Introductory Message
I was talking to some of my younger brethren and I have been talking to them for a long time now', that if they are going to study their Bible, it's best to get to know it all first, and then to start to study it in it's individual texts and portions because if we haven't got an understanding of it all I can study v1 of Ch. 1 and I won't know what is going to follow/ so I might get the wrong interpretation. But if I know what's going to follow then I can study that verse in that light. Then I can be more sure that my interpretation is going to be right, for the Scriptures are their own interpreter. Comparing Scripture with Scripture.
I would like to go right from the beginning right to the end, and I'll try not to be long winded trust you'll have patience with me.
Now will you turn first of all with me to 2 Peter 3, and I'm quite sure that you will have noticed, but for the sake of my younger brethren, that the apostle Peter, he likes to] use the past, the present and the future tenses in the 2nd epistle. In the first chapter we get the present tense, in the 2nd chapter we get the past tense, and in the 3rd chapter we get the future tense.
We get present testimony in the first, we get past error in the second, and we get future prophecy in the third. But that is just broad and I'll leave you to follow the rest out for yourselves. But you'll see what I mean if you can get a pattern of it all then you will know what you are going to study verse by verse.
Reading of 2 Peter Ch 3 vl to end, also 1 Cor 10 v32 and 33
We must remember this that God has a purpose in relation to the sons of men; that there is nothing haphazard; 'and the man is not the master of his own destiny as far as to the con duct of .the things as they progress. And we can discover on a number of occasions in the Scriptures the intervention of angelic hosts in relation to the world, brother and sisters, but don't quote me in relation to the church, but in relation to the world we have quite enough evidence of angelic intervention. For instance in Ch. 7 of Daniel we'll discover the four winds striving upon the great waters, where the four winds '17 are spirit beings if we translate the 17th v of John 3 correctly. The wind bloweth where it listeth in relation to the spirit.
If we turn to Dan, ch.10 we find that Daniel is praying for 21 days, and then Gabriel comes to him, and he says God hath heard thy prayer and sent me. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia hath resisted me these 21 days. Now that wasn't a man, or that man would have resisted Daniel, but here there is a spiritual intelligence that is resisting the spiritual agent that God was sending to Daniel, with that which Daniel desired to know. And so we wrestle not against blood and flesh, and you're not going to correct me after the meeting brother, and say that it ought to be flesh and blood . Well, it's blood and flesh, and I'll say it again. So you will have to have a look in your concordance or in your Greek testament, and you will find that the order is reversed twice. The next time is in Heb 2, 'For as much as the children are partakers of blood and flesh.' Have a look at the context, and you will see the reason why the order is reversed.
And so we'll discover this, that there are agencies behind the natural scene, that it is not so much the man that is moving the pawns upon the board, and deciding the issues of things in the history of a world, but behind the scenes, it's men that become the pawns, and there is a struggle in the spiritual realms, and there is a Satan who would thwart God if it were possible for him to do so but what God has declared, he is able to do. And what he has promised he is able to perform.
So we must take into consideration, first of all God and then this one who is now known as the prince of the power of the air. Now God is, we'll remember that brethren. (I've often heard it and it's wrong of course. 'For he went out looking for a city whose builder and maker was God.' Now that's wrong, you don't put God in the past tense. 'Whose builder and maker is God.' He is still alive. Now God is the self existing God, and if you have not got faith enough to keep on going back and keep on going forward, then don't do it because you can go back to the creation, and in the beginning God, and you can go back to all these angelic hosts that rejoiced at the creation, and God is still there, because He maketh His angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire. And what was before that I don't know but I do know that there was determinate counsel and foreknowledge, and I do know that God devised the means whereby His banished be not expelled from Him.
And you'll find no other person who can remain in full maturity of perfection from all eternity without a beginning and will go on for all eternity without an end. Now that demands simple faith without one atom of human reason but once the seed of human reason is brought into a thing like this then I tell you brother and sister, you are going to shatter your simple faith in the self existence of the eternal God .
