Well, we have our question and answer microphones, but before I take the first question, you have to rest for a second. I'm gonna finish last week's first question, okay? And if you remember, Andrew, I don't have it with me, but I wanna finish that. Andrew Greve asked a question. He said, Andrew, are you here? Why am I answering this if you're not here? But he said, isn't there something about every stone will be knocked down or something like that in prophecy? And so I started, but I said I would cover that this week. So what he was referring to was either Ezekiel 26, which is perhaps one of the most explicit Old Testament prophecies about stones falling, or Matthew 24. And so I'll start with the easier one that all of you have heard of, and that's the one in Matthew 24. And I'd like you to open in your Bibles if you're there, because I want to show you something. that for me is one of the great blessings of going to the Holy Land. Usually in our journeys through the land of the book, as I call it, the Holy Land, we make our way around until finally we come to the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. And if you remember, it's a 40-acre platform that would hold many, many football fields. And today, right in the center of it, Boy, that thing is trying to figure out what I'm trying to do and it's gonna do it better for me. The Dome of the Rock is right there. But we come to this corner right here. This area is called the Wailing Wall, if you've ever heard of it. And there's a plaza right here where people come. And down in this corner, The archaeologists have left a massive kind of pyramid pile of stones. Now, they're not normal stones. They're minimum one ton. blocks that are all squared off and chiseled that were used to build the massive retaining wall of this temple mount, this 40-acre platform. Look what Jesus said about that, starting in verse one of Matthew 24. Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple. He was up here prior to the eighth century Dome of the Rock. The Eastern Gate was here, and somewhere in this area, Or maybe a little bit. I mean, I'm not sure exactly. There's a great dispute over exactly where Herod's temple was, but it was somewhere there because there was these two entryways that you could come up underground stairways, and then there was this courtyard around it, and then a closer courtyard. So it probably was not exactly in the middle where the Dome of the Rock is, but right in the center here was the temple, right there. And they came out of the temple precinct area, and his disciples came up to show him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said to them, do you not see all these things? the temple, the walls, all the way around. In fact, this whole area here. was a forest of columns. Herod, King Herod, the butcher of Bethlehem, Herod, had seen something similar in Athens when he fled Jerusalem, when he was trying to get the emperor to get on his side, and he saw this beautiful building in Athens. It's still there, by the way. If you ever go to Athens, you can still see the building Herod saw. It's not the Parthenon. It's the one down in the, Agora area down below, but he saw the columns and he said I will make one grander than that and he did there was a forest of Columns probably 120 of them. They were probably 60 plus feet tall and they were adorned with many of them with gold because all the pilgrims would, all the Jewish people coming back to do pilgrimage in Jerusalem would leave their offerings of gold as gifts to God and Herod took them and he was so rich he didn't need them. He just spread them around and they had gold olive branches and gold grapes hanging down from it. It was just elaborate. And then the whole top of the temple was covered with gold. So they were kind of, look at verse two. They said, do you see all these, or verse one, you see all this? It was just probably glowing in the sunlight. And Jesus said to them, you see all those things? So surely I say to you, and here's what Andrew was asking about, verse two, not one stone shall be left here upon another that shall not be, and what are the last two words of verse two? Thrown down. Now that takes us to this little pile, this pyramid pile of rocks. Down at the base, this whole area was leveled to the flat pavement level. They took every part of all the buildings and the Romans took them and tumbled them over the edge and they just made it a flat platform and built their own big structure on top of it to to pollute what the Jews had had there. And so Jesus said this whole top would just be all cleared off. And he says, it's going to be not one stone left upon another. Just the bottom kind of, you ever seen when tornadoes go through? And there's just the slab like in Oklahoma because they don't have basements. It's just a slab. That's all that was left up there. But all along the outside here are these piles of rocks. And so I take people that I said, everybody likes to see fulfilled prophecy. Jesus said in AD 30, that not one stone of this most beautiful structure, one of the most of the ancient world, in fact, coming in on this side, was an archway that was the largest archway anywhere built in the ancient world. Anywhere. The largest unsupported And it was just a wonder, and it was a bridge that came down from the temple and went down. It's just unbelievable. And the Romans built a fire under that