Tunneling down

When a lady in our assembly returned from a secular tour of Israel a couple of years back, she informed us that the tour guide, an Arab who gave a clear testimony of salvation, read passages out of the King James Bible about the different ancient landmarks as the group was visiting them, prompting others to gasp in unbelief, “What’s he reading the Bible about that for?!”

Given how the Israelis just recently learned of all the secret tunnels Hamas had dug to go from Gaza into Israel, it’s very interesting to note that the Bible reveals that around the land of Palestine are literal passageways down into the heart of the earth into the underworld.

“Isaiah 13 and 34 present two of the places in the land of Palestine where there are openings that go down into the underworld,” says Jordan. “Now, there a number of departments; a number of places in the underworld. There’s the bottomless pit. There’s the place where the angels are held in chains of darkness; the Greek word for that is Tartarus.

“There’s the place where the souls of people are—hell. So there are a number of different departments for the departed spirits. The Greek word ‘Hades’ and the Hebrew word ‘sheol’ simply mean ‘the world of the departed’; the underworld. The Bible talks about the ‘nether parts of the earth.’

“When you hear somebody say, ‘Well, he died and went to Hades,’ that doesn’t tell you where he went specifically; that just tells you generally he’s in the place where the departed dead go.

“Hell is the word used to describe the place where the souls of men go and they’re in torment. In Luke, the rich man dies and it says ‘in hell he lifted up his eyes.’ The same word ‘hell’ is used for where the angels are. And it’s the word that describes what’s down there in that torment.

 

*****

“Upon Christ’s return at the Second Advent, just like the opening that goes down into the bottomless pit is located in the Red Sea, right south of the Dead Sea, and just south of there in Bozrah and the land of Idumea, there is a shaft--a passageway--that goes down into what we call ‘hell.’

 

“Now, you understand when I say that to you, in the spirit world you’re not confined to what’s in the Carbon-14 material world, so that opening that goes down into the center of the earth into the confines of hell is filled up with earth and dirt right now, and all you see physically is the dirt, but it’s still there.”

“When Israel is brought out of Egypt across the Red Sea in Exodus 15, a phenomena takes place, pointed to many times in prophetic Scripture, that has everything to do with the underworld, the bottomless pit, Satan, demons, hell and the souls of lost dead people.

“Where Israel crossed the Red Sea is an opening that goes down into ‘the pit’ and very well could be the ‘bottomless pit’ from Revelation 9 in which, during the tribulation period, an angel comes down and opens the door, letting out onto the earth demonic creatures who will inflict torture on people.

“At this time, men will want to die but can’t. Verse 6 says, ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ ”

 

(To be continued tomorrow . . . )

Isis, the 'ideal mother and wife'

Nobody looks at the real war; the war behind the scenes that even Israel, as it struggles for its existence in the Middle East today, doesn’t know it’s fighting.

In the Book of Daniel, a major prophetic book discerning future events, you read about the Medes and the Persians, and the Kurds are the modern-day Medes. The nations that made up the Media-Persian Empire still exist.

“Iran today is a powerbroker in the Middle East and yet it’s not an Arab country; the Iranians are Persians,” says Jordan. “The point in Daniel is there’s a spiritual element to the behind-the-scenes conflict and that’s really the real problem. There’s a connection between the spiritual world and the affairs of this earth. There’s a connection in the Bible between what happens in the angelic world, and the angelic conflict, and the affairs of men on Planet Earth.”

*****

Nobody mentions it in the media, but Isis was the name of the ancient Egyptian goddess whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.

“She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the patroness of nature and magic,” informs Wikipedia. “The worship of Isis . . . continued until the suppression of paganism in the Christian era. The popular motif of Isis suckling her son Horus, however, lived on in a Christianized context as the popular image of Mary suckling the infant son Jesus from the fifth century onward.

About.com says, “Because Isis' name means, literally, ‘throne’ in the Ancient Egyptian language, she is usually represented with a throne as a depiction of her power. She is often shown holding a lotus as well. After Isis was assimilated with Hathor, she was sometimes depicted with the twin horns of a cow on her head, with a solar disc between them."

Of course, Satan has been represented by a calf, bull, beast of the field, etc., throughout the Bible. He seeks to take the throne of God.

*****

“In the Bible, every time you see God presented as a woman, it’s a bad deal,” says Jordan. “Jeremiah 44:18 says they ‘left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven.’

“You read that and you say, ‘How’d she get in there?’ It’s an ancient pagan goddess and it isn’t anything brand-new or especially compelling. In fact, the concept of God as mother is an ancient tradition in many religions. In Hinduism, they call her Kali.”

Kali is said to embody all fear and is defined by blackness and destruction, and feeds on death and required blood sacrifices. The severed head she holds in idol representations is said to hold the fate of all the living. Her garland of skulls is meant to show the inseparableness of life and death.

*****

Any peripheral examination of goddesses in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Nordic mythology, instantly shows their intrinsic connection to the demonic influence of Satan.

“Ancient legend told how Isis (Egyptian goddess whose cult spread across the Mediterranean) scoured Egypt to collect the pieces of her brother Osiris’s body after he had been dismembered by their evil brother Seth. Magically restored and revived, Osiris descended into the Underworld to rule the kingdom of the dead,” reads a Barnes & Noble reference book on mythology.

“The Greeks knew of the legend as early as the fifth century BC. They saw parallels between the story and that of their nature goddess Demeter, who could not rest until her daughter Persephone was rescued from the Underworld, after she was kidnapped by Hades, its god, who wanted her for a wife.”

Hades, regarded as king of the Underworld, is said to have had as his companion the popular goddess Hecate, who was associated with ghosts, black magic and crossroads.

Another book passage tells of the goddess Night who “gave birth to many of the evils that cloud the lives of gods and humans, including Doom, Death, Misery, Resentment, Deceit and Strife; Strife herself went on to give birth to further afflictions, such as Murder, Carnage, Battle and Lawlessness.”

