Israel Will Return to God...

Fulfilled During Christ's First Advent!

Hosea 3:1-4 Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans.”

(2) So I bought her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver, and one and one-half homers of barley. (3) And I said to her, “You shall stay with me many days; you shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man – so, too will I be toward you.”

(4) For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim.  Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king.  They shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days.

New Geneva Bible Study Notes:

3:1 love…just like the love.  God’s apparently unreasonable request is patterned after His own loyal, protective, and bountiful love for undeserving Israel.

Raisin cakes.  These delicacies, made from raisins pressed together, were associated with special occasions (2 Samuel 6:10), and may have been used in Baal worship as an aphrodisiac (cf. Song 2:5).

3:2 bought.  Christ similarly fulfilled this picture of love in action when He redeemed His saints from the slave market of sin.

Shekels.  The payment, roughly half in silver and half in produce amounted to about thirty shekels and approximated the price of a slave in Exodus 21:32.  The New Testament teaches that the actual cost of redemption was Christ’s blood (1 Peter 1:16).

3:4 many days.  The waiting period until the coming of Christ, the great and final King of the Davidic dynasty (v.5).

Without king…teraphim.  Israel’s basic political and religious institutions, both legimate (sacrifice and ephod, Exedus 28:31) and illegimate (sacred stones or pillars. Deut. 16:21, idols or teraphim, Zech. 10:2).

3:5 return and seek.  Many Israelites repented with a full desire for intimacy with God at Pentacost (Acts 2:38-41).

David.  This reference points to Jesus Christ, Son of David 2 Sam. 7:12-16; Matthew 1:1; Romans 1:3).

The latter days.  Micah 4:1 Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, And shall be exalted above the hills; And peoples shall flow to it.

4:1 the latter days.  Micah’s prophetic vision shifts from impending judgment in the short term to the “latter days”, when the messianic reign of God is established in Zion.  The expression points to a new epoch, which, though in the hidden future, decisively alters the course of history.  Here it refers to the messianic age, begun at Christ’s First Advent (Acts 2:7; Heb. 1-2) and consummated in the new heaven and earth (Rev. 21,22).

“All Israel shall be saved.”

Romans 11:26

The physical nation of Israel in the Old Testament was, like all other things under the law (the tabernacle, the paschal lamb, the mercy-seat, etc.), was typical. It was chosen of God to be typical of his Church, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:14). The natural nation was typical of God’s “holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). The physical seed of Abraham was typical of his spiritual seed, God’s elect scattered among all nations, who are the true “children of Abraham” (Romans 9:6-8; Galatians 3:29).

All the covenant promises God made to Abraham’s physical seed, the nation of Israel, were conditional promises. The promises were all conditioned upon obedience. The nation failed miserably. Yet, they inherited the land of Canaan and God fulfilled every covenant promise to that typical nation. Not one thing was lacking (Joshua 23:14). Why? Because one faithful man (Joshua, who typified our Lord Jesus) obeyed God. For Joshua’s sake, God brought Israel into the possession of all the good things God promised to their fathers. Even so, all the promises of God to the Israel of God are yea and amen in our great Joshua, the Lord Jesus, for whose sake we shall possess all things eternally with him!

“The Israel of God” is the whole body of God’s elect, Jew and Gentile, who must be saved. When Paul says, “All Israel shall be saved,” he is simply declaring that the whole purpose of God regarding the salvation of his elect must be fulfilled. Not one of the chosen can ever be lost. Certainly, he is not talking about the salvation of all national Israel, or of all Abraham’s physical seed. Many of them have already perished! He is not asserting that all the physical descendants of Abraham living at the time of Christ’s second coming will be saved when they see his appearing. Nowhere in the Bible does God promise salvation to people who physically see Christ! Salvation is promised only to those who look to Christ in faith (Isaiah 45:22).

            The Israel of God is the church of God, the kingdom of God. It is a holy, spiritual nation, not an earthly, political nation. The Israel of God is the household of faith. If you are born of God, if you trust the Lord Jesus Christ, you are a child of Abraham (Galatians 3:6-9). “He is not a Jew, which is one outwardly...But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly” (Romans 4:28-29). The promises of God are not made to Abraham’s physical seed, or to any upon the basis of earthly distinctions (John 1:13), but to Christ, his spiritual seed, and to all who are in him. The adoption, the covenant, the glory, and the promises of God pertain not to the physical seed, but to the spiritual, to the Israel of God (Romans 9:4-6).

            The Israel of God is the true circumcision (Philippians 3:3). They have three things in common, three identifying characteristics by which they are known— (1) They worship God in the Spirit. They worship him in a spiritual manner, in their hearts, without the use of carnal objects (icons and idols), by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. — (2) They rejoice in Christ Jesus. They trust the Lord Jesus Christ alone as their Savior in whom they have complete acceptance with God (1 Corinthians 1:30). — And (3) They have no confidence in the flesh. They do not trust their pedigree, performances, or piety, but Christ alone! The Israel of God is that body of elect, redeemed, regenerate people who live before God by the power of the cross, Christ crucified, and by the rule of the cross.

