Lesson 205 – Framework Review

© Charles A. Clough 2002

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 6: New Truths of the Kingdom Aristocracy
Chapter 4 – The Historical Maturing of the Church

Lesson 205 – Framework Review

10 Oct 2002
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re still in the review mode and again, the reason why we’re doing this extensive review is because when we get to the end of the Church Age and we deal with the Rapture, we deal with the Second Advent, if you don’t have the details going from the Old Testament into the New Testament you can really get some weird interpretations going. The Old Testament anchors you in looking forward to the destiny of the church. A lot of what we’re seeing is to clarify the role of the church. If you remember, one of the events after the ascension and session, the next event was the Pentecost event, there are two events, the ascension and session, Pentecost, and the third one is the divergence of the church away from Israel. As you work your way through the book of Acts you begin to see that the church is pulling away, it’s got a new identity.

The fourth thing we said was that the Holy Spirit’s been active for over 1,900 years and maturing the church. People lose track of that; there’s not too many believers that you meet that have a good grasp of church history. A lot of the history books are 400–500 pages thick but if you’re not that into it, there’s a nice book out called Our Legacy: The History of Christian Doctrine, by Dr. John Hannah who teaches church history at Dallas Seminary. Dr. Hannah has written this book showing the panorama of history, not all the details but just basically the big ideas that have gone down through church history. One of the points is that you can’t dip into church history at AD 450 and say oh, that’s the church and look at all the doctrine they taught then and we believe that, so that’s it. If you did that, you’d lose out on 1,600 more years of development of doctrine as the Holy Spirit subjects the church to heresies along the way. That seems to be how we learn; we learn the hard way. The church learns the hard way and has to confront heretics, attacks and everything.

In the last 200–300 years, since the Reformation, the church has also faced new heresies. To say that we’re going to cease all theological systematization at the level of the 16^th or 17^th century and then say we’re Reformed theologians. The Reformation did some wonderful things and we’re forever grateful to Reformed theology for its clarification of the gospel. But with all due respect, the Reformation was over a limited area of soteriology and to an extent Bibliology, but the Reformation left undone a lot of stuff. To try to say that we are bound in 2002 by 19^th century conceptions of what the Bible looked like, outside of soteriology, is to demean the last 200 years of clarification of the Holy Spirit in doctrinal areas. The church has had to face things that the Reformers never thought about. The Reformers, for example, never thought about worldwide alien pagan eschatology, such as communism. They never encountered these kinds of things and the church has had to deal with that, so it’s driven the church back to digging around and trying to see, “What’s the big plan of God for history here?”

Those are questions that have come up, so the review that we’re going through, just so you don’t get discouraged, as we go through these events just pick up some more details. If you have the notes we’re going to just add a few things, a few observations. This is the hardest section of this Framework series. Each year it gets progressively harder because each year we’re building on the years before and the Scriptures that went before.

So again, to get the big picture, we’ve gone through the events of the Old Testament, creation, the fall, the flood, the covenant, the call of Abraham, we’ve dealt with the Exodus, with Mount Sinai, etc., all these events and we got down to the Lord Jesus Christ two years ago and we went through His birth, His life, His death, His resurrection and then last year we moved further into the epistle area of history where we encountered the first thing which was the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s His departure from the earth. The angels were standing there when this event happened, and as the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the planet earth’s surface into outer space and up through the heavens, those two angels said something very important, that He’s going to come back the same way He left. Which means what? It means that He’s going to appear, it’s going to be a public event, He’s going to land on a piece of real estate and that real estate will be Israel. People will see it; if you would be there with a video camera you could capture this, just like if you had been there with the ascension you could have captured that on video tape. These are public events, they’re not done off in a secret place some place, they are all public events.

That’s something very important for Christians to understand, that the Bible proclaims open history; it is history that is subject to observation. These things are not done in secret. This is not meditating on Buddha’s belly; this is observing something that truly happened in a place called Palestine at a certain point in history. It’s just as real as Washington crossing the Delaware or World War II. Those are historical events; so are these. What happens is that we’ve all been groomed not to think this way because from the time we entered the school system, those of us who were in public schools, we have learned history through the eyes, ears and thoughts of secularists who have taught us history minus these events. So we can spend lots of time in school on the American Revolution, which is fine, we can spend lots of time going back into history at the time of Christ, we don’t talk about Christ, we talk about Augustus Caesar, who was a very interesting person, or Julius Caesar, or we’ll discuss Roman history, but we will carefully excise from the classroom any discussion of the events of Scripture.

Therefore you have whole generations of thousands and thousands of young people that walk out of a classroom who have already, because of all the events, if you have all these events in a history book that we have to learn, we cover up this one and pretend they never happened and we won’t talk about them. So somebody walks away and they heard about that, that, that, that and that, but they didn’t hear about this, so when they hear the Bible taught, and we start talking about things like the ascension and session of Christ, well, that’s not real history because I didn’t learn it in my history class. Well you didn’t learn it in history class because you had a very lousy history teacher and a very lousy history curriculum, frankly. So you’ve learned in your education to extract the Bible out of history and keep it over in a little religious compartment.

That’s not the way we’re doing it in the Framework series. We’re linking the Bible to history so I can’t emphasize enough that these are public, observable, historical events. The more you think about it the more you realize that that’s what makes our biblical Christianity biblical Christianity. Mohammed didn’t rise into Heaven; Buddha didn’t die on a cross. And Buddha, and Mohammed, and Confucius, and all the other religious teachers, never rose from the dead. The point is that we have publicly observable acts in Scripture that no other religion has, and that’s why when we say there is no salvation under heaven except through Jesus Christ, it’s because that’s the way it is.

