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Well, we are in Learn the Bible in 24 Hours as our project, and we are in Hour 11, where

we're going to do a quick survey of the major prophets.

Isaiah, of course, is the first, the largest.

When they say major prophets, by the way, should point out to you, that's not because

they're more important.

It's a misleading label.

It's a label of a librarian.

This means these books are the larger ones.

There are five major prophets, and they're 12 so-called minor prophets.

This just means they're small books.

Some of the most interesting prophets, some of the most important ones, are in the minor

prophets.

So don't let that labeling fool you.

Isaiah is well known as the Messianic Prophet.

There is more stuff in his book that anticipates the Messiah in both his roles, not only as

the suffering servant in his first advent, but also when he comes in power and glory

in the second advent.

Jeremiah is the next of the major prophets, and he really focuses on the divine judgment

upon the nation, not just the nation-visual, but the nation's plural.

But he has a very grim tale, and he's also known as the weeping prophet, because he

had to, in effect, preside over a nation that was disintegrating.

Ezekiel is next of the major prophets who focuses on the coming restoration of Israel.

And he wrote, of course, during the Babylonian captivity, but focuses attention, focuses

attention on the ultimate destiny of Israel.

One of the great tragedies in the Christian church is a broad illiteracy among Christians

about God's program for Israel.

He has not finished with Israel as many people teach, but they have an incredible climax

forthcoming.

And Ezekiel is among the many that talk about that.

Daniel is another of the major prophets, but we've already covered him because half his

book is historical, and we use that as our excuse to cover it in depth already.

So we really have Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel to focus on.

And you may notice, just to make a comment, to help you be sensitive to when I have something

on the screen that's from the Old Testament, it'll show in the little scrolls typically.

And if it's a New Testament, it's in a valamor, in what purports to be a Codex.

And as we pop from Old and New Testament, that'll make you sensitive, I think, to where that

court is coming from.

But as you may recall from our review of the historical books, after Solomon died, there

was a civil war, and we had the nation divided in the southern kingdom, Judah, and the northern

kingdom calling itself the House of Israel.

And the southern kingdom ultimately goes into the Babylonian captivity.

And the prophets that we're going to be talking about, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and

Daniel, are the major ones that we're focusing on.

Isaiah really administered during the kingdoms of Jopham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, all the way to

Manasseh, is the contemporaneous with him.

Jeremiah starts in the days of Josiah and continues right into the Babylonian captivity

through Josiah, Josiah, Chim, and Zetakiah.

And now Daniel, of course, writes during the Babylonian captivity and beyond.

And Ezekiel is, Daniel's transported to Babylon as a teenager in the first siege of Nebuchadnezzar

and Ezekiel in the second.

And so that's the focus of these major prophets is primarily the southern kingdom and all the

way from Jopham through into the Babylonian captivity.

So let's get into Isaiah.

Isaiah is quoted in the New Testament more than any other single prophet.

And Jesus quotes most from Deuteronomy as any book, but the two Testament writers in general

quote more from Isaiah than any of the others.

He has a style that is very lofty, very majestic.

He had a, in terms of vocabulary, his vocabulary rivals that of Shakespeare and Milton who were

known as having the largest English vocabularies, very lofty style and loftier than Shakespeare,

Milton or Homer and some of the other literary greats.

One of the greatest discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a complete copy of the book

of Isaiah.

And you know in 1947 at Cumran, that's a place about seven miles south of Jericho, they discovered

all kinds of very precious documents.

But probably one of the greatest of all the discoveries was Isaiah and what made, because

they had, they found a complete scroll about, usually we have fragments here and there of

various things.

This was a complete scroll of Isaiah and the remarkable discovery was that it wasn't

changed.

The astonishing thing is with the exception I think of half a dozen single letters, the

entire scroll is identical to the ones that we've had before this discovery.

And this is dated by the experts to be about 200 BC.

It is the most recent copy that is complete.

And the fact that it's unchanged is an incredible testimony to the diligence and the discipline

of the scribes.

Because what they would do is when they copied, it's the bare in mind, they didn't have copyers,

they didn't have printing.

Everything was hand copied over of course.

And so as they copied a page, they would then sum, all the letters have numerical values.

They'd sum the page and if it didn't agree with the page they copied, they didn't correct

it, they burned it and started over.

In other words, page by page, they had to be perfect.

And the rigors of the scribes is what the result of all that is a very faithful copying

a very faithful continuing of the text until printing of course was available.

So the Qumran discovery really endorses the accuracy of the Bible that we have.

Now Isaiah's whole life was spent under the shadow of the threatening Assyrian power.

When he was a young man, Assyria carried away the northern kingdom, the kingdom of Israel.

We're focusing of course on the southern kingdom, but Assyria is the big power.

And so the northern kingdom was not just deported, it disappeared because the Assyrians had a

policy of taking their captives and spreading out through the empire, forcing people to change

regions and literally to break up dynasties and so forth.

And so he also witnessed the ruin of the southern kingdom also, the entire nation except

for Jerusalem.

And see in about a few years after the northern kingdom fell, 46 walled cities of Judah were

destroyed and 200,000 captives were taken to Assyria also.

So they had they suffered there.

And the grand achievement of Isaiah's life was when the Assyrians were stopped at the

walls of Jerusalem.

They captured all these other cities, but they literally were stopped by an angel of God.

One night after dinner, one angel slaughtered 185,000 Syrian troops.

And Sinekh Arab retreated never again to try that again.

So he learned his lesson in effect.

So they were stopped rather dramatically.

And so Sinekh Arab even 20 years later never again came against Jerusalem.

So the principle messages that Isaiah is judgment for lack of loyalty and their sin

in the country.

He nevertheless focuses on the coming restoration of the nation.

So on the one hand, many of the prophets hammer away at the sinfulness of the nation and the

dire consequences thereof.

But many of them also focused on God's ultimate restoration of the land.

So one of the things that Isaiah particularly emphasizes is the coming Messiah and that

it will come through the house of David.

And there are a number of style items that we should be sensitive to as we study Isaiah.

One of the things you'll encounter is what some scholars call telescoping perspectives.

It's as if they have lenses of different focal length.

They'll always typically put together two prophecies, one near and one far.

And part of that's for the perspective of the topic they're dealing with.

And part of it is a form of authentication.

When the first thing comes true, it tends to build confidence at the second one will,

if you will.

So there are many prophecies that are sort of double references.

And we need to be sensitive to that.

Often the prophet will be dealing with something local.

And as he talks about something local, the language will go far beyond the local thing

and give us insights that are far more profound.

We need to be sensitive to that.

It's almost like he has a zoom lens, if you will.

And so another thing you'll notice in prophecy in general, in Isaiah particularly, along the

way there will be little treasures dropped by the wayside.

Little incidental insights en route to the main point he's making.

The side comments that turn out to be incredibly profound.

There are little encouragements in my mind every time you see one of those.

Now the highlights of the book of course, the messianic prophecies is exceeded only by

the Psalms.

The Psalms of course are full of messianic prophecies.

One of the things he does early in the book, he has, he is treated in chapter 6 to a vision

of the throne of God.

Now we read that in a Bible sort of, you know, sort of take it for granted.

It's rather staggering even for a prophet to actually be granted an opportunity to behold

the throne room of the universe.

