There are three times in Christ’s earthly ministry that heaven speaks, as it were; the Father audibly speaks to Him where everyone can hear.
The first is in Matthew 3 at His baptism. John sees the Spirit descend on Christ and hears a voice from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Hear ye him.” Here’s the Messiah!
“John said, ‘I didn’t know who He was but that He that sent me said’ . . . so there’s the public testimony from the Father to John the Baptist that, ‘This is my beloved Son,’ ” explains Jordan. “In Luke 3, it was not just a statement for John to hear, but also for Christ to hear. So there’s a double entendre there in the message; the Father visibly, audibly speaking.
“The next time the Father speaks audibly is on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17 (or Luke 9). There’s Moses, Elijah and Jesus and they say, ‘Let’s build three tabernacles,’ and they go to sleep and wake up and they only see Jesus, and the Father says, ‘This is my beloved Son.’
*****
“We sing that song ‘He Could Have Called Ten Thousand Angels.’ The chorus goes, ‘He could have called ten thousand angels to destroy the world and set Him free . . . but He died alone for you and me.’ That song is based upon a statement Christ makes in Matthew 26. When He makes that statement He makes the point of this verse: ‘My soul is troubled . . . ’ (John 12:27).
“ ‘There’s difficulty ahead but what am I gonna say?! Am I gonna say the trouble turns me away from it? Father save me from this hour’? No, He says, ‘But for this hour came I unto this hour. The whole purpose of me being here is this!’ So for the joy set before Him, the reality of what’s going to be accomplished through what He goes through, ‘I choose to go through this.’
*****
Verse 28 says, “Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” Christ prays and the Father audibly answers Him back.
Jordan says, “You remember how the raising of Lazarus back in chapter 11 was for the glory of God? 11:4. All through the Book of John, since chapter 1:14 when he says, ‘We beheld his glory,’ the Book of John puts illustration, incidence, event after event after event, where you see something manifested of the person of Christ, and when you do that, it glorifies it; it magnifies who He is.
“When you see that, you see the Father glorified. So He says, ‘I have glorified it; I’ve been doing that all along in your ministry and will glorify it again.’ In other words, that is a clear statement that, ‘Not only have I glorified it, but I’m going to glorify it again and that’s going to be in your resurrection.’ In Romans 6:4, Paul says he was raised by the glory of the Father.
“That’s a wonderful statement made to Christ and the next verse, in John 12:29, is important: ‘The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.’ They hear something but they don’t understand what’s being said. They hear thunder and people have said that’s an angel talking.
“Job 37 1-4 reads, ‘At this also my heart trembleth, and is moved out of his place.
[2] Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth out of his mouth.
[3] He directeth it under the whole heaven, and his lightning unto the ends of the earth.
[4] After it a voice roareth: he thundereth with the voice of his excellency; and he will not stay them when his voice is heard.
[5] God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend.’
“Elihu says he hears what God’s voice, when He speaks, sounds like, so the idea of the thunder is associated with God’s speaking. So what God spoke, Jesus heard what they said and understood . . . they heard a noise but didn’t understand the words. In other words, there was a direct communication to Christ that He got; the people standing around just thought they heard noise and assumed, ‘Well that was a message from God; an angel spoke.’
“That verse is interesting in the context of the conversion of Saul. Acts 9:3 says, ‘And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:
[4] And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
[5] And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’
“When you compare that with Acts 22, Acts 9 is Luke’s record of the conversion of Saul. In Acts 22 you have the Apostle Paul himself giving a testimony about what happened to him on the road to Damascus ( Acts 22:6). Now Paul says, ‘I heard it.’ Here it says they heard not of the voice of him that spake. In Acts 7 it says they were hearing a voice but seeing no man.
“You say, ‘Wait a minute, did they hear the voice or didn’t they?’ One verse says they heard a voice but don’t see a man. Acts 22 says they heard NOT the voice of him that spake. You say, ‘Why does one place say they heard it and another place say they didn’t hear it?’ The logical observation is the thing in John 12. They hear the noise, they hear the thunder (the voice) but they don’t hear ‘the voice of him that spake to me.’ They don’t get the words. Paul hears what the voice is saying. They just hear the racket.”
Acts 26:14 says, “And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”
Jordan explains, “So when Paul heard the voice it was ‘the voice of him that spake to me’; it was an audible voice talking intelligently to him in Hebrew. When the other guys heard it, they just heard the commotion.
The illustration of that in John 12 helps you ferret out what otherwise would seem like something that didn’t quite fit together because it’s not an unusual thing for God to speak and for people to hear it as a thunder—as a noise. To know that God or an angel spoke but not know what the message was.
“So back here in John 12, Jesus gets the message; the people just hear the noise so Christ explains to them in John 12:30: ‘Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.’ me and to strengthen your faith; to demonstrate to you that, ‘When I pray, heaven answers.”
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Superlatives count
Genesis 10:19 says, “And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.”
Where did the Canaanites live? If you start in Zidon, which is up on the Mediterranean coast up in the north and you go down to Gaza and go out east to Sodom and Gomorrah and that territory, that’s what is called today Palestine.
The Canaanites lived in Israel’s land, or the land God gave to Abraham. He took Abraham and said, “Walk out in that land out there; that’s yours!”
Jordan explains, “The reason he mentions the Canaanites in Genesis 9, and Canaan the descendant of Ham, is to draw attention to the curse that was on the occupants of the land that Israel was going to go in there. Over and over and over again God tells Israel to go in there and throw the Canaanites out. What else were they supposed to do to them? 'Kill ‘em. Get ‘em out. Kill ‘em dead. And kill all of them. Not some of them.' They were to exterminate them and get them out.
“That curse and the justification for that, and the understanding of why that was to be done in Israel’s history, Moses is writing this when those orders were being given to Israel and he writes this thing in Genesis 9 and God the Holy Spirit puts it here to cause Israel in Moses’ day to understand why it is that that was a cursed people. They were ‘outlandish people,’ as they’re called in Nehemiah.
"They didn’t belong where they were and they had settled there against the wishes of the Lord. We’re going to see in Genesis 11 that these are the people that do that kind of thing!
*****
“You understand that term ‘a servant of servants’ is not a derogatory or pejorative kind of a description. In the Hebrew language, when they wanted to say something in the superlative, they would repeat it.
“You heard it said in Genesis 2 when the Lord said unto Adam, ‘The day you eat of the Tree of Good and Evil thou shalt surely die.’ For years I’ve heard preachers say, ‘Well, that means ‘dying thou shalt die,’ and that’s what it says in the Hebrew. People say, ‘Well, see that means dying spiritually you’re going to die physically.’ That isn’t what that means at all!
“What that is is understanding the exact thing that he says in Hebrew without understanding the language and the grammar of the language that’s being dealt with.
"In the Hebrew language, when they wanted to make something in the superlative, they repeat it. We would say, ‘You’re going to surely die.’ In other words, there isn’t any way to get around it and you see that in Hebrew constantly like that. Well here it’s the same kind of thing.
“He’s saying he’s going to be a servant par excellence. There’s nobody gonna beat this guy at serving. He’s going to be the best there is. He’s going to render extraordinary service to mankind and he does it in the area of mechanical skills and technology; getting the job done. Ham’s descendants are to make a tremendous contribution to mankind in that area.
“Japheth (verse 29) is going to spread out and be a developer, an expander, an explorer. He’s going to have the power of technology (the skills developed by the other two brothers and their respective descendants) to expand it out.
“Shem takes care of religion. Every major world religion comes from the tents of Shem. You know, when Ham develops a religion it’s spurious. When Japheth develops a religion it’s a phony and there’s something about you just say, ‘Eehh, there’s something about that that just doesn’t . . .’
“Ham develops a religion and you get something like voodoo. The Mambo-Jambo stuff and the Spiritism. Japheth develops a religion and you get something like Christian Science or the Mormons. But when Shem develops a religion, you come up with Mohammedism, Islam or the Baha’is or Confucianism or Buddhism. If you ever read about the Buddhists and those guys, and you begin to see, you know these guys are onto something. There’s something a little more authentic about that.
*****
“They used to say, ‘The English ruled the waves, the French ruled the land and the Germans ruled the air.’ They were the thinkers in Europe. Well, when you get to messing with Shem, Shem is in his head. He’s thinking.
“I’ll give you an illustration about why you need to understand this; how it will help you in politics and in international affairs. The U.S. went into Korea and got the britches beat off of them. You know why? They didn’t understand Shem.
“Ten years later they went to Vietnam and Shem cleaned their clocks; cleaned our plow! You know why? Japheth isn’t equipped to deal with Shem because he doesn’t think like Shem thinks. Shem looks at that hill out there . . .
"In WW II there was something you were trying to take. You took a city and you could see strategic advantage to it and all that. You go fight Shem and there’s this hill out over there; got nobody living on it but the whole battle, the whole war, depends on taking that hill and keeping it. Well, see that’s in his head! There’s a mental attitude about that thing.
“That’s the same thing that happened in Vietnam. You go up against Shem and there isn’t but one or two things to do. One is to go in there and you just beat him into a pulp, soundly, the first time you mess with him or two, you leave him alone. That’s the only two options you’ve got. You don’t have the option of a limited engagement or that kind of stuff. You know why? He’ll beat you; you just don’t have sense enough to know it yet! He beats you and waits ‘til it dawns on you and that’s just the way he is and you see that all through the Scripture.
“These three men’s descendants are designed to have all those characteristics that are wonderful, good and positively blended together, not in a melting pot but in a divinely ordained system, or nationalism, where all of their contributions were functioning and working and then blended together for the good of the whole. Genesis 10 records the spread
of these men.
*****
“Now the problem comes up that, shortly after they begin to spread out on the earth, rebellion came in. Satan’s policy of evil is to destroy God-instituted nationalism and bring in internationalism and have a one-world government, one-world religion and one-world race. And God’s purpose was not those things.
"God set out these families and He put them in nations and determined they would have geographic and political boundaries between them for the purpose of ‘if happily they might seek after the Lord and find Him.’
“Gen. 10:2. Japheth’s descendants go up; when they leave the Ark they move out north and they go up into Europe and Japheth becomes the Indo-European people. Verse 6: Ethiopia is Cush, Mizriam is Egypt, Phut is Libya and Canaan didn’t make it down there like he ought to have.
“Look at cross-references over in the Book of Psalms. Psalms 105 and 106 are where Egypt is called the Land of Ham and Ham goes down south and into Africa and that’s Ham’s land. Verse 21. Shem’s descendants go toward the East. Verse 30.
“Shem’s the guy God picks up now from here on out because in chapter 11:10, and the reason he picks up Shem is in verse 11:26: ‘And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.’
“Terah lives 70 years and begat Abram and there’s the guy that the rest of the story is all about! You’re going to get these quick genealogies, but the one they’re going to focus on from now on is Shem and you need to notice the things about Ham and Japheth.
“There’s nothing particularly outstanding about Japheth there except maybe verse 10:5: ‘By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.’ If it’s after their tongue, then obviously the divisions and so forth take place after the Tower of Babel destruction because they were just one tongue prior to that.
“I guess the one descendant of Ham you probably ought to notice the most is in verse 10:14: ‘And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came Philistim,)
and Caphtorim.’
“The Philistines are descendants of Ham. You need to remember that. You get over into Israel’s history and you know they constantly have trouble with the Philistines. You remember Sampson fell in love with a little Philistine gal and so forth?
“You want to remember who they came from, where they came from and what they’re doing. They give you a little insight into the makeup of the controversies that are going on over there. There’s a lot of ‘cosmopolitan’ activity going on in your Bible that sometime you miss.
“Esau went and married a bunch of Canaanite women, and when he saw that the Canaanite women, and him marrying them, made his momma and daddy unhappy, he went and married another one!
"You see, there’s things going on there that you don’t want to miss about what’s happening and what was making him unhappy. It isn’t that much different than what goes on in the 20th Century, see? Not that much different at all.”
Where did the Canaanites live? If you start in Zidon, which is up on the Mediterranean coast up in the north and you go down to Gaza and go out east to Sodom and Gomorrah and that territory, that’s what is called today Palestine.
The Canaanites lived in Israel’s land, or the land God gave to Abraham. He took Abraham and said, “Walk out in that land out there; that’s yours!”
Jordan explains, “The reason he mentions the Canaanites in Genesis 9, and Canaan the descendant of Ham, is to draw attention to the curse that was on the occupants of the land that Israel was going to go in there. Over and over and over again God tells Israel to go in there and throw the Canaanites out. What else were they supposed to do to them? 'Kill ‘em. Get ‘em out. Kill ‘em dead. And kill all of them. Not some of them.' They were to exterminate them and get them out.
“That curse and the justification for that, and the understanding of why that was to be done in Israel’s history, Moses is writing this when those orders were being given to Israel and he writes this thing in Genesis 9 and God the Holy Spirit puts it here to cause Israel in Moses’ day to understand why it is that that was a cursed people. They were ‘outlandish people,’ as they’re called in Nehemiah.
"They didn’t belong where they were and they had settled there against the wishes of the Lord. We’re going to see in Genesis 11 that these are the people that do that kind of thing!
*****
“You understand that term ‘a servant of servants’ is not a derogatory or pejorative kind of a description. In the Hebrew language, when they wanted to say something in the superlative, they would repeat it.