So in the ascension and session that we are looking at we want to move on to where that leads us in history. I’m going to draw a little diagram of what we’re trying to communicate and I hope before the evening is out this will make sense. In the Old Testament, here’s an Old Testament saint and he’s looking forward in history. He has a lot of these prophecies in his Bible and there are two sets of prophecies; one talking about a suffering servant. So one talks about the suffering servant and he’s kind of a Messiah figure, in Isaiah and other places. The Rabbis, by the way, thought of the suffering servant as the son of Joseph and they had two Messiahs, basically, that they worked with. In fact, if you want to see what the confusion was turn to 1 Peter because Peter was a good Jewish boy and he was raised with this kind of understanding of the Old Testament. He comments on this, and this probably goes back many years in his own personal life.

1 Peter 1:11, here’s the picture of the Old Testament saint. Look at verse 10 because really the sentence starts in verse 10, “As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry, [11] seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow.” There were clusters of these glimpses; one was the suffering servant and the other one was the glorious King. So they had these two pictures and the glorious King passages, there were a lot of Jews that said that’s the Messiah, He’s going to be a glorious King, and they called Him the Son of David. That’s the Son of David Messiah. But the other guys would say wait a minute, there’s prophecies in the Bible talk about the suffering servant, Isaiah for one, so what are you going to do with that? He’s the Messiah too. You can’t have two Messiahs. Oh yes you can, because we’ve got to be logical about this we we’ll call this guy the Son of David and this guy the Son of Joseph, after the glorious King and after the suffering Jewish guy, Joseph. And that’s how, within Jewish tradition, they tried to resolve this problem. There’s a mystery to them. How do you have two things about the same person, two different careers in the same person? They couldn’t see how you could combine these two careers in one person, so they had two Messiahs.

Well now you have the situation coming, the Lord Jesus Christ comes to Israel, so let’s block out a period of time. This time period, basically three years or so, is the time period when the Lord Jesus Christ had His active ministry in the nation of Israel. He came identifying Himself as THE Messiah, and He used Old Testament imagery. He used Old Testament names, which we’ll get into a little bit. But as this three years went on, as the clock went on, and as the Lord Jesus, as you can understand from reading any of the four Gospels, at first He began to build. If you diagram His popularity, this is His Gallup Poll rating. At the beginning of three years He starts out with zero because nobody knew Him, but He had a PR man, John the Baptist. He was a prophet. John the Baptist introduced the issue of the imminent Messiah. Jesus comes, He’s introduced by John the Baptist and His popularity starts climbing. More and more Jews get on the bandwagon here, we’re for the Messiah, and we want to follow the Messiah. And Jesus is the Messiah, John told us so now His popularity keeps on going.

Then something happens; halfway through each of the four Gospels there’s a reluctance to put spiritual things first. It’s the same old affliction that bothers us; we get our eyes on the gift instead of the Giver. The nation wanted the benefits of the Messiah; because they were politically oppressed they wanted the benefits but they didn’t really want to face the issue of their spiritual relationship with the Lord. That intrudes on my personal life too much. I don’t want to bother with that; that’s a hot potato. We’ll leave that one alone. Jesus wouldn’t let them leave it alone. So they began to get a little cynical about this Jesus. And finally, halfway through the Gospels something else happened that the religious leadership began to go after, because we can’t let this one guy get too popular. There were a bunch of reasons politically why that happened; the New Testament gives us some of them.

So the Lord Jesus Christ’s popularity starts to go down and we have a breach where He begins to … okay, I’m going down in the polls, I’ll change My teaching method, from now on I’m going to teach in code. The disciples are puzzled because prior to this Jesus had always been quite clear in His teaching. In Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, it was very clear and then all of a sudden in Matthew 13, halfway through the Gospel He starts teaching in code, He teaches in parables. What are you doing this for? Then they were disturbed, the disciples themselves, when they realized He was throwing a new theme in here. They hadn’t heard this theme before. The theme was that I’m going to suffer; the theme was, “Don’t be surprised guys, I might not be around too much longer.” You can well imagine this started a lot of thoughts churning. What? I thought the Messiah was supposed to come and bring the Kingdom in. I thought we were supposed to have political freedom, we were going to be blessed, the Romans were going to be thrown out, after all, isn’t that what the Bible says in the Old Testament, that we’re going to have a Kingdom, that the desert was going to bloom and the whole environment was going to be changed? Weren’t these the promises of the Old Testament? What does it mean you’re not going to be around pretty soon?

Now we come to a crisis, and then finally the Lord Jesus Christ is rejected. And His crucifixion represents the national refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah. It’s a national refusal to do that. And at that point we have, all of a sudden, it clicks that this Lord Jesus Christ fits the profile of the suffering servant. However, while that’s going on in the Gospels, I want you to glimpse the difficulty here, the Gospels are not simple things to read and the book of Acts is even more complicated than the Gospels. There are many themes, and for the life of me I can never under­stand why for a hundred years missionaries and mission organizations always used to pick to translate, until New Tribes talked sense into them. … What would they translate first, for some tribe out there with no background in the Bible? “Oh, we’re going to translate the Gospel of Mark; we want them to see Jesus.” Fine, but think about it.

