This section of scripture, starting in chapter 40 of the book of Ezekiel, is an exposition of the Millennial Temple. Nine chapters in excruciatingly great detail. And as I've mentioned in the past, this section of scripture was the last book that the Jews put into their Bible, which is our Old Testament, they call it the Tanakh, because they argued so much about how did it fit. Because the sacrificial practices, the law that's laid out, the temple that's laid out, didn't fit with Solomon's temple or the Mosaic law. It didn't fit with any of it. There were similarities. But it didn't fit and they kept trying to understand why is this? Now the Jews knew that there was coming on this earth a kingdom where the Messiah, HaMashiach they call him, was going to run the government of the world. They just didn't know for how long. They didn't know when, they just knew it was gonna happen. And they started to realize that this book is a description of that. So they added it in. And we are blessed, we are blessed. This is going to be, we're gonna go over this for a number of weeks now, because there's a huge volume of material here. It's an exposition of the temple, but more importantly, the messianic kingdom. This has been known for many, many ages, and there's a lot of Old Testament prophecies about the Messianic Kingdom. And without a fundamental understanding of this kingdom, we miss a lot about the Bible. And you know, I've talked about this a lot, that most seminaries have been dumbing down the Bible, not teaching Hebrew, not teaching the Old Testament extensively. uh... and it makes it very difficult to understand the whole counsel of God and I know I've quoted from Acts chapter 20 where the Apostle Paul is admonishing the Ephesians he said look I talked to the whole counsel of God the whole counsel so important to know the whole Bible God has given us these scriptures he's given us a lot of information about this kingdom Many people in many churches today will declare themselves as New Testament churches. And they just don't use the Old Testament. It's unfortunate because there is just a very, very little bit of information about the kingdom in the New Testament. Almost all in the Old Testament. And I'm going to touch on those things. The Jews in the New Testament knew that a Messiah which means the anointed one, was going to come. They knew this. The Orthodox did. Those who love God, devout if you will, and that he was going to set up his kingdom. But they didn't have any time of when this was going to happen. and people kept pushing it off. Well, it's going to happen later. It's going to happen later. And then they thought, when they saw Jesus appearing, and he had declared himself to be the Messiah, which we're going to look at that in just a second, this is the guy that's going to throw off the yoke of the Romans. He's going to get these occupiers out of here. They didn't realize at the time that he was going to come twice once as a lamb and the second time as the king. One of my professors describes his second advent as coming like General Patton with pearl-handled revolvers taking the world back. It's essentially what he's going to do when he comes back. Now the only things in the New Testament that are different about the kingdom, or should I say not different but added in, is the fact that its duration is going to be a thousand years. We see that stated very clearly in the 20th chapter of the book of Revelation. And that it would end with an eternal order. The last chapter in the book of Revelation describes it as the new Jerusalem coming down. but a further examination gives us this is the new world that's going to be created after the messianic kingdom. So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about these concepts so that we can develop the full understanding of them as the scripture lays this out. Now it's important to understand that these guys that were with Jesus all knew he was the Messiah and they all knew that the Messiah was coming And that there's no shortage of people today that are saying Jesus never said he was the Messiah. He never said he was God. I don't know why they say that because they rely on people not reading the Bible, not studying the Bible. So I'm going to read a passage from the fourth chapter of John to you. Jesus, when his apostles were out shopping, was talking to this Samaritan woman. And Jesus said to her, woman, believe me, the hour cometh when neither in this mountain or in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father. Ye worship that which ye know not. We, the Jews, worship that which we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth. And such doth the Father seek to be his worshiper. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman saith unto him, I know that Messiah cometh, he that is called Christ. When he come he will declare unto us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he. Well, that can't be any clearer. Jesus is declaring himself to be the Messiah. Now there's plenty of other passages that refer to the characteristics of the Messiah and him declaring that he is because of what he's doing. But this one is one of the clearest. Jesus also announced the kingdom, which is the subject of these last nine verses. excuse me, the last nine chapters in the book of Ezekiel. Look what he says in Mark 1 verses 14 to 15. Now this is launching his ministry here. Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came unto Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye and believe the gospel. Now he was proclaiming the anointed time, the announced time, when he would be here. He was affirming the Old Testament prophecies of which there are hundreds. Matter of fact, we've got a seminary class this summer starting in two weeks about the Messianic prophecies. I've got 78 recorded lectures that Professor Baker is going to be going over in this class. There are two terms frequently found in the New Testament, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, and it's important to make a distinction because one is inside the other, if you will. They appear in the Gospels and in a few other places, but the distinction is the Kingdom of God means all the saved people of all times. I also call that the invisible church. Because you can't see who is saved. And we call the visible church, the names on the plaques and the buildings and so on. And within those, there are people that are saved and people that are unsaved. And you don't know who it is except through their fruit. That's how you can get a good inclination. But the kingdom of God is all the elect, if you will, of all ages that are truly saved. It's more inclusive. The term kingdom of heaven is a messianic term. It refers specifically to the time on this earth of a thousand years when God himself in the body of Jesus the Messiah is going to be running the government from Jerusalem. It's also called a Davidic or a Messianic establishment. So the kingdom of God on earth over Israel is gonna place them in a leadership position in the government over the world. And we'll be looking at that structure throughout the next number of weeks as we go over the Messianic kingdom. Now, Jesus announced this kingdom of God as being at hand or just immediately available. That's the salvation, the salvation. It was rejected by the ruling Jews of his time because they had been embroiled in what we call rabbinic Judaism. Instead of following the Bible, their Bible, the Old Testament, the Tanakh, they had gotten into these crazy legalistic principles that they had laid out in what they called the Talmud. The Talmud has 5,000 plus laws in it. And instead, they're all man's laws, too, by the way. It never says it's God's word like the Old Testament says. There's no thus saith the Lord in the Talmud, but they had put this together to try and define what God had said, and they ended up twisting it to the point where it's unrecognizable. If you've ever tried to read the Talmud, it really epitomizes the old joke, wherever there's two Jews, there's three opinions. And it's huge, it's just huge. And that's what they were wrapped up with. And here comes Jesus speaking the Old Testament, because he wrote it. and they did not like it at all so the ruling Jews rejected him and as a result the kingdom of heaven on this earth has been delayed until after the tribulation because the Jews rejected what Jesus had given him they did not accept the gospel and there was a new structure in God's working in this world that was created at the time Jesus left, and it's called the church, the ecclesia. The Gentiles accepted it in masses. The early church were all Jewish believers, but they weren't very many from the leadership. because they were too proud, too self-assured in their rabbinic Judaism, and not the Bible, to know that the Messiah was here. Just astymies me to even think about that, that the God of the universe came to these people and he killed them. We've got to get rid of this guy. He's just, you know, telling us things we don't want to hear. Does that sound familiar with what the world's doing today? I mean, somebody was just shot at a baseball game, a political baseball game, because somebody didn't like what he was saying. Well, that's the world. You can see these things being described in the first part of the fifth chapter of Galatians, where Paul calls it the fruits of the flesh. This is what the fruits of the flesh do. And in the last half of that chapter, he calls the fruits of the spirit. When God's spirit lives in you, the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. And then he ends up with, there's no law against these things. There's no law against these things. These men that were running the temple, running the Sanhedrin, the authorities, just rejected Jesus and the author of the kingdom. Now, as I said, most of the early church were Jewish, the very, very early church. They understood who Jesus was and what he said, and they knew what to do, to believe on the Lord Jesus and they would be saved. Now Jesus told his apostles that they should pray to the Father through the Son, but they should pray for this kingdom to come on the earth, on the world. Now we call this the Lord's Prayer, but it's really the Apostle's Prayer, because he wanted to teach them, this is the way you pray, come on you guys, do this. And I've written it down for you here, and I'm sure you all know it very well. After this manner, therefore pray ye, our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as it is in heaven, so on earth. Now that is really clear. And that's what Jesus is telling them to do. You pray that kingdom is going to come. You pray that kingdom is going to come. And at the point after his resurrection and 40 some days later when he was ascending back to heaven, These