“You heard it said in Genesis 2 when the Lord said unto Adam, ‘The day you eat of the Tree of Good and Evil thou shalt surely die.’ For years I’ve heard preachers say, ‘Well, that means ‘dying thou shalt die,’ and that’s what it says in the Hebrew. People say, ‘Well, see that means dying spiritually you’re going to die physically.’ That isn’t what that means at all!
“What that is is understanding the exact thing that he says in Hebrew without understanding the language and the grammar of the language that’s being dealt with.
"In the Hebrew language, when they wanted to make something in the superlative, they repeat it. We would say, ‘You’re going to surely die.’ In other words, there isn’t any way to get around it and you see that in Hebrew constantly like that. Well here it’s the same kind of thing.
“He’s saying he’s going to be a servant par excellence. There’s nobody gonna beat this guy at serving. He’s going to be the best there is. He’s going to render extraordinary service to mankind and he does it in the area of mechanical skills and technology; getting the job done. Ham’s descendants are to make a tremendous contribution to mankind in that area.
“Japheth (verse 29) is going to spread out and be a developer, an expander, an explorer. He’s going to have the power of technology (the skills developed by the other two brothers and their respective descendants) to expand it out.
“Shem takes care of religion. Every major world religion comes from the tents of Shem. You know, when Ham develops a religion it’s spurious. When Japheth develops a religion it’s a phony and there’s something about you just say, ‘Eehh, there’s something about that that just doesn’t . . .’
“Ham develops a religion and you get something like voodoo. The Mambo-Jambo stuff and the Spiritism. Japheth develops a religion and you get something like Christian Science or the Mormons. But when Shem develops a religion, you come up with Mohammedism, Islam or the Baha’is or Confucianism or Buddhism. If you ever read about the Buddhists and those guys, and you begin to see, you know these guys are onto something. There’s something a little more authentic about that.
*****
“They used to say, ‘The English ruled the waves, the French ruled the land and the Germans ruled the air.’ They were the thinkers in Europe. Well, when you get to messing with Shem, Shem is in his head. He’s thinking.
“I’ll give you an illustration about why you need to understand this; how it will help you in politics and in international affairs. The U.S. went into Korea and got the britches beat off of them. You know why? They didn’t understand Shem.
“Ten years later they went to Vietnam and Shem cleaned their clocks; cleaned our plow! You know why? Japheth isn’t equipped to deal with Shem because he doesn’t think like Shem thinks. Shem looks at that hill out there . . .
"In WW II there was something you were trying to take. You took a city and you could see strategic advantage to it and all that. You go fight Shem and there’s this hill out over there; got nobody living on it but the whole battle, the whole war, depends on taking that hill and keeping it. Well, see that’s in his head! There’s a mental attitude about that thing.
“That’s the same thing that happened in Vietnam. You go up against Shem and there isn’t but one or two things to do. One is to go in there and you just beat him into a pulp, soundly, the first time you mess with him or two, you leave him alone. That’s the only two options you’ve got. You don’t have the option of a limited engagement or that kind of stuff. You know why? He’ll beat you; you just don’t have sense enough to know it yet! He beats you and waits ‘til it dawns on you and that’s just the way he is and you see that all through the Scripture.
“These three men’s descendants are designed to have all those characteristics that are wonderful, good and positively blended together, not in a melting pot but in a divinely ordained system, or nationalism, where all of their contributions were functioning and working and then blended together for the good of the whole. Genesis 10 records the spread
of these men.
*****
“Now the problem comes up that, shortly after they begin to spread out on the earth, rebellion came in. Satan’s policy of evil is to destroy God-instituted nationalism and bring in internationalism and have a one-world government, one-world religion and one-world race. And God’s purpose was not those things.
"God set out these families and He put them in nations and determined they would have geographic and political boundaries between them for the purpose of ‘if happily they might seek after the Lord and find Him.’
“Gen. 10:2. Japheth’s descendants go up; when they leave the Ark they move out north and they go up into Europe and Japheth becomes the Indo-European people. Verse 6: Ethiopia is Cush, Mizriam is Egypt, Phut is Libya and Canaan didn’t make it down there like he ought to have.
“Look at cross-references over in the Book of Psalms. Psalms 105 and 106 are where Egypt is called the Land of Ham and Ham goes down south and into Africa and that’s Ham’s land. Verse 21. Shem’s descendants go toward the East. Verse 30.
“Shem’s the guy God picks up now from here on out because in chapter 11:10, and the reason he picks up Shem is in verse 11:26: ‘And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.’
“Terah lives 70 years and begat Abram and there’s the guy that the rest of the story is all about! You’re going to get these quick genealogies, but the one they’re going to focus on from now on is Shem and you need to notice the things about Ham and Japheth.
“There’s nothing particularly outstanding about Japheth there except maybe verse 10:5: ‘By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.’ If it’s after their tongue, then obviously the divisions and so forth take place after the Tower of Babel destruction because they were just one tongue prior to that.
“I guess the one descendant of Ham you probably ought to notice the most is in verse 10:14: ‘And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came Philistim,)
and Caphtorim.’
“The Philistines are descendants of Ham. You need to remember that. You get over into Israel’s history and you know they constantly have trouble with the Philistines. You remember Sampson fell in love with a little Philistine gal and so forth?
“You want to remember who they came from, where they came from and what they’re doing. They give you a little insight into the makeup of the controversies that are going on over there. There’s a lot of ‘cosmopolitan’ activity going on in your Bible that sometime you miss.
“Esau went and married a bunch of Canaanite women, and when he saw that the Canaanite women, and him marrying them, made his momma and daddy unhappy, he went and married another one!
"You see, there’s things going on there that you don’t want to miss about what’s happening and what was making him unhappy. It isn’t that much different than what goes on in the 20th Century, see? Not that much different at all.”
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Starting line
Prayer is constantly talking to God about everything going on in your life, applying what His Word says. Jordan says, “All of a sudden you’re making all of your life under this wonderful, intimate communion with a heavenly Father who loves you and desires you more than anything else. He desires that fellowship and active communion with you taking what He says and bringing it into your experience by walking by faith.”
Paul says, “Pray for me; I’m excited about what we’re doing.” He writes in II Thessalonians 3:1: “Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you.”
Jordan explains, “Paul’s saying, ‘I want the Word of the Lord to be set free; run without obstacles. Run without needing to stop and be glorified.’
“When you glorify something you demonstrate how valuable it is; how much of a treasure it is. How important it is. How would you glorify the Lord Jesus Christ? How do you demonstrate in your life that you cherish Him more than anybody else; His wisdom, His thinking?
“When you make decisions in life, whose opinion is the most valuable? You’re choosing HIS thinking, HIS attitudes, having HIS actions. I can’t live the life but He gave me His life and that’s the life that’s going to count.”
I Thess. 1:5 says, “For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake.”
The power is in the power of God. As chapter 2:13 says, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.”
Jesus says, “The flesh profiteth nothing,” meaning all of our wisdom, our resources, aren’t the issue.
“You got to start there!” says Jordan. “You never want to glory in yourself. Galatians 2:20 says, ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’
“You’re constantly learning that it isn’t me; it’s Him. Jesus said, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.' The objective measure of the working of the Spirit of God in your life is God’s Spirit wrote a Book and it’s a physical, tangible connection between Him and you.
"You never appropriate that into your experience until you need that. If you don't know it, you can't appropriate it. The need is, 'Not I but Christ.'You're constantly learning that it isn't me. You learn this at a different level; that's part of what maturity is all about.
"Jesus said, 'The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.' The words on the pages are the words of the Spirit and when I beleive that Word and put my faith in it it WORKS; it becomes energizing activity and life in him who believes."
Paul says, “Pray for me; I’m excited about what we’re doing.” He writes in II Thessalonians 3:1: “Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you.”
Jordan explains, “Paul’s saying, ‘I want the Word of the Lord to be set free; run without obstacles. Run without needing to stop and be glorified.’
“When you glorify something you demonstrate how valuable it is; how much of a treasure it is. How important it is. How would you glorify the Lord Jesus Christ? How do you demonstrate in your life that you cherish Him more than anybody else; His wisdom, His thinking?
“When you make decisions in life, whose opinion is the most valuable? You’re choosing HIS thinking, HIS attitudes, having HIS actions. I can’t live the life but He gave me His life and that’s the life that’s going to count.”
I Thess. 1:5 says, “For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake.”
The power is in the power of God. As chapter 2:13 says, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.”
Jesus says, “The flesh profiteth nothing,” meaning all of our wisdom, our resources, aren’t the issue.
“You got to start there!” says Jordan. “You never want to glory in yourself. Galatians 2:20 says, ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’
“You’re constantly learning that it isn’t me; it’s Him. Jesus said, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.' The objective measure of the working of the Spirit of God in your life is God’s Spirit wrote a Book and it’s a physical, tangible connection between Him and you.
"You never appropriate that into your experience until you need that. If you don't know it, you can't appropriate it. The need is, 'Not I but Christ.'You're constantly learning that it isn't me. You learn this at a different level; that's part of what maturity is all about.
"Jesus said, 'The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.' The words on the pages are the words of the Spirit and when I beleive that Word and put my faith in it it WORKS; it becomes energizing activity and life in him who believes."
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Fine-tuning
In Acts 10, Peter is preaching away when all of sudden the Gentiles receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in tongues and speak in Hebrew so Peter could hear them glorify God. If they hadn’t spoken in tongues Peter wouldn’t have known they had the Holy Spirit because you can’t see the Holy Spirit.
Jordan explains, “Peter says ‘Something ain’t right here!’ What was the order in Acts 2:38? Repent, be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. But what’s happening here? Something different! Verse 47 says, ‘Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?’
“It’s changing! You see, if you start out in Acts chapter 2, you got one message, but you get over into Acts 10 and all of a sudden there’s a monkey wrench thrown into the thing. Now come over to Acts 16 if you want to see it get even worse.”
Acts 16:30-31 says, “And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
[31] And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.”
Jordan says, “Now that’s pretty much the same question they asked Peter in Acts 2. But what do they say back there (in Acts 16)? What you got to do? Just believe.
“I get on the radio and read those passages and talk to people about Acts 2 and Acts 16 and we’ll get hate mail. Now you want to get hate mail just read those two passages on the radio! I think, ‘Looks simple to me. One of them is Peter’s message and one of them’s Paul’s message.’
“One is the kingdom program and one’s the dispensation of grace and there’s no problem for you because you understand that distinction. But if you took that distinction out of your mind and thought that was all one thing, wouldn’t that confuse you?
“The conversion of the Apostle Paul is the beginning of a transition period in the Book of Acts. There’s no transition up to that point but, beginning there, there’s a tremendous transition taking place in the message that’s preached and in the methodology that’s operated in the programs and everything else.
“Paul is converted and has been given a new program in Acts 9 on the road to Damascus, and from that point on, there begins to be a transition and change.
“I just want you to see as you go through the book things—it’s not just ‘hummmmmmm’; it’s sort of like you seen in that Precision Tune commercial on TV where the car goes ‘blegh, blegh, blegh,’ and you get a tune-up and it goes ‘hummmmmmm.’ Well, the Book of Acts is before the tune-up. It’s all over the page.
“You get over to Romans and it begins to smooth out for you, but Acts never does smooth out. Acts 3:18 says, ‘But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.
[19] Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.’
“When he says, ‘Repent ye therefore and be converted,’ who’s he talking to there? He’s talking to the nation, isn’t he? He’s not saying, ‘If any one of you Jews out there repent, Christ will come back.’ He’s saying, ‘If you (plural) the nation will repent, here’s what will happen.’
“The nations sins our going to be blotted out so people get all bent out of shape over that passage. ‘Wait a minute, what happened to the individual person?! He would trust Christ and his sins would be forgiven him, wouldn’t it?!’ Sure. We’re talking about the ‘day of atonement’ for the nation.
“The purpose of the Book of Acts is to present the fall of Israel and God’s reasons for sending salvation to the Gentiles apart from the kingdom program and apart from His chosen people. It’s not a history lesson; it’s not a pattern for Believers today. It’s not a design by which the church the Body of Christ should operate today.
“It is written for the purpose of setting forth the fall of Israel and God’s reason for sending salvation to the Gentiles apart from Israel through a new message. And if you’ll get that in your mind, and you’ll see that and consider it dispensationally like that, you’ll see the fruit of studying the Book of Acts can be very sweet.
“If you look at the other way, the traditional way where it’s a history lesson (with examples and principles to live by today) you’re going to have problems. You’re going to wreck your ministry trying to follow things that don’t work; things that God has rendered impossible for you to do today! You need to recognize His purpose; the underlying reason.”
Jordan explains, “Peter says ‘Something ain’t right here!’ What was the order in Acts 2:38? Repent, be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. But what’s happening here? Something different! Verse 47 says, ‘Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?’
“It’s changing! You see, if you start out in Acts chapter 2, you got one message, but you get over into Acts 10 and all of a sudden there’s a monkey wrench thrown into the thing. Now come over to Acts 16 if you want to see it get even worse.”
Acts 16:30-31 says, “And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
[31] And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.”
Jordan says, “Now that’s pretty much the same question they asked Peter in Acts 2. But what do they say back there (in Acts 16)? What you got to do? Just believe.
“I get on the radio and read those passages and talk to people about Acts 2 and Acts 16 and we’ll get hate mail. Now you want to get hate mail just read those two passages on the radio! I think, ‘Looks simple to me. One of them is Peter’s message and one of them’s Paul’s message.’