And we see it in Isaiah 6, we'll find it in Ezekiel 1 and 10, we find it in Revelation

chapter 4 and following.

These are interesting passages that are worthy of very careful study.

The other thing that Isaiah focuses on is the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

And that's why Isaiah, I often facetiously say that Handel wrote the book of Isaiah.

And of course, and I'm kidding of course, because, but so much of Handel's messiah

and his things come of course out literally word for word out of Isaiah.

One of the things that both Isaiah and Jeremiah talk about that's going to be very important

to you and me is the doom of Babylon.

They both talk, both Isaiah and Jeremiah talk about the destruction of Babylon, which did

not happen historically.

Many of your Bible helps unfortunately are an error.

Babylon was conquered by the Persians back in 539, but without a battle.

And even as late as the 1800s AD, it's still there, there's still people living there,

even though it's been eclipsed by other caravan roots and so forth.

But the Bible talks about a dramatic catastrophic destruction of the city on the banks of the

Euphrates that merits our attention because if we're correct in our perceptions here,

there are things going on in your daily newspaper that are pointing to a direction that is forthcoming

that both Isaiah and Jeremiah talk a great deal about.

So the doom of Babylon will be a major topic.

The other thing that Isaiah highlights is the fall of Lucifer.

Where did Satan come from?

What's he all about?

Is that just an idiom of English literature?

Or is he a real living being and the endidias?

And you want to understand that.

We've talked about the letter to Cyrus already that's in the book, but it's one of the dramatic

elements of it.

The Messiah is atonement.

We'll talk about in chapter 53.

Some people call that passage the holy of holies of the Old Testament, incredible passage

both in its scope and its reach, but also in some of the treasures that are hidden underneath

the text.

And we'll show you some of those.

And then of course the book closes in here at the end with a second coming of Jesus Christ

and it talks about his blood-stained approach.

And then most of what we know about the millennium, Jesus is actually going to rule the planet

earth from Jerusalem.

And there's a particular thousand year period that's mentioned in the book of Revelation.

But most of what we know about that period does not come from Revelation 20.

It comes from Isaiah 65 and 66, the last two chapters of Isaiah.

And we're going to take a little addendum.

We're going to talk a little bit about the so-called two Isaiah's and that whole issue.

But it's interesting getting back, there was a plot against the throne, the king, resin

the king of Syria and peck of the king of Israel, the northern kingdom.

They mounted an expedition to depose Ahas, the king of the southern king of Judah, and

to place a son of Tbil on the throne of Judah.

Now this gets thwarted, fortunately.

They were literally going to try to wipe out the house of David.

And that's pretty foolish.

If you understand, the house of David has been supernaturally ordained and protected by God

against all kinds of assaults.

And so this is obviously ill-fated.

It's well known to students of cryptography because in Isaiah chapter 7 there's some

cryptography hidden under the text that reveals what the plot would have happened if it,

what they were planning to do if they had won.

So it's an interesting study and I won't bore you with the details of that except a

highlight that it's there.

But there was an attempt to make a full end of the house of David.

But it would not come to pass as Isaiah summarizes.

But it leads to an incident where through Isaiah, he says to Ahas, the king, although

that plot has been full, he says, ask the assign of the Lord thy God.

Ask it either in the depth or the height above.

Can you imagine getting that opportunity?

The prophet of God comes to you as the king and says, hey, it's a challenge.

Ask a sign.

Whatever you can think of.

But Ahas isn't interested in doing that.

He says, I will not ask neither will I tempt the Lord.

And he said, hear me now, O house of David.

This is Isaiah speaking for the Lord.

Here ye now, O house of David.

No, he shifts now from Ahas to the whole house of David.

So this sign, even though Ahas wasn't going to play ball here, Isaiah gives it to me

anyway.

And the focus is an assurance to the whole house of David.

It's a very profound thing coming here.

He said, hear you now, O house of David.

Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God?

Also, therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign.

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

Your English translations may say, Averge, and there's the Hebrew, it's ha-alma, which

is a word that means a virgin.

Now some skeptics will quibble and say, well, that word can under certain conditions also

simply mean a young maid.

Well that's pretty silly in the first place because he says, the Lord's going to give you

a sign.

Holy young girl's going to have a baby.

That's a sign, you know?

No, the context clearly demands the denotative use of that term.

But just to clarify that, three centuries before the birth of Christ, the best Hebrew

scholars available translated this into Greek.

And they use the word prarthinos, which is a virgin, ununmarried girl, and in the Greek

it's very precise, unambiguous, that's what it means.

Therefore, the Lord Himself shall give you a sign.

Behold, a virgin, or the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.

Now, and so of course, this is all familiar to you.

You always celebrate this around Christmastime.

Christmas has got nothing to do with the birth of Christ, but we celebrate at that time.

It's not biblical, but we won't go down that path here.

But we find a lot from Isaiah in our Christmas cards and elsewhere.

In Isaiah 9, 6, you've all heard this, for unto us a child is born.

unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder and his name shall

be called wonderful.

Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace, there shall be no end, and upon the throne

of David, and upon his kingdom to order it and to establish it with judgment and with

justice from henceforth even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

Well, that's quite a passage.

Now, notice verse 6, let's go back here.

You've heard this verse many times, but you may not have realized that the child is born

is a human.

The son that is given is God.

This is in that verse is included an attribute of the unique identity of Jesus Christ, both

man and God in one person.

And that of course, that doctrine doesn't hang on this verse alone, but it's just, it's

again, you know, supportive of that.

And his name shall be called wonderful.

You may recall back in Judges 13 when Manoa had a strange visitor that was announcing

that the child was going to be Samson.

And so, who am I speaking with?

He said, my name is wonderful.

Well, he's not used to it as an adjective.

He's using it as a proper noun.

Who do you think that person was?

Well I would argue from that he identified himself with Isaiah 9, 6, a pre-incarnate appearance

of Jesus Christ.

But anyway, of the increase of his government, their M.P.

There shall be no end.

Upon the throne of David, did the throne of David exist during the days of Mary and Joseph

on the planet earth?

No.

Rome was ruling things and they appointed an Edomite.

And Edomite is the traditional enemy of Israel.

There's a whole study of Edom you need to do, but he was at Edomite, Herod.

And the throne of David was not operative.

Did Jesus Christ ever sit on the throne of David?

Not yet.

Is he sitting on it now?

No.

He's sitting on his father's throne.

He said, book of Revelation is all about things out of place.

See, Israel is not in the land that needs to be in the land.

Jesus is not in his throne.

He's on his father's throne.

And the woman in chapter 12, excuse me, the woman in chapter 12 is not in the land.

And the church is on the earth, but should be in heaven.

So all those things get adjusted in the book of Revelation.

So, but we'll move on here.

When you get to the passage in Isaiah that some scholars call the Holy of Holies, we'll

call it chapter 53, although I want to highlight something else here.

You have to remember that the chapter divisions were added in the 13th century, and they're

very helpful.

But you should also be sensitive to the fact that sometimes the chapters start too early

or too late.

Often there's a very key part of a chapter that really is the last verse or two or three

of the previous chapter.

And conversely, some major passages start a little after.

So you should be just don't take, recognize the chapter divisions are convenience, but

not necessarily inspired.

The chapter 53 in a sense starts with chapter 52 in the last couple of verses.

And it is an astonishing passage that in this quick survey, there's some places that we

will stop and read it verse by verse because they're so significant and we'll do that

here.