apostles were asking him, hey, you're going to set up the kingdom now or what? When are you going to do it? When are you going to do it? They were waiting for the kingdom. They knew what it was going to be like. And that passage in Acts is very, very interesting because the text there in Acts 1 verses 6 to 7 says, When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power. Now the restoration of the kingdom They were talking about, one, the theocratic kingdom under the Mosaic system, which was a theocracy, that had the promise that this was going to be enacted across the entire world. The Jews, because of their disobedience during the Old Testament times, did not get the kingdom, did not get control of it. And I'm going to touch on that as we go through this section of scripture today as a prelude, if you will, to the Messianic kingdom and the Messianic temple. It's important to realize that very, very few churches, if any, talk about this. I don't fully understand it. I can tell you I started in one seminary and it wasn't teaching much that I wanted and it had a fine name and I ended up going to a little obscure place down in Texas where they were actually teaching the Bible, the whole Bible. This is part of the times that we live in. People are not going to teach these things. Goes with the time, I guess, in the long chronology of all the world events. Psalm 25 14 says, the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him and He will show them His covenant. Meaning God speaks to believers without a recognition, a genuine heartfelt recognition of who God is and a belief in Him. God's not going to reveal things to us. Even the Proverbs says, fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. beginning of understanding. And when people reject God and His morality, because they want to do what they want to do, they never get the message. They don't get the understanding, because God has kept it from them. He's not going to give it to them. There's been an apostasy of a huge magnitude in this day and age. Biblical ignorance just abounds I keep hearing so many crazy things about, well, I believe this and I believe that. Where did you get these things? Whims, notions, just fleeting ideas without any substance. And there is what I like to call an assertive moral turpitude where I'm going to express homosexuality. I'm gonna kill babies. I'm going to just name whatever you want after that. And now, this country that we live in has instituted the killing of babies by law, so to speak, from judicial decree from the Supreme Court in 1973. I can't even imagine how many babies have been murdered as a result of that. And then, last year, The Supreme Court ordained the physical union in marriage of homosexuals. For our friends it can't be long before the Lord comes back. He's never allowed those things to linger for any long period of time in the Old Testament. And it's not going to last long here. I mean you can only poke your finger in God's eye for so long before he takes his vengeance. But as the old King James says, he's long-suffering. They don't call him patient. That's one of the reasons I like some of the terminology in the old King James. He's long-suffering. Because that's what it is to him to do this. to ruin his creation, to defy what he's done, to kill his babies, to engage in these weird relationships that he's given very clear examples of, don't do these things. So, God withdraws. He withdraws. Now, I put down a list of just 10 things here about what people say in churches and seminaries, and you just wouldn't believe some of these things, that they say the kingdom is. They say that it's Messiah's spiritual reign during the church age. I've heard liberals, and I don't even know why they call themselves Christians because they're not, they don't believe the Bible, they don't believe who Jesus is, but they will say that were resurrected in our hearts. Or some other nebulous concept about the truth. And that's where this one came from. Messiah's spiritual reign during the church age. That's the kingdom. No it's not. It's a physical kingdom coming. The apostles all recognize it. Jesus told to pray for it. The Jews rejected it. or they call the gospel, or a renewed heart, or just general religion, or the truth, or salvation, or heaven is the kingdom, or the way of salvation, following the Savior. Some have even said, well, it's just the world to come. Biblical ignorance is huge in this day and age. It wasn't 100 years ago. It was not 100 years ago, but it is now. It is now. It just, this list here just shows you what pastors and Bible teachers and theologians describe as the kingdom. And I keep hearing people say things, well the Bible's not that important. Really? Really? How do you know that? Well, it just is, you know. People will say things with no substance that have no data to back them up, no basis, and they just throw these things out. And then others that are with them that don't know any better, they just accept it and say, well, I heard that so-and-so. The knowledge of the kingdom is only obtained from the Bible, which is the record of God speaking to us and what the Lord Jesus has said. There's no other source. It's the center of all things. The Bible is an authoritative, the authoritative word of God. And Jesus validated the authenticity of the Scriptures. And it claims to be the Word of God. And I put a lot of verses down