Now here is God, what God had before I don't know, what God has in eternity I don't know, but I do know that there is going to be new heavens and new earth.
And I know quite well that God is not going to sit, and I speak reverently, He is not going to sit upon His throne, twiddling His thumbs, and do nothing for eternity.
So I like the Greek form for eternity, the ages of the ages. And in those ages of ages we are going to see the handiwork and the power of God demonstrated for eternity, without a blot of sin or rebellion to mar the whole scene and sight for ever and ever .
Now that is God, and if God had never revealed Himself then nobody would ever have found out God at all. Can a man by searching find out God? Or can he understand the Almighty of perfection? Of course, he can't . But God has revealed Himself, so that here we have the tremendous personality, God is spirit and so he abides forever. And then we come to this person and I think if I read Isaiah 14 Ezekiel 28 (though some would like to cast doubt upon it) I believe these are 2 illustrations of that great personality that God now calls the devil and Satan that old serpent, the one who bore the name of Lucifer, the day star, the covering cherub, that walked the stones of fire, perfect in the day that he was created, and the personality greater than all the created beings that God ever made. There are only 2 angelic beings that we know the names of, apart from Lucifer: the one is Gabriel, the other is Michael, and wherever we get the mention of Gabriel then we will discover it is the wisdom of God that is being demonstrated. But when we get Michael, it is the power of God that is being demonstrated. That is why we do not get either of them in the church period, because Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God, and Christ is the one who takes personal responsibility in the day in which we live.
But here is Michael, the archangel, that is his worth, and yet when he contends with Satan over the body of Moses, he had to say 'the Lord rebuke thee'. He was a personality, greater than Michael himself, and brother and sisters, a personality that had fallen from his position, and we underestimate the power of Satan. So the Lord Jesus says of this person, Lucifer the covering cherub, 'I beheld Satan cast out of Heaven.' And God tells us why, it was because pride had filled his heart. From that time, he becomes known as the Prince of the Power of the air. That is where he sets up his throne, and that is from where he rules, and that, brother and sister, is the position of the great enemy of God and the enemy of the creation of God.
Now, we just leave it there for the time being, as we consider that there are two great personalities. We have got to take God into consideration, and we have got to take Satan into consideration, when we are dealing with the affairs that are upon the earth. And it is a shame, that the world will try to run its course in ignorance of these tremendous facts, and they wonder why they fall into such a state and a condition that they are in today. They are looking for a man to answer the problems, when, brother and sister, there is already a man at the right hand of the throne of God. When the Lord Jesus came, I will just anticipate, He proved that ,He could have brought peace to the earth. He had power over the created universe, it was subject to His hand.
He had power over demons, no matter how many there were. He had power over disease, and He showed to the people while He was here His ability to bring in conditions that could make peace, and they murdered the Prince of peace. But He is coming again, at a later date, and He is coming to show that He could have given peace when He first came, but this time He will give peace, for He shall reign from shore to shore. Wherever rebellion rears up its head, immediately it will be dealt with and stopped.
Now, in the second epistle of Peter chapter 3 it is the scoffer and the mocker that says all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
Now', the apostle Peter says that are not only ignorant, but wilfully ignorant, because there is enough evidence in the world to prove that 'all things are not what they used to be. After all, if I were to go back to this very first scene here in the garden of Eden, by no stretch of imagination can I say that the conditions which prevailed there are the conditions which prevail now. It is foolish of them to say that all things continue. I am getting a bit old now, I'm losing my hair a bit...a lot, but I can look back with a little bit of sense and reason. I can look back sensibly to 60 years ago, (that's almost given my age away, but that's beside the point) but 60 years ago the conditions are nothing like the conditions that prevail today. All things do not consist the same as they did from the creation of the world, things have changed. If I can speak just in a little tiny way, I'll tell you this, if it was ever known that a woman was divorced 50-60 years ago then she walked
alone, nobody would have anything to do with here. But I tell you, today if you have not been divorced you do not get in the news at all. There are a lot of things that are completely contrary to what they used to be.