“One is the kingdom program and one’s the dispensation of grace and there’s no problem for you because you understand that distinction. But if you took that distinction out of your mind and thought that was all one thing, wouldn’t that confuse you?
“The conversion of the Apostle Paul is the beginning of a transition period in the Book of Acts. There’s no transition up to that point but, beginning there, there’s a tremendous transition taking place in the message that’s preached and in the methodology that’s operated in the programs and everything else.
“Paul is converted and has been given a new program in Acts 9 on the road to Damascus, and from that point on, there begins to be a transition and change.
“I just want you to see as you go through the book things—it’s not just ‘hummmmmmm’; it’s sort of like you seen in that Precision Tune commercial on TV where the car goes ‘blegh, blegh, blegh,’ and you get a tune-up and it goes ‘hummmmmmm.’ Well, the Book of Acts is before the tune-up. It’s all over the page.
“You get over to Romans and it begins to smooth out for you, but Acts never does smooth out. Acts 3:18 says, ‘But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.
[19] Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.’
“When he says, ‘Repent ye therefore and be converted,’ who’s he talking to there? He’s talking to the nation, isn’t he? He’s not saying, ‘If any one of you Jews out there repent, Christ will come back.’ He’s saying, ‘If you (plural) the nation will repent, here’s what will happen.’
“The nations sins our going to be blotted out so people get all bent out of shape over that passage. ‘Wait a minute, what happened to the individual person?! He would trust Christ and his sins would be forgiven him, wouldn’t it?!’ Sure. We’re talking about the ‘day of atonement’ for the nation.
“The purpose of the Book of Acts is to present the fall of Israel and God’s reasons for sending salvation to the Gentiles apart from the kingdom program and apart from His chosen people. It’s not a history lesson; it’s not a pattern for Believers today. It’s not a design by which the church the Body of Christ should operate today.
“It is written for the purpose of setting forth the fall of Israel and God’s reason for sending salvation to the Gentiles apart from Israel through a new message. And if you’ll get that in your mind, and you’ll see that and consider it dispensationally like that, you’ll see the fruit of studying the Book of Acts can be very sweet.
“If you look at the other way, the traditional way where it’s a history lesson (with examples and principles to live by today) you’re going to have problems. You’re going to wreck your ministry trying to follow things that don’t work; things that God has rendered impossible for you to do today! You need to recognize His purpose; the underlying reason.”
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Close associations
Cain says, “Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.”
Jordan explains, “Notice when Cain says ‘every one that findeth me shall slay me,’ according to the Law of the Near Kinsman the people who could slay a man were his near kinsmen. So what he’s saying is everybody out there is his relative. Everybody on the face of the earth at that time was a relative of Cain, being a descendant of Adam and Eve.
“They would either be Cain’s brothers and sisters or his nieces, nephews and cousins. Evidently, there’s a lot of people out there because he says ‘every one.’
"At this time the population of the earth has grown considerably and just because you’ve seen Cain and Abel (thus far in Genesis) and that’s all you’ve seen, doesn’t mean Adam and Eve don’t have other children because chapter 5:3-4 indicates they’re having children all along. You’re just getting a representative history in these individuals.
“So the population of the earth is increasing. This could possibly be as far along as 130 years after they got out of the Garden. The population of the earth keeps increasing and growing, so the problem with where did Cain get his wife and those kinds of things are found in the Bible text.
“Psalm 59:11 says, ‘Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield.’ That’s the principle in Genesis 4. God’s determined Cain would live before men and carry out his sentence, visibly executed before his kinsmen.”
*****
Luke was Paul’s companion toward the end of the book of acts are three “we” sections (16:10-40, 21:1-18 and 27:1-28:16) where all of sudden Luke’s describing what’s going on and says, ‘We did that.’
Jordan explains, “That means he joined up with Paul and, for that period of time, he’s with him. The way it goes is there will be ‘they did, they did, they did’ and then comes a ‘we did.’
“Three different times he travels extensively with Paul, and in Paul’s later life, Luke is with him all the way. The beloved physician.
“Now because of that close association he had with Paul, Luke’s writings would naturally have an interest for us. Paul would know Luke’s gospel the best of all of them. If you asked me which of the four gospel accounts did Paul read and carry with him, no doubt it was Luke’s.
“I’m sure that long before he died he had the other accounts because they were collecting together the Scripture. But he’d know Luke’s best because he had the author with him so much and it’s fitting that the Apostle of the Gentiles would have a record of the earthly ministry of Christ written by one who was himself a Gentile.
“Not, again, that the mystery is found or even hinted at in Luke’s gospel, but you see under the guidance of the God the Holy Spirit, as Luke was writing down his gospel, he would be led by the Holy Spirit to include and exclude those features that are different from what Matthew is--those things that are exclusively focused on Israel, and he would put things in that would open things up.
“When you come to Acts, you come with a man who’s looking out here and seeing the Lord and Word and the broader purposes that God has in the earth and he sees the Lord (first) working in Israel to bring salvation to the nations and then in Paul to bring salvation to the nations.”
Jordan explains, “Notice when Cain says ‘every one that findeth me shall slay me,’ according to the Law of the Near Kinsman the people who could slay a man were his near kinsmen. So what he’s saying is everybody out there is his relative. Everybody on the face of the earth at that time was a relative of Cain, being a descendant of Adam and Eve.
“They would either be Cain’s brothers and sisters or his nieces, nephews and cousins. Evidently, there’s a lot of people out there because he says ‘every one.’
"At this time the population of the earth has grown considerably and just because you’ve seen Cain and Abel (thus far in Genesis) and that’s all you’ve seen, doesn’t mean Adam and Eve don’t have other children because chapter 5:3-4 indicates they’re having children all along. You’re just getting a representative history in these individuals.
“So the population of the earth is increasing. This could possibly be as far along as 130 years after they got out of the Garden. The population of the earth keeps increasing and growing, so the problem with where did Cain get his wife and those kinds of things are found in the Bible text.
“Psalm 59:11 says, ‘Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield.’ That’s the principle in Genesis 4. God’s determined Cain would live before men and carry out his sentence, visibly executed before his kinsmen.”
*****
Luke was Paul’s companion toward the end of the book of acts are three “we” sections (16:10-40, 21:1-18 and 27:1-28:16) where all of sudden Luke’s describing what’s going on and says, ‘We did that.’
Jordan explains, “That means he joined up with Paul and, for that period of time, he’s with him. The way it goes is there will be ‘they did, they did, they did’ and then comes a ‘we did.’
“Three different times he travels extensively with Paul, and in Paul’s later life, Luke is with him all the way. The beloved physician.
“Now because of that close association he had with Paul, Luke’s writings would naturally have an interest for us. Paul would know Luke’s gospel the best of all of them. If you asked me which of the four gospel accounts did Paul read and carry with him, no doubt it was Luke’s.
“I’m sure that long before he died he had the other accounts because they were collecting together the Scripture. But he’d know Luke’s best because he had the author with him so much and it’s fitting that the Apostle of the Gentiles would have a record of the earthly ministry of Christ written by one who was himself a Gentile.
“Not, again, that the mystery is found or even hinted at in Luke’s gospel, but you see under the guidance of the God the Holy Spirit, as Luke was writing down his gospel, he would be led by the Holy Spirit to include and exclude those features that are different from what Matthew is--those things that are exclusively focused on Israel, and he would put things in that would open things up.
“When you come to Acts, you come with a man who’s looking out here and seeing the Lord and Word and the broader purposes that God has in the earth and he sees the Lord (first) working in Israel to bring salvation to the nations and then in Paul to bring salvation to the nations.”
Monday, July 11, 2011
Supernatural consumption
Eve names her boy, the first born, by faith. The problem is Cain’s not a man from the Lord. I John 3:12 says ‘he’s of that wicked one.’
Jordan says, “Now, that’s where the idea comes that the ‘original sin’ was sex and you hear people talk about prostitution being the world’s oldest profession and the idea is what Eve and Satan did in the Garden of Eden was they had sex together and the forbidden fruit was sex. And that’s just baloney; a Neanderthal mentality of unregenerate men trying to take the Bible and make it disrespectful.
“When he says Cain is of that wicked one, that’s like John 8:4, ‘Ye are of your father the devil.’ Now, you know good and well your daddy physically wasn’t the devil; he might have given you the devil. It’s talking spiritually; your spiritual daddy.”
*****
Exodus 25 says, And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.
[9] According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it.
[10] And they shall make an ark of shittim wood. . .
Jordan says, “God’s telling Moses what they are to put in the tabernacle. Verse 17 says, ‘And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof.’
“The ark is like a little cedar-chest box with a lid that you can open up and look in. Inside of it they put the Ten Commandments, the two tables of stone, a little pot of manna and Aaron’s rod that budded. This seat up there is gold; verse 18 says, ‘And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat.’
“Cherubim are to be on each side and they’re to be looking down at the mercy seat. Verse 22 says, ‘And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.’ God Almighty was going to meet with them between the cherubim on the mercy seat. That’s where His shekinah glory was to appear; His personal manifestation.
“Think a minute. Here’s Adam and Eve. They come out of the Garden. There’s a place on the earth where they are to go and worship God. God’s presence is going to be there between the cherubim and they come there before that altar and present the sacrifice and the offering unto the Lord.
“That thing remains on the earth until the time of the Flood. And when the deluge comes, this thing is removed away back into heaven. When Noah gets off the boat he builds an altar unto the lord and the first time in Bible that you hear about a burnt offering that ascends up to the Lord, it’s in Genesis 8.
“This thing was on the earth until the Flood, they bring the offerings and things to the Lord there and they come and call on the name of the Lord in this place where God is dwelling in their midst until He goes away. It’s at the gate of Eden and He goes away, the Flood takes place and now they offer the sacrifice here and the things ascend up to God, who’s up there.
“When Israel comes along, God said I’m going to send my manifest presence back down on the earth and I’m going to dwell in the nation Israel in that tabernacle. So, what you’ve got here is a re-establishment of the thing that’s over there.
“You get the details about how things operated. We aren’t given the details before then. He isn’t interested in filling us in in all those details at the time of Adam and Eve, like He doesn’t give us a lot of the details. But we understand the things that were going on but what’s later written down.
“Genesis 4:4 says, ‘And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering.’ Abel brings the sacrifice down through the way, the road that leads back to the presence and he took the blood and sprinkled it there between the cherubim and God came down and accepted that sacrifice.
“In Psalm 20:3, David is talking to the Lord, and he says, ‘Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice; Selah.’ Now the Hebrew word for accept means ‘turn to ashes.’ You see that’s how God accepted the sacrifices.
Fire came down from Almighty God and consumed the sacrifice. Leviticus 9:23 says, ‘And Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation, and came out, and blessed the people: and the glory of the LORD appeared unto all the people.’
“There came a supernatural fire out from before the Lord. My dear friend, you find it over and over and over in the Bible, that the way God accepted the sacrifice that was offered to Him by faith on the altar was the fire came and devoured it.
“In I Kings 18, Elijah goes out on the mountain and there’s the prophets of Baal, and he says, ‘Put your sacrifice up and let’s see who accepts it,’ and they cried to Baal until noon and then he says, ‘All right, throw yours down and put God’s up there.’
"And Elijah’s telling Israel, in one of the greatest texts a preacher could ever preach on, ‘How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.’ Let’s get on with the program!
“Elijah puts the offering out there and he says, ‘Now put the bales of water on it and soak it down where it’s totally water-soaked,’ and he says, ‘Now, Lord, show them you’re God.’ And brother, the fire falls down out of heaven and laps up the water out of the trough around the thing and just consumes the sacrifice.
“Acceptance with Almighty God was demonstrated in times past by the fire coming down and consuming the sacrifice. And that’s how Abel was accepted of God and Cain wasn’t because Cain’s offering just sat there and nothing happened. Nothing supernatural at all.
“The first living thing to die on the earth was a sheep and the first man to die was a shepherd. The ‘chief shepherd laid down his life for the sheep,’ as per Hebrews 13:20. Cain’s religion was too refined, somebody said, to slay a lamb, but not too cultured to murder his brother. Religion is the greatest cause of bloodshed that’s ever been known on the face of the earth.”
Jordan says, “Now, that’s where the idea comes that the ‘original sin’ was sex and you hear people talk about prostitution being the world’s oldest profession and the idea is what Eve and Satan did in the Garden of Eden was they had sex together and the forbidden fruit was sex. And that’s just baloney; a Neanderthal mentality of unregenerate men trying to take the Bible and make it disrespectful.
“When he says Cain is of that wicked one, that’s like John 8:4, ‘Ye are of your father the devil.’ Now, you know good and well your daddy physically wasn’t the devil; he might have given you the devil. It’s talking spiritually; your spiritual daddy.”
*****
Exodus 25 says, And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.
[9] According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it.
[10] And they shall make an ark of shittim wood. . .
Jordan says, “God’s telling Moses what they are to put in the tabernacle. Verse 17 says, ‘And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof.’
“The ark is like a little cedar-chest box with a lid that you can open up and look in. Inside of it they put the Ten Commandments, the two tables of stone, a little pot of manna and Aaron’s rod that budded. This seat up there is gold; verse 18 says, ‘And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat.’
“Cherubim are to be on each side and they’re to be looking down at the mercy seat. Verse 22 says, ‘And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.’ God Almighty was going to meet with them between the cherubim on the mercy seat. That’s where His shekinah glory was to appear; His personal manifestation.