When is Jesus introduced in this book? How many pages before you get to Jesus? Lots - lots of time, lots of centuries, lots of experience. Why do you suppose that; the Holy Spirit didn’t have our insights, He isn’t as good a teacher as we are, or maybe the Holy Spirit had a method to His pedagogy. And when New Tribes Missions, which is the only mission group I know of that has it right; when they go into a tribe that’s never heard of anything, God or anything else, you don’t start with Jesus stories. You start with the creation because that’s where you define the nature of God. Then you start talking about sin; after that you start talking about redemption and then you get to Jesus. You don’t start with Jesus because people don’t have the categories to understand. That’s like saying these people need math so we’re going to bring in calculus. Wait a minute, you don’t start math with calculus, you start out with simple number theory and get that down, then you move on and get into algebra, trigonometry, geometry and those things and then you’re prepared for calculus.

Can you imagine somebody so foolish in a math class to start with calculus? That’s exactly what missionary organizations have been doing for decades in how they translate the Scripture? It’s ridiculous. I know missionologists who have argued and argued with these people about this point and it just goes off like water off of a ducks back, it never clicks. There are people out there to this day that haven’t got it right, still trying to translate the New Testament. Nonsense, you don’t start translating with the New Testament. You start with the Old Testament. That’s the way God started, that’s the way we start. When we get to these things we’re dealing with complicated stuff.

This whole three year period of the career of the Lord Jesus Christ, those years are packed, packed with Old Testament background and you have to know that Old Testament background to under­stand what is going on with this person of Jesus Christ. Then after that, when we get down to the cross, that thing can’t be explained apart from a lot, a LOT of Old Testament stuff. If you don’t understand the Old Testament you’re going to go like Abelard did in church history. He said oh, the Cross of Jesus, it’s such an inspiration. So were the Vietnam War protesters in Vietnam, the Buddhist monks used to pour kerosene on themselves and lit themselves in the street and burned themselves to death. They’re killing themselves for their cause. There are lots of inspiring people doing inspiring acts for their cause. In 9-11 we had 19 idiots that wanted to go see 72 virgins a piece so they ran airplanes into buildings. The point is that people do these things for causes.

Are you going to classify Jesus with these clowns? No! The Lord Jesus Christ died on the Cross to do something more than just show a big public thing for His cause and what He did is substitutionary blood atonement. People can’t understand substitutionary blood atonement until you go back into the Old Testament and see substitutionary blood atonement. Why was it there? What was the issue of the Exodus? The firstborn son was going to die in their house; what’s going to stop the angel of death? Smeared lamb’s blood all over the outside; ugly, smelly, dirty bloody mess! It’s not a pretty sight; we’ve romanticized the cross, but the cross is a horrible thing and people looked upon it, it was the sentence of death for a criminal. And here, this is a great ending for this guy, you know, you start out in the polls, He had this positive response, the nation turned against Him and He dies like a crook. That’s your Messiah? And that’s the image, that’s the burden that early Christians had to face, their Lord Jesus was crucified like a criminal, right next to two of them. There’s the connotation of all that.

Well while this is all going on the Lord Jesus Christ also says that I will return, and when I return things are going to be different. So now we hook on to the other part of the Old Testament prophecy. He’s going to come back as a glorious King. Now we’ve resolved something. We now have a new period of history, the inter-advent age and it’s the inter-advent age that allows us to reconcile those two apparently conflicting sets of prophecy, that yes there is only one Messiah but He comes twice. That shouldn’t be too startling, because repetitively in Scripture God does things twice. Think about your Old Testament history. If you think about how they were going to go conquer the land, what happened the first time they tried to conquer the land? Unbelief. The second time they tried to conquer the land, different route, different leader, Joshua, they made it. Twice they tried to conquer the land.

How many kings started Israel? You had two dynasties, the first kingdom dynasty was the Saulite, the house of Saul, and we say house of Saul, it wasn’t just Saul, it was his son, Jonathan. Jonathan was in the lineage of Saul and by all rights in political succession in the Middle East Jonathan should have been the next king of Israel. That’s what’s so intriguing about what goes on politically. If you know political intrigue, particularly as it was manifested in the Old Testament, in the ancient Near East, if you want to see political intrigue Iraq is a good case, Hussein and his son. His son killed his other son. The other day they had a picture of Hussein coming out of this building and if you know your Bible it was very interesting. They showed this picture of Saddam Hussein walking out of this big marble building, big door, but what the reporter didn’t point out was on either side of the door you have these great wings and if you know your biblical imagery you know they appear in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. That’s why my favorite name for Saddam Hussein is Nebuchadnezzar Junior, because he’s consciously following that ancient Eastern thing. He’s building a theme park at the place that Nebuchadnezzar had Babylon. So the guy knows his history.

The inter-advent age that has been introduced by the Lord Jesus Christ, this age resolves the tension between the Lord Jesus Christ as suffering servant here and coming King over here. So the inter-advent age has been opened up, and as the prep for that time, if you go into the Gospels in Matthew 13, Matthew 13 is the Lord Jesus’ announcement of this new age because He goes in there and He starts talking about, and the Bible is very careful, very specific, mysteries (plural) of the Kingdom. What’s a mystery of the Kingdom? It’s a truth about the Kingdom that is now being revealed that wasn’t revealed before. If you look at all those parables in Matthew 13 and you’ll see that they deal with the issue of when He goes what’s going to happen. There’s a long age here.

I won’t spend a lot of time going over as far as His titles, but the titles come from three Old Testament passages. The Lord Jesus Christ, to describe His career, His words to describe this duality, He used two of these names and the third one is the New Testament doing this. One name was the “Son of Man.” The Son of Man is derived from Daniel 7; that’s where you see the Son of Man image, and it’s a passage to pay close attention to because the Lord Jesus Christ apparently paid close attention to it. In that image Daniel sees prophetically world history. What was Daniel’s place in life when he had those visions? What was he doing? He was acting in the political infrastructure of Iran and Iraq. That’s where he served, Persia and Babylon. He was high up in political leadership, this guy is not somebody that just read his Torah as a little boy; this guy is up into the bureaucracy of a pagan government. He is a government official and had some authority apparently. As an official he deals with foreign policy issues, like our President has certain people that advise him on his foreign policy. That’s where Daniel was, that was the kind of environment he daily lived in. So on his mind, don’t you suppose, was where is history going?