But, brethren and sisters, certain things have happened in this world's history that can only be constituted as crises, because the condition that follow after the crises were altogether different from the conditions that preceded it. So it is only a crises that can do that, that can change the conditions that were, and bring out another set of circumstances altogether different, that is a crisis And so here we have brought out, I suppose you can show me an eighth and a ninth and a few others, but I am talking about principle things, that there are seven crises, and we have already had a number of them, and this is the last of the crises that belong to history, and each one of them has changed the course of 'human history.
Now brethren, if that is so, and it is so, I would like us, just for a little while, to look at the background and to see just how these things could happen.
Now in 1 Corinthians 10 we read: 'giving none offence, neither to the Jew, nor to the Greek, nor the Gentile, neither to the church of God.' There are three distinctions that God has made in the human race. There is not going to be another division, there is not going to be Jew, Gentile, Church and somebody else. God has divided the human race into these three distinctions: Jew, Gentile, Church of God. Now, I think that Church of God there in 1st Corinthians 10 has to do with the local church. But what is consistent with the local church, of course is consistent with the work that began in Acts chapter 2 and will continue and be presented to the Lord Jesus, glorious, having neither spot nor wrinkle or any such thing. So then, it would be good for us to look and see just where God made those distinctions, and just a little while after see if we can find out why He made those distinctions, and what is to follow.
Right, if then we begin in Genesis chapter 1, and we come a way, we will find there are no distinctions in the human race. No, we will come all the way through and find there are no tribes and no nations. No, until we come right away here (Gen. 11) and it says they were of one lip and of one speech. And they said let us build us a city, and a tower, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And so here was one company of humanity without distinction. No distinctions at all. They just dwelt together, and that is how they wanted it to be. And God brought it to an end, we'll leave it just there. He scattered the people abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And then, we discover in chapter 12 of the book of Genesis that God had said to Abram 'Get thee out from thy country, from thy father's house., from thy kindred, unto a land that I will show thee of.' So that when I turn to John chapter 8 and they are ready to argue with the Lord Jesus Christ, they say 'we' that is the Jew, 'we have Abram to our father.' And he becomes the father, the initiator, and the beginner of the Jewish nation.
So when we get Abram brought into being, and God dealing with that nation of Israel then He calls all the others 'the nations'. And that is the word 'Gentile, the nations'. So it is from the calling out of Abram that we get the first division in the human race, and Jew and Gentile coming into being. Now whatever God was doing, He stopped doing it, and because they murdered the Lord of Glory, God scattered the Jews abroad upon the face of the earth.
And then we come to Acts chapter 2, and we find God starts another work, and He brings another people into being, where Paul says 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, but they are all one in Christ.' Now, of course, that work is what He is doing now, and it is called 'the Church.' Although don't come to me after the meeting and say "well, the Church is not mentioned in Acts 2, that 'the Lord added to the church', the 'church' there is not in your Greek testament, 'the Lord added such as should .be saved'." But if He was adding He must have been adding to something, mustn't He? and it is made quite clear a little later on that it was the church that He was adding to.
So that here then, from the Garden of Eden, to the plain of Shinar there were no distinctions. They were of one lip and of one speech. Then from Abraham, right away to the rejection of the Messiah we find that there was a division made in the human race of Jew and Gentile. And then from Acts chapter 2 we find another company of people were brought in, and they are spoken of as the Church. So that here we can see the three distinctions that God made and when He made them.
Now shall we have a look at why Ha made the distinctions? I think that might be helpful to us, and I hope that I can get it all.