“Think a minute. Here’s Adam and Eve. They come out of the Garden. There’s a place on the earth where they are to go and worship God. God’s presence is going to be there between the cherubim and they come there before that altar and present the sacrifice and the offering unto the Lord.
“That thing remains on the earth until the time of the Flood. And when the deluge comes, this thing is removed away back into heaven. When Noah gets off the boat he builds an altar unto the lord and the first time in Bible that you hear about a burnt offering that ascends up to the Lord, it’s in Genesis 8.
“This thing was on the earth until the Flood, they bring the offerings and things to the Lord there and they come and call on the name of the Lord in this place where God is dwelling in their midst until He goes away. It’s at the gate of Eden and He goes away, the Flood takes place and now they offer the sacrifice here and the things ascend up to God, who’s up there.
“When Israel comes along, God said I’m going to send my manifest presence back down on the earth and I’m going to dwell in the nation Israel in that tabernacle. So, what you’ve got here is a re-establishment of the thing that’s over there.
“You get the details about how things operated. We aren’t given the details before then. He isn’t interested in filling us in in all those details at the time of Adam and Eve, like He doesn’t give us a lot of the details. But we understand the things that were going on but what’s later written down.
“Genesis 4:4 says, ‘And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering.’ Abel brings the sacrifice down through the way, the road that leads back to the presence and he took the blood and sprinkled it there between the cherubim and God came down and accepted that sacrifice.
“In Psalm 20:3, David is talking to the Lord, and he says, ‘Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice; Selah.’ Now the Hebrew word for accept means ‘turn to ashes.’ You see that’s how God accepted the sacrifices.
Fire came down from Almighty God and consumed the sacrifice. Leviticus 9:23 says, ‘And Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation, and came out, and blessed the people: and the glory of the LORD appeared unto all the people.’
“There came a supernatural fire out from before the Lord. My dear friend, you find it over and over and over in the Bible, that the way God accepted the sacrifice that was offered to Him by faith on the altar was the fire came and devoured it.
“In I Kings 18, Elijah goes out on the mountain and there’s the prophets of Baal, and he says, ‘Put your sacrifice up and let’s see who accepts it,’ and they cried to Baal until noon and then he says, ‘All right, throw yours down and put God’s up there.’
"And Elijah’s telling Israel, in one of the greatest texts a preacher could ever preach on, ‘How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.’ Let’s get on with the program!
“Elijah puts the offering out there and he says, ‘Now put the bales of water on it and soak it down where it’s totally water-soaked,’ and he says, ‘Now, Lord, show them you’re God.’ And brother, the fire falls down out of heaven and laps up the water out of the trough around the thing and just consumes the sacrifice.
“Acceptance with Almighty God was demonstrated in times past by the fire coming down and consuming the sacrifice. And that’s how Abel was accepted of God and Cain wasn’t because Cain’s offering just sat there and nothing happened. Nothing supernatural at all.
“The first living thing to die on the earth was a sheep and the first man to die was a shepherd. The ‘chief shepherd laid down his life for the sheep,’ as per Hebrews 13:20. Cain’s religion was too refined, somebody said, to slay a lamb, but not too cultured to murder his brother. Religion is the greatest cause of bloodshed that’s ever been known on the face of the earth.”
Friday, July 8, 2011
"I'll do it!"
Matthew 1:18 reports: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
[19] Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.”
Jordan says, “Joseph is the earthly father of the Lord Jesus Christ, not his physical father. Here’s this young woman that he’s betrothed to be married to, he’s in love with her, he wants to make her his wife and it turns out that she’s pregnant and the child’s not his.
"Can you imagine the heartache that must have been? Can you imagine the fear she must have had as to what he was going to think? The verse says Joseph was a just man--it says that first.
“I think about Joseph. He was the man God chose to raise the Lord Jesus Christ. What a privilege! What an opportunity; what a responsibility that was on his shoulders. The God of heaven chose this one man to be the one who would be the earthly father for Jesus Christ, His Son. That’s something. That’s why I love it. He was a just man; he was righteous.
“That’s like that verse in II Peter when he talks about Lot as ‘just Lot,’ Joseph was a justified man. He was a Believer. He believed in the God of Israel. He’d been like Abraham before him. He believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. He was a righteous man; he’s a stand-up guy. He believed God’s Word; he trusted God’s Word.
“It says he was not willing to make her a public example. Joseph had a heart for Mary; he doesn’t want to put her to open shame. He’s considerate of Mary and he’s trying to protect her from whatever the scandal that she’s got herself in.
“And then the Lord comes and says, ‘Joe, that’s my child.’ ‘Yeah, Lord, sure.’ ‘No, Joseph, look over in Isaiah 7:14. You see that verse. That’s being fulfilled right here, right now!’
“Joseph is a Bible-believer. He understood God’s Word. He knew what the promise of the Messiah was and so the Lord sends the angel and says, ‘That verse is being fulfilled and your wife is the one to fulfill it and you’re going to raise the boy—you’re going to name Him and raise Him.’
“You know what he did? He just did what God said. He did what God’s Word required. When God gave him instruction, he believed it. You come to chapter 2, when the wise men come looking for the baby Jesus, verse 13 says ‘the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’
“Think about that! Here’s Joseph and every indication is he’s a poor man with a very humble existence. He’s told to pull up stakes, pack up the RV, put it on the back of the donkey and get out of town and go to Egypt of all places!
“Over and over, that’s the enemy! What does he do? He says, ‘God said it; I’ll do it.’ That’s Joseph. He’s a man that every time God gave him instructions . . . now, when the angel says that to him in verse 15, you see what the angel did is he took out Hosea 11:1 and said, ‘See that verse right there Joseph? That verse needs to be fulfilled; here’s how it’s going to happen.’ Joseph is a man who believed God’s Word and obeyed it.
“He’s the guy who God Himself chose to raise His Son. I think about that and I say, ‘Wow, what an example for a dad. A man of the Word who looks out for and protects his wife, the mother of his children, and then obeys God’s Word in raising his family.’ I say, ‘Wow, now there’s a dad I can look up to!’ ”
[19] Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.”
Jordan says, “Joseph is the earthly father of the Lord Jesus Christ, not his physical father. Here’s this young woman that he’s betrothed to be married to, he’s in love with her, he wants to make her his wife and it turns out that she’s pregnant and the child’s not his.
"Can you imagine the heartache that must have been? Can you imagine the fear she must have had as to what he was going to think? The verse says Joseph was a just man--it says that first.
“I think about Joseph. He was the man God chose to raise the Lord Jesus Christ. What a privilege! What an opportunity; what a responsibility that was on his shoulders. The God of heaven chose this one man to be the one who would be the earthly father for Jesus Christ, His Son. That’s something. That’s why I love it. He was a just man; he was righteous.
“That’s like that verse in II Peter when he talks about Lot as ‘just Lot,’ Joseph was a justified man. He was a Believer. He believed in the God of Israel. He’d been like Abraham before him. He believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. He was a righteous man; he’s a stand-up guy. He believed God’s Word; he trusted God’s Word.
“It says he was not willing to make her a public example. Joseph had a heart for Mary; he doesn’t want to put her to open shame. He’s considerate of Mary and he’s trying to protect her from whatever the scandal that she’s got herself in.
“And then the Lord comes and says, ‘Joe, that’s my child.’ ‘Yeah, Lord, sure.’ ‘No, Joseph, look over in Isaiah 7:14. You see that verse. That’s being fulfilled right here, right now!’
“Joseph is a Bible-believer. He understood God’s Word. He knew what the promise of the Messiah was and so the Lord sends the angel and says, ‘That verse is being fulfilled and your wife is the one to fulfill it and you’re going to raise the boy—you’re going to name Him and raise Him.’
“You know what he did? He just did what God said. He did what God’s Word required. When God gave him instruction, he believed it. You come to chapter 2, when the wise men come looking for the baby Jesus, verse 13 says ‘the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’
“Think about that! Here’s Joseph and every indication is he’s a poor man with a very humble existence. He’s told to pull up stakes, pack up the RV, put it on the back of the donkey and get out of town and go to Egypt of all places!
“Over and over, that’s the enemy! What does he do? He says, ‘God said it; I’ll do it.’ That’s Joseph. He’s a man that every time God gave him instructions . . . now, when the angel says that to him in verse 15, you see what the angel did is he took out Hosea 11:1 and said, ‘See that verse right there Joseph? That verse needs to be fulfilled; here’s how it’s going to happen.’ Joseph is a man who believed God’s Word and obeyed it.
“He’s the guy who God Himself chose to raise His Son. I think about that and I say, ‘Wow, what an example for a dad. A man of the Word who looks out for and protects his wife, the mother of his children, and then obeys God’s Word in raising his family.’ I say, ‘Wow, now there’s a dad I can look up to!’ ”
Thursday, July 7, 2011
After God's own heart
As king of Judah, Asa reigned for 41 years in the southern kingdom. I Kings 15:11-12 says, “And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did David his father. And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.”
Jordan says, “Asa didn’t come from a line of good and godly kings, but he was one. Notice his fathers had polluted the land with idolatry (introducing Baal worship into the land) and took God’s Word out of the culture so thoroughly that the sodomites had taken over.
“It’s interesting when you go through your Old Testament and notice that every time the Word of God was removed from Israel, and false religions came in (in other words, God’s Word was not the cultural norm), almost always the sodomites came in.
“They’re there all along but they’re down in the gutter, under the cover, back in the dark where they belonged. But when the light of the Word of God to Israel became dim and the culture was darkened . . . Look, if you’re doing deeds in darkness and the darkness begins to spread out in the culture, where do you do your deeds? Everywhere.
“When there’s light in the culture, you do it in the closet. You don’t pass laws to have that happen; you preach God’s Word to have that happen. Every time the Word of God was not honored, the Israelites kept going back to these activities.
“Now, when you talk about sodomy, the homosexual lifestyle, you’re talking about the extreme in sexual perversion, which by the time you get to the extreme, you’ve walked through all the other things to get there.
“Oftentimes, the Bible will describe the extreme, understanding that you have to go through all this other to get to that extreme. So you have this complete cultural breakdown of morality, and what’s right and wrong, and Asa comes along and gets rid of it all and turns it around!
“The verse says he removed all the idols that his FATHERS had made. Think about it. Notice in verse 10 he does what his 'father' David did. But between him and David, he had a daddy and a granddaddy and a great-granddaddy before you get back to the great-great-granddaddy David.
“Asa didn’t grow up in a godly home. His grandfather, Rehoboam, if you look at the last verse in chapter 14: ‘And Rehoboam slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David. And his mother's name was Naamah an Ammonitess. And Abijam his son reigned in his stead.’
“I Kings 15:8 says, ‘And Abijam slept with his fathers; and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead.’
“Between Asa’s daddy, Abijam, and his granddaddy Rehoboam, these two guys were real rascals! They were bad kings. Asa’s daddy was a bad dude; he subverted Israel, followed Baal, and rejected God’s Word. His daddy and granddaddy were the same.
“Now Asa’s great-granddaddy (Rehoboam’s daddy) was Solomon, the guy whose ‘heart was divided.’ Solomon starts out great but then he gets hooked up with all this false religion and they turn his heart from the Lord.
“Solomon’s daddy was David. David was the great good king in Israel. ‘The man after God’s own heart.’ II Chronicles 14 says, ‘So Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. 'In his days the land was quiet ten years.
[2] And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the LORD his God:
[3] For he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves:
[4] And commanded Judah to seek the LORD God of their fathers, and to do the law and the commandment.
[5] Also he took away out of all the cities of Judah the high places and the images: and the kingdom was quiet before him.'
“Asa turns the whole culture around! Here’s how this came about. Chapter 15 says: ‘And the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded:
[2] And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin; The LORD is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.’
“You read on down through there and you see Asa does exactly what God said to do. And one of the great revivals in Israel came because Asa made a choice to ‘be ye strong therefore.’
“The prophet comes not to be like his fathers, but to go all the way back to David to the covenant God made with Israel and to stand on the Word of God, and he made that choice and that choice produced results. And Asa cleaned out the Baal worship and all of the social and moral effects that come from forsaking God’s Word.
“Now the question then is, ‘Well, what about his boy? What did his son decide to do? Where did he wind up?’
“When Asa dies at the end of chapter 16, in chapter 20: 32 you read of son Jehoshaphat that he ‘walked in the way of Asa his father, and departed not from it, doing that which was right in the sight of the LORD.’
“Jehoshaphat builds on what his daddy did. He doesn’t have to go around and destroy all the Baal worship. Having had the ground already cleared away for him, he can plant and, if you go down through II Chronicles 17: 5, it says, ‘Therefore the LORD stablished the kingdom in his hand; and all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and honour in abundance. And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the LORD.’
“Not lifted up in the ways of his OWN thinking, but he’s encouraged in the Lord! What he does is he sends teachers out to teach the Word of God. In verse 8, he sends out Levites, the priests. Verse 9 says, ‘And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the LORD with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught the people.’
“Whoa! They got the Book! They’ve got the Book that goes all the way back to Moses! We call it the Received Text. They’ve got God’s Book and He sends it out to be taught and re-establishes the teaching priests.
“They go out into all the towns and villages and Jehoshaphat sends them out to teach God’s Word, and when it begins to permeated Israel again, God’s Word and the truth of who Israel was in the program of God began to take root again in the nation and they had one of the greatest revivals in all of the nation’s history under Asa’s boy!
