a file transfer thing to deal with a moment ago. This evening I'm going to be speaking on the idea or the realm of what is sometimes called replacement theology. And replacement theology is in this day and age quite influential. And I believe that there are certain reasons why it is becoming more influential.
And that we as people who do not, I would say it's fair to say, believe or accept replacement theology, it is good for us to know what it is and why we believe what we believe and why we don't believe replacement theology, even though it is becoming more popular. I don't want to get too far into words without my slides. Here we are. True.
If I tilt my bifocal chin at the right angle, I have it here too as well. What it is, why we don't believe it and what we do believe. Replacement theology is also known as fulfillment theology and it is also known as, this is the forward arrow. I'm hitting it very distinctly.
Give the battery in the twirl. Thank you. The nice thing about the other one is it has built in laser. So with this idea of replacement theology, the idea is of replacement.
So that the church actually replaces Israel. It comes from the Latin super cedare sits in the place of. So if we wanted to transliterate, we might say super cedareism, but that is not how the Latin becomes the English. It becomes English as super sessionism.
But that's a little bit of a difficult word because it has a sense of time. It is not the sense of time. It is really in the sense of place or position. We have the, an ex, a basic explanation of this is that the church now represents Israel.
She is the new legitimate receiver of the Old Testament prophecies and promises made to Israel. The Old Testament prophecies to Israel are and will be fulfilled by, toward, through and in the church. And if you're starting to feel uncomfortable, you should. The church is Israel.
It is the new Israel under replacement theology. Replacement theologians like to be called fulfillment theologians because it sounds a little bit more positive. Prophecies made to Israel and there are prophecies made to Israel. And we know this, have been forfeited by them, by it, as an entity.
And the church inherits them. Essentially, one might say that God is finished with Israel as a political, national entity that is an actually an entity of Jewish people in a place. We don't believe these things, but they are, they are popular, they are influential. And the reasons why are, I think, quite interesting.
The church inherits them in some sense. Now, when we say that the prophecies made to Israel have been forfeited by them and the church inherits them in some sense, this has in it, the hidden within it, what is a hermeneutical problem? That is an interpretational problem that is faced by replacement theologians. Why do they even need to say forfeited?
Because some of the promises to Israel, which is a country with borders and a special actual people within those borders, and that's actually as well as outside of those borders, those promises to Israel are not easily transferred or somehow inherited to a non-material entity. That is the body of Christ. That is the church. So you can see that if I like the idea of the church replacing Israel, then it is easier for me to believe that and to say that if the promises to a place that has borders actually ends up forfeiting certain promises that are difficult to transfer to the church by their very nature, by nature, what the promises are.
Replacement theologians like the church to inherit not forfeit the promised spiritual blessings. Aha. Indeed, amongst these Old Testament promises made to both the people of God in the broad sense of the word, they are both intangible and tangible. You see, you have spiritual promises.
You have promises that pertain to a location to a land with an actual border and to an actual people. In order to be a replacement theologian, it helps if you can make all the material blessings applicable to Israel and all the Old Testament predictions about blessings to the church, to the spiritual blessings, because then the forfeiture is only applied to the material ones. An example of a problem with that would be, what about all the spiritual blessings in the Psalms? Do they then not apply to you?
How would you like it if you were given the book of Psalms and said, and by the way, all of these spiritual blessings are not applicable? Oh, we like them. So we keep them. Well, what about the material?
We don't like the material ones. We don't like the ones that pertain to the land of the country. We want the church to inherit them, to want them to be forfeited. And then they lack substance.
So then you can see that there's a dichotomy between how promises then tend to be handled. Then what that leads to is, if God wanted to revoke, I would say the blessings to a given people group, such as the Jews, why just revoke some of them? Why are we being selective? Why is the replacement theologian being selective about what is being forfeited?
Being selective about what is to be revoked versus what is to be transferred is, in my view, an inconsistency in the treatment of the Old Testament. Any theological system would have to deal with four major realms. First of all, a theology of God. We are Trinitarians.
We believe in a triune God. That would be a key foundational aspect of our theology. Another aspect would be our soteriology. That is, how are you saved?
On what basis do you know salvation? Is it by works? Is it by the blood of Christ? Or is it by some combination of the blood of Christ and by works?