In Genesis chapter 1, after God had made this great creation (and we are not going to go into it tonight at all. I know that there are controversial issues in the matter, and I'll have a talk with you privately if you wanted one. But we will not go into it.) 'But last of all God made the man and his wife, his bride, we may deal with that on Monday night. But He said 'Let us make man in our image and after our likeness and let him have dominion over the works of our hands.' Now brother and sister, that was a tremendous man. And that man has never had his equal in the world from that day until now, apart from the man Christ Jesus, and I don't care what the evolutionist has got to say. If I read my Bible right, we are not going in the same direction as the evolutionist says we are. The evolutionist says that is the direction we are going in, my Bible says the opposite, 'waxing worse and worse', and not getting better and better.
It has been said that the apes look at the man and they say, 'To think that men have the audacity to say that-they descended from us', eh? There are some men that live worse than beasts, don't they?
But here is the first point then, 'Let him have dominion over the works of our hands.' And here is the great work of God, and the great work of God was committed into the hands of a man, and that man was responsible to God for that which was allowed upon the earth. He was the ruler over the great universe of God's creation. I tell you, that man was a man of wisdom, to be able to take the birds, the beasts, the creeping things, and as they passed before him, for that man to know their habit and their character and give them names according to it, that man had wisdom. Brother and sister, if a man is going to reign he has got to have wisdom, and that is why we are in a lot of chaos today, because we have got too many men trying to reign and they have got no sense, and we are in trouble.
So that here we get the first work of universal dominion under the hand of a man. That man's dominion Cain's line sought to usurp, and as a result of it, the flood came, and the human race was destroyed with the exception of 8 people. And God committed that rule into the hands of Noah, and He gave further government into Noah's hand that He never gave to Adam, and He put a sword in his hand. He said: 'He that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' And so God was not going to let the murderer to live because that murderer became the seed of the serpent and produced the flood. But this man failed, of course he failed, and from this man's youngest grandson, can I say that brethren? You know, I'm not just telling you because I want you to know, but the majority of you know, that I have just come in from South Africa, and mark, there are a lot of lies in the paper about it, a lot of lies in the paper, so don't believe everything you read. But I remember the first time I was there, and in one of the assemblies, a brother said to me 'You know the black man is where he is because of Noah's curse.' I said, 'You've got a different Bible to me, because my Bible does not tell me that.' I said, 'Noah never cursed Ham, you know, he cursed Ham's youngest son. And Ham had three other sons that were older than Canaan. The first one was Mizraim, and he is the father of the Egyptian. The second one was Cush, and he was the father of the Ethiopian. The third one was Phut, he was the father of the black man. He only dealt with Canaan, the youngest son. And that is the man that went into the land and called it Canaan. That is why the Hittite, the Perizite, the Hivite, the Jebusite, and all the other 'ites', were in the land of Canaan before Israel ever came. They were the descendants of Canaan. And so when the sin of the Amorite rose up then God released His people and sent them to Canaan and told them to exterminate the tribes, and if they did not, it was to their own hurt. And brother, as far as I have looked at history, you will not find any of Canaan's children in tribes today. The curse of Noah was fulfilled when the nation of Israel went into the land of Canaan. So, please don't be thinking the black man is under the curse of Noah. He is not.'
I’ll tell you why he remains primitive, and why he remains what we would call ignorant to a great extent. It is because civilisation turned in our direction and left the black man alone for so long. And if civilisation had continued to go in the direction it was going, and it started to go in the direction of Africa, brother and sister, and North Africans were being converted, and the Ethiopian Eunuch was being converted, and the first of the Christian conferences was there in North Africa, and if it continued in that direction, it would have been Africa sending missionaries over to us, and we would have been like them. It is civilisation that has put us where we are, but that is beside the point.
But, nevertheless, from Ham's line there springs that notorious man, and he was a notorious man, and a tremendous character, and this one became a mighty hunter in the face of the Lord, that's the word. Not before the Lord, not like an Esau, but in the face of the Lord, in defiance of the Lord, for God would honour the curse that Noah had made, and he was not going to be a servant, but a master. That man's line produced the city and the tower, we cannot deal with it, but I tell you, brother and sister, it is still in existence, a principle.
