I was not sure what to talk about, to be honest with you, but a friend of mine from California was just commenting off-the-cuff about wanting to meet this great Saviour of ours. This was kind of interesting because I had already been working on this study that has to do with Heaven.
I have never done a study on Heaven before. I really have not looked at a lot of the verses that deal with Heaven. I am more concerned in getting there myself, but there is a lot that I have found within the Bible about Heaven; and so I thought that it would be encouraging to look at some of these verses.
If you could turn to Hebrews 11, we are going to read Hebrews 11:8-10. This is talking about Abraham, but this really applies to all of us because Abraham is called the father of the believers. Abraham was seeking a kingdom; he was seeking a city. It says in Hebrews 11:8-10:
By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
One of the things that struck me is that Abraham sojourned. He was on a pilgrimage. He did not know where he was going. What he knew was that God was directing his steps, and he fully trusted God.
This, in itself, is an important lesson for all of us to recognize. We “walk by faith, not by sight,” as it says in 2 Corinthians 5:7. This is a wonderful example for us. This is a wonderful illustration that God gives for us to emulate.
Of course, a believer, by the very nature of his salvation, is going to “walk by faith,” even though we do not do this perfectly because, first of all, we are saved “by the faith of Christ.” After we become saved, we are given faith.
This is diametrically opposed to everything that the world would want to push. Everything in this world has to do with what we can see with our eyes or what we can feel. It is all based on our sensory perceptions that God has, of course, given to us; but the believer is commanded to “walk by faith.” Of course, in order to do this God has to, number one, save this individual. Number two is what we read in Philippians 2:13:
For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.
God is the One who has to motivate us. He not only has to give us the desire, but also, actually, He also has to accomplish that which He commands us to do.
Let us read Hebrews 11:8 again:
…when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
We can also turn to a passage like 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, which underscores this same principle, the principle of trusting God completely. Abraham had been saved out of Ur of the Chaldees. God had been very, very gracious to Abraham and, of course, had decided to use him to start the nation of Israel. God gave Abraham many promises. At the same time, undoubtedly, there were hardships along the way. So in 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, it says:
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
This is the perspective that the believer has that someone who is not saved does not have. The believer has an eternal perspective. The believer is looking for this city. He is looking for this kingdom. This is where he wants to be. He realizes that he is on a mission, that God has commanded him to give the Gospel out while he is here on earth.
What could be more wonderful than this? What could be more wonderful than to be involved in some aspect of getting the Gospel out to the world? The Bible says that we are “ambassadors for Christ,” and yet we do not take any airs upon ourselves because we realize that we are nothing and that God is everything.
God takes the foolish things of this world. He takes “not many noble,” as it says in 1 Corinthians 1. He takes the things that are despised, and the believers are called “the offscouring of all things,” which is not a very flattering term; yet in all honesty and in reality, this is who we are. It is only by the grace of God that God has saved us and that He uses us as a vessel to get the message of the Gospel out to the world.
We know that God has His elect and that most people are not going to become saved; but this is part of God’s election process. God knows this and God is working perfectly, always on schedule, always on time, behind the scenes. Everything is falling right into place in the way that He wants things to be.
Notice if we go back to Hebrews 11:9, it says:
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
This word for “tabernacles” is the same word for “tent.” We use a tent when we go camping. We do not live in the tent all year long. Instead, we just go camping for a couple of weeks, or whatever. We are staying in this hotel and this hotel is kind of like a glorified tent. None of us live in this hotel permanently. We come from California and we come from New York and we come from the Philadelphia area; but wherever we come from, this hotel is not our real home. Neither are the places that we come from our real home. We look for our real home as it says of Abraham in Hebrews 11:10:
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
We have to keep this in the forefront of our thinking. I know that, at least, I do. This is what I am here for. This is the goal. This is where I am headed, if God, in His mercy, has saved me. If He has not yet saved me, this is okay because I can still beg for mercy. I know that I can beseech Him. Like it says in the book of Lamentations, we are to “wait for the salvation of the LORD.”
There is nothing that we can do to save ourselves. We learned this a long time ago, but it bears repeating because of the fact that man is so wired to work. If you do not work, you do not eat; and so, somehow, man wants to take some step that will allow him to take credit for something that he has done.