Indeed, Homer, the Greek epic poet credited with writing the Iliad, has in his account of creation how a goddess, taking the form of a dove, lays a huge egg fertilized by her partner, a giant serpent.

“Everything in the universe hatched from this primal egg," Homer explains. As we all well-know, Satan appears as a serpent to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden.

*****

Dave Hunt writes in his bestseller book A Woman Rides the Beast, “Religion must, in fact, not only be involved in Antichrist’s new world government, but it must be preeminent, for Satan . . . is ‘the god of this world’ (II Cor. 4:4) and desires its worship with a passion.

“ . . . Religion was always the dominant element in ancient world empires, including the four depicted by Nebuchadnezzar’s image and Daniel’s four beasts. Priests, soothsayers, and sorcerers were the closest advisers to rulers for thousands of years, and in most instances were the real power behind the throne, manipulating sovereigns by their ‘magic’ and devious counsel.

“Science itself had its roots in occultism, beginning in astrology and alchemy. Materialism, skepticism, and atheism are of fairly recent origins and will be submerged in the tidal wave of renewed interest in ‘spirituality,’ which is already gathering momentum exactly as Jesus foretold for the last days (Matt. 24:4, 5, 11, 24).”

*****

The Book of Daniel makes clear that in the interpretation given Daniel by God to explain Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the four parts to the funny-looking, gold-headed image depict the four world empires as: Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece and Asia.

In a nutshell, that means the Antichrist, or the “little horn” of Daniel 8:9, will emerge from one of the ancient Greek empire’s four sections represented by Egypt to the south, Greece to the west, Syria to the east and Asia Minor (or present-day Turkey) to the north. He, in fact, arises from Turkey.

In correspondence with Daniel 7, John relays in Revelation 13 that he “stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
[2] And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.”

The great sea is the Mediterranean Sea and when it says Satan gave the Antichrist “his seat and great authority,” Satan’s seat is in Pergamos, not Europe. This is today’s Turkey, the land bridge between Europe and the Middle East and Europe and the East. Constantinople and Istanbul are the same city.

****

“There are things that have happened in the last couple of years that for 1500-1800 years weren’t there,” says Jordan in an old study. “Israel was not a nation; they are now.

“But, you see, if the Arabs went in there and just wiped them out tomorrow, that wouldn’t disturb me because what’s happening now, there’s no verse that’s been fulfilled. Maybe it’s a foreshadowing, but maybe it’s not.

“I don’t know of any prophetic Scripture about the ‘last days’ that you can look at and say, ‘That verse has been fulfilled.’ All the verses about Israel being in the land—okay, they’re in the land, but in those verses, He says, ‘I will gather you.’

“Well, if you know how Israel got put back into the land and made a nation and so forth, with the Balfour Declaration and all that stuff, boy, there was more UNgodliness than godliness in any of that!

“Now, God works through all kind of means, but I don’t know about that particular thing.

“They’ve certainly been re-gathered in unbelief, and that’s the way Scripture says it would be re-gathered. They will not only have to be in the land, they’ll have to be in control of Jerusalem—they’ll have to have a temple, so on and so forth.

“Maybe some of that is a foretaste, but then if I tell you it is, and they got wiped out, what’d I do to Bible prophecy? I said it didn’t come through. So I can’t guarantee it. Sure, I’d be happy if it was. I’m not trying to throw cold water on something,  I’m just saying you got to be careful because you can’t just assume they can’t get wiped out.

“People used to talk about Russia coming down and invading them. Well, that’s not what Ezekiel 38 and 39’s about, but when we were scared of Russia, it made good press.

*****

“In the 21^st Century, people who prognosticated what’s going to happen in the next 100 years (which is a stupid thing to do but people do it) said there are three potential places for there to be world wars.

“One is in the American West. You know it was just a little over 100 years ago there was the Mexican-American War and we took possession of Texas to California.

"Our country’s only been here a couple of hundred years so we think of it as monolithic, but it’s not necessarily that settled, so there’s that potential. That’s not a very big potential, but that’s one of the places they say.

“I was in Arizona last fall and I listened to one of these whack-jobs on the radio, and some guy calls in and he’s just hollering, ‘That land belongs to us; we need to take it back!’ He was a Mexican Independent, whatever. And the commentator did something I thought was brilliant.

“He said, ‘Let me get this right. You want to give New Mexico and Arizona back and what you want is for the Mexican government to run this part of the world and have the Mexican economy?’ The guy says, ‘Oh no, I don’t mean that!’ and the conversation just kind of faded away.

“The other place (predicted) was Poland, northern Europe, but in third place was Turkey.
 

“Turkey is the secular Islamic state that is very westernized. That part of the world has a tempestuous history and when I read about that I said, ‘Whoa, considering the things the Scriptures say will happen in the last days in that part of the world’ . . . You see, if I’m looking for something, I’m looking there because I know the Antichrist has to do these certain things, and has to be in control and things of that nature.”

The essences of God

Because God is a spirit, in order to be qualified to work with Him, you have to connect with Him at that level. The problem with man, descended from Adam, is we’ve been separated from God because of our sin.

“We’re spiritually unqualified and so what the New Covenant does is it brings the spiritual qualification; the spiritual status whereby we can work with God, who is a spirit,” says Jordan. “When you work with Him that’s where it all has to start.

“There’s wonderful things you can study about the essence of God that are fascinating. All of His attributes work together in harmony. There’s two essences that function together to make His integrity. Integrity is His holiness. That’s made up of His righteousness, which is the standard of His integrity and His justice, which is the function of His integrity.

“Righteousness is the perfect rightness of God; His capacity as complete and total perfection in character. His justice is always right—perfect rightness. His justice is the function of His essence that judges people or blesses people.

*****

“Our point of contact with God, when you think of His essences, is not His love; it’s His justice. We think of God’s love like our love and it isn’t like our love. God’s love is the motivator of His other essences and it’s the love of God that motivated the justice of God to develop a plan.

“When you think of salvation, justification and our redemption in Christ Jesus, and you begin to watch the different essences of God work together, His love motivates God. It motivated His omniscience; God’s all-knowingness.