In Isaiah 52 verse 13, Isaiah writes, behold, my servant shall deal prudently.

He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

And indeed he will be very high.

He was lifted up on a cross.

And Jesus makes that point in John 3, speaking of the analogy with the bride's serpent and

so forth.

But then there's a verse.

Verse 14 is a verse that the King James translators didn't feel you could handle.

So they worded it not to be incorrect, but unless you look very carefully, you won't

understand what it's really saying.

As many were astonished at the, his visage was so marred, more than any man, and is formed

more than the sons of men.

What that is actually alluding to is that the abuse that Jesus Christ suffered at the cross

and is prior being put on the cross was so abusive that he no longer looked human.

He was so disfigured, so abused.

We, I think are indebted to Mel Gibson's book of the movie The Passion because I think there's

many things to commend it.

It's a very useful thing.

I know some people are critical of certain subtleties.

I think that's quibbling.

I think he's done us all a gigantic favor for lots of reasons.

Not the least of which you can open a conversation with any stranger.

Hey, have you seen the passion?

No matter what the answer is, you've got a conversation going.

There's two things that Mel couldn't do.

One is he couldn't really communicate who he was.

See, the crucifixion was not a tragedy.

It was an achievement.

But that's too complex to try to do in a film mission, really.

The second thing he couldn't do, didn't do anyway, is to carry it all the way.

If you think that was tough, if he had been even more accurate, it would have been even

more shocking.

And we have materials on that, the agony of love and so forth.

I'll leave that here just as a passing mark.

Let's go on.

Then we get, so shall he sprinkle many nations.

The kings shall shut their mouths at him for that which they had not been told them, shall

they see.

And that which they had not heard, shall they consider.

And then we're into the body of Isaiah 53, as if commonly known, who hath believed our

report to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground.

He hath no form nor calmliness.

And when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows.

And acquainted with grief.

And we hid as it were our faces from him.

He was despised and we esteemed him not.

Surely, he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we did esteem him, stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

He was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way.

And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Let's go back and take a look at that.

Notice how often we are in antithesis.

He in us.

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

We hid as it were our faces from him.

He was despised and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we did esteem him, stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

See the antithesis going on here.

He was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way.

And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

See the substitutionary.

Clearly he was in our place.

And Isaiah nails this probably more precision than all of Paul's pistols put together.

But going on, he was oppressed and he was afflicted.

Yet he opened not his mouth.

He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.

And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.

He was taken from prison and from judgment.

And who shall declare his generation?

For he is cut off out of the land of the living.

For the transgression of my people was he stricken.

And he made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death because he had done

no violence.

Neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.

He hath put him to grief.

When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see a seed.

He shall prolong his days and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

One of the most astonishing prophecies in the book of Isaiah, well known to any serious

student of the Bible, but I'll tell you something that may surprise you.

It isn't fulfilled yet.

That should shock you.

I thought this was filled with a cross.

In a sense it was, in a sense it wasn't because what's being recorded here is Israel's awakening

to that.

This gets fulfilled when they confess their iniquity as Hosea 5, 15.

This is the awareness that God is seeking in the nation at the national level as a prerequisite

to the second coming.

And we'll see that when we get to the book of Hosea in the next session.

Continuing this chapter though, he shall see the travel of his soul.

He shall be satisfied by his knowledge.

Shall my righteous servant justify many?

For he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore, will I divide him a portion with a great?

He shall divide the spoil with the strong because he had poured out his soul unto death.

And he was numbered with the transgressors and bear the sin of many and made intercession

for the transgressors.

He prayed for those that were with him.

So 12 key points here.

He comes in absolute loneliness, a rudive dry ground.

He was despised and rejected of men.

He suffered for sins and in the place of others.

What others?

You and me.

He himself caused the suffering to be vicarious.

He had absolute resignation.

He opened not his mouth and so forth.

He died as a felon from prison and from judgment.

It says.

He was cut off prematurely out of the land of the living.

He was personally guiltless.

No violence or deceit in his mouth.

He was to live on after his sufferings to prolong his days.

And Yahweh, as most people would say it, or Yot He, love He, as some rabbis would say,

his pleasure would prosper in his hand.

And then we mighty triumph after his suffering.

He would divide the spoil.

And by all this God would justify many.

Praise God for that.

Isaiah 53.

Let me tell you now, behind this text are some surprises.

And inside for a minute it's lofty message.

Let's take a look underneath it.

You'll find that encrypted in these 12 verses are all kinds of other words.

Yeshua is my name is encrypted there, his signature.

Messiah, Nazarene, Galilee, Shiloh, which is a mis- Semantic phrase.

Pharisee, Levites, Caiaphas, Anas, Passover, the man Herod, Wiccan Caesar, parish, the

evil Roman city.

Let him be crucified as they're the very quote they use.

Moriah cross and on it goes.

Atonement, bread, wine, obit, Jesse, seed, water, Jonah, all red words.

Now there's more.

That's just the warm-up.

You'll find the phrase, the disciples mourn encrypted there.

And then you find 40 names encrypted in those 12 verses of the people that were at the foot

of the cross.

You got Peter, Matthew, John, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, and two Jameses.

There were three Jameses, but the brother of Christ did not become a believer until

after the resurrection.

And Simon, that is, Matthias, there were three Marys.

One of them was encrypted and tangled with John, by the way, and Salomian Joseph.

Now that's astonishing on the one hand, but let me tell you something that's even more

astonishing.

Some people would argue, well, that just happens by the frequency of alphabets in large text.

We're not talking in large text, we're talking about 12 verses, and we're talking about highly

relevant accidents here.

But there is a word that is composed of four Hebrew letters that are very high frequency,

which means that that particular word would be intrinsically, it would show up in any

large Hebrew text because of the frequency of those four letters.

And you would expect statistically to show up at least once in this 12 verses, it shows

up, it's conspicuous, and it's absence.

And that name is Judas.

Let's move on.

In Isaiah 61, there's an interesting verse that Jesus himself reads when he opens his

ministry, when he goes, when he's at the synagogue in Nazareth, and Luke chapter 4, he is handed

the book of Isaiah, and he finds this place, and he reads this to them.

And when he reads it, he announces this is hereby fulfilled in your ears.

And here's what Jesus read.

And you'll find this in Luke 4, and also it's a passage here, Isaiah 61 verses 1 and 2.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord have anointed me to preach good tidings

into the meek.

He had sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and

the opening of the prison to them that are bound, and to proclaim the acceptable year

of the Lord.

He shuts the book and declares, this day is this passage fulfilled in your ears.

Now they subsequently get upset and try to throw him off a cliff.

I won't go down all that path right now, but this is his mandate.

Jesus opens his ministry announcing this mandate from Isaiah 61.

But this is one of those lessons.

The reason I'm making an emphasis is important for a lot of reasons, but also I want you

to pick up some methodology.

Always pay attention to what's not said, and pay attention to the subtleties, because

the truth is always in the details.

You notice to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord in your English translation you

find a comma, right?

He stopped at the comma.

He didn't read the rest of it.

Well I'm curious about the part.

He didn't read.

If you go to Isaiah 61 verse 1 and 2 you'll discover this is what he read, except the

part he omitted and the day of vengeance of our God.

And he goes on.

You see that part was not fulfilled in their ears while he stood there.