No one likes to be in a state of limbo to where they are not certain of something. Man, by nature, does not like this. This is the reason for all of the false gospels, because they tell you to do something. In the doing of this thing, they are essentially saying, “You can get saved by doing this. You just have to do A, B, and C.” This, of course, is a lie and this is in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches.
Let us look at a few examples of Abraham. Actually, the same would hold true for Isaac and Jacob. They followed in Abraham’s spiritual footsteps; they also dwelt in tents. But they had money. They had belongings. They had cattle. They could have lived in a walled city, I am sure, quite easily; and yet they chose not to. They chose not to because this represented the transitory nature of life on this earth. They were completely exposed to marauders or to animals; and yet they were simply trusting that God would take care of them.
For example, let us go to Genesis 18:1-2. It says here:
And JEHOVAH appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground,
A little later in Genesis 26:12-17, it talks about Isaac in a similar way:
Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and JEHOVAH blessed him. And the man waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he became very great: For he had possession of flocks, and possession of herds, and great store of servants: and the Philistines envied him. For all the wells which his father’s servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we. And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and dwelt there.
Concerning Jacob, go to Genesis 33:18-20:
And Jacob came to Shalem [or Salem], a city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Padanaram; and pitched his tent before the city. And he bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent, at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for an hundred pieces of money. And he erected there an altar, and called it Elelohe-Israel.
So we see that all three of them—and these are the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—lived in tents, which was a picture of the fact that we are here for just a brief period of time.
It is interesting that if we go to Acts 18:1-3, we learn that Aquila and Paul were themselves tentmakers. This was how they made an income. This was their mode of living. We read in Acts 18:1-3:
After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth; And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome:) and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers.
Let us now go back to Hebrews 11:9 to look at this again:
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
In 2 Corinthians 5:1-9, the Greek word there is also rendered “tabernacle” in verse 1 and in verse 4. This is derived from the Greek word “tabernacles” that is found in Hebrews 11:9. This is a very interesting account due to how God is speaking about our life here on earth. We read in 2 Corinthians 5:1-9:
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit. Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.
When most people talk about the Gospel, they say that they have to accept Christ. It is actually the other way around, just like this verse says. We have to be “accepted of him”; then, whether we are alive or whether we are in Heaven, it does not matter because we are with the Lord.
In another place, Paul says that it was “more needful” for him to be here for the sake of the Gospel, even though he would have rather been in Heaven. For us, this is going to happen in a very short period of time. These nine months are going to go by very, very quickly. We all know this as we see the days and the months ticking off.
In our passage in Hebrews 11:8-10, it makes reference to a city that Abraham was looking for. It says in Hebrews 11:10:
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
We can learn something in this same chapter where an assertion is made in Hebrews 11:16 that says:
But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.
We know, of course, that this city, as we are going to be looking at a little more closely, is “the heavenly Jerusalem”; and we find in the next chapter, in Hebrews 12:22, that it speaks about this city and it calls it “the heavenly Jerusalem.” We read there:
But ye are come unto mount Sion…
Mount Sion is another reference to this same city. This is not talking about Jerusalem in the Middle East, because it says:
But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels [or messengers],
So we see that God is focusing our attention, as it says here in Hebrews 11:10:
For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
My friend was saying, “I cannot wait to meet this God. I cannot wait to meet this Saviour who created this whole universe just by speaking it into existence.”
God has been so kind and so gracious and so loving and so tenderhearted towards the human race in ways that we really, up until the present, have not fully understood. Maybe this is because our thinking was colored by the fact that we had a misunderstanding about hell, which could have contributed to this, but we are now realizing in a great way how kind God is, even to the unsaved as well as to the saved, because the Bible tells us, “for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
So our very conception of God is changing dramatically from what we had learned in the past. It is an awesome thing to consider that God is so loving, and yet we hear people who always seem to want to blame God for everything that goes awry or for things that go wrong in the world.
Why is man so quick to lay the blame at God’s feet when all that He has done has been nothing but good, nothing but perfection? We are the ones who have messed everything up, starting in the Garden of Eden when something other than the Lord Jesus Christ Himself was desired.