“Omniscience is His wisdom. He has perfect wisdom, so God’s love motivates His wisdom to devise a wise plan of redemption and reconciliation and restoration. His justice is going to be motivated to develop a plan whereby lost, sinful man can be restored. The plan is called grace.

“Romans 3:25-26 says, [25] Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
[26] To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

“God’s justice had faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, in the fact God could take our sin and impute it onto His Son and that that would be a right thing to do; that would satisfy the righteous standard of God and that He then could take Christ’s righteousness and impute it to us.

“What His justice did was demand that His righteousness be honored and Jesus Christ comes.

“I mean, who would have ever thought to have asked God to do that for you?! That’s that verse in Ephesians 3:20 about, ‘Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.’

“Forget about asking Him; you would have never thought about suggesting that to God! But His omniscience thought about it. His love motivated Him but His justice executed the plan and it’s always through His justice that we contact Him.

*****

“One of the things right division does is it takes you out of all that superstitious nonsense business and it helps you to appreciate the wisdom of God. It isn’t about power.

“You’ve got these ‘word of faith’ preachers where it’s all about power—you make God move in your behalf and it gets so confusing: ‘I’m suffering but I’m resisting. I’m claiming God’s healing and, because I am, I’m resisting, but I’m still sick.’

“You know, it’s, ‘Resist the devil and he’ll flee from you, but he’s still whacking me!' The preacher says, ‘Well, you just keep resisting and that’s godly suffering.’ I’m thinking, ‘Godly suffering! That’s a fool’s errand, is what that is! There’s nothing God-like about that!’

“You know how many times in the Bible when somebody would tell a demon to flee? If somebody says, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ’ for a demon to flee, what would the demon do?

“He’s got no power against the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. I know somebody says, ‘Well, in Mark 5 he didn’t go right away.’ You got no idea what you’re talking about! That demon didn’t want to leave the land; he didn’t care anything about leaving the guy. He went in the pigs. He might have thought that was a step up; I don’t know.

“There’s stuff going on there (in the Four Gospels) that people don’t have any idea about what’s going on and yet they all talk about ‘spiritual power.’ What they’re all talking about is just superstitious nonsense.

*****

“Paul says in Ephesians 3:16: ‘That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.’ That’s the same word where he talks about, ‘Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.’

“You see, the powerful working of the power of God in your life . . . he tells the Thessalonians to do the work of faith with power, but that’s a spiritual power in your inner man. It’s not moving cold fronts and snow storms kind of stuff. And it’s not coming in and zapping you and making your hair stand up on end.

"There’s this inner working of the power of God. All of that is according to a plan called ‘wisdom’ and God’s essence works together with all that.

“When you understand the essence of God then you understand Jesus Christ is God the Son, the second person of the godhead, who took upon Him the essence of man, spirit, soul and body, and holds each together in one person.

"That’s our contact point and that’s why God made HIM to be sin for us that we might be made HIS righteousness. Christ’s the point where the justice of God puts us and where things are set right and now we’re compatible with all the essence of God.”

Son, not slave

In this month’s issue of Christianity Today magazine, the president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Alec Hill, writes, “To counter the notion that I am the center of the universe, for the past eight years I have started my quiet time every morning with the same four words: I am your slave.

“As I’ve pursued the disciple-as-slave metaphor, a rich vein of Scripture has opened up to me . . . Disciples who see themselves as slaves do what their master commands. Ours is not to question the cost, the inconvenience, or the risk. Rather, ours is to hear the Master, delineate his imperatives, and perform them.”

Wow, what a turnoff message to any unsaved college student! But this is exactly the kind of stuff you hear from evangelicals who want you to wrongly believe you’re in a “discipleship” relationship with Christ and are to strictly follow His instructions and parables to His apostles in the Four Gospels as your personal growth regimen. This is the message of the Adversary!

*****

In his Sunday morning sermon this week, Jordan expounded on Paul’s Romans 8:15 declaration: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”

“Notice how the Spirit of God confirms in your heart that spirit of adoption; God doesn’t give you the fear of a slave, but He gives you the spirit of adoption,” said Jordan. “He gives you the affection of a son and that’s what verse 14’s talking about: ‘For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.’

“How does the Spirit of God lead you as a son? You see how verse 14 starts with ‘For’? It’s explaining the verse before it, and that started with ‘For’ so it’s explaining verse 12:  ‘Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
[13] For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.’

“If you want to get rid of that old man’s life in your life, and put on the new man, then you’ll be led by the Spirit of God. How’s the Spirit of God going to lead you? Well, He’s not going to put you under the fear of slavery and bondage to a performance system that you got to perform a certain way to gain God’s blessing.

“He puts you under the position of the affection of a son. The work of the Spirit in our lives is to change our slavish fears toward God into confidence and happy, peaceful affection for who He is as our Father.

“I’m not trying to strive to get there; I’m just rejoicing in who He’s made me. And that’s where the victory is. That’s where the liberty from the flesh, and walking in the flesh, and minding the things of the flesh, is. I’m living in the reality of the identity God has made me in Christ.

“The Spirit doesn’t lead us by stirring up that slavish fear of, ‘If I don’t perform right . . . am I doing it right?!’ You ever do that? Of course you do: ‘Am I being a good enough Mom? Do I understand how to be a wife properly? Am I parenting my children correctly?’ We do that to ourselves all the time. It’s part of the Christian psyche.

*****

“You know, Christians worry about things the world never worries about? Christians worry about sin in their life. The world doesn’t worry about sin in their life. They think they enjoy it.

“Christians worry about their kids turning out right in the context of godliness, not just the success of the world.

“That’s not a bad thing to have goals and godly thinking, but when you start letting that be where you get your identity . . .  I’m not doing this to get it; I’m living this way because of who I am!

“The grace of God teaches me that denying ungodliness and worldly lust—that’s not who I am. I live in the reality of the true current actual identity that I have in Christ. I have that Spirit of adoption and the Spirit brings about that response in our heart to God’s love by crying out ‘Abba, Father.’