there in your notes to show you that. The ones that I have underlined are where Jesus is speaking out against the religious authorities, telling them that they don't know the Bible. And he said that to a lot of them, which is what infuriated them. because they didn't care about the Bible. They cared about the Talmud. They cared about the Mishnah. They cared about the Rashi Rabbah and all the rest of the Midrashim. They cared about what they wrote, what they did, not what God did. And they viewed themselves as the chosen elect, which they were, but they were accountable, and that's what they wouldn't accept. And I've seen this with people in the greater Christian community. Well, we're chosen. We're chosen, so we can't do anything other than just realize how blessed we are and we're going to heaven regardless of what we say, what we believe, what we do. And all of our children are just automatically believers and they're going to heaven too. That's what the Jews did. They viewed themselves as so special that they weren't accountable. And along come Jesus. And they did not like it. There is a de-emphasis. It's not just an ignoring of the scriptures today. It's a de-emphasis of the Bible, pushing it away. Churches don't teach it fully. They don't teach it accurately. It's filled with denominational bias, lack of understanding. and my seminary professors used to say that it's because the seminaries had gone south and uh... they just refused to teach the truth I got saved out of the Presbyterian USA church and uh... after I was born again and I tried to figure out what had happened to that denomination because they were pretty solid back in the eighteen hundreds and I found after studying church history that uh... The liberals had gotten into the seminaries because they were very wealthy. Princeton, Union, Westminster. And they wanted that money, they wanted that prestige, and they wanted that power. And there was, you know, a hundred years ago, there was several very influential people, even presidents, came from that denomination. So the liberals get in, they lied to get positions of authority, and then they bring people in like them. You can read it in a book called Crossed Fingers, which is a very interesting, it's a tome, it's a big book, but he describes in excruciating detail how the church fell. And that's what happens, that's what happens. Instead of having God's word at the center of our life, people will elevate money, position, power, influence, and it just corrupts, it just corrupts, it just corrupts. When people start holding up and teaching the man-centered goals of this earth, they're outside of Christ's will. They're outside of Christ's will. It's what the apostle Paul calls men-pleasers instead of God-pleasers. And he says that you're not getting to the other side if you're pleasing men. That's not what we're here for. We're not here to please men. We're here to please God by telling others what he has said. You know, the Lord Jesus in Matthew 7 verses 14 to 15 said, the way to truth is narrow and straight. Few there be that find it. But the way to destruction is broad and wide. And that's where most of the world's going. That's where most of the world is going. Inherent in this de-emphasis of the Bible being taught is an elimination of prophecy. People just don't want it. They just don't want it. And it's unfortunate, but those that I see, even in today's greater Christian community that are teaching any prophecy, most of them are teaching heretical concepts that aren't in the Bible. Weird stuff, like prophesying what somebody's gonna have for lunch next Thursday or something. It's crazy, just crazy. This is one of the keys, the prophetic sections of scripture, which are huge, are one of the keys to understanding the kingdom. Because Revelation 19.10 says that Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Jesus is throughout the Old Testament prophesied as coming. And because prophecy gets dumbed down or not taught, People get a lack of understanding or no understanding of the kingdom and a incomplete understanding of the king. The inspiration of the Bible is being denied in many, many churches today. There's virtually no understanding of the theocratic kingdom that is coming on this earth. And God is the king in Jesus Christ. The king designed and developed the plan for this coming kingdom on this earth, and it is supernatural. It is supernatural. It is not a natural outpouring of events on this earth. Before the First World War, there were a group of people called the Amillennialists, meaning there is no millennium. Which is really strange because the 20th chapter of the book of Revelation states a thousand year period six times and several aspects of it. And how they can gerrymander that I don't really understand because I've argued that with people until finally I said you know I'm the stupid one here because you're never going to figure this out so I can't talk about it. How they say a thousand is not a thousand. That's what they've done. Now, the Millennialists, before the First World War, were saying that we're going to Christianize the world. And then Jesus comes back. Because we're in the thousand year period now, they say, while the world's being Christianized and then Jesus comes back. That's not what the Bible teaches, but people will believe this because they don't want to study the Bible and they don't have leaders that