“In fact, if you go on down through there, you’ll see that not just Israel, but the heathen nations around Israel began to fear the Lord God of Israel because of the blessings of God on Israel as a result of them keeping His Word. We call that social impact. You ever hear anybody talk about, ‘We want to be socially relevant’? These dudes were!
“What a dad Asa was. Imagine the benediction it would have been for him to be able to look and see what his son did in Israel! What a heritage to pass on!”
Jordan says, “Asa didn’t come from a line of good and godly kings, but he was one. Notice his fathers had polluted the land with idolatry (introducing Baal worship into the land) and took God’s Word out of the culture so thoroughly that the sodomites had taken over.
“It’s interesting when you go through your Old Testament and notice that every time the Word of God was removed from Israel, and false religions came in (in other words, God’s Word was not the cultural norm), almost always the sodomites came in.
“They’re there all along but they’re down in the gutter, under the cover, back in the dark where they belonged. But when the light of the Word of God to Israel became dim and the culture was darkened . . . Look, if you’re doing deeds in darkness and the darkness begins to spread out in the culture, where do you do your deeds? Everywhere.
“When there’s light in the culture, you do it in the closet. You don’t pass laws to have that happen; you preach God’s Word to have that happen. Every time the Word of God was not honored, the Israelites kept going back to these activities.
“Now, when you talk about sodomy, the homosexual lifestyle, you’re talking about the extreme in sexual perversion, which by the time you get to the extreme, you’ve walked through all the other things to get there.
“Oftentimes, the Bible will describe the extreme, understanding that you have to go through all this other to get to that extreme. So you have this complete cultural breakdown of morality, and what’s right and wrong, and Asa comes along and gets rid of it all and turns it around!
“The verse says he removed all the idols that his FATHERS had made. Think about it. Notice in verse 10 he does what his 'father' David did. But between him and David, he had a daddy and a granddaddy and a great-granddaddy before you get back to the great-great-granddaddy David.
“Asa didn’t grow up in a godly home. His grandfather, Rehoboam, if you look at the last verse in chapter 14: ‘And Rehoboam slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David. And his mother's name was Naamah an Ammonitess. And Abijam his son reigned in his stead.’
“I Kings 15:8 says, ‘And Abijam slept with his fathers; and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead.’
“Between Asa’s daddy, Abijam, and his granddaddy Rehoboam, these two guys were real rascals! They were bad kings. Asa’s daddy was a bad dude; he subverted Israel, followed Baal, and rejected God’s Word. His daddy and granddaddy were the same.
“Now Asa’s great-granddaddy (Rehoboam’s daddy) was Solomon, the guy whose ‘heart was divided.’ Solomon starts out great but then he gets hooked up with all this false religion and they turn his heart from the Lord.
“Solomon’s daddy was David. David was the great good king in Israel. ‘The man after God’s own heart.’ II Chronicles 14 says, ‘So Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. 'In his days the land was quiet ten years.
[2] And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the LORD his God:
[3] For he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves:
[4] And commanded Judah to seek the LORD God of their fathers, and to do the law and the commandment.
[5] Also he took away out of all the cities of Judah the high places and the images: and the kingdom was quiet before him.'
“Asa turns the whole culture around! Here’s how this came about. Chapter 15 says: ‘And the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded:
[2] And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin; The LORD is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.’
“You read on down through there and you see Asa does exactly what God said to do. And one of the great revivals in Israel came because Asa made a choice to ‘be ye strong therefore.’
“The prophet comes not to be like his fathers, but to go all the way back to David to the covenant God made with Israel and to stand on the Word of God, and he made that choice and that choice produced results. And Asa cleaned out the Baal worship and all of the social and moral effects that come from forsaking God’s Word.
“Now the question then is, ‘Well, what about his boy? What did his son decide to do? Where did he wind up?’
“When Asa dies at the end of chapter 16, in chapter 20: 32 you read of son Jehoshaphat that he ‘walked in the way of Asa his father, and departed not from it, doing that which was right in the sight of the LORD.’
“Jehoshaphat builds on what his daddy did. He doesn’t have to go around and destroy all the Baal worship. Having had the ground already cleared away for him, he can plant and, if you go down through II Chronicles 17: 5, it says, ‘Therefore the LORD stablished the kingdom in his hand; and all Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and honour in abundance. And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the LORD.’
“Not lifted up in the ways of his OWN thinking, but he’s encouraged in the Lord! What he does is he sends teachers out to teach the Word of God. In verse 8, he sends out Levites, the priests. Verse 9 says, ‘And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the LORD with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught the people.’
“Whoa! They got the Book! They’ve got the Book that goes all the way back to Moses! We call it the Received Text. They’ve got God’s Book and He sends it out to be taught and re-establishes the teaching priests.
“They go out into all the towns and villages and Jehoshaphat sends them out to teach God’s Word, and when it begins to permeated Israel again, God’s Word and the truth of who Israel was in the program of God began to take root again in the nation and they had one of the greatest revivals in all of the nation’s history under Asa’s boy!
“In fact, if you go on down through there, you’ll see that not just Israel, but the heathen nations around Israel began to fear the Lord God of Israel because of the blessings of God on Israel as a result of them keeping His Word. We call that social impact. You ever hear anybody talk about, ‘We want to be socially relevant’? These dudes were!
“What a dad Asa was. Imagine the benediction it would have been for him to be able to look and see what his son did in Israel! What a heritage to pass on!”
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Consenting to wholesome words
Jesus said, “If a man speaks a word against the Son of Man it will be forgiven him, but if he speaks a words against the Holy Spirit it won’t be forgiven him in this world or the world to come.”
Jordan says, “Listen, in order to save Saul of Tarsus, he had to separate this world and the world to come and put a new world in there. If there was no other reason to understand a new dispensation began with the Apostle Paul that verse right there would tell you it did!
“Paul says of himself that he ‘was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.’ He did it ignorantly, like the Gentiles who walked in unbelief just as did Israel.
“By the way, Paul was both of those. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews born of the tribe of Benjamin, but he was also by birth a Roman. He was Jew and Gentile by birth; both in one person.
“There were 12 Apostles because there were 12 thrones to reign over the 12 tribes of Israel. There’s one apostle in the dispensation of grace who’s ‘the apostle of the Gentiles’ because there’s one Body of Christ, but that one apostle is two people. He’s a Jew and Gentile in one because that’s exactly what the Body of Christ is.”
*****
Paul says in Galatians 1:13-14: “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:
[14] And profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.”
Jordan says, “When Paul says he’s was ‘the chief of sinners,’ he wasn’t saying he was the worst profligate that ever lived and the way you know that is in Philippians 3, where he said, ‘As touching the righteousness of the law I was blameless.’ A chief is the guy who leads people.
“In all of the right activity that the law said to do, Paul said, ‘I did it all.’ Well, if you are as touching the righteousness of the law blameless, you’re not someone who lives in the gutter of life. Paul was the opposite of that. He had all the human good, not the human evil.”
*****
Paul goes on in verses 15-16: “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace,
[16] To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:
Jordan says, “Paul is the first in a line of a bunch of people who are going to look to him as their leader. He’s THE apostle; the one you’re going to learn and receive and hear and see the things that god wants you to follow today. He’s your pattern.
“Somebody says, ‘I thought Christ was my pattern.’ Well, it’s a good thing He’s not because He lived a perfect, sinless life. Christ is the Savior of sinners and He’s given you the chief of sinners as your pattern. And when you take your place with the chief of sinners and depend on the Savior of sinners, you got it.
“Think about what you don’t have if you don’t have Paul. You’d never have clarity of the gospel. What is the gospel whereby you’re saved? Isn’t it how Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again the third day? Isn’t that the Good News?”
*****
Paul says, 1:16 ashamed: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
Jordan says, “If you’re trying to follow the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you’re going to go back to His earthly ministry to get your pattern and your doctrine for today, you’re going to have a problem with understanding what the gospel is.
“We call them the Four Gospels but that’s a title, not the content. 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.’
“Don’t think they responded, ‘Thank God, praise the Lord, Jesus is going to die for my sin.’ No, verse 34 says, ‘And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.’
“Just in case you didn’t understand what He said, He said it three different ways in one verse. They don’t understand it, it’s hid from them. They didn’t know what He was talking about. What’s He talking about? The death, burial and resurrection. And they don’t even understand it.
“Listen, these 12 apostles have been preaching ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ for three years and they don’t even understand it! They don’t even understand He’s going to die, much less what it’s going to mean!
“Now if you cannot understand that Jesus Christ is going to die and be raised again, much less what it means, and you’re preaching the gospel, and that’s the gospel Paul preached, can you understand you’ve got to have some confusion?
“If you don’t rightly divide the Scripture and understand there is something different going on in Paul’s ministry than what is going on in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you’re going to go back and live in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and follow those instructions, you’re never going to know how to tell someone how to go to heaven when they die and stay out of hell; how to have peace with God. No wonder there’s confusion about all these different things going on!
“In Titus 3, Paul says ‘not by works of righteousness which we have we done.’ As late as Acts 10, Peter said, ‘I know that he that works righteousness is accepted of him.’ The problem isn’t where the verses are found; the problem is the people preaching it and the message they’re sent to preach.
“One’s preaching the gospel of the circumcision; one the gospel of the uncircumcision. That is two different messages. But if you don’t understand something about where you’re supposed to be in that, if you been taught all your life that we’re part of the church Peter’s the head of . . . you see a lot of people didn’t get too very far away from Mother even after the Reformation.”
*****
“I love Paul’s buts. But is a disjointive conjunction meaning ‘stop.’ Paul says, ‘But you have not so learned Christ.’ What you learned from Christ is the reverse of all that other stuff.
“He says, ‘If so be that you have heard him and been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus.’ That’s an interesting verse because Christ didn’t hear for you to hear. People say, ‘Well, the Lord spoke to me,’ and my first question is what kind of accent did He have?
“I mean, Isaiah said, ‘I heard him in my ear.’ You say, ‘Well, He didn’t speak with an audible voice.’ How do you speak without an audible voice?! You say, ‘Well, it was in my head.’ Well, you had to hear it in your head . . .
“I got a little voice in my head that speaks with a southern accent. What’s the voice in your head speak with? It’s got an accent. It sounds just like you because it is you.
“How did you hear Him? Well, He isn’t standing here. He’s not personally here but He’s given us His thinking. Paul says in I Corinthians, ‘That you may have the mind of Christ.’ In Col. 3:16 he talks about ‘the word of Christ dwells in you richly.’
“In I Timothy 6, Paul talks about ‘consenting to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He’s talking about the epistle that he’s writing. You understand when you listen to Paul’s epistles, you’re listening to Jesus Christ tell you what His thinking is? You literally are hearing Him!
“That’s why, folks, if you don’t understand how to rightly divide the Scripture, you’re going to wind up absolutely out in left field out in the dark.”
*****
Paul says in Galatians 3:1, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”
Jordan says, “To be foolish does not mean to be stupid. ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.’ I talked to a fellow this past week who told me he was an atheist. Now, I can tell you the guy’s not stupid. He’s an educated guy who’s got advanced degrees from the university. He’s not stupid; he’s foolish.
“Psalm 14 says that. Jesus said, ‘O foolish and slow of heart.’ But being foolish in the Bible is not being stupid. It’s being slow to use your mind. It’s to not think; to be thoughtless, unobservant, lazy-minded, not to think the thing through.
“When I asked the man why he’d be an atheist, he said, ‘Well, there can’t be a God because if there is a God He would be terrible for being responsible for all the suffering in the world. There can’t be a God; look at all the suffering.’ All the suffering and injustice means there’s no God.
“Some of the great atheists of our day, Richard Dawkins, for example, that was his same excuse for becoming an atheist: the sufferings of humanity. ‘There can’t be a God.’
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s say there’s no God. Now, what’s your answer for suffering? I don’t think he’d ever thought about that.
“If the suffering of humanity means there’s no God, what do you put in God’s place? Atheism. So the answer to suffering in the world today is atheism, but how’s that an answer for suffering because if there was no God—there can’t be no God; just look at all that suffering in the world.
“I think it clicked with him as we were talking. If you say there’s no God because of the suffering—what is your answer? He didn’t have an answer. If anything, his answer was to be an atheist. But look at all the suffering in the world; how can you be an atheist? The same reasoning gets you to the same conclusion.
“If you’ve got a foregone conclusion that you want to be there, though, that’s what happened with the Galatians. They’d come up with another idea. ‘O foolish Galatians.’ Someone had cast a spell on them. There’s a spiritual deception going on here.”
Jordan says, “Listen, in order to save Saul of Tarsus, he had to separate this world and the world to come and put a new world in there. If there was no other reason to understand a new dispensation began with the Apostle Paul that verse right there would tell you it did!
“Paul says of himself that he ‘was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.’ He did it ignorantly, like the Gentiles who walked in unbelief just as did Israel.
“By the way, Paul was both of those. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews born of the tribe of Benjamin, but he was also by birth a Roman. He was Jew and Gentile by birth; both in one person.
“There were 12 Apostles because there were 12 thrones to reign over the 12 tribes of Israel. There’s one apostle in the dispensation of grace who’s ‘the apostle of the Gentiles’ because there’s one Body of Christ, but that one apostle is two people. He’s a Jew and Gentile in one because that’s exactly what the Body of Christ is.”