“Not just saying it, but when you cry, you enter into the emotional reality of it. You see, being able to cry ‘Abba, Father’ is having access to it to the place that it’s REAL to you—it’s reality for you. That’s why Paul says, ‘For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.’ (Eph. 2:18)

“That word ‘access’ is literally taking someone by the hand and introducing them to the Father and making Him real. That’s not a mysticism; that’s to make His will, His thinking, His person, His mind the delight of your heart.

“That’s what renewing your mind is all about. You see, if you want to know the power of God in your life, you don’t put your ear to what you do. You put your ear to the Word. You put your ear to the fact God loves you: ‘But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ 

“You look to Him because the only individual in the Scripture who ever cried ‘Abba, Father’ was the Lord Jesus Christ when He entered into the reality of your suffering and my suffering. Our sin. So it’s through Him who cried ‘Abba, Father’ that we have by the Spirit of adoption and the capacity to go cry ‘Abba, Father.’

“It becomes a reality in our life that allows us to take His Word and understand . . . and folks, that’s why that daily intake of the Word rightly divided is so crucial. The reality is it’s you having that understanding, and you spending the time to take that information in and say, ‘That truth is what lives in me.’

“Let the reality of the literal, absolute, perfect place that God has given you in Christ be who you are and then recognize and reject anything else than that as unworthy. And that skill set that you get in doing that, that experience you get in doing that, gives hope because that’s going to give you the skill set to use in the ages to come to be able to think like He thinks and to delight in the things He delights in.
 

“That’s a wonderful way to live and it takes all the things in life now and makes them something far more than just things to endure. It makes them glory.

“As you sit in your life and look at the details of your life and you say, ‘Father, just how do you look at this?’ you’ll quit seeing the circumstances of your life as something you need to use and manipulate and gain something for yourself. You’ll see all of that met in Christ and now you’ll see your circumstances of life as an opportunity to serve the Lord by serving others in His stead.”

All in the family

Go to the religious section of Barnes & Noble and you’ll find shelf after shelf of books on the New Age, Wicca, Eastern religions, etc.

In Acts 19, Luke writes about the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus who, when they heard the gospel through Paul’s evangelism there, became Believers and immediately collected up all their pagan literature and burned it for everyone to see.

Verses 19-20 report, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. [20] So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.”

Jordan explains, “Here are people in what we would call the occult, in spiritism, paganism. And they go bring their sacred books, their bibles if you will, and their instruction books and burn them. They don’t need them anymore. Paul said, ‘All these people heard the gospel and got saved.’ They never heard of Christ before!

“The gospel will do its job if you preach it and it has free course. You never have to fear truth and error sitting at the same table. If truth gets an opportunity to speak, it will take care of itself. What happens in the world out there is they muzzle the truth.

“The Adversary tries to confound people with the truth so they don’t preach the truth. The first policy of the Adversary against the church is to get you to compromise the truth, change the message. He attacks the message. If you don’t change the message, he’ll attack the messenger. Those are the two tactics.

*****

“When Paul wrote to Timothy at Ephesus, there was a church of a dead goddess named Diana. In Paul’s day, there were seven wonders of the ancient world and one of those wonders, over a period of 3-400 years, was the Temple of Diana at Ephesus.

“The Temple of Diana had big pillars, fashioned like the stuff in Daniel 3 that Nebuchadnezzar set up. That temple had the entire city cowed. She was called ‘the queen of heaven’ just like Israel, in Jeremiah 34, is said to be worshipping; the Baal worship. It was said that the image of Diana fell down from Jupiter. And that dead god, the one people prayed to and got nothing . . .

“Paul is at Ephesus for a long period of time. He sets up a teaching, preaching, evangelistic center in Ephesus and the Word of God goes out, not just around Ephesus, but all of that whole territory.

“In the Bible, the title the ‘living God’ is used seven times by Paul, more than by any other writer in the Bible. He wants you to be sure you understand that God is alive and personally, actively involved in the local church in the lives of Believers; He’s just not doing it the way He did it with Israel in the physical, external intervention program.

“He writes in I Timothy 4:10, ‘For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.’

“The primary vehicle, the hub, the center ground around which what God is doing today in the dispensation of grace focuses around the work the Body of Christ does through the work of the ministry. That’s why the local assembly is so important. That’s why it gets attacked in such vicious ways by the Adversary. That’s why some people can’t stand to be in it and be involved in it.

“The local church is designed to be not the reflection of the culture around it, but the reflection of the work of the Body of Christ IN that culture.

*****

“One of the great mistakes Western missionaries made in the last three centuries was to think that if they brought people to salvation, it meant that those people needed to be inculcated with Western culture in their clothing, mannerisms and so forth.

“Sometimes people needed to have their culture elevated out of barbarianism, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they had to be Westernized. What the gospel is to do is go into whatever the culture is and purify it, and bring out of that culture how Christ would live in THAT culture. That’s a high calling and a high-thinking process, but that’s what Paul’s talking about in I Timothy 3.

*****

“In our day, management techniques and skills have invaded the ministry, and if you go back into the ‘90s, there was this great push that said you couldn’t have an organization unless you had a delineated purpose statement, mission statement and vision statement. But the purpose statement that God gives is, ‘God, our Savior, who would have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.’

“When Paul says we’re the ‘pillar and ground of the truth,’ that’s the relationship between the church and the truth that we’re designed to proclaim. A pillar holds things up and makes it visible, supports it. The ground, that’s the foundation upon which that pillar resides.

“You don’t have to come here to go to heaven; that’s not the purpose of the local church. We keep a testimony in a community like this alive, not so you can come here to go to church, but so that you can know that the truth is still available and we can hold up a flag and say, ‘The truth is available if you’re interested. Here’s how to find it.’

*****

“The household of God is not a building; it’s a family. It’s the Body of Christ manifested in this location at Ephesus; in our case, in this location in Chicagoland.