are studying the Bible either. So, results in a zero understanding of the theocratic kingdom. Jesus spoke about this kingdom. The apostles knew it was coming. But today you start talking about the kingdom coming and people look at this as foolish, it's not believable, it's strange. Where did you get this stuff? You know God foresaw this 2700 years ago. a warning that these things were going to happen. He described the unbelief where people are going to say this is foolish, this is incredible, this can't happen. You're crazy for speaking these things. The Bible calls this, in response to those things, a strange work and a marvelous work and a wonder for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid because their fear towards me is taught by the precept of men. In other words, you've got men teaching not about God, but about their practices. And if you ever looked, if you haven't been to a mega church someday, you should give it a try. It's like going to a shopping mall. You're not going to hear much about God. You'd zero about the Bible, but you're going to have lots of entertainment, lots of creature comforts and how to make your life better here. how to have a much better life, let's get a better career, let's get better health, let's get better whatever. Now none of these things are bad, but they're replacing what the teaching of the Bible and God is. That's the problem. That's the problem. Isaiah says that the fear of men is taught superseding the fear of the Lord. And we essentially saw that when we read Psalm 25 verse 14. The guys that were with Jesus were waiting for the kingdom. They knew it. They knew it was coming. They knew it had gone all the way back in terms of his announcements from the book of Genesis. But many today teach this kingdom now theology. Or there's another word for it called dominion theology. And that's what the Amillennius were doing before the First World War. They were saying, what if we just Christianize everything and we get Christians into the Supreme Court? And I don't object to that. It sounds good to me. But that's not God's plan. I'd love to see Christians on all the judicial benches and all the lawyers and all the politicians and all, you know, that would be wonderful. But that's not how God describes the prophetic parts of the Bible. Things are getting worse, they're not getting better. They're not getting better. There is no kingdom, now, theology. But that's what many people are teaching. Well, we're in the kingdom right now because Christ has been here and we're talking about salvation. That's not the kingdom. A lot of people, this has been going on since about 300, they read the Bible allegorically. The early church read the Bible the way it was written. When you get around 300 AD, You've got Constantine the Roman Emperor had unified the split that had happened a few years before him and he declared an edict of toleration to Christianity. The pressure was off the Christians. The pressure was off. The blood of the saints is the seedbed of the church. And those people that were persecuted had genuine faith. They weren't falsifying their faith to be cool in some church, you know, hey, I belong to so-and-so denomination. No, because if they said that, they were subject to get killed. The Romans had them being eaten by lions, the Jews were going after them, and the gladiatorial fights were huge at the time. Constantine stopped all that. And between Constantine, just in the early 300s, and then hit the second emperor after him, Theodosius II, The laxity came into Christianity where they weren't trying as hard. And then at Theodosius II's decree, everybody's gonna be a Christian. He forced Christianity on the culture. And when you merge the church with the state under a human, not under God, you're gonna get corruption. So what happens to the Bible? They started interpreting it, what we call allegorically, or spiritually. Well, a thousand doesn't necessarily mean a thousand. You know, it can just mean a long time. This kingdom's a long ways away. I mean, it's nothing to be, you know, we've got to twist things around and soften them and so on. And they did that out of self-preservation. If you look at the writings of Augustine, in his early documents, he was just describing the scripture. Well, after the Roman emperors declared themselves God and you had to start worshiping them, then he softened his approach and he started getting allegorical. Well, I know what it says, but it doesn't really mean that, you know. I mean, there's more ways than one to look at the way these texts, and that allegorical interpretation exists today. And when the Bible is interpreted allegorically, or spiritually if you will, God's message does not get across. Because you've changed it to be whatever the person reading it wants it to be. Peter describes this as being just a heresy. The Bible is of no private interpretation. It doesn't. I put a whole bunch of things in your notes there about some details about this and I won't go into them today. But just suffice it to say that they twist the scripture and they soften the words to mean something other than what they want. And it all started in the 300s, the late 300s, because of this emperor worship. And an individual expositor starts forcing his own ideas or his own theology or denominational bias into the text of the scripture. You know, there's a concept in warfare. It's jamming