Is it a major realm within any theological system? Thirdly, ecclesiology. What constitutes a church? What is a church?
Is it bricks and mortar? Is it people? Is it some combination of bricks and mortar and people? And in terms of how the church operates as the body of Christ, how is it supposed to operate?
The ecclesiology, the meeting together, is the sense of that word. And finally, and this turns out to be, I can say this evening to you, brothers and sisters, a more divisive issue. As you go down through the list, you will find that you can agree with many, many Christians about the Trinitarian nature of God, and that you have nothing to disagree with them about. Then as you go to more specific things, like salvation, then you might find that there would be some difference.
Then you go to ecclesiology, as you go down the list, and you find more differences. Well, here's the big one. When you get down to the fourth thing on the list, that is what, in fact, causes a great deal of, shall we say, discernment of discrimination within Christendom in terms of theological systems. The eschatology, that is, the doctrine of the end times.
How do you think? How do you believe? How do you understand that God will wrap up history and move us on into eternity? There you would find a tremendous amount of variation.
Broadly speaking, there would be two major theological systems amongst evangelicals, born-again people, in the West, especially in North America. They are known as Reformed Theology and Dispensational Theology. So replacement theology is actually a component of Reformed Theology. It mainly affects the eschatology of Reformed Theology.
It would be a thing that discriminates them, if you will, from us. So it's a thing within a thing. Replacement Theology is part of the eschatology of Reformed Theology. There are many large, famous, reputable seminaries that are Reformed Theology seminaries.
However, that ends up, your beliefs about how God is going to wrap things up, tend to affect eventually the other aspects of your theological beliefs. At the opposite extreme of what we would believe here would be amylenialism, that God will move us on into eternity without a literal thousand years of reign of Christ. How might that affect your thinking? Well, I know an amylenialist and he's a born-again man.
And he believes that things are getting continuously better, that society is getting continuously better, and eventually will actually usher in the arrival of Christ. And you're looking at me and one brother shaking his head, no, things are not getting better. So it's just one example of how one's eschatology might affect one's view of the Christian living in a fallen society. To be fair, there are degrees of supersessionism.
The most pronounced perhaps would be that with regard to the people of Israel, there is no particular future salvation for them, and there is no future nationhood for them. The next one up from that, you might say, second degree supersessionism would say yes to a future salvation of the Jews, but no to the significance of actual nationhood. Whereas our view would be yes to both of those questions with the additional proviso that we don't think in terms of a gradual salvation of the Jews. Our view would be yes, there will be a calling of the Jews.
A remnant will actually be saved and come to Christ, and that it won't be gradual. And we would also say that the political entity of Israel will be, and in fact as we know, is an actual entity. And for us, that would actually be the earnest of what has happened. I need to keep myself up to speed.
So within the idea of a future salvation, the passage that is almost impossible to deal with as a supersessionist is Romans 11. And we will look at Romans 11. I will have it on the screen. So moderate supersessionists would claim that, you know, well, I have to agree with you on Romans 11 with regard to the salvation, the eventual salvation of the Jews, however many of them would say yes, but.
And the yes, but is that they would be gradually incorporated to the church. So in fact, we might have people come into this building, hear the gospel, and be saved. Yes. So some supersessionists would be then saying, well, that's what's going to happen to the Jews.
The same thing will happen. There will be this absorption of the Jews people by conventional faith, by conventional salvation, gradually into the church. And that's not to me what Romans 11 is teaching. I think that if you think that it is merely a gradual process, that actually makes you an immoderate supersessionist.
The discriminating question seems to be, is there a last day's conversion? I would refer you to Zechariah, chapter 12, which I will also put on the screen. The problem with the question of the salvation, the future salvation of the Jews, and the nationhood of the Jews being treated differently is, why would I, if I was God, save Israel and leave them dispersed, if both of them are Old Testament prophecy? That's a tough one.
That's where supersessionism gets into difficulty there amongst other places. Now, it's always good when you're thinking about a complex subject, a theological subject, a biblical subject, at least to try to understand why the other person thinks the way they do. So I'm trying to be fair to the supersessionist. I'm trying to say, well, what are some of the reasons you might think the way that you do?