As a Jew what do you suppose he was thinking about? We know what he’s thinking about later on because he tells us. How did Daniel get there? Daniel was a prisoner of war; he was a hostage, so he was brought to a foreign country as a young teenager, as a hostage, left with no mother, no dad, a teenager all by himself here. And he had to fend for himself, and apparently he had very good training in the Bible so when he hit the suffering he was able to endure it and make do, but he never lost his Jewishness. While he was there in this pagan nation, apparently having great abilities, he was promoted, like today Christians can do well at certain jobs. People are so sloppy in the work place today if you come to work on time you’re exceptional. People promote you just because you’re doing something besides breathing, and actually accomplishing something at least for an hour or two of the eight hours.

Daniel was promoted because he did things. They may not like him as a Jew. This is a difference, people don’t have to like you, get over that; people want to respect you. They may not like you, they may never like you; you can’t worry about whether people like you or not. That’s the trouble with Americans; they’re always worries about whether the world likes us. I’ll never forget an interview with a British guy, he was talking to one of the talking heads on television and he said you know, I can’t understand you Americans. He says you’re the super power in the world and you’re worried about whether people like you or not when we, of course in his arrogant English demeanor, when we English ruled the world the world hated us and we loved it. He says they envied us, it meant that we were so good they envied us and we took it as a compliment when people didn’t like us. That’s something we don’t learn as Americans and we’re uncomfortable, still to this day, about whether Timbuktu out there likes us or votes for us in the United Nations.

Daniel lived in that kind of milieu, and he had a vision about where history was going. There were going to be four kingdoms; it starts off with the Babylonian which is today equal to Iraq, the Medo-Persian Empire which deals with half of Iraq and Iran, the Grecian Empire centering in Greece and Rome centering in Italy. Each of these four kingdoms was represented in this vision by animals. Not people, animals! There’s a reasons behind that, because the fifth kingdom that is pictured here is going to be the Kingdom of the Son of Man. The fifth kingdom is the only one symbolized by a human being. Why? I believe that the reason why the symbolism switches from animals to people, going back to Genesis, is that only people are made in God’s image and that fifth kingdom is the only kingdom in world history that is suitable for human life. All the other kingdoms of the world that have ever happened, including American society, will be looked upon as sub-human when Jesus Christ comes and reigns in His Millennial Kingdom. There will be the perfect society, the society that the communists tried to bring in by World War, that Marx, the dictator [can’t understand words] we’ve got to rid all these things, got to change the institutions. God says you don’t change institutions, you change hearts.

In the fifth kingdom that will come it will be a kingdom, a political organized society that will have all kinds of industry in it, farming, leadership, local associations, government, and it will be fit for human life. So the picture here is that we have… ultimately this kingdom will smash all those other kingdoms. Why? Because they’re bestial nature is the sub-human consequence of the fall of man. They are inadequate social organizations. Yes, the communists were right in saying society is evil; where communism went wrong was thinking they could redeem society by some political gimmick. You can’t redeem society by political gimmicks because all you do is replace one animal with another one. So the solution is the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. That scares people. It scared the Reformers, by the way, Reformed theology couldn’t stand this idea of the fifth kingdom and they considered this a radical, the radical reformers they called these people.

Here we have this Kingdom and the Son of Man is associated with this Kingdom and watch when the Lord Jesus Christ uses it in Matthew 26:64. Here He is, He’s being interviewed prior to His crucifixion, and He says something here; it only took two sentences. Watch how everybody around the Lord Jesus just about freaks out when He drops this one on the table. Verse 63 for context, here He is, public hearing, an investigation. We’d say it’s a trial, it’s kind of a silly trial, a mock trial, an improperly administered trial, but they keep interrogating the Lord Jesus Christ. Notice in verse 62 they keep asking Him, and asking Him, and asking Him, and He refuses to talk, He kept silent. So finally in verse 63 the high priest get so exasperated by having Jesus not answer his questions that he comes out and he says, “… I adjure You by the living God, that You tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus didn’t say “Yes.” He means “yes,” but watch how He says it.

Verse 64, “Jesus said to him, ‘You have said it yourself,” in other words, He just admitted I am, “nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you will see,” and the quote in verse 64 comes from Daniel 7, “The Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Who’s going to see it? The high priest is going to see it. And he’s going to see Him coming on the clouds of heaven, not going to, through the clouds of heaven, it’s not the ascension mentioned in verse 64, this is His return to earth. You will see Him “coming on the clouds of heaven.” You can see in verse 65 what happened, “Then the high priest tore his robes, saying, ‘He has blasphemed!” Obviously if the priest has that reaction in verse 65, verse 64 must have a lot of connotation to it. The image of the Son of Man is the image of the leader of this future, perfect, human society who is divine Himself. In other words, history will end with this divine human figure, and it carries this connotation of divinity or the priest wouldn’t have torn his clothes up. The priest really got ticked at this one, this really was something else. So the fact that effect in the courtroom tells you how loaded this passage is. With our Gentile background we don’t get all that.

