. The wise men were from Iraq.

18. Peter preached in Iraq.

19. The "Empire of Man"
described in Revelation is
called Babylon, which was a city in Iraq!

 

*****

Iraq is second only to the nation of Israel in number of mentions in the Bible, referred to under the names of Babylon, Land of Shinar and Mesopotamia (which literally means "between two rivers"—specifically the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers).

The name Babylon, which originates from the Tower of Babel in Gen. 11, appears 160 times in the Book of Jeremiah alone. 

 

***** 

What makes events in Iraq so fascinating is knowing how heavy Babylon plays into future Bible prophecy regarding the "end times" tribulation period and the rise of the Anti-Christ, whose world religious-political empire will be headquartered in Babylon.

 
 

In an old study, Alex Kurz talked about how Babylon once again becomes a city of luxury and commercial traffic, as prophesied in Rev. 18.

 
 

"This is the economic Babylon," Kurz explained, quoting Rev. 18:2. "It's not the 'Great Whore' of Chapter 17. This is the city of commerce which is located in modern-day Iraq, which makes interesting all of this interest today in making Iraq a democracy.

 

"Think about what happened to Germany after World War II. It became an economic power in Europe. What happened to Japan after WW II? It became an economic power in the Asia-Pacific region. What might happen in modern day Iraq if it truly becomes a democracy?

 

"In fact, the purpose is to have a stable economic center in Iraq. Babylon is in Iraq. I'm not saying prophecy's being fulfilled—this all might fall apart and they'll have to start over years from now—but why the interest in Iraq? I just find it highly interesting."

 

*****

 
 

Through New Testament accounts, we know Peter was in Babylon when he wrote I Peter and I Peter is a book aimed at Jewish believers living in the coming Tribulation.

These scattered tribes will be found in Babylon, as Rev. 1 confirms. When Peter and James write to the scattered, they actually identify for the reader the areas involved.

The Book of Revelations instructs the scattered believers to get out of Babylon before the wrath falls. It provides the information for their escape from the horrific effects of the 70^th Week of Daniel, which begins with the Anti-Christ signing a covenant with Israel.

 

******

 
 

In his 1989 book, "A Dispensational Synopsis of the New Testament," Bible scholar Charles F. Baker writes of this time period, outlined in Revelations, "Another mighty angel shouts from heaven, 'Babylon the great has fallen.' God's people are warned to come out of her.

 

"The merchants, ship owners, and the rich lament for her when they see the smoke from her burning. This indicates that Babylon in this chapter (Rev. 18) is viewed more as a commercial center of world trade. The eternal doom of Babylon is announced as an angel takes up a stone like a mighty millstone and casts it into the sea, causing Babylon never to be seen again."

 
 

Specifically on Rev. 17, Baker writes, "Babylon is represented as a great prostitute riding on the back of the scarlet-colored Beast, namely, the Anti-Christ world ruler who has a mysterious name written on her forehead: 'MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.' She is the world apostate religious system, drunk with the blood of the martyrs, supported by the Beast during the first half of the Tribulation. Many details about the Beast and the woman will become clear when the fulfillment occurs. The Beast will turn on the woman and destroy her."

 
 

Obviously this is all amazing demonstration of God's way of having things come full circle, so to speak.

 
 

As Chicago-area preacher Don Cote once assessed, "Around the Babylonian vicinity there's a tripod area that was the very center of the Garden of Eden. Isn't it interesting that (the human race) is going back to that? Abraham and his family—his father, his grandfather—they came up out of Babylon."

FAR more startling times ahead

“It’s a fascinating thing how much on the front burner the Apostle Paul puts the issue of sexual purity among the saints,” says Jordan. “Now, I say that to say this: The culture our country is shifting into is a world like Paul lived in.

"Paul lived in a much more belligerent culture to scriptural marriage than we live in, so when he says these things in I Thessalonians, you got to understand he’s talking to a culture of people who don’t have a biblical thinking process about marriage—not even the remnants of one like we still have in our culture today.