I don't believe what you believe. But it's always good, I think, for us to have some understanding of where the other camp is coming from. One of the factors in this is that if you look at the teachings of Clement, Tartulian, Cyprian, Augustine, what we see is that there was a lot, once the Apostle John had passed on, that we see that there was a lot of actual subsequent teaching that considered that the Jews have been moved away and what you might say out of the picture. The Gentiles will be the ones who come out of all nations in Isaiah 10.
God has, rather in Hosea, we see a picture of God and Israel in the metaphor of a marriage. And Tartulian, 100 years after John, said, well, God has divorced Israel. It was a divorce. A divorce is final and complete.
Cyprian went as far as to say that whenever God is speaking of Israel, it's a real supersession. Replace the word. Replace the word that we are the church. You can put the church every time you see a promise to Judah or Israel.
You can take it out and you can put in the word church. Augustine is a very well-known theologian. And in fact, in the history of Western philosophy, a very significant figure acknowledged by secular philosophers. He taught that we are the italic, the seed of Abraham.
So when you ask Augustine why did Israel exist in your day, well, that is to prove the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah that since Israel still exists, it is logical to presume that promises of the Messiah to Israel are probably true. After all, Israelis or Jews still exist. They are not a fantasy. They are not a fantasy.
So that helps give apologetic weight to the idea of a Messiah, the continued existence in some form of the Jewish people. This is quite an interesting one. The Duwe Reims Bible, of course, has books of the apocrypha that the Protestant church does not accept, including Epistle of Barnabas. That's an anti-Semitic book.
It is hundreds of years after Christ. And the Catholic Church, as many of you will know, has actually been quite anti-Semitic. And that has influenced, I think, all of us. It has influenced Western society, because the Catholic Church is a very powerful entity.
And unfortunately, I would say there are Protestants who simply don't know their Bibles. And when there is a feeling amongst people who believe in God that Israel is something to be dismissed, whatever camp it may be coming from, people tend to go with it. Ecumenism, that we're all in one big, happy family, will tend to cause Christians who should know better to engage in anti-Semitic thinking. Martin Luther, I mean, a man that we would have to have great respect for, a very courageous man, he wrote in 1460 that if God was going to do anything with the Jews, he would have done it by now.
In other words, the sheer length of time, roughly 1500 years after the Lord returned to heaven, Martin Luther was kind of saying, I mean, he was a straight as a Catholic priest, was kind of saying, if we might have expected God to do something with Israel, we've been waiting for 1500 years. Hello, Martin Luther, we've been waiting 2000 years, and we still think that the Lord is going to come. And we don't abandon the idea that the Lord Jesus is going to return just because it's been 2000 years since he last walked this earth. It's still logical fallacy.
Another factor would be that post 134 AD Judaism, and that would put you at the bar, Simon Barcockba, rebellion. You have to admit, bears little resemblance to Old Testament Judaism. Modern Judaism is often Hasidic, if it's Orthodox. It's Talmudic.
That is, these are the writings of man. Beware of that. They are Talmudic. They follow the Talmudic and the Torah.
Yes, we believe in the Torah, the five books of the Bible. What about the Talmud? No, we don't. The temple was destroyed in the year 70.
So modern Judaism has no core. It has no core. You might say that modern Judaism is a very strange religion because the sacrificial core has been taken out of it. The temple was raised in the rebellion of 8067 to 8070 that the Lord Jesus himself predicted was going to happen.
So, and it's rabbinic. Where no sacrifices? Well, no sacrifice, no priest. So it becomes, I tell the Chinese people, where do Jewish people go?
Do they go to church? Yeah, we think they go, no, they go to synagogue. What's synagogue? Well, it just means meet together.
And this is the substitute for a system that's been gone for nearly 2,000 years. And who leads the, you might say, who's the pastor in the synagogue? Do we call that a pastor? No, we don't know what they're called.
I'll tell you what it's called. It's called a rabbi. And he would be the analog of a Christian pastor. He's not a priest.
He's not anything. The whole system is gone. The core of Judaism is gone. We were in Spain and went to a museum of Moses Maimonides.
Very famous, learned it, brilliant. Talmudic, rabbi and teacher. And the Jews have a saying in Hebrew, from Moses to Moses, there was nobody like Moses. From Moses, the original Moses, to Moses Maimonides.
You know, that's 2,500 years. There was nobody like either one of them. But what kinds of things did Moses Maimonides teach? Rabbinic, Talmudic stuff.