I’ll just hurriedly refer to the other two of the three passages of the Old Testament that Jesus used to develop who He was. One is Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is really built from 2 Samuel 7 and the Davidic Covenant. Psalm 2 introduces the name the “Son of God.” That title had reference to the Messianic King sitting on the throne in Jerusalem, who unlike all other kings was not corrupt. What’s the argument of the Bible in Samuel and Kings? Remember this because the Bible teaches you how to think politically. The book of Judges argues that when you have people doing their own thing, perfectly libertine democracy if you say that, where “every man does what is right in their own eyes” our society goes down the tubes. And it’s an indictment of the fact that you can’t have democracy with sin natures because the majority will always vote for the flesh.

That’s why democracy has had an awful history of … we’ve tried to transplant democracy from America into every nation on earth and it always blows up in our face, and the reason is that we don’t know American history. It flourished here because of the Christian roots in our country; that’s why it worked. But you can’t take democracy that works with Christian roots in America and take it to the land of the hotten-tots some place that don’t have any Christian base, give them the right to vote. What does that mean? Maybe we want to be cannibals so we all vote to go eat the other tribe. That’s democracy; it’s not going to work. So democracy doesn’t work by itself and it doesn’t work not because it’s a bad idea, it’s really a good idea, God the Holy Spirit recognizes a democratic issue in the church, give and take, distribution of spiritual gifts. But it doesn’t work with a sin nature; you have to have some divine restraints going on in order to make democracy work.

Judges is the book that refutes the idea that we can just go out and have democracy and everybody will be fine. The argument in a nutshell: Judges says that people are sinful. The argument of Samuel and King is what? What did the people do? They had a kingdom, they had a government. The transition chapter is 1 Samuel 8, one of the great political chapters of the Bible where Samuel said okay Israel, you’ll get a king but let me tell you what it’s going to be like. This was done in AD 1000, and he anticipates the totalitarian government of the 20^th century because in that address the prophet Samuel says you get a king and here’s what’s going to happen. He’s going to tax you and tax you and tax you and tax you, he’s going to take away your freedoms, and you’re finally going to all be servants of him. You’re going to have a bureaucracy that you can’t believe that you’re going to create by going to a monarchy, and lose your freedoms. Samuel and Kings is an indictment of leadership of the flesh. Whereas Judges refutes democracy in the flesh, Samuel and Kings refutes totalitarian government in the flesh, whether it’s communist brand, fascism, whatever it is, where you concentrate power in one or two or three people, that’s bad too because the one or two or three people have sin natures.

In 2 Samuel 7 God says the house of David I have chosen, and this dynasty will never go away. You will have sinners sit on that throne and I will discipline them and discipline them and discipline them but that dynasty will go on. How can a dynasty go on forever? It either has to have an infinite number of people or it has to terminate in one perfect leader. That’s the only way you can have an eternal dynasty. So guess what? It terminates in the ideal Son of David, and that ideal Son of David is looked upon prophetically …, after you have one or two kings on the throne the prophets begin to say whoa, hold it, we thought it was great to have a king here but these guys don’t cut it. See how the Holy Spirit leads; they wanted a king, okay, try it, and see what happens. And that’s how the Holy Spirit always does, He lets us wallow in it until we get sick of it, tired of it, okay, I think I’ve learned my lesson Lord, now what have You got for me? Then He says okay, are you listening now? Here’s what I have for you and he starts to develop this ideal king. And the title of that ideal king is the “Son of God.” That’s Psalm 2.

Then we have Psalm 110, the most quoted Psalm in this area in the New Testament. In Psalm 110 we have the priesthood of a king. That’s rather Gentile, by the way, because the priests and the king in Israel were separated. Jesus could not have been a priest after Aaron because he was from the tribe of Judah and Levi was the tribe of the priesthood. So Jesus couldn’t be a Hebrew priest. That’s why He’s combined the Melchizedekian priesthood that was a Gentile priesthood. You say why is He bringing Gentiles into it? Because what was the precursor of Israel. Israel didn’t come into existence just for herself. Three promises to Abraham were a land, seed and worldwide blessing, the Abrahamic Covenant, basic covenant of all the Old Testament: land, seed and worldwide blessing. Why did Israel exist? She’s going to have her own land, regardless of Arafat and the U.N., Egypt, Iraq, etc. Israel will have the land of Israel. They will produce a seed. The seed has been produced, the Lord Jesus Christ. And finally they will be a worldwide blessing.

These three passages, and by bringing the priesthood in … [blank spot] and you’ve got to deal with the priest function which is man going before God. To get to the ideal society you have to deal with social sin and the raw material from which you’re going to make your society or kingdom. That means you have to bring people into confrontation with the living God, and that’s the role of the priest. So at this point we have something interesting and quite unique in world history. Here is where you have political leadership that also accomplishes redemptive functions of bringing the people that we rule into a relationship with God. So the king-priest is also an image of the Messiah. If you want to teach political science, there’s enough material in these three passages for a whole semester course. You could interact with all the different ideas, etc. Nobody does it because nobody reads the Bible seriously but if somebody were to read the Bible seriously and do something like that, I think it would be a fantastic course. So you have this background. The Lord Jesus Christ pulls out these ideas. He’s not inventing this; the Lord Jesus Christ is simply using what is already there in the pages of the Old Testament.

Let’s go back to this interim age. Every one of those three passages we just cited, if you were to go back to Daniel 7, Psalm 2 or Psalm 110, you would notice in the text that this figure receives power and honor and glory but has to wait. He has to wait for something. Psalm 110 says “Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies Your footstool.” So there’s a waiting period and that’s something else that’s revealed that this figure, grand as He is, has to by the will of God wait on something to happen. That introduces us to what is going on in this inter-advent age. There’s something that has to happen here or the millennium could have theoretically come back in the New Testament. What we have introduced here is a period of time in which God is doing something that is kind of preparatory for the Kingdom. It’s a time when God is gracious to the world prior to His judgment.