“The Hebrew term for the ‘house of God’ is Bethel. Paul’s literally using Jewish terminology here. God resided in the nation Israel to make Israel the people He chose them to be, but now in the Body of Christ, people who were barred from being a part of the house of God are now made participants in the house of God.

“Paul never calls the church a business. People say you need to have business principles in your ministry. He never calls it a business but he calls it a body. He calls it a building. He calls it a house and a household. We don’t operate on the rudiments of the world that businesses operate on.

“Ephesians 3:14-15 says, ‘For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
[15] Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.’

“What people who aren’t dispensationalists do with that verse is they say there’s the family who’ve died and gone on to heaven, the ‘Church Triumphant,’ and then there’s the ‘Church Militant,’ or Believers who are still down here.

“But if you studied the Book of Ephesians instead of theology books, you’d never have come up with that idea. Because, starting in Ephesians 1, he’s talking about the government God established in the heavens and the government God established in the earth, and the fact that He has an agency to reclaim that government in the earth, the nation Israel, and now He’s forming the Body of Christ as the agency to reclaim that government in the heavens.

“Now, you and I are made fellow citizens with the saints and we’re in the household of God, which is heaven and earth. He’s the Father of that whole household, the whole family, and He’s the one who’s the head of it.

“Paul explains in Ephesians 2, ‘[19] Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;
[20] And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;
[21] In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord:
[22] In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

“The temple’s not made of hands (‘God doesn’t dwell in temples made with men’s hands’); it’s a temple made out of people.

“When God gave Moses the pattern for the tabernacle, it was a tent that God was going to dwell in, but it was made out of skin. Amos 9 calls it the ‘tabernacle of David’ and that’s that little Believing Remnant in Israel where God’s going to live in the flesh-and-blood lives of some Israelis.

“This temple that God is building, putting people together in as a habitation--God’s the builder, He’s the architect, He lives there, He provides for it; it’s where He’s honored and it’s where the family is.

*****

“That expression, the church of the living God (I Timothy 3), that’s a fun expression.

“II Corinthians 6:16, ‘And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

“You see, we’re the dwelling place of the LIVING God. That term has a very special emphasis to it. He’s not a dead god; not an inactive god who’s a phony but the real thing.

“I Thessalonians 1:9 says, ‘For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.’

“The living God is in contrast with the dead gods of the idols and that’s the way it is all through the Bible.

“The Apostle Paul before he got saved was a rabbinical scholar and when he uses terms like that that come out of his thinking process, you can go back in the Old Testament and find the meanings to these terms.

“The first time that description occurs in the Bible is in Deuteronomy 5:26. 4:16. They know about idols. They saw them in Egypt. They’re aware of all that and Moses says to them, ‘Where is there any nation out there with all their gods that’s like us who’ve been in touch with the real thing; the living God?’

“Joshua picks up on this when they go in to cross the Jordan River to go in to take the Promised Land. God gathers them all together, He puts the ark out front and the priests and they’re going to walk in—go across Jordan.

“Joshua 3: 9-10 says, [9] And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, Come hither, and hear the words of the LORD your God.
[10] And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.

“There’s the ark of the living God—watch what He does. Every time you see that term occur through here, what He’s saying is, ‘Watch the living God go to work!’ He’s a God who does things and takes action.

“Look at Joshua 2. You remember Rahab. Some spies come in and she says something to the spies she’s going to hide that’s quite interesting. Joshua 2:9-10:  ‘And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.
[10] For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed..

“Notice that’s past tense. You know what she’s saying to those spies: ‘You know, forty years ago we heard what God did when He brought you out of Egypt and we’ve been sitting over here trembling in our boots waiting for you to come take us out too. We know God has already given you this land. What you been waiting on?!’

“Of course, it was Israel’s unbelief that caused them to wait that 38 years. The Gentile knows it. You know, what they heard about the living God. That’s what Moses said: ‘Who’s ever heard about the living God like us?’

“When the Gentiles up there in Jericho heard about it, they said, ‘Whoa, they got the living God on their side and our hearts melted knowing we were dead meat!’

“I Samuel 17:26 says, ‘And David spake to the men that stood by him, saying, What shall be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach from Israel? for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?’

“David said, ‘All I need right here is what I’ve got in my hand. My sling.’ He goes out and gets him five smooth stones because Goliath’s got four brothers, and he says, ‘The living God will take care of us,’ and he was befuddled that Israel wasn’t believing that.

“Daniel’s in the lion’s den in Daniel 6:26. You know who Daniel’s God is? He went over there and gave Leo lockjaw and God delivered him; He’s the living God. Darius knew all his gods were dead gods."

Running headlong into greater evil

What Bible-believers understand like no one else is that the political structure of our country and this world is controlled by "the prince of this world," i.e. Satan.

“We live in a culture that’s running headlong into greater and greater evil, debauchery, violence and corruption, polluted by modern barbarians,” says Jordan.

“When the Apostle Paul talks about being a good citizen living in a society, he was in a culture that was every bit as pagan and as corrupt as ours is.

*****

“You shouldn’t think that our world is the only one that ever had abortions. When Jesus Christ was born, there was a wicked tyrant who ruled that land and sent out word, not to kill unborn babies, but to kill every child under two years old that happened to be born a male.

“People talk about the political and economic oppression of the government, but when the Lord Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, His mom and dad had gone there because there was a decree from the government of His day that there would be a tax.

“I mean, where could there ever been a more unjust government and taxing system than what they were under? But they didn’t say, ‘We’re not going to go.’

*****

“They lived in a day when slavery was institutionalized. Racial bigotry is an odious, nasty, ugly thing. But you read through your Bible and you don’t find people decrying the Roman government; bemoaning the evil economic system or even the injustices.

“You’re not going to get rid of those things, folks, by fighting the system. The way you have an impact on the nation is you go out and understand people need to be transformed internally (through salvation). They need to have a change inside of them.

“That’s why in Philippians 2:14, Paul says, ‘Do all things without murmurings and disputings: That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world.’