*****
Paul says in Galatians 1:13-14: “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:
[14] And profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.”
Jordan says, “When Paul says he’s was ‘the chief of sinners,’ he wasn’t saying he was the worst profligate that ever lived and the way you know that is in Philippians 3, where he said, ‘As touching the righteousness of the law I was blameless.’ A chief is the guy who leads people.
“In all of the right activity that the law said to do, Paul said, ‘I did it all.’ Well, if you are as touching the righteousness of the law blameless, you’re not someone who lives in the gutter of life. Paul was the opposite of that. He had all the human good, not the human evil.”
*****
Paul goes on in verses 15-16: “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace,
[16] To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:
Jordan says, “Paul is the first in a line of a bunch of people who are going to look to him as their leader. He’s THE apostle; the one you’re going to learn and receive and hear and see the things that god wants you to follow today. He’s your pattern.
“Somebody says, ‘I thought Christ was my pattern.’ Well, it’s a good thing He’s not because He lived a perfect, sinless life. Christ is the Savior of sinners and He’s given you the chief of sinners as your pattern. And when you take your place with the chief of sinners and depend on the Savior of sinners, you got it.
“Think about what you don’t have if you don’t have Paul. You’d never have clarity of the gospel. What is the gospel whereby you’re saved? Isn’t it how Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again the third day? Isn’t that the Good News?”
*****
Paul says, 1:16 ashamed: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
Jordan says, “If you’re trying to follow the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you’re going to go back to His earthly ministry to get your pattern and your doctrine for today, you’re going to have a problem with understanding what the gospel is.
“We call them the Four Gospels but that’s a title, not the content. 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.’
“Don’t think they responded, ‘Thank God, praise the Lord, Jesus is going to die for my sin.’ No, verse 34 says, ‘And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.’
“Just in case you didn’t understand what He said, He said it three different ways in one verse. They don’t understand it, it’s hid from them. They didn’t know what He was talking about. What’s He talking about? The death, burial and resurrection. And they don’t even understand it.
“Listen, these 12 apostles have been preaching ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ for three years and they don’t even understand it! They don’t even understand He’s going to die, much less what it’s going to mean!
“Now if you cannot understand that Jesus Christ is going to die and be raised again, much less what it means, and you’re preaching the gospel, and that’s the gospel Paul preached, can you understand you’ve got to have some confusion?
“If you don’t rightly divide the Scripture and understand there is something different going on in Paul’s ministry than what is going on in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you’re going to go back and live in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and follow those instructions, you’re never going to know how to tell someone how to go to heaven when they die and stay out of hell; how to have peace with God. No wonder there’s confusion about all these different things going on!
“In Titus 3, Paul says ‘not by works of righteousness which we have we done.’ As late as Acts 10, Peter said, ‘I know that he that works righteousness is accepted of him.’ The problem isn’t where the verses are found; the problem is the people preaching it and the message they’re sent to preach.
“One’s preaching the gospel of the circumcision; one the gospel of the uncircumcision. That is two different messages. But if you don’t understand something about where you’re supposed to be in that, if you been taught all your life that we’re part of the church Peter’s the head of . . . you see a lot of people didn’t get too very far away from Mother even after the Reformation.”
*****
“I love Paul’s buts. But is a disjointive conjunction meaning ‘stop.’ Paul says, ‘But you have not so learned Christ.’ What you learned from Christ is the reverse of all that other stuff.
“He says, ‘If so be that you have heard him and been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus.’ That’s an interesting verse because Christ didn’t hear for you to hear. People say, ‘Well, the Lord spoke to me,’ and my first question is what kind of accent did He have?
“I mean, Isaiah said, ‘I heard him in my ear.’ You say, ‘Well, He didn’t speak with an audible voice.’ How do you speak without an audible voice?! You say, ‘Well, it was in my head.’ Well, you had to hear it in your head . . .
“I got a little voice in my head that speaks with a southern accent. What’s the voice in your head speak with? It’s got an accent. It sounds just like you because it is you.
“How did you hear Him? Well, He isn’t standing here. He’s not personally here but He’s given us His thinking. Paul says in I Corinthians, ‘That you may have the mind of Christ.’ In Col. 3:16 he talks about ‘the word of Christ dwells in you richly.’
“In I Timothy 6, Paul talks about ‘consenting to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He’s talking about the epistle that he’s writing. You understand when you listen to Paul’s epistles, you’re listening to Jesus Christ tell you what His thinking is? You literally are hearing Him!
“That’s why, folks, if you don’t understand how to rightly divide the Scripture, you’re going to wind up absolutely out in left field out in the dark.”
*****
Paul says in Galatians 3:1, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”
Jordan says, “To be foolish does not mean to be stupid. ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.’ I talked to a fellow this past week who told me he was an atheist. Now, I can tell you the guy’s not stupid. He’s an educated guy who’s got advanced degrees from the university. He’s not stupid; he’s foolish.
“Psalm 14 says that. Jesus said, ‘O foolish and slow of heart.’ But being foolish in the Bible is not being stupid. It’s being slow to use your mind. It’s to not think; to be thoughtless, unobservant, lazy-minded, not to think the thing through.
“When I asked the man why he’d be an atheist, he said, ‘Well, there can’t be a God because if there is a God He would be terrible for being responsible for all the suffering in the world. There can’t be a God; look at all the suffering.’ All the suffering and injustice means there’s no God.
“Some of the great atheists of our day, Richard Dawkins, for example, that was his same excuse for becoming an atheist: the sufferings of humanity. ‘There can’t be a God.’
“I said, ‘Okay, let’s say there’s no God. Now, what’s your answer for suffering? I don’t think he’d ever thought about that.
“If the suffering of humanity means there’s no God, what do you put in God’s place? Atheism. So the answer to suffering in the world today is atheism, but how’s that an answer for suffering because if there was no God—there can’t be no God; just look at all that suffering in the world.
“I think it clicked with him as we were talking. If you say there’s no God because of the suffering—what is your answer? He didn’t have an answer. If anything, his answer was to be an atheist. But look at all the suffering in the world; how can you be an atheist? The same reasoning gets you to the same conclusion.
“If you’ve got a foregone conclusion that you want to be there, though, that’s what happened with the Galatians. They’d come up with another idea. ‘O foolish Galatians.’ Someone had cast a spell on them. There’s a spiritual deception going on here.”
Monday, July 4, 2011
Quite a reign
When James was 13 years old, as the young king in Scotland, he had a distant cousin, Esme Stuart, a French Catholic, who came to Scotland to befriend King James and seek to convert him into Catholicism.
As an account reads, “Though still in his early teens, James used his most persuasive arguments on his cousin, causing him to become a Protestant convert. He was to die a Protestant. Esme wrote a document which ‘condemned in detail many aspects of Catholic belief and practice.’
Jordan says, “The dude’s a soul-winner at 13 years old, preaching the gospel! In March of 1604, James told the Protestant clergy, ‘Be more careful diligent than you have been to win souls for God. Where you have been in many ways sluggish before, now wake yourselves up again with a new diligence at this point.’
“You say, ‘Wow, what’s got him so fired up?!’ When he established the colony in Virginia, it was ‘for the propagating of the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the knowledge of the worship of God.’
“He pleaded that, ‘The true Word of God and the service of God in the Christian faith be preached, planted and used in the new colony of Virginia. The inhabitants of those parts live in utter ignorance of divine worship and are completely deprived of the knowledge and solace of the Word of God and probably will remain and end their days in such ignorance unless such a great evil is cared for as soon as possible. Therefore, we ought to end that out of the love for the glory of God and the desire to work for the good and the salvation of souls to those parts. Dedicate yourselves to and perform the ministry of preaching the Word of God in those parts.’"
*****
In a book to his son, James made it clear, “As to the apocryphal books I omit them because I am no papist.” Jordan says, “That’s good advice from a dad to his boy. He wrote his boy about godliness, holiness, a fear and knowledge of God, decidedly pure and chaste conduct. Among James’ good qualities, one contemporary said, ‘None shine more brightly than the chasteness of his light which he hath preserved without stain, down to the present time, contrary to the example of almost all his ancestors.’ ”
James’ writes his son about how a man should carry a “certain natural modesty and kindness. He wears his hair short, about food and clothing he does not care, I wish therefore someone has a single coat or one living before others have doubles of plurality.”
Jordan says, “That doesn’t sound like the description 50 years later of
King James being this prurient-interested person. He wrote in his book ‘Demonology’ that ‘evil is never to be done that good may happen. Sodomy and witchcraft are horrible crimes. When choosing friends, my son, guard against corrupt lads, effeminate ones, eschew to be effeminate in your clothes.’
“The dude was pretty clear to his son. He said, ‘Be ever careful to prefer the gentlest nature and enjoy frequently hearing the Word of God.’
*****
Sir John Oglander said about James “he was the best scholar and wisest prince for general knowledge that ever England knew.”
Jordan says, “That’s probably a common view of him from contemporaries but he was also a widely persecuted king. His official motto when he took the crown was ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ yet he fought with the Catholics most of his life.
“While he was king in Scotland he was confronted by a Roman Catholic conspiracy called the Spanish Blanks, in January, 1593. Basically a bunch of Jesuit priests, Father William Wright and crowd, instigated a plot to bring 5,000 Spanish troops to Scotland to take over the kingdom. It was discovered it was thwarted but it set James’ political bent—they didn’t like him.
“In The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, 13 conspirators were after James and their goal was to restore the Catholic religion in England. In 1603, there was a big plague in London in which 30,000 people died. The Catholics fomented the idea that the plague was God judging the Protestants.
“The superstition of all that gets to going and so, in order to discourage that, here comes James out of the shoot and he begins to attack the Roman system as being superstitious. As he does that, these Jesuit terrorists begin to plot his destruction.
“Here’s what Guy Faulks said in his trial: ‘Many have heard King James say at the table that the pope is the Antichrist, which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite.’
“And it was that opposition that James took to the front that caused these guys to say, ‘Hey, we need to get rid of King James.’ They filled the basement of Parliament with gunpowder. They were going to do it in November of ‘05. Now what happened is it was discovered. James immediately condemns the Jesuits as a generation of vipers and things go on from there.
*****
“He lived all of his reign under the threat of personal attack by Jesuit terrorists. One of the first accounts of that I ever read was a story of a young girl who was a chamber maid; a servant in the castle.
“For King James’ protection, when he went to bed at night bodyguards would slide a bolt through the door to secure it so he’d be in his chamber locked from the inside.
“But with the bodyguards bribed to go away, terrorists managed to have that mechanism disabled and the bar taken out, so the door, rather than being locked, was open. This little girl found out about the plot and she ran up into the king’s chamber and warned him of what was happening. They discovered the door couldn’t be locked to keep the assassins out.
“This young girl goes and takes her arm and puts it through the hasp on the door and uses her arm to hold the door locked while James gets away. And this young girl literally has her arm broken and severed in half and dies from the wounds.
“Imagine a guy who can inspire that kind of loyalty out of young believers. As I said, 50 years after his death, he’s being hounded and claimed to be a homosexual by professed Roman Catholic antagonists.
“I just want you to understand King James was not this nefarious guy or this detached, uninterested person. When you find out who he really was, he turns out to be a Bible believer, a scholar in his own right and someone who the Jesuits targeted specifically for destruction over and over.
“His crowning achievement was probably, during his reign, the term Great Britain was applied to the British Commonwealth. He did have quite a reign.”
*****
In the first decade or more after its introduction in 1611, the King James Authorized Version was simply entitled, “The Holy Bible,” and that’s all you read: “The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New Testament.”
Jordan explains, “They did not put people’s names on the Bible. King James did not say, ‘This is my Bible.’ Where King James came from is in the dedication. The translators dedicated it to the king and consequently, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘Where the word of the king is there is power.’
“By the way, it’s interesting that many of the English bibles that have been translated down through history--many of the influential bibles in the line of the Textus Receptus--have been translated under the reigns of good kings, including Alfred the Great in 899 with the Saxon Bible and Alfonso XIII of Spain when the Protestant bible came out. You find under the reign of some of these monarchs who were favorable to the Scripture the peaking of translations for those nations. And that’s not a fluke. That’s part of the way things operate.
“You’d be well to look into some of these things and enjoy the details. You need to be able to look across history and spot some of your kinfolk.
“King James did oversee the setting up of the most extensive translating process of any bible in history. With three separate locations, two separate translating groups checking the translations of the others and then editorial committees bringing them together; bringing in all of the peoples’ knowledge and the whole country and fine-tuning the thing, going over all the controversial issues. And they were not producing a new translation. They were also not trying to produce an easier-to-read translation.”
As an account reads, “Though still in his early teens, James used his most persuasive arguments on his cousin, causing him to become a Protestant convert. He was to die a Protestant. Esme wrote a document which ‘condemned in detail many aspects of Catholic belief and practice.’
Jordan says, “The dude’s a soul-winner at 13 years old, preaching the gospel! In March of 1604, James told the Protestant clergy, ‘Be more careful diligent than you have been to win souls for God. Where you have been in many ways sluggish before, now wake yourselves up again with a new diligence at this point.’
“You say, ‘Wow, what’s got him so fired up?!’ When he established the colony in Virginia, it was ‘for the propagating of the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the knowledge of the worship of God.’