Will it be?

Absolutely.

That comma after the word Lord has lasted for about 2,000 years.

But it's coming.

I think you may have seen that sometimes people put a bumper sticker on Jesus' coming soon

and boy is he angry.

And it's a little irreverent perhaps, but it has a scriptural basis, because he's coming

in power to make the right, wrong things right and so forth.

And so I think that's instructive.

Let me comment, there's so much we could spend a whole year just studying Isaiah.

It's very frustrating just to try to pick a few highlights.

But there is something I do want you to understand.

There are, I'll call them pseudo scholars that claim there's two Isaiah's.

And remember when I was an emerging teenager, very excited about the Bible, I ran into these

doctrines and they really set me back for a while.

I didn't really buy them and yet they bothered me.

See the idea is that Isaiah has been broken up into 66 chapters just as we have 66 books

in the Bible.

And notice is the first 39 chapters have a certain style.

And from chapter 40 on it seems to shift, rather noticeably even in the translation.

So some say the first 39 chapters really were written by what they call Isaiah 1.

That was a different writer, a different, earlier writer.

And he spoke, the subject of Isaiah 1 is the day of the Lord and it focuses on Judah, Israel,

nations and Jerusalem.

And then there's a four chapter historical addendums, started with Hezekiah and how

they foolishly get themselves exposed to the threat of Babylon and so on.

From chapter 40 through 66 they call, that was written by a different Isaiah.

That was Isaiah 2 we'll call them.

And that deals with the suffering, servant and the consummation and so forth.

People have noted that such a different style in the two and so they say there were two

Isaiah's.

And that always bothered me.

You know you've got people that think there's five different authors to Genesis to the Torah,

the so-called documentary hypothesis.

All that is nonsense.

All of that is easily shredded by good scholarship, doing a little homework.

But you don't need to because Jesus authenticated the Torah.

You can throw all that nonsense away.

It's liberal foolishness, tragic undermining of people's faith.

Well the Deuteronomy is Isaiah theory.

You'll find in many so-called Bible helps.

And I never bought it but it always bothered me because it lurks there all the time.

And I am so grateful, so grateful for my friend John.

The fallacy by the way can be argued from stylistic distinctives.

It's refuted by careful study of style, images, vocabulary and constructions which span both

those books, both parts of the books I should say.

And people who argue there's two Isaiah's betray the fact that they don't understand

the organization of the book.

If they comprehend the whole design you'll recognize it's a single book.

But also when it was translated into Greek there are descriptions to it and so forth.

And you can also see some try to argue that one of the half the book was written after

the exile and all that because Isaiah, see Isaiah, predicts the destruction of Babylon.

What makes that provocate, he's writing at a time that Babylon hasn't even risen up as

an empire yet.

He's writing before Babylon conquers Assyrian becomes an empire.

But he writes about how it's going to be destroyed.

Well they couldn't have been, he must have been written later.

That's the skeptic's approach.

Well actually there are pre-exile quotations all through the scripture.

But anyway, but there's also New Testament quotations.

They're the ones that interest me.

John, I'm so indebted to John.

In John chapter 12 on verse 38 John quotes from Isaiah in verse 38 of chapter 12 he says

that the saying of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled which he spake, Lord, who hath

believed our report, to whom hath the arm of the Lord be revealed?

Does it sound familiar to you?

Sure.

He's quoting from Isaiah 53 verse 1, right?

Well a few verses later he quotes from Isaiah again.

He says, he hath blinded their eyes and hardened their heart that they should not see with their

eyes nor understand with their heart and be converted that I should heal them.

These things said Isaiah when he saw his glory and spake of him.

John is quoting here from Isaiah chapter 6 and Isaiah chapter 6 Isaiah sees the throne

of God and in that passage he explains why some people don't believe because God has

blinded their hearts, blinded their eyes, hardened their heart that they should not see

with their eyes nor understand with their heart nor be converted and I should heal them.

These things, there's a reason and I won't go into the whole story there.

But the point is John is quoting then from Isaiah 6 verse 9 and verse 10.

Okay?

We together so far?

The exciting discovery is there is a verse 39 between verse 38 and 40.

And I'm not being facetious, it's a treasure because John says after quoting from Isaiah

2 if you will, the second Isaiah, Isaiah 53, therefore they could not believe because that

Isaiah said again and he quotes from Isaiah 6.

He quotes from Isaiah 53, he quotes from Isaiah 6 and links them as being written by the same

Isaiah.

So if these scholars that get their PhDs and H2SO4s from their seminary are correct, John

is wrong.

I bet on John.

See, this linkage of the two Isaiah's is precious to me because it's another example

of several things.

There is no heresy, there is no false doctrine, there is no weird awful wall idea that isn't

anticipated in the Scripture.

You'll find the subtlest little things tucked around, you'll discover that they're planted

there by the Holy Spirit to refute some nonsense that someone will come up with in the future.

And this Deuter Isaiah thing is shredded by one little verse, verse 39 and John 12.

I'm so grateful for that because I remember the grief that I had as a teenager for many

years until I discovered this to put away this nonsense about the Deuter Isaiah.

Well let's look at the panorama of history, of course we've gone through this with Abraham

all the way through and so forth and we're now focusing on the exile and literally up

to the exile, the Babylonian captivity and the major prophets start in the middle of

the monarchy and go into the, but not through the end of the Babylon captivity except for

Daniel, Daniel does.

And the minor prophets of course start earlier and go later.

So the minor prophets, even though they're smaller books, cover a larger span of history.

Now let's get down here and take a look at Jeremiah who officiates so to speak in the

final days of the monarchy before it goes into the Babylon captivity.

And so he's known as the weeping prophet.

He was commissioned in chapter one and then he has a bunch of prophecies that before the

fall of Jerusalem.

The first chapters two through 20 are undated aren't specific.

By the way they're not necessarily in chronological order.

There's a whole thing there I'll spare you right now.

But there are a handful of them that are specific and very dated for some reasons that

deal with the last four of Judah's kings.

You understand there were about nine different dynasties in the northern kingdom but there's

only one dynasty in the south king of the dynasty of David.

You should need to keep that and need to understand that.

You can't properly explain the history of any nation if you leave God out of the picture

and corrupt leadership inoculates the whole nation with moral poison and the inward failure

ultimately issues forth in national sin.

And that's exactly the performance of the nation that Jeremiah is overseeing and it's

a tragic tale.

If you go through our commentaries the ones that we did some years ago you may even hear

me weep on it.

It's a tough stuff because as you go through that you can't help but see some parallels

with our own nation.

But in any case there are also prophecies from chapter 40 to 44 prophecies after the

fall of Jerusalem where he's carried off to Egypt, continues writing.

Then there's a whole bunch of prophecies included upon the Gentile nations, Egypt, the Philistines,

Moab, Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Elom, Persia.

He also talks about the doom of Babylon and we'll talk more about that before it's

all over and of course, finite Jerusalem is overthrown.

The weeping prophet.

He's one of the bravest, tenderest, most pathetic figures in history because he was a patriot

as well as a prophet.

He cared about his nation and that makes it painful.

He ministered for over 40 years, about 80 years after Isaiah, under two kings, the most tragic

national record ever written.

And in 40 years he never received a grateful response from anyone thrown in dungeons, prison.

They felt his writings were treasonous.