And so, when God saw them building the tower and the city, He said 'Go to, let us go down, and see what they do.' And when He saw what was being done, He said: 'Now there shall be no end to their imaginings.' If they do this, they have got the basis of success, and so God said, 'Let us scatter them abroad.' And he scattered those people abroad upon the face of the earth, and He did it with the confusion of tongues. And so a man would turn to his father or his son and they would not understand each other, and they would look here and there and somewhere else until they found someone else who spoke the same language. And off they went in their different directions, and countries were formed and boundaries were made and cultures were cultivated, and so we find nations today, and they haven't found an answer yet, have they? We've got the United Nations organisation, and the nations are as much divided today as ever they were. I'll tell you something else, they will never be able to find a language that will meet the need of all the nations. What was it some years ago? You older ones... Esperanto! Do you remember it? I could read Esperanto.
I could speak it. It was known as the worldwide language. Trouble was I couldn't find any one else who could speak it, so I gave it up, so I still try to speak English.
But He scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth, and He put that work down. Now God does not finish a work like that, does He? that is failure, isn't it? Failure! He puts a man in dominion, and that man's dominion is usurped by his son Cain, and God had to deal with it at the flood. He gives the dominion to Noah, and that man's dominion is usurped by his grandson, and there the city is built, and they are going to establish themselves in defiance of God. And God scatters it abroad. Where's universal dominion now?
Everything is in chaos, and then God begins with Abraham. Now instead of giving everything to Abram like he gave everything to Adam He gave him nothing, and the Scriptures says 'No, not so much as the sole of his foot to rest upon.' And all the land he had was what he bought from the sons of Heth to bury his wife in, and he was buried there himself, and so was his son, and his son's son after him.
But this man became the pilgrim and the stranger (it'll take us a night to deal with that). But brother and sister, as a stranger he had a tent, as a pilgrim ha had an altar. As a stranger ha had nothing down here, but as a pilgrim, he had everything up there. Here we have no continuing city, if he had had a city, he would not have been a stranger, and if he had continued, there he would not have been a pilgrim. And so here we have the man with no anchors in the earth, he went out looking for 'a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.'
Now, to this man he gave .the promises. Promises that were confirmed to Isaac and to Jacob and to his seed after him. And from this man 100 years old, and his wife 90 years old, the man that looked at hopelessness with hope and believed God, and a child was born, and the seed became as the sand of the sea shore, innumerable, and as the stars of the sky, without number, and as the dust of the ground, they all speak of the nation of Israel - sorry brother, if you think the stars of the heaven speak of the church. If you look in the Old Testament you will discover that the nation of Israel is spoken more of as the stars of the sky than they are spoken of as the sand of the seashore. We'll look at that a bit later on, we can't look at that now.
But God dealt with that man and dealt with that nation, and because God's purpose rested in that man and that nation, Satan sought its destruction there in the land of Egypt. Now they were not there 400 years, brethren. My, my, dear, dear, they were not there 430 years either. 430 years commences from the time when Abram left Padan-Haram to the time of the Exodus. Have a look at it.
The 400 years is from the time of the weaning of Isaac at 5 years of age to the Exodus, and that was 30 years. Abram was 25 years as a pilgrim and a stranger before Isaac was born. Then another 5 years on top of that. And that's the difference, so there is no contradiction in the 400 and the 430.
But then, brother and sister, you take Isaac, and Isaac was 60 years old when he got married; and then Jacob was born. And then when you come to Joseph, then Jacob was somewhere about 78 years of age before Joseph was born. So you are going to take that 30 years, and that 60 years, and that 70 odd years, you are going to take it all, and a further 17 years on top of that, because Joseph was 17 years old when he was sold into Egypt, and then you take all that away from 430 and you get the number of years that they were in captivity. Have a look at it, brethren, it makes very interesting reading. I think if you look carefully you will have a series of 40:40 years of bondage, before Moses was born; 40 years of bondage when Moses fled from Egypt; 40 years, Moses in the wilderness; 40 years, when Israel was brought out in the wilderness into the land of Canaan. So there you are, have a look at it for yourselves. It's no good me telling you if you don't look at it.