and caused the whole thing to collapse, and they just stripped everything off here and threw it down here. A.D. 30, Jesus said, not one stone will be left, and it happened in A.D. 70. So 40 years later. Remember, 40 is always a number of testing and all that. But did you know even what Jesus said in verse 2, Remember, Andrew's question was, not one stone prophecy. The place, that is, is in Matthew 24. But the prediction Jesus was going on is actually back in chapter nine of Daniel. So back up, you're in Matthew, go back to Daniel nine. And this is probably Daniel nine, 27, is perhaps if there's one prophetic passage, and I will start, let me see, I'll start on, oh, let's see. Actually, it starts in verse 24, and it goes all the way down through verse 27. Now, look at all the elements. It says in verse 24, 70 weeks are determined. That's interesting. And there will be in verse 25, there'll be seven weeks and 62 weeks. That's halfway down verse 25 of Daniel 9. And the street should be built again and the wall, even in troublesome times. Now look at verse 26. It says after 62 weeks, Messiah will be cut off. So verse 26 says, and this is Christ's crucifixion, Messiah, that's Christ. Remember, Messiah's Meshiach is the Hebrew word that's translated in Greek Christos or Christ. But Messiah cut off, which is the crucifixion. So it says that in verse 26, not for himself. In other words, it was a substitutionary atonement. But look at this. This is fascinating. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. So right back here, Christ is gonna be crucified AD 7, or I mean AD 30. That's the first part of the verse. The second part of the verse says that the people that crucify Christ, the crucifiers, who are they? Who actually nailed Jesus to the cross? Romans, yeah. So those people are the Romans. So the people, the crucifiers, look what it says in verse 26. The people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city. Who destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70? The Romans. I mean, that's just plain old history. AD 70, Titus, The Roman general came and took his legions, surrounded the city, starved them to death, basically, until they were just throwing bodies over the wall because people were dying so fast and they didn't have any place to bury them. They were starving. They would go out and let the Romans capture them or kill them because it was worse inside the city than being captured or killed. But in AD 70, Look what it says they will do. They will destroy the city and the temple, the sanctuary. And that's exactly what they did in AD 70. Now, what Andrew didn't talk about, but is right there is, it says the people of the prince who is to come. It's interesting. The prince that is to come in the Old Testament is just one that title, the prince who is to come, is one of 30 plus titles or names of the Antichrist. This one that comes at the end of days and does bad things. And that's one of the centers of prophecy. It says in verse 27, he, Who is the he of verse 27? The people of the prince. So the prince is the antecedent for the he. This prince will confirm a covenant with many for one week. In the middle of the week he shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering and on the wings of an abomination. Do you remember Jesus saying in Matthew 24, see Jesus, Matthew 24, his sermon is totally tied to this Daniel 9 passage. So, back to Andrew's question, let's not get too far away from his question. Basically, he was asking about prophecy and something about stones and flattened and nothing standing. In the New Testament, That's the key Matthew 24 we just looked at. But there's another one. And since Andrew's not here to tell us what he meant, let's look at the other one. It's in Ezekiel. So now you're in Daniel, back to the book just before it, Ezekiel. And this is probably statistically one of the most phenomenal. In fact, there's a guy named Peter Stoner in the 50s, the 50s, like, you know, 65 years ago, 60 years ago. This man named Peter Stoner, wrote a book about probability. And I think it's published by Moody Press or something. It's probably not in print anymore. But he was a statistician, and he was always doing statistical analyses, and he liked using the state of Texas. And he would say the probability of finding, now let's see. I'm not a very good geographer, but there we go. That's kind of Texas. How do you like that? I just know it's the southern county of Oklahoma where I used to live. Oklahoma is up here. And down there is that lower county where they have all the oil. But Stoner would, this Christian statistician mathematician guy, would He would say, if you covered Texas, you know, the largest state south of Alaska, if you covered Texas with silver dollars, shows 1950s, I mean, people would have remembered silver dollars then. And he said, you didn't just have them flat, you would cover the state a foot thick. And if you put one red painted silver dollar in the mix, and all of this was a foot thick of silver dollars. He said, statistically, the likelihood that the following set of predictions would all exactly take place. This is one of his in Ezekiel 26, okay? So the probability of Ezekiel 26 happening statistically First of all, who's Ezekiel? Ezekiel was a companion of Jeremiah and Daniel, so they're buddies. Ezekiel, the prophet, was an unusual character. He was a prophet and a priest. Wasn't