Mankind desires the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. For these things, we all deserve death. We deserve destruction; and yet in spite of this, God has provided and secured a salvation that is so wonderful that I, for sure, do not have the words to describe it. All we can do is to look at some of these things that the Bible talks about, which is why we are doing this today.
Let us now look at Hebrews 13:14:
For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.
When you think about what is going to happen between May 21st and October 21st, this verse really, really, hits us. Everything is going to be demolished. Everything is going to be smashed. There is not going to be one ounce of mercy left. God is just going to take it all and there is going to be nothing left.
Everything that man has worked so hard for is going to be gone. We find people who are just working, working, working, and working. They are just striving and striving and doing everything that they can to climb up the ladder of success or to make money or to make a name for themselves. They are striving to do all of these things, but what is going to happen? They are going to lose it all; and the one thing that they are really going to lose out on is eternal life. They are going to lose out on “the city of the living God.”
Yet man, by nature, wants to live. If you were to ask someone if they would rather die or if they would rather live, nine times out of ten they are going to say that they would rather live; that is, if they are being honest. There are, however, people who want to die because they do not have any hope; but most people want to live because they have hope, albeit a false hope. The Bible says, “When a wicked man dieth…the hope of unjust men perisheth.” This kind of hope perishes with him, because it is a false hope.
For the believer, however, we have a living hope, “a lively hope,” a true hope. We cannot see it, except in the Scriptures; but as God works in us “to will and to do of his good pleasure,” we recognize how faithful God is. We recognize how faithful He is to His promises, and so this trust continues to develop more and more and more.
I am going to get off this subject a little bit, but this is why Abraham was able to obey God in relation to his son Isaac. God had promised him this son, and yet this son did not come for quite a long time. Finally after the son came, God told Abraham, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” Abraham obeyed, just like we read of his obedience in Hebrews 11:8.
The next morning after God called Abraham to sacrifice his son, he got up early and gathered the donkeys. He got the firewood. He got Isaac and he got the knife. Then he headed out on a three-day journey to Mount Moriah, which is where Christ hung on the cross. This is also where the foundation of the temple was laid right at the altar that David was told of by God at the threshingfloor of Onan the Jebusite, which was the forerunner of the city of Jerusalem. At that time, a plague hit and thousands of people died. The angel of the Lord finally stopped this plague; and then He said, “Build an altar.”
Yet we know that this physical locale does not have anything that is anymore special than the bush that is still there where God appeared. After God left the bush, there was nothing special about the bush. It was still just a bush. If you burned it yourself, it would burn down and turn to ashes. What made the bush special was because God was inhabiting the bush. He was speaking out of the bush to Moses.
In the same way, we recognize that this is where we want to be. We want to be in this continuing city. We want to be where there is life. Man was created to have life. Death and destruction is the opposite of life. This is not why God created man. He created man originally to enjoy Him forever, to enjoy the miracle of life.
If you remember, there is a passage that says, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” All live to God; and so we see this aspect of eternal life that God is always demonstrating through the Scriptures. It is a theme that runs all the way from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible.
Again, this shows us how privileged we are. Even if we are not saved, we are privileged to be alive. Even if we are not saved, we are privileged to not have to burn forever in hell, as we previously thought. Yet God is so gracious to give 200 million people, or so, this wonderful gift of eternal life.
Let us now go to Revelation 21:2:
And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
As far as the idea of “prepared,” as it says here:
…prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Just think about this. The true believers are going to be married to this living God, this eternal God who is the very essence of life and who is just so incomprehensible that we just stand in awe. We stand in amazement at this God. Of course, when we think about the fact that the Word became flesh, as one of us, and “dwelt among us,” it is even more staggering to realize that He would humble Himself in such a manner as to come down to our level, to “condescend to men of low estate.”
What a condescension that God demonstrates by His coming to earth, which was a demonstration of what He had previously fulfilled in eternity past when He was “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”! This was when the sins of all of the true believers were paid for. He came down to demonstrate this, as well as everything that was involved in this demonstrations; such as going into the garden of Gethsemane, all the way through to that resurrection morning when the angel told Mary that He was not there and that He had risen.
God gives us all of these little details, and yet we are just beginning to understand now that this was all a demonstration. He is underscoring and highlighting how magnificent the actual atonement is for us. He was the One who bore the brunt of the wrath of God “before the foundation of the world,” and we certainly do not understand this, among many things that we do not understand.