This is the last era in Bible history; this is why it’s called “the last days,” it’s not last days just because Jesus might come tomorrow. It’s the last days because this is the last age of grace. God has sent His Son, His Son was rejected, and His Son goes to heaven and He’s sitting there tapping His foot, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and part of the reason why He’s waiting is so that individuals can come to a relationship freely, the Holy Spirit woos them to Christ, without compulsion, without coercion, until the day when it’s too late, because once the Lord Jesus Christ comes there’s a separation. The day of evangelism just stops right there, that’s it. Of course it goes on in one sense in the Kingdom because of natural birth. But the idea is that with the inter-advent age ends [can’t understand word].

Now turn to Acts and we want to remember a few things that happened in the next event. Right after the Lord Jesus Christ was talking to them and He gave them the final instruction in Acts 1 He said He wanted them to stay in Jerusalem for a while, to wait. Yet at the same time in verse 8 He said they would be witnesses out from Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit comes on the day of Pentecost, that’s Acts 2:1, “And when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. [2] And suddenly” this thing happens. The thing to notice is it happened on a Jewish calendar day. Do you remember the Jewish calendar day that Jesus died? In the Jewish calendar Jesus died on the day of Passover. The Holy Spirit comes exactly on the day of Pentecost. Does that tell you something about the Jewish calendar? It’s divinely inspired. And the Jewish calendar has three other holidays that haven’t been fulfilled yet. One is the Feast of Trumpets, one is Yom Kippur and the other is the Feast of Tabernacles, and they are all in the fall of the year. All the spring holidays have had something happen on them, but the fall holidays have not. That has led many to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ will establish the Millennial Kingdom some year in the fall, it will be on exactly the right day of the Jewish calendar.

But here the Holy Spirit comes on the day of Pentecost, and there are three miracles in verses 2-3. They are all public, they are all observed; if you had a tape recorder you could have taped it, if you had a video camera you could have captured it in video. Verse 2, “And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent, rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. [3] And there appeared to them tongues as of fire,” think of lightening, have you ever seen lightening forks coming out of a cloud, it takes the path of least resistance and sprays all over the place, it’s probably something like that, “tongues of fire,” because fire can mean that. It’s always pictured as a nice little gaseous flame, artists always do that and really it might not have been, it might have just been sort of like lightening. I don’t want to ruin your artistic image, it’s just a suggestion. In verse 3 you have both noise, public noise that could have been tape recorded, and you have an optical phenomenon looking something like this fire business, and it rests on each of these guys. [tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them.”] It doesn’t kill them but it rests on them.

Then in verse 4 they “began to speak with other languages.” Down through church history we’ve had people insist that these languages are some sort of glossalia in some sort of a sense of some blah, blah, blah stuff. That’s not what the text says here, this is known human languages. What it is, think about it, what was the nationality of these people? Jews. Through what language had revelation generally come, for the last 1,400 years, what language? Hebrew. Now all of a sudden what’s happened? The gospel, the announcement of the Lord Jesus Christ is now being heard in all these languages. He gives you the list in verses 9–10. There are almost a dozen different languages that suddenly the Word of God is being preached in all these different languages. That is an adumbration of the fact that what God is now doing is something that is global; it is not limited to just Israel. That was prophesied in the Old Testament, because after all, when the Messiah would come He would come and He would set up this Millennial Kingdom and the Kingdom was of this world, it was global. So far nothing out of the ordinary as far as the Old Testament is concerned.

Now Peter gets up and he makes an announcement in verse 14. He makes two speeches, one in Acts 2, one in Acts 3 and in these speeches Peter links the event with the ascended Christ. Notice his argument. He cites Joel; that refers to a spiritual thing that’s going to happen prior to the Kingdom, and then he says, verse 22, [“Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles] “and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst …,” through Jesus, and later through some of the apostles. Verse 23, you nailed Him to a cross. He cites Psalm 6 for the resurrection. Then he concludes, verse 33, here’s where he links Pentecost, the second event we’re talking about with the first event, the ascension and session of Christ. He says, “Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear.” So what Pentecost becomes, Pentecost is the manifestation on earth of what has happened in heaven. It’s the verification that Christ has arrived in the throne room, that He has been accepted by God the Father, and that He has gained what He has said He was going to gain, “I will pray the Father and He will send the Holy Spirit,” and the Holy Spirit came.

Peter connects them all, so what’s happening here is something that was prophesied to happen before the great kingdom, the great day of the Lord, and now it’s happened. Then what Peter does is he issues a gospel invitation, or what looks like a gospel invitation. He says, verse 38, “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and let each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. [39] For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself.” It describes after these people become Christians, they have fellowship together in verse 42, but interestingly they stay together as Jews and they stay together in the temple community. There’s no sense that what we have in Acts 2 is anything unusual as far as Israel goes. It’s not a church movement over against Israel. It’s a group of Jews, they are all Jews, no Gentiles here yet, they are all Jews, they’re sitting in the city of Jerusalem, they go back into the temple precincts every day and worship.

In Acts 3, Peter gives his second sermon. There’s another event that happens, and Peter explains it again. And he says, because of the healing, verse 18, “But the thing which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled. [19] Repent,” now look at how he phrases this, “Repent therefore and return, that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” If you know the Old Testament, that’s a code. The “times of refreshing” are simply a Hebrew code for the Millennial Kingdom. So what Peter is doing here, he’s saying if you will accept the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Kingdom can come and come now. This is a strange thing, and this is one of the complexities, but in Acts 2 and 3 Peter’s sermons are crucial to understand something that happened right here at the origin of the church. The church appears to be missing here; these are Jews in the nation of Israel worshiping at the temple. And nothing is said about separating from Israel here. In fact, if they would accept the Messiah they would have the Kingdom and the Kingdom they’re talking about is the Kingdom of Old Testament prophecy.