a king, or it would sound like Christ, prophet, priest, king. He was a prophet who was formerly a priest before Nebuchadnezzar came and destroyed everything. Nebuchadnezzar came actually three times to Jerusalem. In 586 B.C. he took Daniel. In 597, which is prior, remember in B.C. the numbers are going up the further you go into the past, so into the past further, this is closer to our time, this is longer ago, he took Ezekiel. And in 605, he came the first time and took a bunch of people. So in the middle deportation, Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem three times. First time, you know, kind of knocked down a few things, took their money, subjugated them, told them don't act up. They acted up. So he came a second time, hauled off a lot more people, including the author of this book, Ezekiel. So in 597, Ezekiel goes off to Babylon he starts writing About 592 and he goes for about 20 years till about 570 I mean this is just basic what you have to learn when you're in Bible school And so during his 22 years a lot of history is happening first of all 586 the fall of Jerusalem in 586 Nebuchadnezzar as in King Nebuchadnezzar and the fiery furnace and the three men and Daniel Einstein that whole book Nebuchadnezzar destroys Jerusalem. He kills the people, hauls them away to Babylon. That's called the Babylonian captivity, last 70 years. Ezekiel is in there during that time, in Babylon. When Nebuchadnezzar got done with Jerusalem in 586, he is headed home, and he says, whoa, got the whole army out here. Might as well do something else. So what does he do? He keeps conquering. He just goes north of Jerusalem to the greatest maritime power on earth at the time. They were called the Phoenicians. If you ever heard of Hannibal and the Elephants and Carthage, that's the same crowd. They were the mariners of the ancient world. They sailed the Mediterranean and beyond. They went out into the Atlantic at times. They were really well-known Phoenicians. And their headquarters was called Tyre, T-Y-R-E. And Tyre, you all know Tyre. Hiram, the head of, the king of this place, was a friend of David's and supplied David's son Solomon, what? Cedars of Lebanon, yeah. Because he was in Tyre, which today is a Palestinian refugee camp. The PLO runs it in Tyre and Sidon, which is in Lebanon today. But Tyre, in the time of the Bible, was one of the wealthiest, most glamorous, I mean, they were the people who had it all. They were the trade people, they took the Egyptian stuff to Rome, you know, or to the Etruscans before Rome, and the Greeks, and they were just, they were the expert mariners. And now look at chapter 26, because what happens is, in verse, chapter 26 of Ezekiel, God has Ezekiel prophesied the doom of Tyre. And he is very, biblical prophecy is usually very, very clear. And it came to pass in the 11th year, on the first day of the month, that the word of the Lord came to me, saying, son of man, because Tyre is set against Jerusalem, all that stuff, therefore, verse three, the Lord am against you, O Tyre, and will cause many nations to come up against you, as the sea causes its waves to come against you. Now, to hear that would be like for us to say, I don't know what you'd think would be an impossible situation, but to say, like, the Japanese will run out of money, or the Swiss will run out of, you know, money, because they have all the gold there, all the storage. It was just like blowing smoke for Ezekiel to say that, because Jerusalem was destroyed, smoldering, and the most powerful maritime, I mean, how would you even fight them? Nobody had boats back then. Except they had the monopoly on it. And God says, I'm gonna bring many nations against you, and cause, as the sea causes the waves to come up, I'm gonna send nations to you. So, let's just do a quick, if you did a, kind of a Wikipedia, which, you know, is mixed reliability. In 1000 BC, That's the time of David. Tyre was great. By the time we get to 586 BC, Tyre ruled, kind of like Britannia. It was kind of like the British Empire. They had colonies all over the place, and they were fearsome. In fact, crucifixion was invented by, most likely, these people. The Carthaginians used it, because Carthage today, Carthage, you know, is in northern Africa. When they excavate the city of Hannibal, they find literally tens of thousands of babies that had been burned alive in their worship of Molech. They were the Molech baby-burning people that imported all their horrible stuff to Jerusalem. So by 586, they were decadent, they were cruel, they were heartless. In fact, every time you built a new building, you buried a baby alive in the foundation as an appeasement to the gods. They were cruel, heartless. Kind of like American abortion industry today, right? It's the same thing, only a little more streamlined. But these people were fearsome. I mean, if you can kill a baby without batting an eye, you are rough and tough. And to say that those people would be destroyed when they had the best navy, they had all the Hannibal elephant stuff that we see later, and all that went on with the Roman Empire, they were strong. But look what the Lord says. Now here's the prophecy starting in verse four. The walls of Tyre will be broken down. To us that means nothing. You read Herodotus or any of the historians of the time, the walls of Tyre were 15 stories high, that's 150 feet high, by 15 feet thick. And