Israel–God’s Timepiece

What this episode covers

Please enjoy the audio by our Guest speaker One of the hardest things I have about coming here is I’m a one-off. I’m only here speaking one time a year. And I tend to be a teacher, and I speak straight through a book. So right now, I’m in Acts in our service at the church I pastor. And I’m in Ezekiel in Sunday school, and I just go straight through. And so, when I have to do a one-off, it’s something different for me. And I usually try to squeeze too much in and probably go too fast. But here we go. At the end of World War II, towards the end of World War II, the war in Europe had died down, and the war in the Pacific had escalated. The Allied forces were making advances. They outnumbered the Japanese with their warships and their airplanes. But it still was tough fighting. And even though the Allies could make advances in Southeast Asia with all the islands, the Japanese were able to move their troops, move their warships, and cause quite a few fatalities to the Allies. There was no warning system, and so the Allies came up with the idea of putting Australians and New Zealanders and some British people on the islands in Southeast Asia with a radio and some binoculars. And they would be the early warning signals. And they would call in, or they would tell of airstrikes and prepare the Allies to meet those. And it made a huge difference. It made a big enough difference that the Japanese went out of their way to hunt them down, captured many of them, and executed everyone that they found. In Madang, and I think there’s a picture of it here, maybe. Yeah, there’s a memorial to the coast watchers in Madang, Papua New Guinea. We’ve been down there to see this. And there’s a plaque there, and the plaque says this. To those that watched, warned, and died so that others would live. Watched, warned, and died so others might live. The idea of watching is kind of the theme of this teaching here today. I’ve been in Ezekiel, and in Ezekiel, kind of an interesting book. If you ever get to read it, it gives you a good description of the cherubim’s. I should have brought a picture of the cherubim’s that you can see. They have four faces. They have a man, a lion, an eagle, and an ox. And so, these faces go out, and they have six wings and kind of strange beings. But Ezekiel had to do a lot of crazy things. But one of the things he did is he was prophesying that what God had already determined was going to happen to Judah. And then God said to him, you are to be a watchman. You’re to be a watchman. And a watchman was a man that typically went on the walls, and he would look for the danger. And for Ezekiel, that meant symbolically, he was to look for the signs of the very judgment that he is predicting is going to come. In John 16, verse 3, Jesus talking to the Pharisees, the religious rulers, he says to them, hypocrites, you can figure out the weather. You can figure out the weather, but you don’t understand the signs. Signs of the times. You don’t understand. You can do the weather, but you can’t figure out the signs of the times. In 1st Thessalonians, it says this, but you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this day may overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light, sons of the day. We are not of the night, nor of the darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep as others do, but let us watch and be sober. The idea of sober there is valuing the things that are important. Be sober, value the things that are important. But it tells them to watch. Now, it’s interesting that he tells them to watch, and he’s talking about the rapture. Remember, Thessalonians is talking about the rapture. He tells them to watch, and there’s no signs for the rapture. Do you realize that? There’s no signs in Scripture that you could look at to say, this is when the rapture could happen. From the book of Acts on, the rapture could have happened any time. There’s no prerequisite for the rapture to happen.

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