Don Fortner

PRE-MILLENNIALISTS

Many pre-millennialists hold that Christ intended to establish the kingdom of His father David when He was on earth – a national kingdom.  Because the Jews refused to repent, this kingdom was postponed till His second coming, when it will be set up, and He will reign at Jerusalem. 

This view is open to very serious objection indeed.  It tends to challenge Job’s affirmation, ‘No purpose of Thine can be restrained.’  It supposes that Jesus made a national offer of an earthly kingdom to the Jews, whereas He made no such offer; indeed, when they would have made Him a king, he would not have it (John 6:15).  Moreover, it makes the kingdom an earthly and national institution, while the New Testament preaches entirely a spiritual and eternal kingdom from every nation and tribe and tongue. 

It also fails to explain how glorified saints and people still in the flesh can live and associate together during the thousand years.  Instead of ‘people still in the flesh,’ we might have said ‘sinners in the flesh,’ for though righteousness is supposed to prevail in the millennium, yet at its close Satan is to lead a host to battle from the four quarters of the earth whose number is as the sand of the sea (Rev. 20:8)! 

Lastly, as Louis Berkhof states, this pre-millennial view ‘erroneously seeks its main support in a passage (Rev. 20:1-6) which represents a scene in heaven and makes no mention whatever of the Jews, of an earthly and national kingdom, nor of the land of Palestine.’

(The Momentous Event by W. J. Grier)

"YOUR TIMING IS OFF"

 

Why is there so much speculation and error about when the end might be, whether the end has reference to the rapture, the return of Christ to set up his millennial kingdom, or the return of Christ to inaugurate the new heavens and new earth (2Peter 3:13 ; Rev. 21:1)?

While there are a number of reasons why prophetic speculation continues unabated, one reason stands above them all: Fulfilled prophecy is being interpreted as if it were unfulfilled prophecy. This error was also made by the first-century Jews. When Jesus "came to His own...those who were His own did not receive Him" (John 1:11).

These unbelieving Jews did not believe Jesus was the fulfillment of centuries of prophetic pronouncements that are found in "the Law of Moses and the Psalms (Luke 24:44)....

A similar contemporary example would be that many Jews today are still awaiting the Messiah. Like their first-century counterparts, they do not believe that the messianic prophecies were fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus in the first century. The messianic prophecies have been taken from their first-century fulfillment context and have been projected into the distant future as unfilled prophecy.

In a similar way, many Christians take prophecies that have been fulfilled--either in Old Testament events or in events following the ascension of Jesus --and view them as still unfulfilled. They then manipulate these fulfilled prophecies and apply them to contemporary events. Their speculations are wrong because they are applying fulfilled prophecies to current events. They ignore the time texts that speak of a near coming of Jesus in judgment upon an apostate Judaism that rejected its Messiah in the first century.

(Last Day Madness by Gary DeMar)

The latest gossip among the End Time Madness crowd will be Solar Flares which will cause some sort of virus causing famine next month, September 2013.  If you go back in America's History you will discover that this has occurred before during America's Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

America's Dust Bowl of 1935...

The ecosystem disruption unleashed plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers.
If the dust storms that turned daylight to darkness weren’t apocalyptic enough, seemingly biblical plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and destroyed whatever meager crops could grow. To combat the hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits that overran the Dust Bowl states in 1935, some towns staged “rabbit drives” in which townsmen corralled the jackrabbits in pens and smashed them to death with clubs and baseball bats. Thick clouds of grasshoppers—as large as 23,000 insects per acre, according to one estimate—also swept over farms and consumed everything in their wakes. “What the sun left, the grasshoppers took,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said during a fireside chat. The National Guard was called out to crush grasshoppers with tractors and burn infested fields, while the Civilian Conservation Corps spread an insecticide of arsenic, molasses and bran.

The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday, the 14th, was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Day became night.

PAPAL PERSECUTIONS

We come to a period when persecution, under the guise of Christianity, committed more enormities than ever disgraced the annals of paganism. Disregarding the maxims and the spirit of the Gospel, the papal Church, arming herself with the power of the sword, vexed the Church of God and wasted it for several centuries, a period most appropriately termed in history, the "dark ages."

 

The kings of the earth, gave their power to the "Beast," and submitted to be trodden on by the miserable vermin that often filled the papal chair, as in the case of Henry, emperor of Germany. The storm of papal persecution first burst upon the Waldenses in France.

 

Persecution of the Waldenses in France

Popery having brought various innovations into the Church, and overspread the Christian world with

darkness and superstition, some few, who plainly perceived the pernicious tendency of such errors,
determined to show the light of the Gospel in its real purity, and to disperse those clouds which artful priests had raised about it, in order to blind the people, and obscure its real brightness.

The principal among these was Berengarius, who, about the year 1000, boldly preached Gospel truths, according to their primitive purity. Many, from conviction, assented to his doctrine, and were, on that account, called Berengarians. Berengarius succeeded Peer Bruis, who preached at Toulouse, under the protection of an earl, named Hildephonsus; and the whole tenets of the reformers, with the reasons of their separation from the Church of Rome, were published in a book written by Bruis, under the title of "Antichrist."

