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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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