the communications so that the troops do not get the direction from the commanding officer, the generals. And that's exactly what Satan does. He jams God's communication to us by dumbing down these scriptures. So God does not speak clearly through to us except if you read it for what it says. And you study it for what it says. You don't accept these crazy harebrained methods of reading that twist this around. And the one that I keep bringing out, there's so many people will do this. They say 1,000 is not 1,000 in the 20th chapter of Revelation. How can 1,000 not be 1,000? It says it is. What is it? Well, it's just a long time. Well, how much of a long time? And they really accept this stuff. It is very, very, very strange, hard to understand, but it's a satanic jamming of the communication from our commander. The kingdom was announced, actually it was developed, decided in God's mind before, the foundation of the world, It's supernatural, it's connected to the supernatural one that came into this earth. And I put some verses down there that validate that. The Lord created the heavenly kingdom and that existed before the fall. Now when we have looked at the fall of the anointed cherub, whose Hebrew name is Halal, The Latin translation that Jerome made in the 300's called him Lucifer. When he fell from grace as the top cherub, and the cherubim are the highest level of the celestial beings, when he fell from grace he dragged with him a third of the host angels. They became the demons. and they have antagonized this world ever since. He polluted the heavenly tabernacle and the book of Hebrews tells us that was one of the things that Jesus' death and resurrection did was to cleanse the heavenly tabernacle. God did that. The kingdom of heaven has a tabernacle and it's coming on this earth except the temple replaces the tabernacle, and that's what these last nine chapters of Ezekiel are going to show us in excruciatingly detail. The only way to understand all these things is by having an understanding of the whole counsel of God. The entire Bible, both Testaments, they're not separate. It's one long story. One long story. The Orthodox Jews, the reverent Orthodox Jews, knew that there was a literal restoration of the theocratic Davidic kingdom. It was coming. It was coming. They just didn't know when. And they knew what its characteristics were. And I've given a few references in your notes there. God in his sovereignty chose a particular group of people he came to Abraham and he gave him a covenant and that covenant only went to a chosen son Isaac and then to Jacob Abraham's grandson whose name was changed to Israel and he had twelve sons and those twelve sons are the sons of Israel the children of Israel that will be the leaders, if you will, under King Messiah running the government in the Messianic Kingdom. The church will have a role. The Gentiles will be serving the Jews, not as subordinate to them in any sense of them ruling it over us, so to speak, but we will be working for them as, like I call in the managerial Org charts, a dotted relationship, you know, we report to Jesus as the king, but we will work for them. And Isaiah is very, very clear about this, how this is going to be organized. And I'll have some charts for you later as we go through this thing. The kingdom was offered to them. And as we've seen, they denied it because it's the leaders that he went to. leaders that denied it. Now Jesus came to all the popular people, the common people first, and the leaders saw him and they rejected him. They knew though that there was a kingdom coming that would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and sometime this king that would come was going to unite the ecclesiastical community. It used to be called the Commonwealth of Israel with the government. There was a precursor to this under the Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant starts to be laid out in the 19th chapter of Exodus. And that was a conditional covenant based upon whether or not they would obey God. And God laid out these 613 laws, told them, this is what you will do, and if you do that, and if you obey me, I'm going to bless you. If you don't obey me and you turn from me, I'm gonna curse you seven times over and it's not gonna be pleasant. They have not obeyed him and therefore they've been cursed over and over and over again. But this theocratic kingdom, he got this model of what it was gonna be like and in order to show the world what God would do, he chose these people, this little group of people And he gave them dietary practices, sanitary practices, social practices. He gave them himself meeting with them in the tabernacle. And he gave them practices, these hygienic practices that nobody had at the time so that the world would see what God can do and will want that. the natural descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And those that they had adopted in are the commonwealth of Israel. Now the Jews thinking at some point in time, because of the way the kingdom verses are laid out, specifically in Isaiah thought, well, we will be the kingdom and the Gentiles will come in to the commonwealth of Israel. The church is what the Apostle Paul calls one of the eight mysteries in the Old Testament. And a mystery that's described in the New Testament doesn't mean that it's just hard to understand. It just means that it wasn't revealed in the Old