“That’s how you do it and you see from the passage they lived ‘in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation.’ But Paul’s not telling them to go out and fight that by political means. He’s talking about fighting it by holding up some light that gives life. And that light, which is life, transforms the rest.

*****

“By the way, you don’t transform a culture by quoting II Chronicles 7:14: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.’

“You know what the problem with that is? Go back and read the context, and the context is when He says, ‘If my people,’ the two verses before tell you it’s the people of Israel!

*****

“Paul says in Titus 3, ‘Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, to speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness unto all men.’

“The message is, ‘Go out and be good citizens in the world; go out and live in the culture as pagan, and wicked, and evil as it is, but go out there and live in it as a Believer.’ ”

(Editor’s note: To be continued tomorrow . . .)

When your god's not worth a dead horse

Jordan relayed in his Sunday evening study that he’s been getting mail asking about what’s going on in Israel and how Christians should relate to the nation Israel.

He informed, “Did you know that people like Bill Hybels out in Willow Creek, and John Piper up in Minneapolis, people of great fame in our day, believe the nation Israel should be left to be destroyed and supplanted by a Palestinian state, and that we should not have a nation Israel in the earth?

“You go on the other side of the spectrum, and (popular preachers and theologians) say, ‘Well, they’re God’s people and if you bless Abraham you’ll be blessed; if you curse Abraham you’ll be cursed. So, in order to keep America safe, we need to bless Israel.’

“Both of those things are totally unscriptural. They’ve nothing to do with the Bible.

“One is a whacked out view that thinks God is through with Israel, and all the promises He ever made to Israel about giving them the land, and giving it to them forever, have been spiritualized and somehow have already been fulfilled, and that all the curses belong to the nation Israel and all the blessings belong to us.

“Both of them just completely abandon a Bible base even though one of them believes there is a future for Israel, as Scripture teaches there is.

“I read that stuff, and I think, ‘What kind of confusion you get in that! No wonder the world out there thinks it’s time to take a couple of Alka-Seltzers and go to bed when people start talking about the Bible.'

“But the day in which we live is a day in which that’s going to change. No matter what the world thinks, you and I are the church of the living God. The false system out there isn’t the criteria; the measure of our ministry isn’t what’s against us but who’s for us.

*****

“Habakkuk 2: 18-19 says, ‘What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols?
[19] Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach! Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.

“They say, ‘Here, talk to me!’ They think that stone that’s got no life in it is talking to them. They think it’s God and you get into the spiritual deception.

 

"That’s why Paul in Acts 17, when he’s at Mars Hill, says, ‘Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. [23] For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.’

“Now, if I stood up and called you guys a bunch of superstitious ignoramuses, you’d get a little mad at me. But that’s what Paul’s saying, and Paul is talking to the intellectual center of the Western world at Athens--the Greeks, the great philosophers and scholars of the ages. He’s saying, ‘You’re a bunch of superstitious ignoramuses who happen to be religious.’

“You see, truth, when it gets into the marketplace, will take care of itself. But what it comes up against is that lie program.

*****

“If you start in Isaiah 40 and go through chapter 48, you have a whole series of challenges God makes to the false religions that have captured the nation Israel. It’s fascinating to read through these eight chapters and read what he says to them and how God literally just mocks the religious crowd and challenges them and dares them.

“God says in Isaiah 41, ‘Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob.
[22] Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.

“He’s saying, ‘Look, you got all these gods you claim to be doing something—DO SOMETHING! Tell us the future!’ I mean, if your god can’t tell you where you’re going to go when you die, he’s not worth a dead horse; you need to get off of it.

“You remember Elijah on Mt. Carmel with the prophets of Baal. I Kings 18. God said, ‘I’ll tell you what. We’ll find out whether Baal’s God or Jehovah’s God. What we’ll do is offer a sacrifice. Put it out there and the one that answers from heaven by fire, that’s God.

“The prophets of Baal, 450 of them, put there’s out and (chanted) ‘Hamaheemajeema’ all  morning. Elijah sits there a little while and then says, ‘Having a little trouble there, guys?’ Maybe you ought to talk a little louder. Maybe he’s asleep and you need to wake him up.’

“A little while later, Elijah comes back and says, ‘You know, I don’t know, maybe you caught him on a bad day. Maybe he’s traveling. You got his cell phone number? Call him up?’ He mocks them and finally they give up.

“He comes out again and says, ‘Now, I want to make this thing fair. Here’s my sacrifice. Here’s my altar. But I tell you what, we want God to answer by fire, so I want you to take this (sacrifice) and just hose it down with water so nobody can question that you can’t start a fire on it.'

“Elijah then says, ‘Okay, Lord, show them who’s God,’ and BOOM, the fire came down. You know why that is? One is a living God and one’s a false god. One could act and the other one couldn’t.

“Now, look at God’s conclusion in Isaiah 41:23-24. Here’s the verdict: [23] Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.
[24] Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought: an abomination is he that chooseth you.’

 “He said, ‘I’m going to bring this guy down here and clean you all out, and when it happens you’ll know that I won. I’m the winner.’ He brought the Assyrian down and brought the Persian in, wiping them out just like He said he was going to do.

“When Paul said we are the church of the living God, he’s recognizing that there’s a counterfeit church out there. The fundamental thing that being the church of the living God declares is, ‘One, there’s truth and two, there’s the lie program. There is another god system and we’re not it. You represent the creator of heaven and earth. That’s who the God of the Bible is.’ ”

Where the term 'blockhead' comes from . . .

“Some of the greatest woodwork, craftsmanship and artistry you’ll ever see is associated with religion, where people seek to and do create gorgeous things,” said Jordan in a recent study.

“I remember being in South Africa some years ago and we went into one of the first Dutch settlement churches that was built there in Cape Town hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

“When the Dutch first settled that part of the world, there wasn’t anybody living down at the tip end of Africa because the climate was too hostile and the closest African tribes were the Zulus, which were way up north of them.

“And the Dutch built a church there and it’s still there. I remember standing in it, looking at a pulpit built from one big block of wood, a tree, that would fill that whole wall. I went up in it; it was built for a little skinny guy because they were small people.