They didn't repent obviously and so forth.

And one of the questions as you studied Jeremiah and I encourage you to do that is to see if

you think there's any parallels to our own predicament.

I'll give you one quote from it.

It sort of captures his mood.

In verse 1 he says, oh that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears that

I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.

This is his mood.

In fact, there's an acrostic poem added to his book called Lamentations, basically an

acrostic poem amplifying all this.

There was another weeping prophet that wept over Jerusalem while writing a donkey.

In Matthew chapter 23 Jesus himself said, oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem thou that kills the

prophets and stone us them that are sent to thee.

How often I would gather thy children together even as a hen gathard chickens under her wings.

And she would not.

Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.

For I say unto you, you shall not see me henceforth until ye shall say, blessed is he that cometh

in the name of the Lord.

Here you have the purpose of all history.

How I would have gathered the children together as a hen gathered chickens.

That was the purpose of all history.

The tragedy of all history, ye would not.

He came and they received them not.

But the triumph of all history is that there will be a day when they will say, blessed

is he that came and came and came from the name of the Lord, and they will achieve that

destiny that God has specified all through the Old Testament and the new.

Well, some highlights.

There are a lot of key themes in Jeremiah.

The process of divine judgment in national life is the overriding theme.

And the whole theme is that God has not abandoned his throne.

And neither has he abandoned his people.

He is a Jewish, and I will punish, but I will restore.

That's basically his message.

And he precisely specifies the seven-year captivity.

In fact, it's Daniel reading chapter 25 of Jeremiah that realizes as a captive in Babylon,

it's about over.

Jeremiah said it's going to be 70 years.

It turns out it was 70 years to the very day.

But something very important that we learn from Daniel, I'll remind you, when Daniel discovers

the end is about near, he doesn't say, man, isn't that neat and put his feet up on the

desk and relax?

He goes to prayer.

If you knew that God was coming back, if the Lord's rapture of the church or whatever

was happening by the 1st of March, what would you do?

Man, I'm really, oh boy, he's coming to know.

That means you got, that's the time to get into serious prayer.

Prayer is God's way of enlisting you in what he's doing.

And that's exactly what Daniel did when he read Jeremiah and discovered the precision

that took for granted, the precision that was there.

And Jeremiah also talks about the New Covenant.

He gives the name to the New Testament.

We call it the New Testament, which is a strange term because it's testament, like a will

of someone death and of course that's part of it.

But a New Covenant probably more descriptive and that really comes out of Jeremiah 31, the

whole idea of a New Covenant.

And then the Duma Babylon, of course, is a topic I've mentioned.

There's another verse that many people don't really understand in Jeremiah 22, closing

chapter 30 of chapter 22.

By the time you get there, God has had it with these kings.

The northern kingdom went from bad to worse and they're gone.

But the southern kingdom was not much better.

They had a few exceptions come along.

Josiah has a guy and a few others.

But from there on, it's downhill after Josiah.

In fact, it gets so bad under Jack and Iah that God pronounces a blood curse on he and

his descendants.

And if you look at Jeremiah 22 verse 30, thus saith the Lord, write this man, childless,

a man that shall not prosper in his days.

For no man of his seed shall prosper sitting upon the throne of David and ruling anymore

in Judah.

Here's a curse on Jack and Iah.

Okay, he blew it.

Bad news.

But notice what God has done.

He's pronounced a curse on the line descending from Jack and Iah.

Whenever I get into this topic, I always can't resist visualizing that when that happened

in the councils of Satan, they probably had a party.

Because I'm sure they were convinced God had shot himself in the foot, as we might say.

That he, because he, God has committed himself to a messiah coming from the line of David.

This is the Davidic line.

And if there's a curse on it, how's he going to have a messiah?

And as I visualize that imaginary thought, I visualize God turning to the angels saying,

watch this one.

And as you go through your Bible, when you get to the New Testament, you get to Luke,

Luke gives you a different genealogy than Matthew does.

Matthew gives you the legal line from Abraham down through Joseph, the legal father of Jesus

Christ.

Not the blood father though.

Luke being a doctor is interested in this humanity.

He goes from Adam to Abraham.

But Abraham to David, they're identical.

But David, Luke takes a left turn.

Doesn't go through Solomon, the first surviving son of Bathsheba.

He goes through the second son, surviving son of Bathsheba.

A guy by the name of Nathan, not Nathan the prophet, but another Nathan, I believe.

And to Mary.

And so here, Jesus Christ is in, has entitlement to the throne through Joseph, his legal father.

He also has entitlement through Helai, through the, the provision in the Torah for the daughters

of Zalaphahad.

And so those are things that, it's, it's, it's, it's always exciting to me to see how

this all ties together.

It's interesting in its own right, but it's also interesting from a methodological point

of view.

Because if you stand back from the Bible and look at the whole package, you discover that

every detail is skillfully designed to fit together.

There's nothing in there irrelevant.

And that's a challenge to find some things that what's set there for.

Study it because they'll, behind that question will be a treasure, a discovery.

And it always does.

Well, the doom of Babylon, I think I've covered this before, but we'll talk more about it

before it's all over anyway.

The destruction of Babylon, according to Isaiah 13 and 14 in Jeremiah 1551, is that it's

never to be inhabited.

It'll never, the building materials will never be reused.

And it'll be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah.

That has never happened.

It has been inhabited.

The building materials are presently being reused.

It has never been destroyed catastrophically and finally as Sodom and Gomorrah has.

Both Jeremiah and Isaiah emphasize that.

The fall of Babylon 539, some of your Bibles help say fulfill that is not true because

it fell without a battle.

It became Alexander's capital.

It was Persian capital for two centuries and a Greek capital following that.

It had after feet over the centuries, but it's presently being rebuilt.

And one of the things you want to watch because if we understand our Bible correctly, this

fabled city from the Tower of Babel, it has a destiny to rise again as a major world power

to receive the judgment that God has instore for.

And as you watch that happen, it's going to be very fun because a lot of good Bible

scholars don't agree with this.

They check you're getting carried away with all this.

Well we'll see.

Stand back and watch.

Watch your newspaper.

You'll see.

And there's also an aspect of this that we'll touch on when we get to Revelation.

So okay, we've been focusing down here at this point.

Let's take a look at Ezekiel.

He was a priest and a prophet like Jeremiah.

Not only at office of prophet, but he also had a priest background.

He is one of the 10,000 that were taken in the captain of the second siege, Daniel the

first, these guys in the second, about 11 years before the final overthrow of Jerusalem

when it's finally destroyed.

See Jeremiah and Ezekiel kept preaching to yield to Nebuchadnezzar because he's God's

instrument of judgment.

The false prophets said no, God's chosen people and they always encouraged rebellion.

And both Ezekiel and Jeremiah says if you do it again, God is going to destroy you.

They're a vassal right now, but they're at least able to live there.

If you keep this up, God is going to level the place and that's exactly what did happen,

11 years later.

But Ezekiel talks about the coming judgments on Jerusalem.

He's a very colorful character.

He has all kinds of similes and visions.

He acts out skits to make his point and they're really bizarre ones.

I won't go through them here, but they're very colorful reading.

He also deals with the future destinies of the nations and he specifically has a passage

on the origin and destiny of Satan.

Both Isaiah and Ezekiel give us most of what we know about Satan's origin and ultimate

destiny.