so to say that a city that was perched on the edge of the Mediterranean that had 15 story high walls and a fleet moored behind it that could fight you and whisk around their soldiers anywhere, was quite an interesting prophecy. I'm sure people chuckled at that. And I will also break down her towers. So, reigning the city, there were four towers. So, the walls have to come down, the towers have to come down, and then it says, I mean, this is very detailed, very precise. And I will also scrape her dust from her, So there's gonna be some rubble removal. You know, somehow they're gonna scrape up the dust. And I will make her like the top of a rock. For what? A place for the spreading of nets. That would be like saying Manhattan is going to be farmed again and you're going to see cotton fields where all the, just, it looks like a whole forest of office towers and skyscrapers. I'm talking about here, Manhattan, New York City. If someone came along, from a burning city, an occupied person, a loser of a battle, Ezekiel, and say, Manhattan will be leveled, plowed, cotton growing in rows. You'd go, uh-huh, yeah, that's a good one, you know? And flat, and nets spread on it. Okay, this is what our friend with the silver dollars said. To say, and actually Ezekiel said it in 592, that's when he wrote chapter 26, that's what this 11th year, maybe sometime after 597 to 592, he wrote that. For him to say that at the height of Tyre's, Phoenicia's power, He said, to say that anyone could knock down those walls, that anyone could continue and knock down their towers, and that anyone that did that would bother to remove the rubble, and that it would get so flat people would be attracted to it and fish and spread their nets to dry. He said the likelihood of that is like 1 times 10 to, I think he said the 16th or something like that, which is how he got Texas covered with a foot of silver dollars with one red one. That's 1 to 10 to the 16th. The likelihood of you kicking around through the foot of those silver dollars to find the red one. Okay? So how did this happen? Well, basically, Nebuchadnezzar conquers Jerusalem, and in 585, he's headed home, and someone says, hey, why not knock on the doors of that big city? We got our whole army here, and fight him, and he did. And basically, verse four, to destroy the walls of Tyre, Nebuchadnezzar started a campaign that lasted for eight years. till 5, about 78. From 585 to 578, for those seven, eight years, he besieged and fought against Tyre, and the only thing that he was able to do is to break down the walls and the towers. And just as it looked like he was gonna get them, They all jumped in their boats, and there was an island off the coast a half a mile, and they just all had another fortress there. And all the Phoenicians just moved by boat, took all their money and everything valuable out of the city, moved to the island a half a mile off the coast, and let Nebuchadnezzar come into an empty city. So he went home and gave up. And so the first two, happened. We had this 585 after Jerusalem till 577 with Nebuchadnezzar. And he did one and two of this prophecy. And then nothing happens and and Tyre goes on even more, making money, landing colonies, until guess who comes along? Remember who's next? His name is Alexander the Great. You know, back then people didn't have to have last names. They just were so famous. You know, David, Abraham, Alexander, you know, the Great. And he came along and he started, they're still rich, they're still powerful, they're still hauling in the loot. and he was conquering the world, and they kept running away on their little boats, and he couldn't, and they'd go to their little island. So Alexander was not to be deterred, and he went and took, he knocked down, and notice what it says here, break down her towers. He will also scrape her dust from her and make her like the top of a rock. Alexander started a campaign, and he continued after he died, because, you know, he didn't, he died young. His generals finished this off, and they leveled the mainland city, and they took all the rubble to build a one-half mile long causeway. And they Is there an Ian Causeway? There we go. I wish the board would correct my spelling, not my drawing, you know. But he and his generals completely leveled the city of Tyre and actually made it flat, built a causeway, and then flattened the city on the island so completely that there was no evidence that there was ever a city on that island. And today, if you go up the refugee camps, you'll see that island was used, and you can see ancient lithographs, it was used as, what does it say in verse five? As a place of the spreading of the nets. So in 597, or whenever Ezekiel first said this, chapter 26, it looked impossible. Then it looked like Nebuchadnezzar did something, but he didn't do what the Bible said. But then comes along Alexander, and even though after his death he wasn't there, but his generals finished the job, and to level the city, scrape it off, I mean, all this is just normal history. This isn't in the Bible. You notice none of this is just the prophecies here, but history records that between Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, and his generals, to the T, this was fulfilled, which to me is fascinating because if God, you notice that somewhere here, right here, I sit in Daniel 9, the same God that predicted that there was going to be the