“I was looking at the artistry, just beautiful handiwork with faces in it, and I was complimenting it to this lady who said, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of love that went into that.’ I’ve remembered that.

*****

In Psalm 135, the Lord says, "The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
[16] They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not;
[17] They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.
[18] They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them.

“Over in Isaiah 40-48, where He’s doing the polemic against the false religions Israel was following, He says, ‘You know, you go out there and you cut the tree down and do all this stuff to make it all beautiful, and then when you want to sweep, you got to move it because it can’t even get out of your way. Yet when you got a need, you go pray to it and ask it to help you. It can’t even get out of your way to clean the floor and you think it’s going to help you when your kid’s sick or an enemy’s coming?! Are you nuts?!’

“That’s why He says there in Psalm 135: 18, ‘They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them.’

“Well, if they’re dumb, blind, deaf and dead, then what are the people who trust them? They’re dumb, blind, deaf and dead. That’s where the term ‘blockhead’ comes from. You got a head made out of a piece of wood.

“So the emphasis Paul’s making in I Timothy is that ‘the church, the body of Christ,’ is where God works and where He lives and where He’s personally active and it’s not like religion. It’s not like Diana. It’s not like the Baal-worshipping stuff.

“Now, look, Diana doesn’t exist today, but the ‘queen of heaven’ does--‘mystery Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’ exists today. All that false religion—get in your Bible and find out what Baal worship is and you’ll find it everywhere you go out there.

*****

“This morning, we closed the service with that song ‘Face to Face.’ I didn’t have the heart to say it after we sang it, but every time we sing that I think, ‘There’s an illustration of hymnology teaching false doctrine.’

“Because that verse is taking a verse out of I Corinthians 13 about ‘face to face we shall see Him’ and making it be a reference to dying and going to heaven when the verse has nothing to do with that.

“That stuff just seeps in everywhere and you have to constantly be aware; constantly be checking. One of my favorite songs, ‘And Can it Be,’ has got a line in it, ‘He emptied Himself of all but love.’ I was singing that not long ago and I thought, ‘I don’t believe that! That’s an NIV and NAS translation of Philippians 2. That isn’t what that verse ought to say.’

“Paul says, ‘That’s not us out there in that dead system.’ We’re the church of the LIVING God. This is where God really is at work and where He really will save people. Where He really will transform people’s lives. Where things really happen that come from heaven. Where it’s God’s grace. Inexhaustible grace to a world that’s exhausted in sin. Over-abounding, over-abundant grace for our needs because it’s the LIVING God and it just flows out of His abundance.

“That’s who we are and God help us if we would stop to try to be the world’s policemen, or try to put people on a treadmill of performance; some conditional basis of trying to gain favor from God that He’s already completely provided for you in Christ.

“You say, ‘Well, what does that do to your growth?’ That lets you grow, not because you have to grow to get something from God, but you can grow in what God’s already given to you.

“He says, ‘Sit down and I’ll be life for you,’ and it’s His life. So that’s what we are; we’re a congregation where God lives.

“By the way, our relationship to the truth is important and that’s why we’re the ‘pillar and the ground of the truth.’ ”

Wicked good counterfeiter

There is a whorehouse religion out in the religious system of the world today that will ultimately culminate with the religion of the Antichrist, through which he will be proclaimed Israel’s Messiah-- the Second Coming of Jesus for Christians and the 12th Imam for Muslims--and sit upon the throne in Jerusalem and declare himself to be God.

“Such will be the persuasive power of the lie program in that day and it will all focus and center in that piece of real estate where civilization began,” says Jordan. “It’s amazing how thoroughly the Adversary seeks to clone what God is doing.

“I’ve said for many years that if Jesus Christ stood right here today and the Antichrist stood right next to Him, the average Christian couldn’t decide which is which and wouldn’t be able to identify the right one. And if they were forced to pick, they’d pick the wrong one! Satan is such a deceiver.

*****

“The Antichrist will be an Assyrian Jew reigning with ten kings of the earth who bow to his persuasiveness. They’ll come and join willingly, not because he holds a dictatorial hand over them and says, ‘If you don’t take my mark and do what I say I won’t let you eat.’

“They’ll come because they drank of the wine of fornication of his apostasy. He’s made the kings of the earth drunk with this wine and they come deluded into doing it; not because they’re forced, but because they’re deceived!

“The Antichrist is going to be a counterfeit religious ruler who works miracles in the earth. Through the religious persuasion of the ‘false prophet’ he gathers authority. So there is a religious element to it and it’s called ‘mystery Babylon the great, the mother of harlots.’

*****

“God literally sends a ‘strong delusion’ to the unbelievers left behind at the Rapture. They want a lie so God says, “Okay, I’ll send you a lie. In fact, I’ll send you THE liar and THE ultimate lie.”

“In order to get Israel to buy into that they have to depart so fully from the truth to the lie program. Israel will depart so completely that the lie seems like the truth.

“I mean, you imagine II Thessalonians 2:4: ‘Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.’

“Here’s how he does that. He’s going to substitute the truth of the Creator for the creature as being God. Where’s the temple of God? It’s in Jerusalem.

“By the way, that’s a great verse to tell you the Antichrist isn’t going to come from the Vatican. He’s the profaned prince, as Ezekiel calls him, and he takes over in Jerusalem. But imagine having this character go in and sit in the temple!

“Remember, God had a throne in the temple where He sat. It was between the cherubim on the mercy seat over the Ark of the Covenant. This guy’s going to go into the throne room of the temple and sit there and say, ‘I’m the Creator.’

“Israel’s going to be so spiritually blinded, departed from the faith so thoroughly, that that’s all going to make sense to them. That’s how thoroughly deceptive this character’s going to be.

“The fundamental way he’ll do that is by demonstrating himself to be God by transitioning from the man of sin to the son of perdition by way of that resurrection.