“Paul lived in a totally paganized culture, and for him to say ‘the husband of one wife,’ the response would have been, ‘You mean I can’t have as many wives as I can afford?' In a polygamist culture you could have as many wives as you could afford to have and keep up. Paul said, ‘No, no. Just one.’ And they said, ‘Huh?’

“So, these things are startling to the people he talked to. They’re rather startling to the world we’re going into and the world our little girls  and boys are going into--7-8 year-old kids. The world they’re going to come into as adults is going to be FAR more startling.

*****

“Our culture has always had sex stuff going on. You know, if you want to advertise a car you put some half-naked gal on the hood and men are attracted to the car.

“The psychology of that is in I Corinthians 11:7: ‘For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.’

“When a culture glorifies a naked woman as a sex goddess, what are they really glorifying, according to the verse? They’re glorifying themselves and that’s why that stuff works that way.

“The point is with ‘the husband of one wife’ (I Timothy 3) here’s a man who has a married relationship in which he’s faithful, his spouse is faithful and they’ve built a home based upon that marriage that demonstrates this is the way God intends to live in marriage.

“In Titus 1, this issue is between the two things about ‘being blameless.’ Again, Paul puts this thing right out front.

*****

“Years ago I used to be on (preacher) ordination committees for men outside our assembly, but very few times did I ever do it for someone I didn’t know really well.

“The times that I did, one of the things I wanted to know about was, ‘How about your marriage? How about your family? Where’s your wife in this? Where are your children? Let me come and spend the day with you.’

“I found immediate resistance to that, not just from the candidate but from the committee . . . it’s like, ‘We don’t want to ask too many questions.’

“Someone told me just yesterday about going to this church where their pastor of 50 years finally retired and they got a new pastor, and on the first Sunday this new pastor gets up to preach, he says, ‘Now, I just want to be very clear to everybody here that I believe Israel has been replaced by the church.’

“This couple, her lady and her husband, told me, ‘We knew right then we couldn’t stay there,’ and, of course, my question was, ‘How come the (church) didn’t find that out about him until they gave him the job?’

“She said, ‘Well, there wasn’t anybody in the leadership of the church who knew that question to ask.’ Which means they had a pastor for 50 years who was a nice guy, visited hospitals, patted people on the head and took care of their ‘felt needs,’ but didn’t teach them enough about the Bible to get them out of a wet paper sack.

*****

“Paul writes in I Thessalonians 4:3, ‘For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication.'

“The very first thing he talks about in relationship to the Thessalonians being set apart for the purpose God created them is that they would redirect their affections from an incorrect sphere of self-gratification to the truth of God.

"And the reason that fornication is there is because it’s as, I Corinthians 6:18 says, ‘Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body.’

“That’s a sin that functions down in your inner man. Proverbs 6:32 says, ‘But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.’

"Can you understand, if you’re going to be in a position of leadership where your main function is the edification of the souls of believers, the issue of not destroying your own soul is got to be front and center?

“When he says he destroys his own soul, that’s like over in Romans 14:20: ‘For meat destroy not the work of God. All things indeed are pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence.’

“You completely dismantle all of the edification in your inner man. You make yourself unable to function. Why? You just become totally lascivious. Totally a slave to your flesh.

*****

“Don’t take that thing about sexual purity lightly. God doesn’t. The culture we live in, until the last 60-70 years, marriage was a rather understood thing.

“Actually, until Ronald Reagan was president, the idea of a person who had been divorced becoming president was abhorrent. The only two reasons Ronald Reagan got elected in spite of that is one, he had such an openly committed relationship to Nancy Reagan that it kind of took away the specter of the divorce he’d gone through previous to that.

“Two, he was an effective enough politician to parlay his positives into the office. Prior to that, the great scandal was Kennedy: ‘How could you have a Roman Catholic be president?’ Those things were scandalous things. Now they’re just sort of, ‘Were we ever worried about that? What were we worried about?’

“Now it’s a commonly accepted thing. I remember a missionary from Brazil coming up here back in the ‘80s talking about how in the culture he lived in, if you wanted to get married you just went down to the courthouse and filled out a paper and nobody had ceremonies and it was a real secular kind of a thing.