So in a nutshell what we’re saying is the inter-advent age was viewed as a very short time period here. It was collapsed down; we know it’s longer but then it was collapsed down to a very short time. What’s going on here? If you want the key to what’s going on here, the Lord Jesus Christ gave us the key when He gave the parable in Matthew 22 because in Matthew 22 He said the King would send out an invitation to a feast and it would fall on deaf ears, invitation number one. Then He said and the King will send out a second wave of inviters, and they will not only be rejected but some of them will be killed. How many apostles were killed during the Gospels? None. How many people do you see martyred in the book of Acts? That’s where the death begins. So Matthew 22 is actually a parable prophesying that Israel will … here’s our number two again, how many invitations does the nation Israel get? Two, they get one by the Lord Jesus before He was crucified, Jesus says behold, the Kingdom is here, and they said we don’t want you. Peter acts as the interpreter for Pentecost, he invites the nation again, right smack dab in the political center of the nation Israel he goes on record as saying if you now will accept it, after you crucified Christ He ascended to the Father’s right hand, He sent the Spirit, do you get it Israel, because if you do you can trust Him and you’ll have your Kingdom.

Of course we know that by the end of Acts something has happened, they don’t do this. So Matthew 22 says there’s a third thing that’s going to happen, and the third thing according to Matthew 22 is the King is going to send His armies and He’s going to burn the city down. What happened to Jerusalem in AD 70? It was burned down. So this is a testimony to the termination for a time being of the role of Israel. Next week we’re going to deal with the beginning to sense our identity as Christians in this new thing called the church, which is going to be seen as something entirely different from Israel. Israel originated by virtue of something that happened on earth, the call of Abraham. How did the church originate? By something that happened where? If Pentecost is the start of the church, and we’ll prove that next week, what was Pentecost a result of? The Lord Jesus Christ ascending to the Father’s right hand to send the Spirit. That’s why when this was understood, this idea of the church being distinct from Israel, why teachers refer to the church as God’s heavenly people and Israel as God’s earthly people. There’s a distinction because Israel is the earthly people of God. Israel was born on earth through earthly things and has an earthly destiny, to bring the Kingdom, to save the world from itself.

The church has another function, it was born in Heaven through the Holy Spirit being sent from Heaven and it’s going to go back to Heaven to be raptured and to be forever with the Lord. It’s a heavenly destiny. So there are two different bodies, two different destinies and this has profound implications with how you interpret the return of Christ and what goes on in this complex of events that we’ll see.

Question asked: Clough replies: Melchizedek was a Gentile. The question was raised about this Melchizedek figure, and this guy is a real mystery because scholars have thought maybe he was Shem, whoever he was, the Bible just doesn’t clarify other than just paints this portrait of Melchizedek. His name, if you take his name apart, the Hebrew noun for king is MLK, if you know your consonants you can fill in the vowels kind of, so MLK, there’s the word king, and “zedek” is the Hebrew word for righteousness. So he’s the king of righteousness. He existed in Abraham’s day. Remember the story, he was the king of Salem, and that was the place where Jerusalem eventually came to be. But he was a Gentile; he was a Gentile that preceded Abraham. And what’s significant about him, and I think Paul Richardson in his book, Eternity in Their Hearts has it very right that he probably represents what may have been typical of the way God reigned prior to the call of Abraham in history. In other words, between the Noahic Flood, when Noah and his sons went forth on earth…

Let me make a little digression here, some of you have asked about the sons of Noah that I keep talking about, the Hamites were the inventers, etc. that comes out of work by a guy by the name of Arthur Custance, a Canadian guy, he worked with the Canadian Department of Defense, he was a PhD in linguistics. He did a fascinating series and the books have been out of print for years. Zondervan published it, The Three Sons of Noah, it went out of publication, nobody can get hold of it, it’s hard to get. I’ve got one of the few sets still left of his papers, he used to publish papers about forty pages long on different topics, fascinating topics. Somebody found out that there’s a website where you can go download these things. Somebody graciously consented to put them on the internet. I believe it is Custance.org and that might be a source if you happen to be looking for that and can’t find it anywhere else, because unfortunately it’s never been put back into publication.

Anyway, in the period between Noah and Abraham we know the sons of Noah went out to colonize the planet. We know that they carried knowledge of the Word of God because they had at least the first 9 chapters of Genesis. All people groups originally had the light. It’s not true that the light only came to some people; it was lost maybe, yeah, but it originally was there in the lineage. Everybody can trace their lineage back to somebody who knew Noah; we can all trace our genes back to that family. If you go back far enough in your family line through all the unbelief that may have been there, sooner or later you’re going to arrive back at someone in your line who had access to the Word of God.

Melchizedek was one of these people and he ruled as both king and priest. Nothing more is said, other than the fact that he puts these two functions together. We would call it kind of a violation of separation of church and state but apparently he ruled that way. And the significance is that Abraham paid tithes to him. That goes on to an interesting thing in the book of Hebrews. This man is a mysterious figure who represents pre-Israelite age, when it was the age of the Gentiles. And God had His way of working back then, we don’t think about that; there were centuries and centuries went on when Israel wasn’t around, there was no Israel. How did God work with the different people groups? He worked through, apparently, like Paul Richardson points out in his book Eternity in Their Hearts, He worked in all these little groups and colonies and He had His righteous people like Melchizedek around and they knew enough, they were the ones … he had bread and wine, look at that, he had a lot of knowledge of the Word of God and these guys apparently just phased out, the societies tubed out, got pagan, maybe killed off people like Melchizedek and others.