But Ezekiel will also focus, fortunately, on the restoration of the nation Israel.

He'll talk about the Valley of Dry Bones and he'll talk about Gog and Magog.

He'll touch a bit on those.

And then of course he has a tremendous amount of detail on the millennium from chapter 40

through 48, but how the land will be allocated and he has an incredibly detailed specification

for the final temple.

Not the temple that they will be rebuilding in the near horizon, but the temple in the

millennium.

And it's subject to a lot of debate because it's too detailed to be just an allegory

of some kind.

And yet it's so bizarre that it raises other questions, but that's a special study.

So there are strange similes all through Ezekiel.

He shuts himself up in his home.

He binds himself.

He is struck dumb.

He was to lie on his right and his left sides for a total of 430 days in one episode.

He ate bread that was prepared in an unclean manner and he shaved his head and beard, which

was considered a shame in their particular culture and calling.

So he's a...

He's this kind of character.

But one of the things he has that attracts a lot of attention is he has a vision of the

throne of God.

And in this he sees cherubim that have four faces.

Isaiah, Isaiah 6 sees seraphim.

They may be the same thing.

Some scholars think there may be two different kinds of things, but in each case they share

these strange four faces, a face like a lion, an ox, a man, and an eagle.

Now it's interesting because the camps of Israel are numbers too.

The twelve tribes were clustered into four camps, the camp of Judah, the camp of Ephraim,

the camp of Reuben, camp of Dan, which have as their ensigns those same four symbols.

And then when you get to the Gospels, we haven't gotten there yet, but when we do you'll discover

that the four Gospels present Jesus Christ from four vantage points.

Matthew being a Jew presents him as the lion of the tribe of Judah.

And Mark presents him as the suffering servant, the classical symbol of service was of course

the oxen.

And Luke's a doctor, he's focusing on Christ's humanity and presents him as the son of man.

And John is a whole other thing with the son of God.

So we'll talk about that when you get to the Gospels.

Let's talk about Satan because he's too important to...

Not to highlight here.

We talk a little bit about his origin as a gem in his destiny.

We learn most of that from two books, Isaiah and Ezekiel.

In Isaiah 14 we find his ambition as exemplified by his five eye will statements.

Ezekiel tells us that he was the anointed cherub that cover.

The cherub singular cherubim is a super angel.

He apparently was the anointed one, that is the one appointed over all the others.

The anointed one that coverth.

There's a quaint way of expressing that.

In Revelation we find a summary of his attempts to thwart the plan of redemption.

All the way through...

You can study the Bible from cover to cover in terms of Satan's attempts to thwart God's

plan.

As it's revealed more clearly, he makes his attacks more specific.

All the way through.

But let's take a look at Ezekiel 28.

Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre and say unto him, thus saith the

Lord God thou sealest up the sum full of wisdom and perfect and beauty.

Now this...

He's talking in this general passage about the king of Tyre.

But now in his language starts getting carried away here a little bit.

Thou sealest up the sum full of wisdom, perfect and beauty.

I have never met the king of Tyre, but I don't know if he was the ultimate of wisdom and

ultimate in beauty.

That sort of...

It's a little extreme to be found in a document like the Word of God.

Then the next phrase nails it.

Thou hast been in Eden the Garden of God.

Really?

Was the king of Tyre in Eden?

I don't think so.

This is being addressed, I believe, to the power behind the king of Tyre.

Follow me?

Strange structure, but we see it frequently in the Scripture.

Thou hast been in Eden the Garden of God.

There's only three people in the Garden of God that I know of.

This is not Adam or Eve.

It's in the hush, the shining one.

Every precious stone was thy covering.

The sardius, the topaz, the diamond, the barrel, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire,

the emerald, and the carbuncle in gold.

The workmanship of thy tablets and thy pipes was prepared in the day that thou hast created.

These precious stones are classic ways of reflecting colored light.

And we find that obviously in the breastplate of the high priest, we find it in the New

Jerusalem in Revelation.

It's an idiom that deserves a lot of attention, but we're really indulging in conjectures that

go any further than that.

But the other phrase in here, the workmanship of thy tablets and thy pipes, those are musical

terms.

It's from this phrase that we understand that his music capability was unparalleled.

And there's speculation on some that he probably lived the worship in heaven until he got

overly ambitious and got carried away with his own plans.

Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth.

And I have said these so.

Thou hast upon the holy mountain of God, thou wast walked up and down in the midst of the

stones of fire.

Thou was perfect in thy days.

From the day that thou hast created, comma, thou was perfect.

From the day that thou hast obviously a super being.

It's obvious though that he's a created being.

Question, who created them?

Jesus Christ.

Colossians tells us that all things are made by him without him was not anything made that

was made, and by him are all things held together.

So you often hear between Christ and Satan as a phrase or something.

That's misleading.

They're not equals.

Not by long shot.

Satan is a created being.

So let's not confuse that point.

Then we have the saddest words, saddest words in the entire scripture.

Thou was perfect in thy days.

From the day that thou hast created, till, iniquity was found in thee.

An interesting scrapbook to put together would be make a list of all the untills in the Bible.

They usually represent a milestone of some kind, profound milestones.

You could make quite a doctrinal dissertation just highlighting the main untills in the

scripture, and this is one of them.

He's the anointed cherubate coverth.

He was in charge.

Until iniquity was found in thee.

Then it goes on by the multitude thy merchandise.

They have filled the merchandise being like traffic, multitude thy traffic.

They have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned.

Therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God, and I will destroy

the old covering cherub from the midst of the stones of fire.

Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty.

Thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness.

I will cast thee to the ground.

I will lay thee before kings that they may behold thee.

And Isaiah is going to pick up on this theme, give us a little more amplification than it.

I continue with Ezekiel.

Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multisenctuaries.

See, he apparently led worship.

Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy

traffic.

Therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, and it shall devour thee,

and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.

So this ruler is going to make out an ash of himself, but let's move on.

All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee, thou shalt be

a terror, and shall, and never shalt thou be anymore.

Let's shift to Isaiah.

There's a similar passage in Isaiah 14.

See, remember, Isaiah 14 is equal 28, it's multiple of seven.

But in Isaiah, he is taking after the king of Babylon.

Ezekiel is tired, here's Babylon.

But again, the same thing, the language goes, pierces beyond the literal king, and is talking

about the power that's behind him.

And Isaiah says in verse 12, following, How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son

of the morning.

How art thou cut down to the ground, which this weak in the nations, for thou hast said

in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven.

I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.

I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation and the sides of the north.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.

I will be like the most high.

The five I wills, unbridled ambition.

This is why God hates pride, because it was the pride in Satan that led to the beginning

of sin.

That's why leaven is a symbol of pride, because it corrupts by puffing up.

Isaiah continues, yet thou shalt be brought down to shawl, to the sides of the pit.

When you see the word hell in the English, you have to realize there's several choices

it could be referring to.

If it's in the Old Testament, it's typically talking about shawl, which is not the grave.

The grave is for the body.

The shawl is the domain of the spirit.

The shawl can't be owned.

There's lots of graves, only one shawl.

It's similar, but different concept.

The grave speaks to the physical, the soul and the spirit are in shawl.

In the New Testament, the term would be Hades, roughly equivalent, unless he's talking about

the ultimate place, which is Gehenna, because even shawl and Hades will be thrown into

Gehenna at the end.