You know what that is? That's related to a lot of Pharisee stuff, a lot of rules, a lot of regulations who invented those, man, man invented those, Jewish men. So that affects how Christians think about modern Judaism. I have to say too that amongst a lot of Christians, there is both a weak grasp and low interest in the Old Testament.
It's not very good when a believer claims to be a believer, but his knowledge of the word of God is that superficial. You might get away with it for a while, but I think it does bite you. You will get into trouble if you imagine that as one writer was talking about, you know, there was the fall, and that's the origin of sin. And then you skip ahead 6,000 years, 4,000 years, and you go back to the second.
And there's Christ. Yes, the Messiah came, there were some prophecies. And he died for our sins. And now we're in the church, and we read the New Testament, that Old Testament, oh, that's a hard book.
I've met people like that. Oh, I don't read the Old Testament. I've read about the life of John Deaf and Baker. His parents were Christians, and he said, they were Old Testament people.
I think they were New Testament people. That was John Deaf and Baker's assessment of his own parents. Very Christian community, very Christian parents, but that was John Deaf and Baker's assessment of his parents, New Testament people. There's a lot of people like that.
They have, I would say, even a love of the New Testament, but when it comes to actually requiring you to study that doesn't help, that doesn't help in this situation. Hermonautical challenges means that, yes, you have to think. You have to understand. Famous German theologian named Barth, Carl Barth, said every Christian needs to be a theologian.
Now there are theologians and there's theologians. I'm not a theologian, but the point of Barth's statement is that study your Bible. Do you call yourself a Christian? It is incumbent upon you to be a student of the Bible.
Do you understand the meaning of the Bible? When the word says love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, your mind. Do you think about this Bible? Do you engage your neural network here to try to understand the whole thing?
It's incumbent upon you to do so. I think Barth made a good statement. Modern Judaism, this is most interesting. As is often the case in history, the Jews haven't helped their own cause.
Modern Judaism has not been very sympathetic to vangelicals, even though there are even examples I've read about. Evangelicals getting excited. They want the 67 more. Let's go help them build the kaboots.
Yeah. And then they find out that they're friends on the kaboots. They're Jewish friends. And you try to speak about the gospel.
And they tell you, just shut up. Don't. Not interested. You want to work on the kaboots?
Fine. This happened to students of an American seminary. It's recorded. You want to work on the kaboots?
Fine. You're going to tell us about this, Jesus of Nazareth? Go back to the states. So this kind of breaks the romanticism of the whole thing.
You get it very excited about the eschatology of the Jews. And then you find out, oh, Jews themselves are not very open to what I have to say. And it kind of puts a wet blanket on the whole thing. In this day and age friends, I would say, be careful.
I have Muslim friends. We talk about the Bible. And I'll tell you this. You don't start with where the embassy should be.
You don't start with that unless you want to kill a conversation dead from the get-go. So there is a tendency, shall I dare to say, maybe more a little bit stronger south of the border, to mix spiritual things and political things. There's a danger there. There's a real danger there.
Do you want to end up having to somehow defend everything that the secular state of Israel does? Do you want to have to? No, I don't think you want to have to do that. I don't have to do that.
God is not finished with them. But that doesn't mean that everything that these people do, who are, in fact, lost people. They are lost. It doesn't mean that everything that they do is something that we have to stand behind.
So we have to be careful how much we want to mix politics and the faith in our position. Finally, here's a big one. Wow. At five to seven, I'm on my post-modernism rant.
I'm appalled. In the past six months, I've been reading from Professor Grouthius' work on Truth Decay. I've been doing some research on it because I'll tell you part of my motivation. It affects my job.
It affects my own freedom of speech. And I needed to look into what post-modernism is because it is taking the world by storm. I'm going to tell you a couple of shocking things. Just for starters, where's Canada?
Well, they did a survey about what people believe. Do you know that 35,000 of your fellow Canadians, when asked what is the religious system they believe in? Yes, I did say 35,000. Put down that it's the force of Star Wars.
So that's where we are. That's where we are. In other words, it doesn't matter if the narrative is true. If you like, the narrative.
I actually have come to hate this word. The way in which it is used in modern times is that, oh, you're a Mormon and you have a narrative. It doesn't matter whether it's true. Does it make you feel good?