By the year of Christ 1140, the number of the reformed was very great, and the probability of its increasing alarmed the pope, who wrote to several princes to banish them from their dominions, and employed many learned men to write against their doctrines.

In A.D. 1147, because of Henry of Toulouse, deemed their most eminent preacher, they were called

Henericians; and as they would not admit of any proofs relative to religion, but what could be deduced from the Scriptures themselves, the popish party gave them the name of apostolics. At length, Peter Waldo, or Valdo, a native of Lyons, eminent for his piety and learning, became a strenuous opposer of popery; and from him the reformed, at that time, received the appellation of Waldenses or Waldoys.

Pope Alexander III being informed by the bishop of Lyons of these transactions, excommunicated Waldo and his adherents, and commanded the bishop to exterminate them, if possible, from the face of the earth; hence began the papal persecutions against the Waldenses.

The proceedings of Waldo and the reformed, occasioned the first rise of the inquisitors; for Pope Innocent III authorized certain monks as inquisitors, to inquire for, and deliver over, the reformed to the secular power.

The process was short, as an accusation was deemed adequate to guilt, and a candid trial was never granted to the accused.

The pope, finding that these cruel means had not the intended effect, sent several learned monks to preach among the Waldenses, and to endeavor to argue them out of their opinions. Among these monks was one Dominic, who appeared extremely zealous in the cause of popery. This Dominic instituted an order, which, from him, was called the order of Dominican friars; and the members of this order have ever since been the principal inquisitors in the various inquisitions in the world. The power of the inquisitors was unlimited; they proceeded against whom they pleased, without any consideration of age, sex, or rank. Let the accusers be ever so infamous, the accusation was deemed valid; and even anonymous informations, sent by letter, were thought sufficient evidence.

 

To be rich was a crime equal to heresy; therefore many who had money were accused of heresy, or of being favorers of heretics, that they might be obliged to pay for their opinions. The dearest friends or deaest kindred could not, without danger, serve any one who was imprisoned on account

of religion. To convey to those who were confined, a little straw, or give them a cup of water, was called favoring of the heretics, and they were prosecuted accordingly. No lawyer dared to plead for his own brother, and their malice even extended beyond the grave; hence the bones of many were dug up and burnt, as examples to the living.

If a man on his deathbed was accused of being a follower of Waldo, his estates were confiscated, and the heir to them defrauded of his inheritance; and some were sent to the Holy Land, while
the Dominicans took possession of their houses and properties, and, when the owners returned, would often pretend not to know them.

These persecutions were continued for several centuries under different popes and other great dignitaries of the Catholic Church.

(Excerpt from Foxe's Book of Martyrs)

(To be continued)

Damascus, Syria and Isaiah 17

Does the Bible Predict God’s End-Times Destruction of Syria —and Is Prophecy About to Unfold Before Our Eyes?

[1] The burden against Damascus. "Behold, Damascus will cease from being a city, And it will be a ruinous heap. [2] The cities of Aroer are forsaken; They will be for flocks Which lie down, and no one will make them afraid. [3] The fortress also will cease from Ephraim, The kingdom from Damascus, And the remnant of Syria; They will be as the glory of the children of Israel," Says the LORD of hosts. [4] "In that day it shall come to pass That the glory of Jacob will wane, And the fatness of his flesh grow lean. [5] It shall be as when the harvester gathers the grain, And reaps the heads with his arm; It shall be as he who gathers heads of grain In the Valley of Rephaim. [6] Yet gleaning grapes will be left in it, Like the shaking of an olive tree, Two or three olives at the top of the uppermost bough, Four or five in its most fruitful branches," Says the LORD God of Israel. - Isa 17:1-6 NKJV

Bible prophecy speculators will tell you this passage refers to the modern State of Israel and Syria.  This prophecy has been fulfilled.  Please read the following:

From the Geneva Bible Marginal Notes concerning Isaiah 17:1-6

Isaiah 13:1 The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.

The burden of Babylon is the great calamity which was prophesied to come on Babel, a grievous burden which they were not able to bear.  In these twelve chapters following he speaks of the plagues with which God would smite the strange nations (whom they knew) to declare that God chastised the Israelites as his children and these others as his enemies: and also that if God does not spare these who are ignorant, they must not think strange if he punishes them who have knowledge of his Law, and do not keep it.

The chief city of Syria.  It was a country of Syria by the river Arnon.  It seems that the prophet would comfort the Church in declaring the destruction of these two kings of Syria and Israel, when as they had conspired the overthrow of Judah.

The ten tribes gloried in their multitude and alliance with other nations: therefore he says that they will be brought down and the Syrians also.  Verse 4 And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of…Meaning of the ten tribes who boasted themselves of their nobility, prosperity, strength and multitude.

As the abundance of corn does not fear the harvest men that would cut it down: no more will the multitude of Israel make the enemies shrink, whom God will appoint to destroy them.

Verse 6 Yet gleaning grapes shall…Because God would have his covenant stable, he promises to reserve some of this people, and to bring them to repentance.