*****

"That expression Paul uses in II Thessalonians 2:3, ‘that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition,’ is a two-stage revelation of the Antichrist. Those are two very important titles. In fact, the third one is in verse 8 where he’s called ‘that Wicked,’ and you see that’s got a capital ‘W’ because it’s a proper name. That’s one of the names of the Antichrist.

“There are a couple of dozen specific names given to the Antichrist in Scripture. These are three of the most powerful ones because they describe him. Psalm 10 ends by identifying ‘that wicked one, that man of the earth.’

“Psalm 10 is a whole psalm about the rise and career of the Antichrist and the believing remnant in the last days and their relationship and dependence on the Lord in facing the Antichrist.

“It’s a psalm about him oppressing the poor and the poor here are those people who can’t buy or sell, specifically because they didn’t take ‘the mark of the beast’ from Revelation.

“They’re the poor in Matthew 25 when it says, ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was naked and you gave me clothes.’ The reason for those things has to do with the persecution and oppression the Antichrist will be putting on some people in that specific period of time in the last days.

*****

In the midst of the 70^th week of Daniel, he transitions from being that man of sin who is the personification of human natural rebellion and wickedness (the sin of man) into becoming the son of Satan. That is, the personification of the satanic program and the personification of the working of Satan.

“That’s the reason Paul says in II Thessalonians 2: 9, ‘Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.’

“Time wise, this takes place in what Daniel calls ‘the midst of the week.’ You have to be careful when you’re talking about a term like ‘the midst of the week’ and ‘the middle of the week.’ We often talk about the middle of the 70^th week of Daniel because there are 42 months in the first half and 42 months in the last half. 1,260 days in one and 1,260 days in the other. The midpoint is the 1,261^st day.

“But if I say ‘in the midst’ of something, that doesn’t bring it down to just one day or even two days. The midst can be a middle part. If you have seven years of the 70^th week of Daniel, and I said the midst of it, well, really the midst of it could be the fourth year. You’d have three before and three afterward and you’d have a middle year.

“The term ‘midst’ isn’t going to expand out to be a whole year but it’s going to be a period of several weeks—really probably about a month’s worth of time.

*****

“Revelation 11:7-8 says, ‘And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.’

“Notice that Jerusalem has become spiritually equivalent to Sodom and Egypt. That is NOT a compliment.

“Spiritually they’ve become, as Revelation 18 says, ‘The hold of every fowl and unclean birds (spirits).’ This is the center where the Antichrist is going to come and set up his throne.

“What I want you to see is who it is that leads in the killing of these two witnesses? Well, it’s the beast, but he’s described in an interesting way: ‘That ascends out of the bottomless pit.’

“Now, the dudes in the bottomless pit are, well, they’re not humans. And yet here, when he looks at the Antichrist, he’s been transformed into something that is beyond just a human experience.

“In chapter 17, he’s identified as ‘the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit.’ There gets to be some rather extraordinary, if I try to be polite about it, activities involved in the career of this guy.

“How is it that he, in the middle of his life, becomes the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit? If you come over to Revelation 13, you’ll see this character, because John’s going to amplify on who this beast is that you read about in chapter 11 and 12.

*****

“Revelation 13:1 says, ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’

“In chapter six, when he shows up, he’s only got ONE crown and now he’s got 10 of them. By this time in his career he’s gone out and taken over the ten kings that were there and he’s now sitting as the ruler of the government in that region.

“The chapter goes on, ‘[2] And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. [3] And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.’

“Now, if you’re mortally wounded and then that wound is healed . . . if you come down to verse 11 says, ‘And I beheld another beast (this one will be called the false prophet in chapter 19) coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.’

“So this beast, this false prophet, is going to come along, and through the doctrine he promotes, is going to cause the world to worship. Now, who do you worship? Don’t you worship God? The false prophet is going to preach a message that causes people to worship the first beast—the Antichrist.

“Verse 12 says, ‘And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.’

“Notice the basis for the worship of that first beast is this deadly wound gets healed. The basis isn’t that he was wounded; it’s that he got over the deadly wound!

“Verse 13 says, ‘And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.’

“Notice this guy is a miracle worker. Nobody’s going to look at the miracles and say they were charlatans. He’s literally going to be able to . . . we read the verse in II Thessalonians about signs and lying wonders. They’re wonders designed to deceive. So he deceives them that dwell in the earth by means of those miracles which he had power to do.

“The next verse says, ‘And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.’

“Here’s a guy, he’s the man of sin. He gets into a situation where he is assassinated with a sword and then . . . now remember he’s the ANTIchrist. Jesus Christ dies but in His career He doesn’t just die; He’s raised again.

“This guy’s going to duplicate the career of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’ll die and he’ll prove himself to be the son of perdition with power by resurrection from the dead.

*****

“Isaiah 37: 5-7 says, ‘So the servants of king Hezekiah came to Isaiah.
[6] And Isaiah said unto them, Thus shall ye say unto your master, Thus saith the LORD, Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard, wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me.
[7] Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’

“One of the heads of those seven heads back there is Assyria. The Antichrist is often identified, especially in Isaiah and Micah, as the Assyrian. The events are really a prologue for the events in the future.

“But notice what he says about him in Isaiah 37. Here’s the king who’s come against Jerusalem, against Hezekiah, and he’s going to fall by the sword in his own land. But now look back at chapter 14, where we’re going to talk about this dude again.

“Isaiah 14:24 says, 24] The LORD of hosts hath sworn, saying, Surely as I have thought, so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall it stand:
[25] That I will break the Assyrian in my land, and upon my mountains tread him under foot: then shall his yoke depart from off them, and his burden depart from off their shoulders.

*****

“The beast is described in terms of grotesqueness. When Scripture refers to the ‘brute beast,’ it’s talking about the the violence, the ferocity, the cruel, heartless slayer.

“Isaiah 11:4 says, [4] But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.

“When the Lord Jesus Christ comes to reign, He’s going to reign in real justice, not impacted by media concerns, social concerns, political concerns. That’s why II Thessalonians 2:8 talks about the Wicked ‘who he will consume with the spirit of his mouth.’ ”