Well, good. There's your narrative. You're a Christian, are you? Well, you have a narrative.
Doesn't matter if any of it is historical reality at all. It's your narrative. It's repugnant. I'll go further and say that there is a professor at the University of Toronto who has become very famous.
And his name is Jordan Peterson. And he's been threatened with dismissal. But because he becomes so famous and so respected that they dare not. They have backed off.
University of Toronto sent him two letters. And then at the end, didn't fire him. But you want everything he has to say. He's an interesting man.
He's an intellectual. He's an interesting man. He goes to England to give interviews. He's known all over the world.
His parents were Christians. He knows the Bible. He abandoned God. He abandoned the faith of his childhood.
But here's a kicker. This will tell you where we are. Jordan Peterson has a lineup, I am told, in a midweek meeting on Young Street in a movie theater that isn't being used on that evening. And what is he talking about?
He is talking about how the metaphors in the Bible can help you and the people line up out into the sidewalk to hear him explain the meaning of the metaphors of the Bible and how they can enrich your life. And nobody in the lineup cares whether or not what is being said is historically factual or not. That is the world in which we live. We have to try to get our head around it.
It is not the way you and I think. The Apostle Paul said that if the resurrection is not factually true, I am a fool and so are you. And we are the biggest, most pitiful people, most biggest fools on the face of the planet. There's a step back.
It matters enormously whether these things are factually true. Under postmodernism, the ideas of absolute right and wrong have been long ago thrown out the window more than 10 years ago. What has replaced it? If you are an oppressor, you are automatically evil.
If you are a victim, you are automatically good. Therefore, when the discussion turns to the state of Israel, oh, they oppress the Palestinians. They're automatically evil. The Palestinians are oppressed.
They're automatically good. That is postmodernism. It is the psychology of the modern age. It is quite disturbing.
In addition to all of these various bullets and factors, we have the fact of, I would say, simple plain and simple illogical thinking. A non-sequitur is simply a statement that does not follow, that the second statement does not follow from the first. But I'm going to give you a whole bunch of them. God has not blessed you.
Israel yet. We haven't seen an en masse salvation of Jews since the gospel was preached 2000 years ago. Therefore, God will never do that. That doesn't follow.
The Jews rejected Christ, rejected the gospel, and most of them continued to reject the gospel. Therefore, we should abandon them theologically and eschatologically. That doesn't follow. God has not blessed Israel with national salvation.
Therefore, the fact of a presently restored political nation of Israel is irrelevant. It's not irrelevant. We have in AD 70 under the Emperor Nero, the guy who is said to have fiddled while Rome burned the destruction of the temple and the end of sacrificial worship, taking the core out of Judaism. Then in AD 132 to 134, we have Simon Barcocka's rebellion and the death and destruction, not only in Jerusalem, but in what we would think of Israel under Emperor Hadrian.
Remember that Hadrian built a wall between Scotland and England. And he instructed a man named Severus to do away with these people. And the capital became known as its alien capitalina. Do you know that Jerusalem was at one time called alien capitalina as a result of an edict from Hadrian?
So these are terrible judgments. And they're terrible judgments of God. And in fact, the former was predicted by the Lord himself. This will temple will not stand.
Mark chapter 13. There won't be one stone left on another stone. They suspected there was gold in the mortar. So let's get the mortar out from in between the stones.
Therefore, no further dealings by of or from God can follow for the Jewish people. That's a non-sequitur. There is no present, salvation, or a serological distinction between Jew and Gentile. How should a Jew be saved if he comes in this room?
Same way I need to be saved. There's no difference. Therefore, there is neither any eschatological difference. That's not true.
There is eschatological difference. So all of these inferences are no spiritual guidance. They are not logical. They do not follow.
What is the most important proof text of supersessionists, Galatians 3? For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus, for as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have been put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free.
There is neither male nor female. For ye are all one in Christ Jesus and if he be Christ's. Then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise? Hmm.
What's the context? Well, the context, and this passage indicates that there are two questions being dealt with in Galatians 3. One is, can you be saved by different methods? Does salvation exist with different means?
As I said at the beginning, can you have some people say by faith, some people say by words, a mixture of faith and work? No. There is only one way to be saved. That is what Galatians is teaching.