“I remember him saying that to us and some folks got to shaking their heads, saying, ‘How in the world can that be?’ Well, now you see it happening all around you all of the time.

“I saw a thing the other day where a dog-catcher married a couple right here in Illinois. A dog-catcher? You can just get anybody to do this stuff. Why? Because the culture has shifted.”

*****

“Just this morning you saw all those kids up here getting their graduation for Sunday School, and you see the privilege of teaching scripture to those children and what a bright group of them it is, and you hear about them learning hundreds of verses of scripture, and you see the motivation and the real genuine interest and hunger and it’s their parents; it’s families that do that. A lone Sunday School teacher can’t do that.

“You know what kind of oddballs those kids are going to be when they get out into the world and the community out there? It’s easier to be an oddball for the Lord Jesus Christ today than it ever has been in our world; our culture.

“Now, I think that’s a good thing. I like being an oddball. I’ve always liked kind of standing apart from the crowd. It used to be you had to stand on the street corner, shout and preach and hand out tracts. Now you don’t have to be quite so loud about it.”

Pounding the Pentateuch

One of the things you learn from studying the writings of the Old Testament prophets is how often they refer back to the Pentateuch, the books of Moses.

Jordan recalls when this fact first “got anchored in my mind” in his early 20s after someone gave him a copy of E.W. Bullinger’s study Bible called “The Companion Bible.”

“My habit when I get a new Bible is just to read through it, and here I was staying in a motel in Philadelphia, Miss., called the Delphia, and I just started reading through it,” says Jordan. “I’m reading through the prophets and what Bullinger does, starting in Isaiah, is he marks what he calls a ‘reference to the Pentateuch,’ and puts them into his notes. I got to noticing that and I was stunned by how many times you’d see a reference back to the Pentateuch. A lot of times when you’re just reading through you don’t pay a lot of attention to them but he was marking them.

“From then until now it’s been something that’s fascinated me as you study how often, and especially in the prophets Isaiah to Malachi, the exhortation will be built on what God had already told Israel.

"And that’s why in Hosea 14 he says the problem he’s having is, ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge of God’s Word; for lack of knowledge of what God’s saying.’

“They abandoned the Scripture; they abandoned the Bible. They let go of what God had given them and consequently, all of the foundation of what God was doing was abandoned.

“So when he exhorts them, he goes back to the Scripture. None of these prophets are guys just standing there preaching. What they’re doing is taking the truth of God’s Word and bringing it back into application to the nation. And you’ll see that over and over.

“It’s a fundamental principle in all these prophets that what they’re doing is applying the truth God had given the nation Israel, beginning with Moses, in written form.

*****

“In Deuteronomy 29, Moses gives what’s generally called the Palestinian Covenant, but in chapters 28 and 29 he talks to Israel about those ‘five courses of judgment’ and then, because they’re obviously unqualified to receive the blessings God gave them and they’ve broken the covenant, in chapter 30 he tells them how God’s going to give them the land in spite of themselves.

“Deuteronomy 30:1 says, ‘And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee.’

“In other words, this chapter is going to look toward what Hosea’s talking about. The curses and the blessings: ‘You’ve been driven out among the nations; that fifth course of judgment has come upon you. Here’s what you need to remember.’

“Verse 2 says, ‘And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.’

“You see, when they’re out there and scattered among the nations, what are they to do? They’re to return to the Lord.

*****

“Notice it says ‘with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.’ You remember when Jesus says, ‘You’re to love the Lord thy God with all your heart and all your soul’?

“You see what that verse says? You’re to obey the Lord and everything He commanded you with all your heart and with all your soul. That’s how you love the Lord thy God with all your heart and soul.

“I don’t know if you ever thought about what that verse is talking about, but he’s not talking about just saying, ‘Oh Lord, I love you, how wonderful you are. You built the hills, you built the mountains and the stars.’ It’s not that kind of thing.

“Jesus said, ‘If you love me, keep my commandments.’ The way you love God is you take His Word and you take what His will is and what He’s doing and you agree with it; you value it and you cherish it the way He did.

“Why are they to return to the Lord? Verse 4 says, ‘If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee.’

“No matter where they’ve been scattered in the captivity, God’s going to bring them back into the land. ‘And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.’