We'll see when we get there.

So seeing Satan, yet thou shalt be brought down to shawl, to the sides of the pit.

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee and consider thee saying, is this the

man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, that made the world as a

wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof, that opened not the house of his prisoners?

Wow.

See, in Matthew 25, Jesus says, then shall they say also them on the left hand, depart

from me, ye cursed in the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

See the ultimate punishment that we always talk about, in hell in the common vernacular,

was made for Satan and his angels.

And no one will be in hell because of their sin.

They will be in hell for having rejected the provision God has made for their sin.

There's a difference because Jesus Christ paid for it on the cross if you'll but accept

it.

Well, Ezekiel also talks about the restoration in Israel in several terms.

His passage of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is a classic, of course.

It's a vision of the restoration of Israel.

They're brought back to life in the flesh and then later, breathed with the Spirit.

Many people say, they're in the land but they're not in belief, no kidding.

But they can't be back, they can't get the Spirit and fill it back in the land.

So step one is taking place, they're in the land.

And the good news is, there's a ground swell rising of Jewish people who are believers

in the Messiah.

That's exciting.

In Isaiah 11, 11, we didn't pick this up when I was there, I want to leave it for here.

In chapter 11 verse 11, there's a passage in Isaiah says, the Lord shall set His hand

again the second time to recover the remnant of His people and goes on from all over the

world.

The Lord set His hand on them to bring them back from Babylon, that was the first time.

When He sets His hand the second time, that's all she wrote.

You and I have been watching that since the last part of the 19th century into the 20th

and the middle of the 20th century on May 14th of 1948.

David Ben-Gurion, citing Ezekiel as his authority, named the new Jewish homeland Israel.

And so God has begun, he's begun to work and what he starts, he finishes.

It's going to be painful but it's coming.

And of course this is fulfilled, this part of it, at least in the first half of the

20th century, the second time.

Why is Israel to be restored?

Ezekiel 36 verse 22, therefore, saying to the house of Israel, thus sayeth the Lord,

God, get this.

I do not this for your sakes or house of Israel, but for my holy namesake which ye have profaned

among the heathen, whether you went.

You've got a saying through Ezekiel 36 to Israel, the good news is you're going to

be restored, but not because you deserve it, every place you went, you blew it.

But my name is on the deal, so my honor is at stake.

So I'm doing this for my sake, not yours.

That's what he's saying.

I do not this for your sakes or house of Israel, but for my holy namesake which ye have profaned

among the heathen where ye went.

See, that's why I think the third commandment is so serious, thou shalt not take the name

of the Lord thy God and vain.

There's nothing to do with vocabulary, nothing to do with swearing.

It has to do with ambassadorship.

If you're going to take the name of the Lord upon your life, you better represent him fairly

accurately.

He's very jealous of that.

Moving on, he continues, I will sanctify my great name which was profaned among the heathen,

which ye have profaned in the midst of them.

And the heathen shall know that I am the Lord, sayeth the Lord God, when I shall be sanctified

in you before the rise, for I will take you from among the heathen and gather you

out of all countries and will bring you into your own land."

That's what we're watching.

Now that's chapter 36 and 37.

In chapter 40 on we have the Millennium, the Millennial Temple.

There's a highly detailed description, it's not simply subbolic.

Several nations are going to worship there, by the way.

Offerings and sacrifices are going to be resumed.

People are shocked.

What do you mean you can?

I thought Christ died once and for all.

He did.

But Christ's death is what saved people, not the blood of bulls and goats in the past.

Offer of Hebrews emphasizes.

So the offerings in the future are no different than the offering of past.

They're both memorials.

The ones in advance are prophetic and what's coming, these are going to be commemorate

what happened.

But they will be resumed.

And by the way, something will disturb a lot of people who are hung up on Saturday Sunday

issues.

The Millennial Temple is only open on Saturday and on the new moons.

What happened to Sunday?

Well, that's fine now.

We have Liberty in Christ and He's the fulfillment of our Sabbath, so I'm not going to get into

a law trip here.

But it's interesting to discover that God ordained the Sabbath day in Genesis.

And it's rather disturbing to read Isaiah 56 and other passages where clearly He uses

that as a measure of people who are trying to please Him.

Do they profane the Sabbath or do they honor it?

Not keeping the law, that's another issue.

But I'll leave that with you to think about it.

Anyway, the thing that's a simple issue hasn't studied it.

But there is an event that occurs after the restoration of Israel, which is going on,

and before the Millennium.

And that's chapters 38 and 39.

Gog and Magog, strange invasion.

It's famous for two reasons.

First of all, it's the occasion in which God Himself intervenes to quell an ill-fated

invasion of Israel by Magog and His allies.

A powerful guy by the name of Magog, arms and leads a group of allies in an invasion

of Israel that God intervenes in.

The allies are listed in Ezekiel 38, Persia, Khush put, which is north in dark Africa,

Libya, Gomer, Togarma, Meshek and Tuba.

Meshek and Tuba being principal cities in Antsolia, Turkey.

And the other thing, the reason this passage is so well known among Bible scholars is the

passage appears to anticipate the use of nuclear weapons.

That's a pretty absurd thing.

Where do I get that?

Well, I'll show you.

First of all, let's figure out who Magog is.

Hesiod was a Greek that act poet which wrote in the 8th century BC.

He wrote before even Ezekiel did.

He identifies the descendants of Magog as the Scythians by the Greek name.

He wrote it as the father of history, wrote in the 5th century.

And he also calls them the Scythians.

They terrorize the southern steps of Russia from the 10th century BC to the 3rd century

BC, all the way from Ukraine to China.

The Great Wall of China was built to keep them out.

We're in an attempt to anyway.

Phallon Josephus calls the Great Wall of China the ramparts of Gog and Magog.

Soviet archaeologists who have done all kinds of discoveries of the kurgens that are the

graves of the Scythians.

And they know everything because they've been frozen for 2500 years.

So they're going to analyze the bodies to find out what's the still material of the

digestive tract that can be analyzed.

Then it'll a great deal about their lifestyle because they are the forebear to the true

Russians.

In any case, they come from the uttermost parts of the north.

Now if you look at a map of Israel, the invasion comes from where?

The uttermost parts of the north.

What's uttermost north of Israel?

It doesn't take a genius to see that as is Russia.

And what happens is Magog lines up these tribes to invade Israel, but God intervenes.

It won't let it happen.

And the leftover weapons, as equal tells us, will provide all the energy needed for Israel

for seven years.

It tells me that it happens before the seventeenth week of Daniel because after that you don't

need the energy.

Professionals are hired to clear the battlefield.

They wait seven months before entering and then they just clear it for seven months, according

to Ezekiel 39.

They bury the dead east of the Dead Sea, read that downwind.

And furthermore, if a traveler finds something the professionals have missed, he doesn't

touch it.

He marks the location, lets the professionals deal with it.

And anybody that's been briefed on nuclear biological chemical warfare knows Israel.

This language in Ezekiel has written twenty-five hundred and fifty years ago.

It sounds like a DOD publication the last few years.

Well we talked about the seventeenth week of Daniel, which of course is defined by a covenant

being enforced by a world leader.

In the middle of that seven year period there's a nomination of desolation.

We've talked about that already.

And Jesus himself, quoting Daniel 12, labels the period between the abomination of desolation

to the end of that week as the Great Tribulation.