Testament. And that is the church. The church is what Christ started. And that church is the unity, equal unity of the Jews and the Gentiles. in the church. So it's not the Gentiles coming in under the Jews, it's the Gentiles and the Jews together as one unit, equal heirs, the church, the church. We can see that Matthew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 3 describes the genealogy coming through these Jewish people. There was in Ephesians 2.14 the Apostle Paul describes there a middle wall of partition which divided the Jews and the Gentiles, but that's gone in the church. And one of the reasons that the Lord created the church was to make the Jews jealous. So that they would want the blessings that he was pouring out on the church. The blessed assurance, the peace that we have, the comfort, the knowledge that Jesus is coming back. The world doesn't have these things. We do. We have these things. And it's important to look at the impressive words of Moses describing what was going to happen in Deuteronomy 32. If you have time to read that later, please do. Verses 1 to 43. Because Moses describes there is coming an apostasy within Israel. He's describing it within the Jews, and they did. That's exactly what they did, is that early parts of this book that we have gone over, you can see up to the Babylonian captivity how bad they were, denying God. defecating towards his temple. I mean, just doing the rankest, sacrificing their kids. I mean, they were doing what the equivalent of abortion is today, to their children. Burning them in these big furnaces to pagan god Molech. I mean, it was terrible what they were doing. Terrible. God wanted them to be his chosen people and he blessed them. They turned from him. So he chastened it, he scourged them, he scattered them. The Jews who finally make it into the kingdom are going to be just a small fraction of all of the Jews that have been and most of them are gonna die in the great tribulation. The tribulation is described in detail in the Old Testament at the time of Jacob's trouble, because that's one of the reasons for the tribulation coming on this planet, to bring the Jews back to their Messiah. And the tribulation ends with them crying out, Baruch Hashem Adonai, blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord. Jesus said that, I'm not coming back until you guys call me. You'll figure it out. You'll call me. You'll call me. But it's going to take this enormous persecution. If you read, starting in chapter 6, all the way through 19 of the book of Revelation, that's what's coming on this world. It's going to make World War I and II pale in comparison to what's coming. But that's what it takes, unfortunately, to take sin out of the hearts of humans It's going to take that sort of a correction. God has not cast off his Jews completely, the nation Israel. It's temporary. It's temporary. And chapters 9, 10, and 11 in the book of Romans are a great exposition of this. Israel past, present, and then 11 is future. And Paul says in 11, 25, and 26, I don't want you to be ignorant and wise in your own conceits, you Gentiles in the church, because God has only cast them off for a while. Just for a while. He hasn't forgotten them. Now, the theocracy that is coming is an amalgamation of the civil and an amalgamation with the religious, if you will. And this is going to be the way the world is going to run under King Jesus. There will be one King, one set of laws, God's laws, God running this. And it's going to be a time when we will be required to go to Jerusalem at least once a year for the Feast of Tabernacles. The Jews will be required to go more frequently. Many of us will be living there during this time. The prophet spoke a lot about this time. And we will be going over a lot of those passages in the next number of weeks here. God has a theocracy in the heavens that will be on this earth, and we are to pray that he brings that kingdom of heaven to this earth. All law is going to come from him. He will be seated, the Messiah, in the temple at Jerusalem. And I will be bringing pictures of the structure of the temple, the mountain of Jehovah, which is 50 miles by 50 miles. Jerusalem is going to be in that. The temple itself is a mile square. I just think about that. The temple is a mile square on the mountain of Jehovah. That's going to be the center of the government of the entire world. And when the theocratic kingdom, a thousand years is up, there's going to be a little skirmish from a few of the people that were born to Gentiles that did not become believers and then that will be put down immediately and we will go into what God says is a restoration of the eternal order. And we will be back to what God intended in the first place. Now he knew that mankind was going to sin. He knew what Satan had done to cause the disruption in the heavenlies and to come into the creation and destroy that. And he knew that and he had his plan already established for making the corrections. And it's underway. It's underway now. The word Satan is a Hebrew word for adversary. So the anointed cherub, once he fell, we see this in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, became God's adversary. And that will all be done at the end of the theocratic kingdom, the thousand year kingdom, because Satan is going to be cast into the lake of fire where he will burn in torment for all eternity. Let's pray.