*****

“Notice this is a literal, physical, visible, earthly return of a literal, physical, visible, earthly people.

“All the people who tell you God’s through with Israel, that they’ve already possessed the land as much as they’re going to possess it, that verse says, ‘I’m going to bring them back, I’m going to put them in the land I promised your fathers and it’s going to be the LAND!’

“That’s how you know the premillennial dispensational study of God’s Word is the way you want to go and forget all these people who spiritualize it and say, ‘You’re Israel and you’ve got the blessings, and God gave the curses to national Israel.’

“If that’s true then you’re at the mercy of the theologians to understand what the Bible says; you can’t understand it for yourself.

“Verse 6 says, ‘And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.’

“The next verse says, ‘And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee.’ That what Hosea’s talking about when he says, ‘Return unto the Lord.’

“Verse 9: ‘And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers.’

 “That’s what Hosea is referencing in Hosea 14:1: ‘O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity.’

“Do exactly what Deuteronomy 30 tells you to do when you find yourself in the captivity--you return and obey the voice of the Lord thy God, doing all of His commandments, and the Lord will give you the things He promised He’ll give you; He’ll give you the blessings.”

Break one and you're done!

Visiting Ohio Amish country last month for a Bible conference, I noticed inside the old diner in downtown Berlin was posted a copy of the Ten Commandments, only a few feet from a rack of salvation tracts.

In Jordan’s 8:30 A.M. Sunday morning radio show on WYLL 1160 Chicago (which can be heard live over their website) he commented, “You ever hear anybody say, ‘We need to post the Ten Commandments on the school house door or the court house wall’? One of the silliest things I ever heard in my life is for some Christian preacher to say, ‘We need to post the Ten Commandments.’

“Listen, if you want to go around posting the Ten Commandments, you need to convert to Judaism because that’s what it is! Don’t be some Christian preacher, some Christian pundit, some Christian promoter, promoting the Ten Commandments and think you’re promoting Christianity; you’re promoting Judaism.

“Galatians 3:10 says, ‘For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.’

“The curse of the law is that you can’t keep it. That’s why the Bible says 'Christ hath REDEEMED us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’ (Gal. 3:13)

“What the law did was point out the failure of man. That’s why the law gives strength to sin because it keeps pointing out, in spite of how good you do, you don’t do it perfectly. You see, the law is weak through your flesh because you can’t keep it. I Corinthians 15:56 says, ‘The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.

*****

“Do you know there are 613 commandments in the law? You usually hear about the first ten, you probably can’t name them, and if you could, it would be hard to get them in order. If you could name them in order, you couldn’t pick out two of them that you actually do perfectly.

“James 2:10 says, ‘For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.’

“You go around, stick out your chest and bust your buttons about keeping six or seven of the Ten Commandments and yet there’s 606 more that you didn’t even know about and you break about half of them in a lifetime.

“All you got to do is break one and you’re guilty of ALL of it. How many times do you have to steal something before you’re a thief? How many times you have to murder someone before you’re a murderer?

*****

“The law says, ‘You have these responsibilities. Here’s a command, or here’s a promise, that’s connected with a condition of your performance, and you don’t perform so you don’t get the blessing.’ That’s what law is.

“Is it a good work to shovel your neighbor’s snow? Sure it is. But then, why did you do it? That’s really the question. If you did it just to be proud, show how good a neighbor you are and make everybody love you, what is that? That’s self-gratification. That’s why Paul says, ‘The thought of foolishness is sin.’

“Now, if you went out there just to do it because it’s the right thing to do, and this is the kind of thing you do because this is who you are, that’s a little different motivation.

“That’s why in Matthew, Jesus tells them, ‘You’ve heard it said, Thou shalt not kill. But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.’

“You know those verses? The one everyone quotes is, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’

“But do you know what Christ does? He takes the law and internalizes it and says, ‘It isn’t just what you do; it’s who you are that’s being revealed by what you do.’ You know what you need? You need that taken out of the way.