In his book Richardson deals with some cases in the Western hemisphere where this might have been true. You can trace back some of these tribal areas and they can all give this account of the high God that left us, so they have this memory that back one time before we worshiped all the spirits we used to worship one God but somehow He left us or He disappeared, He got mad at us or something so we don’t know Him anymore, so now we have to worship the demons. So there’s that history, we call that primitive monotheism. Custance has a neat paper on that, too.

You have this in the history of the human race, this root in Melchizedek. When does Melchizedek come up again in Scripture? Psalm 110 and Psalm 110 is written by, the human author is David. The Old Testament professor at Dallas, Dr. Merrill in his book Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel, summarizes the Old Testament, and he points out something very interesting. Remember Saul was rejected because he sacrificed and he messed around, he didn’t wait for the priest to come. Merrill points out, however David managed to do things that really bordered on priestly duties. For example, David demanded that the cultists, i.e. the tabernacle and everything, be put at Jerusalem. There was no mandate from the priests to do that, David did that. He wanted that in Jerusalem. Remember the great dance that he had as he went with the procession through the city, and his wife couldn’t stand it, she was Saul’s daughter. He points out that David was taking an active role really to the point that was kind of out of line as far as the role between the Levites and the king. The Torah kind of kept those guys apart, each with his own duties. David kind of mixed them, and apparently he was reverting in his mixing of those two, he was reverting to an ancient pre-Israelite model of Melchizedek.

So that’s the background for that Psalm, and then David like he always does, he knows he’s a sinner so he sees God doing these things but he knows he’s not the guy, but he knows it’s going to be out of his loins, so he projects onto the future the trends that he sees God working in his life. That’s Psalm 2, it’s going to be according to His king, etc. but he projects it onto this future king who will fulfill this. So Melchizedek represents, I believe why this is brought in in the New Testament is because that’s the way the author of Hebrews has of showing that the mission of Israel wasn’t unto itself. The Jews had a tendency because they were so persecuted that … it’s like us, sometimes we get with Christians and how the Lord works in our lives, we don’t see that wait a minute, we’re here for a larger purpose. The Jews had that provincialism and that had to be broken in order to prepare for the church.

The author of Hebrews does that and he uses the Melchizedekian argument to refute the Law, new priesthood, new law, and he uses that as a mechanism. He argues quite parallel to Stephen because remember before Stephen was killed in Acts 7 he gave that big long speech that got everybody so angry that they stoned him to death. If you go through the themes of Acts 7 and you carefully look at the logic, first of all when Stephen is introduced he turns out not to be a Galilean Jew; he turns out not to be a Jerusalem Jew. He turns out to be a Diaspora Jew. That’s interesting; he’s one of the early people who is a Jew who has traveled around the world, traveled more outside of Israel. He’s not provincial like Peter, for example as a Galilean Jew, probably never walked outside of the land of Israel. Now you have this guy who’s been around.

It seems like the Holy Spirit worked in Deacon Stephen’s life to give him a grasp of a larger picture. So he gets up when he’s being attacked and he says let me tell you something, Israel, and he tells all the Jews, he says isn’t it interesting three of your most cherished beliefs come from Gentiles, and from Gentile lands. And they are shocked. He says first of all, ask yourself where did the first Jew start? In Israel, or outside of Israel? Ooh, outside of Israel; ooh, Israel comes from a Gentile land. Then he says and where was the Torah given, in Israel or outside of Israel? Ooh, Mount Sinai - that really wasn’t part of the promised land, so territorially it was given in a Gentile environment. And by the way, the temple that you worship so hard and so fast, what has been your history of treatment of that temple down through the years, desecrating it, etc. So he really attacks the Torah, the temple and the nation’s national visual. Not attacking it in a bad sense but saying that it’s part of a larger purpose that roots back to the third part of the Abraham covenant which was worldwide blessing. Israel is not a hot house, Israel is to grow plants in its hot house but the plants are to be brought out into the world, and that’s the image that you get, that’s the breaking up in the book of Acts, that’s where the church starts to become visible now. They’re going to take that little thing and run with it.

All that to say that you have these churning themes in the Old Testament so multifaceted and you find the Holy Spirit taking these things out in the book of Acts and developing this new thing called the church, and Melchizedek is part of it.

Question asked: Clough replies: That was one and then they had others, if you get into the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran community, they had some other ideas of it, but you could tell that these people had the prophecies, they just couldn’t get them together right. And it’s sort of interesting, sort of like we are, we have so many mysteries in our life, why did God do this and He promised to do that, and what we have to realize is He has a method in His madness and it’s maddening sometimes to wait on His method, but that’s the way it always has been. Think about the conflict in the Old Testament between what Paul mention in Romans 3; how can God justify the wicked and still remain just. That’s a mystery, until the cross and all of a sudden, oh, that’s how He does it. So it’s encouraging to look at things like the cross resolving that contradiction, the First and Second Advent as a way of logically reconciling this other contradiction so that what those resolutions do for me is that it tells me when I can’t figure something out, it’s not a conflict in God’s plan, I just can’t get the pieces together. Someday we’ll see, the pieces will all fall together, it’s just right now they don’t fit too much.

Next week we’ll go on, I want to show how the church develops, I want to get clear in our minds the difference between the church and Israel before we start going into the prophetic passages.