“He pleaded that, ‘The true Word of God and the service of God in the Christian faith be preached, planted and used in the new colony of Virginia. The inhabitants of those parts live in utter ignorance of divine worship and are completely deprived of the knowledge and solace of the Word of God and probably will remain and end their days in such ignorance unless such a great evil is cared for as soon as possible. Therefore, we ought to end that out of the love for the glory of God and the desire to work for the good and the salvation of souls to those parts. Dedicate yourselves to and perform the ministry of preaching the Word of God in those parts.’"
*****
In a book to his son, James made it clear, “As to the apocryphal books I omit them because I am no papist.” Jordan says, “That’s good advice from a dad to his boy. He wrote his boy about godliness, holiness, a fear and knowledge of God, decidedly pure and chaste conduct. Among James’ good qualities, one contemporary said, ‘None shine more brightly than the chasteness of his light which he hath preserved without stain, down to the present time, contrary to the example of almost all his ancestors.’ ”
James’ writes his son about how a man should carry a “certain natural modesty and kindness. He wears his hair short, about food and clothing he does not care, I wish therefore someone has a single coat or one living before others have doubles of plurality.”
Jordan says, “That doesn’t sound like the description 50 years later of
King James being this prurient-interested person. He wrote in his book ‘Demonology’ that ‘evil is never to be done that good may happen. Sodomy and witchcraft are horrible crimes. When choosing friends, my son, guard against corrupt lads, effeminate ones, eschew to be effeminate in your clothes.’
“The dude was pretty clear to his son. He said, ‘Be ever careful to prefer the gentlest nature and enjoy frequently hearing the Word of God.’
*****
Sir John Oglander said about James “he was the best scholar and wisest prince for general knowledge that ever England knew.”
Jordan says, “That’s probably a common view of him from contemporaries but he was also a widely persecuted king. His official motto when he took the crown was ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ yet he fought with the Catholics most of his life.
“While he was king in Scotland he was confronted by a Roman Catholic conspiracy called the Spanish Blanks, in January, 1593. Basically a bunch of Jesuit priests, Father William Wright and crowd, instigated a plot to bring 5,000 Spanish troops to Scotland to take over the kingdom. It was discovered it was thwarted but it set James’ political bent—they didn’t like him.
“In The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, 13 conspirators were after James and their goal was to restore the Catholic religion in England. In 1603, there was a big plague in London in which 30,000 people died. The Catholics fomented the idea that the plague was God judging the Protestants.
“The superstition of all that gets to going and so, in order to discourage that, here comes James out of the shoot and he begins to attack the Roman system as being superstitious. As he does that, these Jesuit terrorists begin to plot his destruction.
“Here’s what Guy Faulks said in his trial: ‘Many have heard King James say at the table that the pope is the Antichrist, which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite.’
“And it was that opposition that James took to the front that caused these guys to say, ‘Hey, we need to get rid of King James.’ They filled the basement of Parliament with gunpowder. They were going to do it in November of ‘05. Now what happened is it was discovered. James immediately condemns the Jesuits as a generation of vipers and things go on from there.
*****
“He lived all of his reign under the threat of personal attack by Jesuit terrorists. One of the first accounts of that I ever read was a story of a young girl who was a chamber maid; a servant in the castle.
“For King James’ protection, when he went to bed at night bodyguards would slide a bolt through the door to secure it so he’d be in his chamber locked from the inside.
“But with the bodyguards bribed to go away, terrorists managed to have that mechanism disabled and the bar taken out, so the door, rather than being locked, was open. This little girl found out about the plot and she ran up into the king’s chamber and warned him of what was happening. They discovered the door couldn’t be locked to keep the assassins out.
“This young girl goes and takes her arm and puts it through the hasp on the door and uses her arm to hold the door locked while James gets away. And this young girl literally has her arm broken and severed in half and dies from the wounds.
“Imagine a guy who can inspire that kind of loyalty out of young believers. As I said, 50 years after his death, he’s being hounded and claimed to be a homosexual by professed Roman Catholic antagonists.
“I just want you to understand King James was not this nefarious guy or this detached, uninterested person. When you find out who he really was, he turns out to be a Bible believer, a scholar in his own right and someone who the Jesuits targeted specifically for destruction over and over.
“His crowning achievement was probably, during his reign, the term Great Britain was applied to the British Commonwealth. He did have quite a reign.”
*****
In the first decade or more after its introduction in 1611, the King James Authorized Version was simply entitled, “The Holy Bible,” and that’s all you read: “The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New Testament.”
Jordan explains, “They did not put people’s names on the Bible. King James did not say, ‘This is my Bible.’ Where King James came from is in the dedication. The translators dedicated it to the king and consequently, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘Where the word of the king is there is power.’
“By the way, it’s interesting that many of the English bibles that have been translated down through history--many of the influential bibles in the line of the Textus Receptus--have been translated under the reigns of good kings, including Alfred the Great in 899 with the Saxon Bible and Alfonso XIII of Spain when the Protestant bible came out. You find under the reign of some of these monarchs who were favorable to the Scripture the peaking of translations for those nations. And that’s not a fluke. That’s part of the way things operate.
“You’d be well to look into some of these things and enjoy the details. You need to be able to look across history and spot some of your kinfolk.
“King James did oversee the setting up of the most extensive translating process of any bible in history. With three separate locations, two separate translating groups checking the translations of the others and then editorial committees bringing them together; bringing in all of the peoples’ knowledge and the whole country and fine-tuning the thing, going over all the controversial issues. And they were not producing a new translation. They were also not trying to produce an easier-to-read translation.”
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Liberty to excel
When it came time for James to assume the throne, he left Scotland and traveled down to London and on the way there was a Millenary Convention.
One thousand preachers had signed a petition to the new king asking for consideration of a long list of grievances, suggestions and things that needed to be done both in the church and in the culture. He met with those preachers at Hampton Court. They used the address because of its massive size.
One of the things that came out of the meeting was James’ agreement they would produce one final translation of the Scripture. Bancroft’s Rules were the rules by which the translators had to operate. James selected out the best of the available scholars.
Jordan says, “You have to understand you have a group of people who first came out of Bloody Mary’s persecutions. They go into the bright light of Queen Elizabeth for all that time. Well, when you come out of persecution into liberty, what do you do? You tend to excel.
“So there had been this 50-year period where they had advancements and learning. And you know how Christians are. If you’re giving them liberty and advancements and learning, there’s also fighting: ‘Well, I think it says this. No, it says this.’ Let’s be honest, that’s how we are, but that’s part of the exercise of learning.
“If we didn’t disagree with one another, we’d never find out something was right and something was wrong. You ever thought about that? A verse in Corinthians says, ‘For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.’
“The way you try something is you take and cross examine it. So when you look at controversy that way, not as a destructive mean, nasty, personal thing, but as the natural course of growing, all of a sudden it isn’t quite so bad.
“The Geneva Bible, for example, had become the most popular English bible of the time. To translate it they went to Geneva, headquarters of John Calvin. Calvin’s son-in-law headed the group that translated it and the people in most of Protestantism made it real popular because it was the right size and it had a lot of study notes. But the study notes were all extremely Calvinistic. So the Calvinists loved it, and if you weren’t a Calvinist, you didn’t like it.
“By the way, King James was not a Calvinist! In the book he wrote to his son, he warned him about the influences of Calvinism. One of the reasons you will discover that so many people who oppose the KJV today, people like James White, for example, are five-point Calvinists.
“If you go through a list of people who are on the other side, in the quote intellectual-scholarly (that’s what they think of themselves) and ask who are they and what they believe, you’ll find consistently the overwhelming majority are extreme Calvinists.
“Now why would they not like the KJV? Because they had a bible that was the most popular bible of the time that the KJV was written specifically to replace! The Bishops’ Bible was supposed to do it but it didn’t. The KJV did!
“By 1640, that was the last year the Geneva Bible was printed. In less than 30 years, the Authorized Version had supplanted very other English version. None of them were printed again as popularly to be distributed. The KJV was the bible that took over the market.
“The pilgrims, when they came over on the Mayflower, they brought a Geneva Bible because they came before 1611.
“King James authorized the founding of Jamestown, Va. That town was founded in honor of him and he authorized it, and when you read the dedication, what he wrote had everything to do with the gospel. So here’s a guy interested in seeing the gospel get out.
“In James’ book ‘Demonology,’ published in Edinburgh in 1597, he wrote, ‘The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch, in post this following treatise of mine . . . without regeneration, men slip into slavery and into the horrors of hell. Men have obtained to a great perfection of learning and yet remaining overbased, alas, of the spirit of regeneration and fruits thereof, tread upon the slippery and uncertain scale of curiosity, becoming bondslaves to their mortal enemy and their knowledge. For all they pursue therof is nothing increased except in knowing evil and the horrors of hell for punishment thereof. Christians do not demand revelations from God, visions, or inquire into things which He hath not revealed to us by the Scriptures. It becometh us to be content with a humble ignorance, they being things not necessary for our salvation. Many of the witches’ art are of such silly illusions like to the little transubstantiational god in the papist mass that I could never believe in.’
“That would get him in a little trouble, see? Now he was the King of Scotland writing that in a book that became an international best-seller. You think, ‘Okay, would he have a target on his back?!’ So all I’m trying to get you to understand is that he was a Bible-believer. He did not know everything we know.
“He writes, ‘Prophecies and visions are now ceased. All of the spirits that appear in these forms are evil. Two symptoms of devil possession are incredible strength and speaking of sundry languages, which the patient is known by them that were inquired with him never to have learned.’
“You thought tongue-talking started at the Azusa Street Mission in 19-whatever. Old James is saying, ‘They were doing that over here and it’s of the devil!’
“My point to you is James believed ‘the whole Scripture was dictated by God’s Spirit. The scripture must be an infallible ground to all true Christians.’
“In 1605, when he visited Oxford for first time, they put, at his request, Bible verses all over the place. Don’t fall into the idea that he was nut case; some fowl-mouthed cussing guy over here looking for some child to bed. That’s not who he was. He was a Protestant; a Bible Believer.
“When he wrote his son in the book for his boy, he said, ‘Praying God as you are regenerated and born in Him anew, so you may rise to Him and be sanctified in Him forever with garments washed in the shed blood of the lamb. Remember, my son, salvation is the free gift of God, as Paul sayeth.’ ”
One thousand preachers had signed a petition to the new king asking for consideration of a long list of grievances, suggestions and things that needed to be done both in the church and in the culture. He met with those preachers at Hampton Court. They used the address because of its massive size.
One of the things that came out of the meeting was James’ agreement they would produce one final translation of the Scripture. Bancroft’s Rules were the rules by which the translators had to operate. James selected out the best of the available scholars.
Jordan says, “You have to understand you have a group of people who first came out of Bloody Mary’s persecutions. They go into the bright light of Queen Elizabeth for all that time. Well, when you come out of persecution into liberty, what do you do? You tend to excel.
“So there had been this 50-year period where they had advancements and learning. And you know how Christians are. If you’re giving them liberty and advancements and learning, there’s also fighting: ‘Well, I think it says this. No, it says this.’ Let’s be honest, that’s how we are, but that’s part of the exercise of learning.
“If we didn’t disagree with one another, we’d never find out something was right and something was wrong. You ever thought about that? A verse in Corinthians says, ‘For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.’
“The way you try something is you take and cross examine it. So when you look at controversy that way, not as a destructive mean, nasty, personal thing, but as the natural course of growing, all of a sudden it isn’t quite so bad.
“The Geneva Bible, for example, had become the most popular English bible of the time. To translate it they went to Geneva, headquarters of John Calvin. Calvin’s son-in-law headed the group that translated it and the people in most of Protestantism made it real popular because it was the right size and it had a lot of study notes. But the study notes were all extremely Calvinistic. So the Calvinists loved it, and if you weren’t a Calvinist, you didn’t like it.
“By the way, King James was not a Calvinist! In the book he wrote to his son, he warned him about the influences of Calvinism. One of the reasons you will discover that so many people who oppose the KJV today, people like James White, for example, are five-point Calvinists.
“If you go through a list of people who are on the other side, in the quote intellectual-scholarly (that’s what they think of themselves) and ask who are they and what they believe, you’ll find consistently the overwhelming majority are extreme Calvinists.
“Now why would they not like the KJV? Because they had a bible that was the most popular bible of the time that the KJV was written specifically to replace! The Bishops’ Bible was supposed to do it but it didn’t. The KJV did!
“By 1640, that was the last year the Geneva Bible was printed. In less than 30 years, the Authorized Version had supplanted very other English version. None of them were printed again as popularly to be distributed. The KJV was the bible that took over the market.
“The pilgrims, when they came over on the Mayflower, they brought a Geneva Bible because they came before 1611.
“King James authorized the founding of Jamestown, Va. That town was founded in honor of him and he authorized it, and when you read the dedication, what he wrote had everything to do with the gospel. So here’s a guy interested in seeing the gospel get out.
“In James’ book ‘Demonology,’ published in Edinburgh in 1597, he wrote, ‘The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch, in post this following treatise of mine . . . without regeneration, men slip into slavery and into the horrors of hell. Men have obtained to a great perfection of learning and yet remaining overbased, alas, of the spirit of regeneration and fruits thereof, tread upon the slippery and uncertain scale of curiosity, becoming bondslaves to their mortal enemy and their knowledge. For all they pursue therof is nothing increased except in knowing evil and the horrors of hell for punishment thereof. Christians do not demand revelations from God, visions, or inquire into things which He hath not revealed to us by the Scriptures. It becometh us to be content with a humble ignorance, they being things not necessary for our salvation. Many of the witches’ art are of such silly illusions like to the little transubstantiational god in the papist mass that I could never believe in.’