But this word “prepared,” as it says here:
…prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
We also see this same word used in connection with the five wise and the five foolish virgins in Matthew 25:34. Of course, this is talking about the ones who had no oil. They are then sent away to get oil. In the meantime, the door is shut; but the door is shut after the five wise virgins go through. The bridegroom comes and then the door is shut. Then the other ones are left outside knocking, “Let us in; let us in,” but it is too late.
We know when this door is going to be shut, just like in Noah’s day. This door will be shut on the 17th day of the 2nd month. On May 21st of 2011, the door will be shut forever and no one will be allowed to come in after this.
So we read in Matthew 25:34:
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
When was it prepared? It was prepared “from the foundation of the world.” This is when the preparation had taken place. In A.D. 33, this is what Christ came to demonstrate. He came to demonstrate what had happened prior.
We read something in 1 Corinthians 2:9 that is, of course, very appropriate for this subject. It says:
But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
Even looking briefly at some of these things, we do not have a clue as to what is in store, because this verse says:
…Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man…
We are just getting a tiny glimpse. We are getting more than the nonbeliever gets, of course, because he is not attuned to the Bible. He has not been qualified by salvation to understand some of these things, even though there are a lot of nonbelievers who are very familiar with a surface reading of the Bible. Of course, Satan is a master theologian himself. But we see that God does everything on such a grand scale. After all, just look at what is out there!
I was looking on the Internet about these solar flares. There has been a lot of activity on the sun just in the last couple of days. I think this started last week. You look at these images of these huge flares and there are temperatures that range from 1.4 million to 4 million degrees Fahrenheit. Who can even comprehend this, and this is just a little aspect of creation? Yet to God, this is nothing. It is like an afterthought. It is like when He said, “He made the stars also.”
So we just marvel and are just awestruck by these things, but yet we should not be because of the fact of this Being, this great God, this great Saviour who created everything and who does everything perfectly. I have to add that all of this is for His own glory and honor.
What a privilege to be, not only a believer, but to be alive at this time to see these things that are unfolding. We are the only generation to see these things. Many other generations might have wanted to see these things; and yet, for some reason that we do not know, God has you and me here at this time in history to be part of this generation.
This just underscores, at least for me personally, that time is running out. We know that God is going to bring in all of the sheep. Not one of them is going to be lost—we know this—but this also brings home the reality that we need to be at work. Of course, it is God working through us. Obviously, this is a given. But we are to warn the world in every way that we can. God will use and bless these efforts if they are faithful to His Word.
Let us also look at Revelation 19:7. It says here:
Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.
By the way, “made ready” is the same word “prepared” that we just looked at. The only reason that she is “made ready” is because God has “prepared” her. God has clothed her with the robe of Christ’s righteousness. This is the only means whereby we can get into Heaven.
If you remember, there is a parable of a man who did not have on a wedding garment. The host very graciously came to him and said, “Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?” Then the Bible tells us that this man “was speechless.” This was because he was lacking what all of us by nature lack, which is the robe of Christ’s righteousness. Apart from this, we have nothing. We are headed for death. We are headed for destruction. The only solution for fallen man is the robe of Christ’s righteousness.
Now, we talked about the city having foundations. In Hebrews 12:22 and in Revelation 21:2, we learned that this city is also called “the heavenly Jerusalem” or the “new Jerusalem.” There are other terms that God uses as well. One is “God’s husbandry” or “God’s building.” Husbandry has to do with farming. Paul said, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”
God is very interested, of course, in agriculture. He created everything that goes into agriculture, but there is also a spiritual farming of which God is the Divine farmer who is providing all of the necessary elements for growth. When we look at the parable of the seed that falls on the four different kinds of ground, it is only the “good seed” that falls on the “good ground” that produces “fruit”: “some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.”
This is because God is the One who is making sure that the right climate and the right amount of fertilizer and the right amount of sun and the right amount of nutrients are in the ground and that they are enabled to give the plant life and to make the plant to grow and be able to bear fruit. God is the One who has to do this, and so we can see why God uses the term “God’s husbandry.”