Romans destroying Jerusalem, knocking down the temple, knocking down the walls after they crucified Christ, and that the people of the prince, the Roman people, would be the ones that produced for us this world ruler. And the Bible says this world ruler is going to only allow people to buy and sell with a what? A number, yeah, the mark which is a number. Did you know we're already there? I mean, I have a pocket full of numbers, don't you? I mean, 6355050299129469. Did you get that? Those numbers on credit cards, you can't buy without numbers nowadays. Try and run a car without having a number. Try having your paycheck given to you in money. It's electronic transfer. And what's interesting is God said that this world ruler would rule the world basically with digital or numeric buying and selling, instead of commodity buying and selling. If I can trade you a silver coin for grain, no one can stop me. But if I can only buy stuff digitally, and if one person basically runs the back office. Have you ever gone to Speedway and put in your card and it goes, err, go see cashier. There's something wrong with your card. Doesn't work. You poke it in all you want. How would you like for someone to say, you, Christian, can't buy Unless you say you're not a Christian, I'm going to turn your credit card off. That's fine today. There are three million preppers in America. That doesn't mean that they wear their pants a certain way or whatever. It means they're preparing for something. But no prepper can prepare at a global level to anybody controlling all of commerce. You cannot buy, you cannot sell without a number that's controlled by the prince of the people that came to crucify Christ and knock down the city of Rome. So basically what I'm saying is that if God predicted through Daniel, Daniel lived six centuries before Christ, 600 years before Christ actually, 500 and some years before Christ. And he predicted detailed, What would happen? Christ would come. Christ would be cut off or crucified. The people that crucified Christ are going to destroy the city of Jerusalem and the sanctuary. And the same one that predicted all that says, after him was coming, a prince who would digitally control the world. You know what's amazing? The same God that's predicted the future is the only one that's told us about the past. He tells us about our origin. where we came from, our purpose, why we're here, and our destiny. And the same God that wrote prophecy has done all those things. So I'm so glad Andrew asked that question, and I would keep going if, you know, if he had any more, but now it's time. Where's my friend that was so patient? Come on up. And you have to say, hello, my name is, and can't wait. Yeah, hello, my name is Frank Coulter, and I always thought that when believers died, that they went to heaven, and that was someplace far away, probably up, and whatever all that would entail. But then I was wondering, what part would the new Jerusalem and the new earth play in that eternal state? Who's gonna dwell in these places? The new earth, as it talks in Revelation, is coming down from heaven, Is that going to replace the Jerusalem on earth, or what? I can't quite figure out the significance of how they're going to be used in eternity. What a wonderful—how do you spell holter? It's holter, K-O-L-T-E-R. Say it again, K— Right, O-L-T-E-R. How many of you know Frank? Raise your hand. Okay, all the rest of you say, hello Frank. There, we should learn people's names every night that we have, because I've seen you around here forever and never gotten that written down. Okay, quickly, multiple parts of his question, people die, where do they go up into heaven? Basically, It's very interesting to think about. The quick thing is this, that when there are dimensions, they can all be existing in the same place, you just can't see the other ones. Have you ever wondered how Jesus could show up here and disappear and show up there? Where was he in between? Most likely, just like we are kind of held in a little box of four dimensions, you know? Boy, that thing likes to draw. Look at that. This thing is clever. Whenever you draw anything close to square, try and... So I'll be off. There we go. Four dimensions. We have length, breadth, depth, and time. So we have matter, space and matter, and we know the primal forces. But basically, everything has length and breadth and depth that gives it spatiality, and then we know about time. We don't know much beyond that. Einstein Hawking are going into, you know, in their quantum this and, you know, their unified field theory of relativity and all that and figuring out that when you go faster it changes time. They're just starting to realize that there's, in fact, even now with all the astrophysical work being done, there's more out there. Basically, let's say this. The ancient philosophers used to say that there are probably, one of them said there are 14 dimensions. So if you think about that, if we're down here, these are people that only, there was a book called Flatlanders, it was people that were only two-dimensional, they only had width and length, but they didn't have height. And so we, They couldn't understand us because they only saw things flat and they didn't have that third dimension. And then of course they didn't know anything about time. But if we're down here in these, you know, dimensions of 1, 2, 3, 4 with time, anything