“That would get him in a little trouble, see? Now he was the King of Scotland writing that in a book that became an international best-seller. You think, ‘Okay, would he have a target on his back?!’ So all I’m trying to get you to understand is that he was a Bible-believer. He did not know everything we know.
“He writes, ‘Prophecies and visions are now ceased. All of the spirits that appear in these forms are evil. Two symptoms of devil possession are incredible strength and speaking of sundry languages, which the patient is known by them that were inquired with him never to have learned.’
“You thought tongue-talking started at the Azusa Street Mission in 19-whatever. Old James is saying, ‘They were doing that over here and it’s of the devil!’
“My point to you is James believed ‘the whole Scripture was dictated by God’s Spirit. The scripture must be an infallible ground to all true Christians.’
“In 1605, when he visited Oxford for first time, they put, at his request, Bible verses all over the place. Don’t fall into the idea that he was nut case; some fowl-mouthed cussing guy over here looking for some child to bed. That’s not who he was. He was a Protestant; a Bible Believer.
“When he wrote his son in the book for his boy, he said, ‘Praying God as you are regenerated and born in Him anew, so you may rise to Him and be sanctified in Him forever with garments washed in the shed blood of the lamb. Remember, my son, salvation is the free gift of God, as Paul sayeth.’ ”
Poet's license
In the 1500s, England was ruled by Henry VIII. He’s the one who cut the heads off his wives heads when they didn’t do what he wanted. He’s the one who finally threw the pope out of England so he could marry another woman.
As the king from 1509-1547, Henry was very antagonistic, not just to Rome, but to Protestants. It was during that time that much of the Bible, including William Tyndale’s translation, the Matthews Bible and the Great bible, was done.
William Tyndale finished his translation in Saxony (on the continent) because Henry, who had banned everything Tyndale wrote, had falsely accused him of sedition and Tyndale had to flee England to keep the king from cutting his head off.
“Saints can be kind of wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” observes Jordan. “At one point Tyndale had finished the revision of his translation and wanted to publish but had run out of money, so a merchant friend of his in London went to the archbishop and said, ‘I have a way to purchase some 2,000 of Tyndale’s Bibles—we could purchase them and then burn them.’
“So they purchased through this emissary all these old Tyndale bibles that Tyndale wanted to replace anyway. The archbishop buys them, brings them to London, burns them and makes a big thing out of it. The king’s ever so happy. Tyndale takes the money and reprints his revised edition. Of course, the merchant friend didn’t let on that he was a friend of Tyndale’s; he just went ahead and made the business deal.
“After he died his nephew became King Edward VI. Edward was a ‘Live and Let Live’ kind of a guy. When he died, Bloody Mary took over and she was as rabidly Roman Catholic as anyone could be. The Catholics had set up in the meanwhile on the mainland, where the Douay-Rheims translation came from.
*****
Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits. Loyola was a general in the army of Ferdinand Isabella, the one who financed Christopher Columbus, and he was also rabidly Roman Catholic. Much of the Spanish Inquisition took place under his nose.
“Loyola was wounded in the fighting to expel the Muslims from Europe. He couldn’t be a soldier anymore so he was casting about, ‘Well what should I do for the good of man and the glory of God,’ so he comes up with the idea…by that time the Protestants had spread all over Europe and the papacy was sort of behind the scenes.
“In 1454, Constantinople fell (Istanbul). The Ottoman Empire comes in and takes over the Byzantine Empire. All of the eastern church, the Muslims came in and took them over and the Byzantines flee to Europe.
“For the first time in a millennium, Greek language, manuscripts, culture and understanding comes into Europe. The Romans (Latin) had pushed them out. When they did that, Erasmus is there. All of this original language and Greek understanding comes in and there’s this confluence of all this education, thinking and opportunity. It was an exciting time.
“The pope was beginning to wake up: ‘We’re in trouble!’ Two-thirds of Europe is Protestant and the other third is leaning that way. Loyola says, ‘I know what we need to do. We’ll found the Jesuits for the specific purpose of subverting the Protestant Reformation.’ That’s what the Jesuits were for. That was their charter.
“One of Loyola’s goals was to train 300 priests to send back to England to re-establish Romanism in England. But because the English have been translating this bible into English, you know, Wycliffe comes along and he takes all of these disparate pieces of translations. You’ve got a new language developing. He puts this complete English bible together, begins to publish it and Wycliffe was a statesman. He’d been a member of parliament, called on by the king of England to help. He was a well-known figure.
“So Loyola says, ‘What we need to do is get us an English bible,’ and they go to Rheims France and start translating the bible. They also set out a place and they’re training 300 priests they’re going to send back.
*****
“Bloody Mary’s over here chopping the heads off of people. She literally beheaded some of the great saints of the Protestant Reformation in England. And then she croaks.
“After she dies, Queen Elizabeth comes on the throne and she was as much the other way as Mary was that way. She was rabidly Protestant, so now all the Catholics have to uproot and go. The 300 dudes being trained, forget it, they can’t come. Douay-Rheims is a failed effort.
*****
From 1558-1603 you have this golden era of English accomplishments and moving forward under Queen Elizabeth’s reign. When she died there were a whole bunch of different bible translations and before she died she actually sent to parliament a proposed legislation to authorize one final English translation that would gather together all the bibles that had been done and make out of them just one final acceptable English translation.
“Before that passed she died, but it was on the books as being a proposal,” says Jordan. “James the sixth of Scotland was born in 1566 in the summer. He was crowned King of Scotland while he was a baby.
“By the way, his coronation sermon was preached by John Knox, one of the great saints of the old school in church history. He preached his coronation message. I say that so you understand it came out of a strongly Protestant heritage.
“Now, 36 years later he became James I of England in July of 1603 after the death of Queen Elizabeth. James, when they talk about him being ugly, vile and vulgar; when they say vulgar, they don’t mean cursing, they mean plain, ordinary.
“When you see pictures of James he was kind of a reddish-looking faced guy. Looks sort of like a red-headed stepchild kind of cartoon character. He was a skinny guy. He was married, had kids, so forth, a family man, but he was nerdy, as we would say. He was a bookworm. He wasn’t the warrior-type ready to pick up the sword and slay the dragon. He was a poet. He translated. He was educated and fluent in languages.
“People who would come in and meet him as a child (7-10 years old), and the ambassadors from France, for example, would go away and say how fluent he was in French and then how he met the Italian ambassador and that he could speak as equally in Italian as he could in French and spoke both as well as he did English.
“In 1584, he wrote ‘The Essays of a Pretense into the Divine Art of
Poetry.’ He wrote, ‘A Fruitful Meditation on the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Verses of Chapter 20 of the Book of the Revelation.’ That’s an interesting thing to write. In 1589 he wrote, ‘A Meditation on the First Book of the Chronicles of the Kings.’ In 1591 he wrote, ‘His Majesty’s Poetical Exercises.’ In 1598 he wrote, ‘The Law of Free Monarchies.’ In 1597, he wrote a book called ‘Demonology,’ in which he denounces homosexuality quite clearly.
“He wrote a book for his son, ‘Basilikon Doran,’ which became an international best-seller, something that didn’t happen a lot in that era.
“I say all that so you understand that before James became King of England he had a background in thinking and understanding and knowledge and awareness of doctrine, things that pertain to Scripture. He was a man who enjoyed the study of Scripture. He actually had translated a Psalter, a book with some of the psalms in it, himself.”
To be continued…
As the king from 1509-1547, Henry was very antagonistic, not just to Rome, but to Protestants. It was during that time that much of the Bible, including William Tyndale’s translation, the Matthews Bible and the Great bible, was done.
William Tyndale finished his translation in Saxony (on the continent) because Henry, who had banned everything Tyndale wrote, had falsely accused him of sedition and Tyndale had to flee England to keep the king from cutting his head off.
“Saints can be kind of wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” observes Jordan. “At one point Tyndale had finished the revision of his translation and wanted to publish but had run out of money, so a merchant friend of his in London went to the archbishop and said, ‘I have a way to purchase some 2,000 of Tyndale’s Bibles—we could purchase them and then burn them.’
“So they purchased through this emissary all these old Tyndale bibles that Tyndale wanted to replace anyway. The archbishop buys them, brings them to London, burns them and makes a big thing out of it. The king’s ever so happy. Tyndale takes the money and reprints his revised edition. Of course, the merchant friend didn’t let on that he was a friend of Tyndale’s; he just went ahead and made the business deal.
“After he died his nephew became King Edward VI. Edward was a ‘Live and Let Live’ kind of a guy. When he died, Bloody Mary took over and she was as rabidly Roman Catholic as anyone could be. The Catholics had set up in the meanwhile on the mainland, where the Douay-Rheims translation came from.
*****
Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits. Loyola was a general in the army of Ferdinand Isabella, the one who financed Christopher Columbus, and he was also rabidly Roman Catholic. Much of the Spanish Inquisition took place under his nose.
“Loyola was wounded in the fighting to expel the Muslims from Europe. He couldn’t be a soldier anymore so he was casting about, ‘Well what should I do for the good of man and the glory of God,’ so he comes up with the idea…by that time the Protestants had spread all over Europe and the papacy was sort of behind the scenes.
“In 1454, Constantinople fell (Istanbul). The Ottoman Empire comes in and takes over the Byzantine Empire. All of the eastern church, the Muslims came in and took them over and the Byzantines flee to Europe.
“For the first time in a millennium, Greek language, manuscripts, culture and understanding comes into Europe. The Romans (Latin) had pushed them out. When they did that, Erasmus is there. All of this original language and Greek understanding comes in and there’s this confluence of all this education, thinking and opportunity. It was an exciting time.
“The pope was beginning to wake up: ‘We’re in trouble!’ Two-thirds of Europe is Protestant and the other third is leaning that way. Loyola says, ‘I know what we need to do. We’ll found the Jesuits for the specific purpose of subverting the Protestant Reformation.’ That’s what the Jesuits were for. That was their charter.
“One of Loyola’s goals was to train 300 priests to send back to England to re-establish Romanism in England. But because the English have been translating this bible into English, you know, Wycliffe comes along and he takes all of these disparate pieces of translations. You’ve got a new language developing. He puts this complete English bible together, begins to publish it and Wycliffe was a statesman. He’d been a member of parliament, called on by the king of England to help. He was a well-known figure.
“So Loyola says, ‘What we need to do is get us an English bible,’ and they go to Rheims France and start translating the bible. They also set out a place and they’re training 300 priests they’re going to send back.
*****
“Bloody Mary’s over here chopping the heads off of people. She literally beheaded some of the great saints of the Protestant Reformation in England. And then she croaks.
“After she dies, Queen Elizabeth comes on the throne and she was as much the other way as Mary was that way. She was rabidly Protestant, so now all the Catholics have to uproot and go. The 300 dudes being trained, forget it, they can’t come. Douay-Rheims is a failed effort.
*****
From 1558-1603 you have this golden era of English accomplishments and moving forward under Queen Elizabeth’s reign. When she died there were a whole bunch of different bible translations and before she died she actually sent to parliament a proposed legislation to authorize one final English translation that would gather together all the bibles that had been done and make out of them just one final acceptable English translation.
“Before that passed she died, but it was on the books as being a proposal,” says Jordan. “James the sixth of Scotland was born in 1566 in the summer. He was crowned King of Scotland while he was a baby.
“By the way, his coronation sermon was preached by John Knox, one of the great saints of the old school in church history. He preached his coronation message. I say that so you understand it came out of a strongly Protestant heritage.
“Now, 36 years later he became James I of England in July of 1603 after the death of Queen Elizabeth. James, when they talk about him being ugly, vile and vulgar; when they say vulgar, they don’t mean cursing, they mean plain, ordinary.
“When you see pictures of James he was kind of a reddish-looking faced guy. Looks sort of like a red-headed stepchild kind of cartoon character. He was a skinny guy. He was married, had kids, so forth, a family man, but he was nerdy, as we would say. He was a bookworm. He wasn’t the warrior-type ready to pick up the sword and slay the dragon. He was a poet. He translated. He was educated and fluent in languages.
“People who would come in and meet him as a child (7-10 years old), and the ambassadors from France, for example, would go away and say how fluent he was in French and then how he met the Italian ambassador and that he could speak as equally in Italian as he could in French and spoke both as well as he did English.
“In 1584, he wrote ‘The Essays of a Pretense into the Divine Art of
Poetry.’ He wrote, ‘A Fruitful Meditation on the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Verses of Chapter 20 of the Book of the Revelation.’ That’s an interesting thing to write. In 1589 he wrote, ‘A Meditation on the First Book of the Chronicles of the Kings.’ In 1591 he wrote, ‘His Majesty’s Poetical Exercises.’ In 1598 he wrote, ‘The Law of Free Monarchies.’ In 1597, he wrote a book called ‘Demonology,’ in which he denounces homosexuality quite clearly.
“He wrote a book for his son, ‘Basilikon Doran,’ which became an international best-seller, something that didn’t happen a lot in that era.
“I say all that so you understand that before James became King of England he had a background in thinking and understanding and knowledge and awareness of doctrine, things that pertain to Scripture. He was a man who enjoyed the study of Scripture. He actually had translated a Psalter, a book with some of the psalms in it, himself.”
To be continued…
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