“What’d Christ do with that system? He abolished it! I love that. That means He wiped it out. The verse says, ‘Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace.’ (Eph. 2:15)

*****

“You remember when Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, if you want peace and prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, open this gate and tear this wall down’?

“That wall represented the Iron Curtain. That term came from a speech Winston Churchill gave up in Minnesota about an ‘iron curtain falling across Europe.’ He talked about the division of the Cold War. ‘Get rid of this symbol of that division!’

“Paul said, ‘You know what Jesus Christ did with the law? He tore it down. He got rid of it. He abolished it. Now how did he do that?’

/;.

“Colossians 2:14 says, ‘Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.’

“When you blot it out, you wipe it out. You abolish it. You take it out of the way. He says ‘blotting out’ because it’s talking about something that’s written down that was against us. That’s what the law is. It isn’t for you; it’s against you. If you don’t get that out of God’s Word, you’ll never get the issue of religion and the law.

“It’s the Cross work of Christ that sets us free, not only from sin but from the condemnation of the law against our sin.”

No need for self-defense mode

Here’s some great advice from Jordan in a study he gave the other week:

“People say, ‘Oh, Brother Jordan, so and so said you did that,’ or, ‘So and so said this about you,’ and I often respond, ‘If you can believe that I did that, then believe it. If you can believe I said that, then believe it.’

“You say, ‘Well, don’t you want to defend yourself?’ I got over having to defend myself--having a desire to defend myself--a long time ago. When you get into the self-defense mode, you just show how important you think your identity is. And you know what your identity is? In you it’s nothing, but in Christ it’s everything.

“Grace tells you it’s okay, because, as Romans 8 says, ‘What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?’ Paul says, ‘Who is he that condemneth?’

“It’s God who justifies and it really isn’t what people think and you don’t need to be in the self-defense mode because that begins to show how much you think of you. You’re not thinking very sober about the issue.

“You’re able to relax and say, ‘Hey, if you’ve known me to be that way, then believe it.’ When you get there, you’ve got to have a track record to depend on and that’s when you need to remember that when you’re going through things, people are watching. Maybe not right there but down the road.

*****

Paul writes in II Timothy 2:9, ‘Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound.’

Jordan explains, “He wasn’t an evil doer but he suffered trouble AS an evildoer. There were people who thought Paul was a crook. That’s why he says in I Thessalonians 2:10 says, ‘Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and justly and unblameably we behaved ourselves among you that believe.’

“Among the Believers, they knew better. The Romans, the world, the government would have said whatever. The ‘lewd fellows of baser sort’ could have said whatever they wanted to, accused him of sedition and all kind of riot.

“But the people who knew him, and can I tell you that’s one of things you learn . . . Paul advises in I Thessalonians 5:12 says, ‘And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you.’

“One of the reasons for that is you know who they are (putting the right people into the jobs) but the other thing is you know them so that when you hear things about them . . . ”

Father's Day message

Ephesians 6:4 says, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Jordan says, “Notice that it’s possible to fail as a father by provoking your children to wrath. That’s something you have to be on guard against. But the positive is to ‘bring them up.’ Notice it didn’t say to ‘send them off to.‘ It didn’t say, ‘Send them over there and let momma teach them.’ It said bring them with you. You go there and take your kids with you because, if you’ll go there, the likelihood is they’ll follow you there.

“You know what I’ve learned about being a dad. I learned from my dad that the longer he’s been with the Lord the more impact he has on me. That’s a strange thing. Have you experienced that? The older you get the more you remember what your dad said to you?

“He’d probably be happy that I finally listened to some of the things he said to me. Most of them I didn’t listen to very carefully, necessarily, while he was alive and I was living at home. My point is those things stick with you through life, for good or bad.

“Now, they’re not excuses. The bad aren’t excuses for you to do bad, and the good’s not an excuse for you not to have to do good. They’re just there and the influences come along.

“Ephesians 5:33 says, ‘For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.’

“You know, you read surveys about what do men need and what do men want. Can I tell you that a man’s first greatest need is not sex. That’s what all the psychologists say. You go in my office and get Chuck Colson’s book about marriage and the first thing he says is every man needs is sex. That isn’t what that verse says.