in this next dimension we wouldn't be able to see or comprehend. But when it came into ours, we would see it, but when it came out. And so basically, I mean, I don't want to go so deep, we'll all drown, but if we're on earth, it is very possible that heaven is just How do you like that? I mean, that, wow, it's, come on, will you leave my drawings alone? I'm having enough trouble doing it, that heaven is around us. And so, and I've said this many times, because when I was a little boy, my parents always helped me. They let me make an ant farm once, and my ant farm was this thin, two pieces of plexiglass with sand, close enough that the ants could never be out of sight. They were stuck between the two pieces of plexiglass. And I could see them But they really couldn't see me. I would try. I would, you know, do stuff and they just busily were going up and hauling everything down and stuffing it in the basement and doing what ants do. It's very possible that we, when the Bible says that we are before the eyes of the Lord, In fact, that word, amprosthen, is actually before the face of the Lord. It says that we live out our lives on earth, and here's God's face looking at us. He is looking at us and seeing all of us on earth, and the face of God is watching us. We're right there. How is that possible? It's the dimensionality. So, let's get to heaven and everything. Basically, we are here and this is physical existence, this is spiritual existence. We are living in a universe that has a physical dimension and a spiritual dimension. Unsafe people are only aware of the physical dimension and they're aware when spirits come down here. And when they do, they call them demons, witches, ghosts, or extraterrestrial things. Did you know in the whole universe, there's only God, angels, and us? And if somebody's moving something around on Mars, and moving stuff up there that our space probes see, if we're not doing it, God's not messing around with Mars. There are not extraterrestrials. Did you know this is part of evolutionary thought? There are some from us, you know, primeval stuff, that have ascended in evolution so much higher than us that they're coming back to tell us secrets. That's exactly the description of a demon. Demons are smarter. They are higher. They are more powerful. They know every language. They know all of history. They don't sleep. They're just intelligences with vast powers. Limited by God, but vast powers. So, our whole culture, like I said this morning, that God has written a guide for immortality, and the rich and famous say, anything but that. We'll cry out genocide, you know, flash freeze us and download our brains, but we won't listen to the guide. because of the God of this world has blinded their minds. So when a person dies, the only thing that dies is their physical body. we are in the image of God. And so our body goes to the dust, and our spirit goes into the spirit world, and basically in the Old Testament, all the spirits were in one of two places. They were in Hades, but Hades, Luke 16 tells us, has a happy side, and an unhappy side. Okay, so we'll go like this. There's a happy side and unhappy side of the grave. And in the happy side, Abraham was there, Moses, and Lazarus. And the rich man was over here. And between them was an uncrossable chasm. We covered that last time. And so when someone dies, In the Old Testament, their body goes to the dust and they go to this place. Now that place is always described, I can't draw a circle, as downwards. So it's somewhere in the earth. After the, and we covered this last time, after the crucifixion of Christ, Jesus went and emptied this side and took everybody there to paradise. And if you want to know where paradise is, it shows up again in Revelation 2 and 3, and it's synonymous with heaven. And so now, we're talking about your question about whether the new heavens and the new Jerusalem, what they have in connection with the present and the present Old City of Jerusalem. Okay, and the Bible explains that. So let's go there, because we're gonna run out of time. Go to 2 Peter 3, because the scriptures tell us something which should temper all of our views of this place, lovely as it is. The Apostle Peter, says this, verse 10 of 2 Peter chapter 3. So 2 Peter 3, what about new heavens, new earth, and all that? 2 Peter 3 is kind of the big picture of what's gonna happen. And it says in verse 10, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. What's the day of the Lord? The day of the Lord is code, if you read the whole book of Joel, Joel is all about the day of the Lord. So is Isaiah. has many references to the day of the Lord. Also, Zechariah, especially 12 to 14. So this is an identifiable thing, day of the Lord. The day of the Lord is the time of God's wrath when he comes back to judge the earth. We would call it the second coming of Christ. And it says the day of the Lord, the second coming of Christ, the judgment, the final, you know, everything, will come as a thief in the night, in which, now remember, Peter is just lumping it all together. The other prophets tell us that Christ comes. He divides the sheep and the goats. He sends the goats away from him into punishment. The sheep populate the earth and all the promises of the Old Testament finally come true. There is no carnivorous animals or no poisonous animals. That perfect time, not mentioned by name in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, it's called the 1,000 years. And we covered that last time too. But after all that's over, verse 10, The Lord ends everything with this. The day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. The heavens will pass away with great noise. The elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and Jerusalem and all the national parks and Manhattan and Kalamazoo will be burned up. Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved. So not only burned, verse 11, dissolved. And you notice what it says, it says that the heavens and the earth, there is nothing left in the physical world that doesn't go through this dissolution, this Atomic level, when it says the elements, that was the Greek word for the elemental level. This is at an atomic level, not even a molecular, an atomic level of absolute dissolving with great noise and great heat, fervent heat, almost sounds like fission or fusion. Atomic and then it says since all these things will be dissolved verse 11 What manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness looking for and hastening? The coming of the day of God because of which the heavens will be dissolved verse 12 says being on fire The elements will melt with fervent heat as if we didn't even hear it the first time he repeats Peter repeats it Nevertheless verse 13 according to his promise. We look for new heavens and a new earth now what's interesting about the new New, there's two kinds of new. There's neo, and there's also, come on Greek scholars, I haven't done this in so long, but there's two words for new. There's new for new, like if I get a new pair of shoes, it's new the same. But if a guy gets a new wife, it's new different, okay? So, new different. And so, if I get a new pair of shoes that I really like, they're probably gonna look just like these, and this is the third pair. I just like them, and I just get new ones just like them. That's the word that's used by Peter for new heavens and new earth. In other words, it's gonna be new just like this. That means grass will be green, water will be blue, bluish green, and that things will be like that. It's not like in the new heavens and new earth, God's gonna change everything and all of a sudden it's gonna be purple. You know, God already has set his color scheme that he loves. And the new heavens and the new earth are gonna be just like everything here, only as they were intended to perfectly be. And if you remember, before the fall, that there wasn't death, there wasn't dying, there wasn't disease, there wasn't destruction, and sin had not entered. And Romans 8 tells us that the whole universe is groaning to be liberated from the curse of sin. That's why If all the universe and all of the earth and everything on it is going to be destroyed and God starts over with new heavens and new earth, where are all those other civilizations? You know, out there somewhere, other planets, you know, they're always looking for something out there. God says the entire universe is going to be dissolved and reconstituted and made the way sinlessly that He wants us to see it. So, to answer back to, let's see, what were all the points you had? Because we only have 30 seconds to not be late. We got too far. People die, new heaven, new earth, replace the present. Yes, the present ones are completely destroyed, reconstituted, and then God makes the city of God that he's preparing, that he's made in a room for us, and he's bringing it down, and if you know, it's a 1,200 mile cube, and it comes down to earth, which is a 8,000 diameter circle, and a 1,200 mile cube, that is physically impossible. It would make too big of a wobble, it would ruin something. But this is a whole new universe that we're entering into. And if God's gonna put a 1,200 mile cube on our little planet, it's gonna really be neat to see. And he has this, and when Paul saw it, he said, it's inexpressible what I saw. And God gave him a thorn in his flesh, because he would have been proud, because he saw heaven, and John saw it. And that's where every one of us that know Jesus Christ are headed. So Frank, did I say enough, or do you want me to pick up next week? Write some more down, because people are running out of sitting time, okay? And I'll answer more. That's good, yeah, let's all stand while it's good, and thank you for coming to our concert. Let's bow for a word of prayer, and as we do, pray throughout the week for the, Mark told us this afternoon in the worship subcommittee that 3,900 invitations have been passed out by the saints here for this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Now pray that the Lord will bring people attached to those for his glory. Let's bow. "'Thank you, Father, that I have not seen or ear heard, "'neither has it entered into the hearts of man, "'the things which you have prepared for us, "'but you have revealed them to us. "'In your word and we are registered in heaven.'" And I pray that we would live like those that are registered in heaven, realizing this world is not our home. We're just tent dwellers and aliens, but we're left here as your ambassadors to reconcile men and women to you, O Christ. And help us to do that with joy and hope and peace and expectancy as we're kind and tenderhearted and forgiving those around us. In the precious name of Jesus, we pray. And all God's people said, amen. God bless you as you go.