Jeremiah in chapter thirty verse seven calls it the time of Jacob's trouble because the

focus of course is Israel.

Now of course we know because the abomination of desolation is desecrating a temple, we know

by then the temple will have been rebuilt.

We don't know when it's going to start, but we know it's standing by then because that's

the focus of this issue.

The seventeenth week climaxes with the Battle of Armageddon, which is in turn interrupted

by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of God's Kingdom, the Millennium.

The question is where does Maygog fit in, the Maygog invasion?

Many scholars, good scholars, place it as part of the Armageddon scenario.

How Lindsay to this day still believes that's the correct understanding and he may prove

to be correct.

He's certainly a major factor in our perceptions here.

On the other hand, there are a number of us that happen to believe for a number of technical

reasons that the Maygog invasion is not connected with Armageddon, it occurs prior

to the seventeenth week of Daniel.

And we have our reasons, that's not important because I'm not here to really attack that

one or the other except to make this point.

The placement of that has some ambiguities, but something that we all agree on, all conservative

scholars agree on, is that it occurs after the rapture of the church.

So if the Maygog invasion appears to be getting positioned on our horizon, that's exciting.

It's the way I usually express it if you see the stories decorating for Christmas, you

know that Thanksgiving's not far away.

There is a disturbing hint in Isaiah 39 that I can't resist sharing with you.

The more you know about the details of the text is equal 38 and 39 and the more you know

about the current geopolitical horizon, the more it seems that it's getting in position.

However, in verse six, God says, I will send a fire upon Maygog, he's talked about that

already, Helsons of Fire falling on the field forces, and among them that dwell carelessly

in the Euliah, and they shall know that I am the Lord.

The word aisles or coastlands is ambiguous.

There are some that worry what may be hinted at here is that it may be United States missiles

that are used to wipe out, to quell this invasion of Israel, and it precipitates a hit in return.

That the fire on Maygog may also fall upon them who dwell carelessly in the remote coastlands.

Some people suspect that this might be the way that God chooses to finally bring judgment

upon America.

And we'll talk about that when we get to the minor prophets because they have much to say about that.

So in our subsequent sessions we're going to talk about the 12 minor prophets in our 12,

and then we're into the New Testament.

We'll talk about the Messianics we're at and how sure can we be of these things as our bridge.

But let's take a quick look at how these sit together.

Here are the southern northern kingdom.

The southern kingdom of course goes to the Babylonian captivity and then we have the exile prophets.

The northern kingdom had been spirited away earlier, but it gets conquered by Babylon.

So those they get commingled again.

I want to talk a little bit about the Old Testament texts.

See the original Hebrew, sometimes called the Vorlaga, was pulled together in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Septuagint translation is the translation of the Old Testament that occurred three centuries before Christ's ministry.

It started about 285 B.C. to 270, 72 scholars in Alexandria were commissioned to do this, took them 15 years.

And the primary quotes in the New Testament of the Old Testament come from the Greek.

It's about the ninth century, well first of all, there is a council of Yomnia that in 90 A.D.

where they meet and they're upset because their Greek Bible has become the Christian's Bible.

And so they lay the groundwork for what eventually becomes the Masoretic text.

See the Hebrew, a little comment about Hebrew language to give you some, a little more background here.

The Hebrew language is characterized by vividness, conciseness, simplicity, and it, but it also makes it difficult to translate fully.

It takes twice as many English words to translate Hebrew.

But it has a root structure, it's formed from three letter roots, and it, with forms developed by a change of vowels or by adding suffixes or prefixes.

But they're all, it's all based on three letter roots.

The root constants give Hebrew a semantic backbone and stability, not characteristic of Western languages.

And verb usage is not characterized by precise definition of tenses.

It's very context dependent.

Therefore it seems designed to allow puns and word games.

That's why we see all kinds of exploitations of those features in the Biblical text.

Let's talk about Greek as the other primary language, just the opposite.

It's very beautiful, it's rich, it's harmonious.

And it's a fitting tool for vigorous thought and religious devotions, but it's also incredibly precise.

It's characterized by strength and vigor, the language of argument.

It has a vocabulary style that could penetrate and clarify phenomenon rather than simply describe.

So it's far more a perceptive language.

It's the most precise form of expression of any language in existence, the Greek.

Let's give an example, the Greek verbs have to fit five aspects, tense mood, voice, person, and number.

A Greek verb will convey far more than just its definition in lexicon.

It'll tell you who's performing the action, whether just one or more than one is doing it, when it is done,

whether it is single event or a process, whether it is an actual happening, a command, or just something wished for,

whether it's a subject of verb is active or a passive precipitate or both.

We have passive voice and active voice in English, they have optative.

It can be both.

A single Greek word may thus require a phrase or a sentence or more in another language.

Just the Greek verb requires a sentence to get across what it's commanding.

There was a classic attic Greek which was subtle and very expressive, and that characterized the culture at its peak, of course,

but it's often untranslatable.

After its conquest, Alexander the Great encouraged the spread of Greek culture, and regional dialects were replaced by

Hellenistic or common or Koine Greek, and that's the Greek that we're dealing with here.

It's simpler, less elegant, but it retains much of the original strength, beauty, and clarity, and its rhetorical power.

Well, the Septuagint manuscripts, there's a number of them, I won't take you through all of these in detail,

except that we have plenty of the Septuagint manuscripts.

Unceles have been simply that they're all capital letters.

The vellum unseles came out of Alexandria, and we now have discovered that many of them were modified by the Gnostics

in the third and fourth, fifth centuries.

And I won't go through all of those, that's a whole other discussion.

We have a briefing back on how we got our Bible that will go into this for you if you're interested in that.

But the Council of Yomna is worth understanding.

In 90 AD, they rejected the Septuagint because it become the Christian's Bible, and so they want to return to the Hebrew versions

upon which it's based, the Verlogan, if they could, and they produced a unified text of the Tanakh, the Old Testament,

and tried to see the divergent texts were destroyed.

And that led eventually to what we call the Masoretic text, and that's the English translation came from, primarily from Masoretic.

The Masoretes were a group of very, very strict scribes from the 580 to about 950 AD,

and they're the ones that developed a form of vowels.

Old Hebrew didn't have vowels, you inferred the vowels.

Well, they put little marks above and below the letters to imply the proper vowels.

And the oldest of these is 895 AD, only part of it, there's still parts of it that are missing.

But anyway, I won't go through all the other texts except to say that we have good copies of these, and they're ample from the Faustians' AD on.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, of course, there were 11 caves in Wadi Kumran, 600 manuscripts, and 60,000 fragments, many of still being studied.

85% were leather, only 15% were papyrus, more durable.

And in cave 4, they had 40,000 fragments of 400 manuscripts, 100 of which were biblical.

Every book has been found except Esther, parts of it least.

And the important things to understand that the Septuagint is well before the New Testament period.

That's why it's so valuable to us as we study prophecy because there's no question about the existence and what,

because the Septuagint is three centuries earlier, and it is in Greek, very precise.

No excuse for ambiguities.

The central theme of the Old Testament is that it's the count of a nation, the New Testament is the count of a man.

The Creator became a man. His appearance is the central event of all history.

He died to purchase us, and he is alive now.

And our most exalted privilege is to know him, and that's what the Bible is all about.