As for salvation, are there different kinds of salvation so that race, gender, social status all imply some kind of a different salvation for different people of different backgrounds? No. Obviously not. And that is what the thrust of Galatians 3 and the book of Galatians is getting at.
So what are the errors here? Well, when using this to support a replacement theology, the first area is, you're ignoring the context. The second area is, you're overextending a principle. And the third area is that you are pretending that there is silence in the scriptures elsewhere.
I say, confirm with Maxwell, who's Mr. Maxwell? Mr. Maxwell has a book in every law library in this country.
Maxwell's rules of legal interpretation. Every law student needs to know about that book and gets familiar with that book. One of Maxwell's important, very important principles is that if you have a statute, that statute does not automatically overwrite every conceivable related idea. Especially if there is a statute that supersedes it.
Well, I may have silence in this verse on a particular issue, but that doesn't mean that the entire statute of Nova Scotia has no content on that question. Of course it doesn't. We found a statute over here that applies to this case. There isn't silence elsewhere in statute law on the question.
You're saying that this one is silent on that question? Yes, it is. But that's not to say that the entire scripture or the entire statute of law is silent on that question. So you'll find that the cults make use of these three things.
The overextension of an idea, the removal from context, and the attempt to say that because this scripture is not clear or is somewhat silent on a given question, that the scripture, the whole Bible, is silent on that question. Those are the three very common techniques to mislead people. I hope you're in the mood for Bible study tonight. What kinds of replacement theology are there?
What kinds of supersessionism are there? The some of the church fathers that I alluded to talked about punitive supersessionism. Why do they, why do some want Israel to be completely set aside? And the entire 100% focus of God is on the church.
Well, the idea is that God gave Israel a chance to be blessed, but removed them from all possible blessings as punishment, as punishment for rejecting his son. That is called punitive supersessionism. Now, one of the reasons I'm giving this message is to deal with one of the very last thoughts of my previous message, in which I said from Mark 1212, that God will bring closure, bring judgment that has closure in addressing those Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and others. I didn't want you to go away thinking forever and ever that I meant that God is finished with Israel completely forever, 100% forever.
No. However, the temple was destroyed. By the time 80, 70 had happened, there was no temple. There were no priests.
There were no sacrifices. The Lord Jesus said, this system is going to end. You are going to be judged. And they were.
And the system was finished. In fact, redemptively, it was finished at the cross. My footnote for number, my little footnote there, because perhaps I won't read that through, but I'm dealing with the question of forfeiture and whether forfeiture necessarily means non-transferability. What is the other kind of supersessionism?
It is called economic supersessionism. And that is that it's quite Calvinist, you see. And it's no accident that Reformed theologians will think of things the way that a Calvinist would think of things, that things are pretty cut and dried from before the foundation of the earth, including the role of Israel in history. So they would say that it was part of God's greater plan of redemption for the house of Israel to become utterly, ontologically and morally obsolete, at a certain point in God's story and God's history and his history.
Namely, the cross, after all, wasn't Jesus of Nazareth the perfect Israelite? Well, he was. But that to me does not then mean that God is finished with Israel. Ontology means, from the point of view, of being.
The existence, from the fundamental being idea, the so-called economic supersessionist would say that they have no reason to exist as an entity, as a being ontologically or morally. It's completely obsolete that the people of Israel, the Jews. And it's interesting why they use the word economic. If you move around in brethren's circles, you might be talking about, you hear brothers say, well, you know in the old economy, talking about maybe the tabernacle worship, talking about how God dealt with them under the age of the law.
Brother might say, under the old economy, yeah, ukonomia is an idea of household function. It means how God deals with a group of people in a dispensation. He dealt with, from Moses to Christ, according to what? What was the basis for that relationship?
The law. You said, all these things. Sinai. All these things we will do.
Yeah, really? You failed very hugely in your human attempt to try to obey God in that dispensation. So the supersessionist would find it funny to talk about dispensational supersessionism, right? That would be really weird, because we're dispensationalists, and they're supersessionists.
They wouldn't take our word and put it in front of their word. So they would say, they are economic supersessionists. That it is not punitive. It is part of God's vast plan that Israel was brought to a full stop at the cross.
There's that explanation about that. Sorry for being out of sync a little bit. I don't know if you've noticed how modern politics tends to romanticize things. Romanticization is something that appeals to your emotions, not to your mind.