“When you try to live your life based upon what the world tells you need, you need to look behind what they’re telling you because somebody’s trying to sell you something. Have you caught on to that yet?

“You know why sex sells. I was watching the television the other day and it was just nakedness all over. Not just women but men and so forth. The reason that sells like that is in I Corinthians 11:3: ‘But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.’

“If the head of the woman is the man, when you’re out there selling the woman, who are you really glorifying? The man. There’s a self-centered, self-exalting issue in that. That’s why it’s used to sell because it’s designed to stroke the man’s ego and to suck the man in and to get the man’s pride going. There’s a psychology in that.”

Emergent antiquity

“Today, there’s a big resurgence of Calvinism,” informed Jordan in his Sunday morning sermon last week. “It’s fascinating what we’ve lived through in the last 70 years. There was a great fundamentalist movement in the first part of the latter part of the 1800s, early 1900s. It came out of the Reformation and the recovery of Bible truth.

“The fundamentalist movement in the ‘40s and ‘50s made a tactical mistake: When you’re gaining and learning and growing in life, if you ever reject it, you just stop where you are.

“Chicago was the citadel of fundamentalism in all of America. Someone in the 1940s wrote a biography on Harry Ironside, who pastored Moody Church, and called him the ‘archbishop of fundamentalism.’ He was one of the premier leaders of the fundamentalist movement, where they were standing for the Word of God; they were standing for salvation by grace through faith and Pauline truth.

“In fact, if you read the books Ironside wrote in the ’20s and ’30s, you’d think I wrote them, or J.C. O’ Hair wrote them, or C.R. Stam wrote them. They were clear about Paul’s ministry; the difference between prophecy and mystery; the law and grace; the Body of Christ and Israel.

“They understood those things. That’s what we come out of. And O’Hair warned them. Back in the 1940s J.C. O’Hair warned the fundamentalist camps--he said, ‘You turn your back on the distinctive ministry of Paul and God’s going to scourge fundamentalism with the rod of Pentecostal fanaticism.’ That’s exactly what happened!

“Because fundamentalism weakened itself into what was called ‘New Evangelicalism,’ which now that fundamentalism is gone, they just call themselves evangelicals, which is sort of a watered-down version. That took place in the ’70s and ’80s and the charismatics took over. And you get the charismatic confusion in the ’80s and ’90s.

*****

“You know, we mentioned earlier about contemporary Christian music. You know where contemporary Christian music came from? It came from Chuck Smith at Calvary chapel out in southern California. That one ministry out there changed the whole tenor of evangelicalism.

“It introduced a style of music, a style of worship, a style of church services, a style of activity, and now fundamentalists, because they’re into ‘gain is godliness’ and so eager to have the crowd of people. It’s, ‘You got to entertain people to get them in, and getting them in is godliness.’

“Smith went out into the Pacific Ocean and baptized a thousand ‘Jesus people’ in one weekend and everybody said, ‘Oh, God’s moving!’ Why? Because they thought ‘gain was godliness.’ How do you get that way? Go read I Timothy 6. The first thing you did was you turned away from wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ for the ministry of the Apostle Paul.

“Paul writes in I Timothy 6: 3-5, ‘If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;
[4] He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
[5] Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.’

“The charismatic movement focuses on experience; what satisfies your flesh. Listen, religion is designed for the satisfaction and the lust of your flesh. You go into great temples and the architecture, and the beauty of the surroundings, and the music, and it satisfies the aesthetic values that your heart has and you want to ascribe to that. You look at it and say, ‘Wow, this is wonderful,’ and you feel humbled from it.

“Then there’s the other side of the flesh. Not just the formalism, but there’s jumping the aisles and running the benches and everybody having a hootenanny. They moved into that and that’s taken over evangelicalism today.

*****

“If you aren’t grounded in Romans, what’s the next book and the next book? Corinthians and Galatians. Romans is, ‘Here’s the gospel of grace.’ Corinthians is, ‘There’s reproof about not getting right in Romans.’ Galatians is corrections about not being right in Romans doctrine.