And so, every male child was to be killed, so that the next generation was to have been females. And had they been females, there would not have been a next generation to follow, and it was the extermination of the seed of Abraham that he sought. But God brought them out. To them he gave the covenant of the Law, and there the sacrifices by means of which they could maintain a relationship and a fellowship with God. Ultimately he brought them to the land that he promised, to Abram, Isaac and Jacob, and there they had a very motley history that caused God to cast them away, and put them down.
Now brother and sister, here the Christ of God came according to His promise, because He promised them a Messiah. And when He came, they rejected Him, they crucified Him. When they rejected Him, then God rejected the nation. And so Israel, brother and sister, let me say it, Israel is still scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. Now I am tired of hearing that the nation of Israel has been recovered. The nation of Israel has not been recovered, it is not a nation, it's a state. It is the State of Israel, and the Nation of Israel will not be recovered until the end of the tribulation, when God will send four angels to the four winds of heaven and gather in the elect from the four corners of the earth. And that is when the nation is going to be gathered. We ought to he careful.
So God scattered them abroad upon the face of the earth. Now, that's failure again, is it not? God has not succeeded in what he undertook to do. The result of both the works is that God has just scattered the people abroad. Here, as far as universal dominion is concerned, away from Eden to Shinar, He just threw it down and scattered the people abroad. Then from Abram, right away to the rejection of Christ, He just put it down and scattered them abroad. But my, there's a lot to follow, isn't there?
Now brother and sister, the work that He is doing now is the work in relation to the third classification of people, it is the Church, those redeemed by the blood of Christ. And I must say this, though I am sorry that I have got to say it, that it does not matter if they are a Roman Catholic, or a Church of England or a Methodist or who they are, if they have put their trust in Christ they belong to that Church as much as I do. Would to God that they learned the truth of separation and assembly gathering, it would be better for them, and it would be better for the testimony. A simple faith in Christ is enough to put them into that Church. That work He is doing, and He is doing that today.
Now brother and sister, let us have a look at the order of things now. Will you notice, we have got universal dominion with a man to represent God. Then we have got the nation of Israel, and His work with the nation. Then we have got the Church, and there are the three distinctions in the human race. But, brother and sister, God is not going to finish the work in the same order that He started it in. Now, you younger ones, you younger people, and perhaps some of you older people, prophecy is a real happy hunting ground for speculation, isn't it? Eh? My, you'll read in the papers, my, that Scriptures fulfilled there alright, eh? I know a brother, he's got a whole scrapbook full of newspaper cuttings, and the date on them, and the Scripture underneath where it was fulfilled. Brother and sister, let me tell you this, no Scripture is being fulfilled today.
Now here are two works, which God started and never finished. What is prophecy?
God telling us beforehand how He is going to finish those two works that He started. Why is not the Church mentioned in the Old Testament in prophecy?
Because God 'had never started it, and so it remained a mystery that was never revealed unto the prophets. So do not, please, brother and sister, go and try and find the Church in the Old Testament. Mark you, you will find it in picture, of course. When you know the truth of the Church, you will realise that the Spirit of God knew it long before it began and He had given pictures of it in the Old Testament. But you will not find prophecy in relation to the Church.
Well now, this is the third work that God is doing, but this is the first work that He is going to finish. He is not going to put it down, He is going to finish this work, and it is going to be at the rapture when the Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the arch angel and the trump of God and the dead in Christ shall be raised first, then we which are alive and remain, we shall he caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we be for ever with the Lord. And He has finished the work, and He has taken the Church out of the way, brothers and sisters. That means the Church is not going through the tribulation, doesn’t it?