It does not appeal to logical thinking. It appeals to the soft side of you, the emotional side of you. And I think that what happens then, and people who study the effect of television on people, the effect of advertising, is that if you can get through to someone emotionally, they start thinking in a way which is in concert with probably wrong emotions. So it's an undermining of the way that you think.
If I can only get you to feel differently about something, your mind will follow. Does that sound familiar? Sounds like me. We have to be careful.
So the Jews don't like me. I like them. I like their Bible, but they don't like me. And the Jews are just as lost as anybody who's lost that I know.
So why would God give them further thought? Why would God restore such people? That isn't clear thinking. That's emotional thinking.
There is, there are sort of what you might say as I've said this evening, some contributing factors toward that, but it is not biblical thinking. It is not clear thinking. We are, not like my saying this as forthrightly, but essentially we are dispensationalists. And we see, as I have been saying, a dispensation of the law.
Am I under the law? I'm not under the law. I'm under grace. Was the Jew of Samuel's time under the law?
Yes, he was. So we have, you might say, a relative ease in understanding the Bible. Part of the relative ease of dispensationalism with our theology and our view of what God is going to do with Israel is simply that. The seventh dispensation is the literal 1000-year reign of Christ.
I believe in a literal 1000-year reign of Christ in which the Lord Jesus will rule with a rod of iron, with a rod of iron. This is a system of thinking that actually challenges replacement theology to the core, an extremely influential way of looking at the Bible. This is a Schofield Bible. He was a lawyer, and he produced a study Bible, which is actually extremely helpful in understanding a dispensational breakdown of the Bible, including what happens with Israel.
And it basically, after, as I say in my footnote, the various influential people that studied the Bible and came to, I would say, a deeper and broader understanding of things followed by the Niagara conferences and near the turn of the century, coming into the 20th century, basically took theology by storm. The influence of dispensational theology ran amok in the United States, Dallas Theological Seminary, and many, many other seminaries are, to this day, dispensational. So we represent an important way of understanding the Bible. And there are many professors of theology at many seminaries who are with me on this, you might say, with us on this.
But the big one, the big shocker, came that when the state of Israel came into existence in 1949, as expected by dispensationalists, you might say, the world was completely shocked. And dispensationalists said, this is the earnest of what is to come. God is going to bring these people back. God is going to save these people in his own time and in his own way.
Look, what's happening? Not only that, with the wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, and the subsequent troubles that have happened, the world looks at Israel and goes, how in the world have you survived? It defies all logic, it defies all mathematics, it defies all expectations that this little nation is the most successful nation in the Middle East. It's also the only democracy in the Middle East.
It's also the strongest economy in the Middle East. It's also the place with the greatest amount of entrepreneurship in the Middle East. Far and away, 33% of all Nobel prize winners have been Jews. What is the percentage of Jews on the Earth?
It's just under half a percent. It's less than 1%. So the power and the blessing that's with these people and how God is, I believe, protected these people leading up to the tribulation and what comes after. I believe that it is of God and the world stands amazed.
The world doesn't know why, but I think we know why. At this point, it's sort of an embarrassment of riches. How do you select some scriptures that are Old Testament passages that challenge replacement theology? Isaiah 11, think about these words, and he shall set up an instant for the nations and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the Earth.
Note that, from the four corners of the Earth. This book is written about 750, 800 B. A. 586 is the exile to Babylon.
Are they coming back from Babylon? Yes, they are. But wait a minute. Wait a minute.
This is from the four corners of the Earth. And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, which shall be left from Assyria, like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt. In other words, a very good highway. People will be coming from the four corners of the Earth with relative ease back to this place, like it was a highway, like an exodus, except coming in to the country from the four corners of the Earth.
Isaiah 60, the sons also have them that afflicted thee, shall come bending unto thee. When has that happened? The Jews are hated. When has this happened?
Shall come bending unto thee in all day that despise thee, shall bow themselves down at the souls of thy feet, and they shall call thee the city of the Lord, the Zion of the holy one of Israel. When does that happen? That is yet to come. Micah.