“You know who the Corinthians were? They were man-centered; they were the ancient charismatics of Paul’s day. The Galatians were Moses-centered. They’re the Calvinists and the Reformed teachers of Paul’s day. They didn’t have those titles but they were the same activities back there. We just have modern manifestations of them today.

“When you move from the charismatic stuff, the next thing you go into, and this is what we have today, is a resurgence of Calvinism.

“Did you know the largest Protestant denomination in the world, the Southern Baptists, are now fighting for its life over this issue?!

“You watch the great resurgent movement; the call it the emerging church and the emergent church. It’s the Bill Hybels (Willow Creek) and the Rick Warrens of the new generation. They’re all basically Reformed people. You have Mark Driscoll (Acts 28) and John Piper. These guys are nuts when it comes to teaching the Bible; they’re all a bunch of Reformed Calvinists. You need to know that.

“Everybody talking about Jesus isn’t talking about the Jesus of the Bible. And even when they are talking about the Jesus of the Bible, they aren’t talking about the ‘Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery.’ (Romans 16:25)

“What that means to you practically is, in Calvinism and in all this Reformed theology, the law is the standard by which you’re to live your life.”

Be careful what you don't wish for . . .

I’ll never forget the time I met a friend at Fanelli’s Café in SoHo and, in the course of spontaneous conversation, I brought up the Bible and my beliefs as a Christian.

I had the urge to go to the bathroom and by the time I returned from the woman’s room after being gone no more than five minutes, I found my friend had vanished! She just took off!

I was shocked, looking around the room for what seemed like a half hour, thinking surely she would return, but she never did. I didn’t speak to her again for over a year and it was only the death of a mutual friend that brought about our brief reunion. I knew better than to even mention God.

*****

What kills me is how many Christians too—even  some of my closest family members--avoid hearing what I have to say about God’s Word and what He's really doing in our world today.

I believe part of their mentality (on top of thinking, “Agh, what does she know about anything anyway?!”) is:

“If I’m not confronted or corrected regarding my relationship with God, and how my belief system may actually contradict His Word and be erroneous, I don’t have to change anything about how I’m living.”

The worst part is they think that excuses them from being held accountable by God for what they do not know. It’s the old ‘ignorance is bliss’ subtext.

Of course, this doesn’t work at all because God knows our every thought and motive. By running away (literally) from the possibility of hearing truth, the conscience is further seared and it only makes it harder to come to your senses. There’s no fooling God. He sees that you have little or no interest in learning who He really is and your relationship with Him is negatively affected.

Ultimately, an unsaved person receives a worse punishment from God for being someone who rejected (or avoided) an opportunity to hear His Word than those who can honestly say they’ve never had anyone (including the TV and radio) try and present salvation truth to them.

I always remember how my pastor says when he was a door-to-door evangelist in his home state of Alabama, back in the ‘70s, he would have people tell him, “I’m just not ready, preacher.” He would respond, “Well, when are you gonna BE ready?!”

Waiting to get on-board with what God’s really doing and your part in it is waiting for disaster. Like the great Chicago preacher J.C. O’Hair used to say, “Light rejected becomes lightning.”

Jordan explains, “When you share God’s word with people, if they reject it, it hardens their heart. Sears their conscience. There’s a spiritual transaction down in their inner man that is the result of their refusal to believe God’s word.”

Here is a great passage on this from an old study of his:

“The Word of God will do its work when you believe it. But it’s also powerful. It’s energetic. It’s got dynamism to it. It’s got live, creative energy. That’s why Paul says, ‘It’s sharper than any two-edged sword.’

“The world Paul lived in they had a bunch of different kind of swords. They had a sword that was a big old monstrous thing that only had one edge to it and they carried it on their shoulder because they didn’t want it to cut themselves.

“God’s Word is not like that. It’s not only effective sometime. I mean, maybe you could beat a guy over the head with the blunt side of that sword, but you couldn’t cut his head off very well.

“In the Roman world they had a sword; I call it the ‘Bat Masterson sword.’ You ever see a guy have a sword stuck in a walking cane and it’s hidden away? Well, they had a sword like that. But God’s Word is not that way. You can hide it in your heart and so forth, but it’s not a word that is to be hidden away so you don’t use it or nobody knows about it.