But brothers, when he has finished that first work (third?) there at the rapture He will go back to that second work concerning Abraham and his seed, and He finishes there in the time of Jacob's trouble, in the tribulation, the Great One Daniel's 70th week. And we will remember in Daniel 9 that Gabriel says to Daniel '70 weeks are determined upon thy people' Hm? So that the Great Tribulation is God finishing His work concerning the nation of Israel, and if you read Daniel Ch 12 you w-ill see that God has got a remnant that is going to be faithful to Himself And if you have a look at Malachi 3, they that feared the Lord, they spake often one to another. That is the faithful remnant, and He is going to bring out a faithful remnant
Well, brothers, I have heard it asked time and again, 'Is the 144,000 literal?' Brother and sister, I am not bothered. It could be. But someone was telling me last week that they are the ones going into the millennium. Brother and sister, there is a lot more going into the millennial blessing. There are those that are going to be saved in the tribulation; there are the faithful ones down through the years, that are going to be in the millennium, because they will be raised from the dead before the millennium, is started. But that is by the way.
And so God will close His work determined upon the nation of Israel, but we cannot go into that, we will have to follow that later on. But He is going to deal with the Times of the Gentile as well, and bring that to a close.
Now brother and sister, that is why you get angels back again, because God is dealing with the nations, and He is dealing with the world again. And so He will finish that work, and He will finish that work by coming to Olivet, and Olivet is split asunder and a refuge found for the faithful remnant, while He deals in righteousness upon the nations.
Now having finished that work, He will go right back to His first work of universal dominion and there will be universal dominion, and there will be a man to represent it. That man will be the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. So He will finish His first work of universal dominion that He put down and scattered the people abroad, He will finish it there in the millennium, He will take up His second work that He began with Abraham, the work that He put down when they rejected the Messiah, and scattered them abroad, He will finish it there. And this work, that began at Pentecost, He is carrying on, and will carry it on, until the Lord shall take us all home to heaven.
Now I trust that that has given a simple understanding of what the whole of the Book is taken up with. Now just let me say this one thing, I did say I'll say it in respect of the coming of the Lord Jesus. Brother, this work, i.e. universal dominion, was begun in the earth, and it was carried on in the earth, and it will finish in the earth. It belongs to the earth from the beginning to the end. Now this work (second work with Abraham) He began in the earth, 'Look to the north, the south, the east, the west, all this shall be thine,' and He carried it on in the earth, and He is going to finish it in the earth. So that these two works from the beginning to the end, they have to do with the earth. But brother, this last work does not. It has nothing to do with your genealogy; it has nothing to do with your nationality; it has got _ nothing to do with that. But your name has got to be written in the Lamb's book of life. That is where it starts. Not just to be able to trace it back to be born of Abraham. The 144,000 you know, will be able to trace their genealogy back to Abraham, and if they can do that they can take it the rest of the way back to Adam. The 144,000 will be able to stand on the end of time 'and trace their genealogy right back to the beginning. I reckon the Americans would give a lot for a genealogy like that, don't you?
Now brother and sister, this one belongs to heaven. We are born from above, hm? That is where our names are written. That is where we are seated, in the heavens, in Christ. That is where our blessings are, spiritual blessings, in the heavenlies, in Christ. That is where we are exhorted to set our affection, our minds, upon things above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God. That is where our home is, 'I go to prepare a place, for you'. So that from the beginning to the end, we belong to heaven. So brother and sister, behave as though you belong to heaven, and not to the earth. There are some of us that are grubbing about the earth, and you would not think there was a difference between us at all.
So you see, you cannot have a heavenly people going through the tribulation when God is dealing with an earthly people. For whose testimony is it going to be? Is it going to be the testimony of the Church, or is it going to be the testimony of the nation of Israel? There will be two different testimonies altogether, because they are two different kinds of work.
Well, I will leave you there, brethren , and I trust that I have given you some material to think about.