And many nations shall come and say, come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob. When has that happened? And he will teach us of his ways and we will walk in his paths. For the law shall go forth of Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
Verse 3, And he shall judge among many people and rebuke strong nations afar off. And here is the famous one, right, that you have heard, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares. When is that happened? And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. What we have is war, war, and more war. This is yet to come. And it will be centered around Zion.
Zech, right, 12. And I will pour upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplications. And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced. The recognition of the Messiah by the Jews.
Has that happened? That has not happened. It is coming. And they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for his only son.
And shall be in bitterness for him as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. What about the New Testament? Luke 1, An angel, and behold, you will conceive in your woman, bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. And he will be great, and will be called the son of the most high and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.
And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And his kingdom will have no end. That kingdom is not here yet. Romans 11, this is a very tough one pertaining to the salvation of Israel, which actually causes a super sessionist to back off from replacement theology.
For I would not brethren, the Roman Christians, that you would be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own conceits. That blindness in part is happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. Turn away ungodliness from Jacob. That is the Lord Jesus, and that is not happened.
Then we come, of course, to the book of Revelation upon which David McDonald gave an entire series of messages. I would have seen again a little bit. Let me just, this is slide 16. And I think this is the second to last slide.
Book of Revelation is a difficult book to handle. But consider these things. Revelation 7, we see the special servants of God during the tribulation, and who are they? Saved Jews.
Going out. What do we see about the great tribulation? Scofield's comment is footnote at the bottom of Revelation 7, 14, where we read these two important words, great tribulation. He says in his footnote, involving in a measure the whole earth, the great tribulation is distinctively the time of Jacob's trouble of Jeremiah 30.
And it's vortex, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land. I like that. Jerusalem and the Holy Land are in the center of the vortex of the book of Revelation. Unavoidable.
And in Revelation 16 and 19, where is Armageddon? It's in the Valley of Jezreal. Magiddo. The Valley.
It's in the state of Israel. This is described in the book of Revelation. Finally, an interesting point. I'll make mention of this book shortly.
Did you notice in Revelation 21 and 22 that in the eternal state there's mention of nations? The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it because God's glory illuminates it, and it's lamp. It's lamp is the lamb. The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
They will bring the glory and honor of the nations into it, and so on. So do you want to suggest that in that context Israel is excluded? That would be impossible and completely illogical. So we have every reason to believe and accept that Israel will be restored, that God is not finished with his people, and that the prophecies of the Old Testament can be relied upon to come true.
Some sources that I would recommend to your consideration. If you go on YouTube and you type Bible project followed by any book, you are going to have an enjoyable five or ten minutes. I don't know if a Kenneth Shaking's head, I guess, can't have probably done that a number of times. And what you will see is somebody who's an absolutely amazing sketch artist walk you through any given book of the Bible with nice diagrams and cartoons and an outline of breakdown.
So if you want to learn about, as I did, more about the book of Zechariah, yeah, watch the Bible project Zechariah two or three times to get a sense of it. It's an important book. It's a post-exilic book. They're back.
They're back. But they're discouraged. How do you understand this book? Chapter 12 is Future Things.
They're already back. They're building the temple. It's very important. A man named Ansti has taken some of the older brethren writers.
This is the prophecies of Isaiah expounded, and you may find that quite helpful. The writings of Ansti, often making use of some of the brethren writers. Darby was hard to read. Everyone says Darby is hard to read.
It's kind of hard to read. And some of the other famous brethren writers, Bruce Ansti, has made a couple of them more digestible. And this book here is actually right on the money, has the church replaced Israel by Michael J. Vlach, a theological evaluation.
And it's a very balanced and fair treatment. And he, as a professor at a seminary, says, why would anybody believe this? Well, in fact, he treats the other camp in great detail, in great detail. He still comes out on our side, you might say.
He still comes to the conclusion that I have left you with that God is far from, finished with the state of Israel. They will be restored to their land. And there will be salvation for the Jews, for a remnant. Shall we pray?
Our Father in heaven, we thank you for the fact that we can take confidence that you are in control of all things, you are in control of history. And yet you know the very details of our lives on an hourly basis, on a minute-by-minute basis, Lord. Your love is with us. Your spirit guides us.
You never leave us. For this, we are very thankful. We are very thankful that you would teach us to be students of your word and to rejoice in what you are doing and in what you are going to do. In Jesus' name, amen.
Thank you for your attention.