“They had a sword that was an innate kind of a sword. One that was used to show your rank like a general would wear. A General Patton kind of a sword that you walked around and showed off with but don’t use it. Well, the Bible’s not a showpiece that’s of no practical use.

“They had another sword; it was a small one that just had a sharp tip on it to thrust. You couldn’t cut; you just stick with it. But the Bible’s not a point here and a point there and point there.

“This sword (Paul’s referring to) was little so it was easy to use, but it had two edges to it. Either way you wanted to cut, it cut. It was called the ‘slaughter knife,’ actually, and it’s the sword the Roman Empire used to conquer the world with because those two edges were where it would cut either way.

“God’s Word works either way as long as you use it. If it’s only got one edge, it’s only effective some time, but this two-edged sword, here’s what Paul says:

“II Cor. 2:15 says, ‘For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish.’

“When you preach God’s Word to others, it either cuts life or it cuts death. People believe it and it gives life. They reject it and Proverbs 13:13 says, ‘Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth the commandment shall be rewarded.’

“That same gospel that a man would reject and have it blind him, that same message when someone believes it, gives life. So it’s a two-edged sword. Life for those who believe and death to those who don’t. ‘Death to death, life to life.

“Hebrews 4:12 says, ‘For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.’

“You would never know there’s a difference between your soul and your spirit in your inner man if it wasn’t for God’s Word. We all know that we have an outer man and an inner man.

“The older you get the  more you realize you have an inner man because your inner man and your outer man don’t get along as well as they used to. Your inner man says, ‘Okay, let’s go!’

*****

“What passes for psychology, they’re talking about being able to study your soul, but they don’t know what your soul is; they can’t distinguish it between your spirit and your soul. They have no way of studying it. They might can see some things it does, but they have no answers. It takes God’s Word to do that.

“So God’s Word is sharp; it has this cutting capacity to distinguish; to split hairs but not just hairs—invisibly fine hairs between the soul and the spirit. And work in your soul and spirit the things that need to be worked there.

“When he says ‘joints and marrow,’ the marrow is the part of the body that produces the blood; the life that’s in the flesh. The Word of God is the source of spiritual and physical resurrection. That’s the point of the passage.

“He says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Jesus says to His disciples in Luke 24, ‘Come touch me, I have flesh and bones.’ Well, if you have flesh and bone but you don’t have blood, the marrow is where the blood in your body is created.

“What that’s a reference to is physical resurrection, but it’s also a reference to the spiritual working of God in your inner man and God’s word can do that and it’s a discerner of the thoughts and intents of your heart. That’s the part of that verse that’s kind of scary, isn’t it?

“When you read God’s Word, it reads you. It’s a critic that can evaluate and discern, not just what you think . . . you know, I say to you that ‘God hears everything you think,’ but He doesn’t  just hear what you’re thinking; He knows WHY you’re thinking it, usually before you do.

“Your heart is so deceitful and desperately wicked that it can fool you. Like Paul says, ‘But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.’

“Your heart can deceive YOU into thinking that your motive is one thing and it’s really another. It’s God’s Word that can tell you what it really is. That’s why you can’t trust your emotions. You can’t trust your viewpoint; all you can trust is God’s Word.

 

“The verse in Hebrews 4 starts out, ‘Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight.’ Notice it’s ‘his sight.’ You see how He gives personality to the Word of God? That’s because the Word and God are one.

"The verse ends, ‘but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.’

“God is omnipotent, so the Word of God is powerful. God is omniscient. He’s everywhere. God is omnipresent, so there’s nothing that isn’t open to Him and all that He is is attributed to His Word.

“That’s why that Book is so important and that’s why Jesus says, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.’ It’s not the external things. It wasn’t with Israel and it won’t be with you.

“It’s His Word and where life is, where the enabling power of God’s life to go down into your inner man and transform you from the inside out, resides in that Book. Where the working of the Spirit of God is is in His Word.

“A guy wrote a book some time ago called, ‘Satan is alive and well on Planet Earth.’ Well, can I tell you God the Holy Spirit is alive and well on Planet Earth and ready to work, quickly and powerfully when you believe it.”