This city is also referred to as “the temple of God.” This, of course, is an interesting analogy because we know that believers are referred to as “the temple,” and Christ also refers to Himself as “the temple.” I do not have the time to develop this now, but this is what struck me as I was reading Mark 14:57-59:
And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him, saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands. But neither so did their witness agree together.
In another passage, He refers to this and says, “But he spake of the temple of his body.”
I thought that this was interesting because this word “destroy” could possibly be a reference to the fact that Christ was destroyed. He was not destroyed on the cross. He was destroyed “before the foundation of the world.” This is when He was annihilated; but I do not have the time to really get into this at this time.
Let us now look at 1 Corinthians 3:6-9, which has a verse that I quoted earlier. It says:
I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.
Notice, if you will, that He makes the point:
So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth…
This is because God is the One who is doing all of the work. We cannot take any credit.
If we cannot take any credit for our salvation, why would we think that we could take credit for something after salvation? All credit has to go to God Himself: all of the glory, all of the honor. We are just vessels. We are just clay pots that God uses in a variety of different ways.
This, in itself, is a wonderful thing, when we think about how each individual believer is different. We have different talents and a different calling, and yet God uses all of the parts of the body to get the work done.
Again, this just goes to show how wonderful and how gracious He is, especially when we realize that we do not deserve salvation. We do no deserve to be God’s servant. Who are we? We are nobodies, and yet, as I said earlier, God takes the foolish things of the world, He takes the things that are despised of the world, and, for His own good purposes and to abase man who is so prideful—man who looks at what he has done or thinks that he has done with the technology or with the advances in medicine or science—and God is the One who brings all things about.
So God shows man, really, how insignificant we are. We realize that we can only come to Him, as God might give us a broken and a contrite heart, and beg Him for mercy because of the fact that we are nobodies; and yet God uses this vast army of nobodies to get the job done. This is, again, all to His praise and glory and honor.
One other verse that we will look at and then I will need to close is 1 Corinthians 3:11. It says:
For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
We know that He is also called the “chief corner stone.” We will hopefully get more into this as we go through this week. I hope to look at some more aspects of this foundation. But this word “laid” has to do also with the fact that Christ laid down His life. He said, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” He laid it down for His sheep.
This again, in itself, drives home the point: why would God do this? Why would God take upon Himself these sins of man: the rebelliousness and the hatred; we could list all of the sins of mankind. Why would He actually become this sin so that He would have to die? We know that “the wages of sin is death.” Why would God the Father be willing to pour this upon Himself so that He would be annihilated? How could God be annihilated? How can we understand these things? We cannot; but God is greater than death.
In 1 Corinthians 15, God talks about May 21st in 2011. He says in 1 Corinthians 15:51-58:
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.
What a promise! What a hope that God gives the human race! We look at death as that “last enemy,” but Christ has defeated death. He has defeated destruction and annihilation. He is greater than this.
This is why the Bible says that the grave could not contain Him, “Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.” Not only was it unable to contain His physical body; but even before the foundation of the world, this was not a problem for God. Nothing is.
This reminds us of the verse, “Is any thing too hard for the LORD?” No, nothing; nothing at all is too hard for Him. This is because He is eternal God. This is such a wonderful promise and it is a promise of life.
There is a Psalm that speaks of “the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard,” and then He says in this Psalm, “the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.” This is the blessing. The blessing is eternal life. This is what God has in store for us, for the true believers.
As I said before, if someone is unsure of their salvation or if someone does not feel that they are a believer, wonderfully, they can continue to cry out to God for mercy. There is a wonderful promise for this that we find in Lamentations 3. There are a lot of places we could turn to, but this is just a wonderful hope that God gives us.
As we are learning that one out of maybe 35 people have the possibility of salvation, how astounding is this? Even if you take the larger figure of one out of 70, the odds are still good.
What are the odds that you are going to win the Pennsylvania lottery? These odds are one out of ten million, or something like this; and yet this is just money. Anyone who wins a lottery will just end up broke anyway because Christ is coming back. They cannot take it with them, so what good is it going to do even if someone were to win the lottery? This might turn out to be the greatest curse possible for this individual, because then they are focused on things that are going to dissipate, things that are not going to be here in a very short period of time.
The only thing that is going to last throughout eternity is the true believers, the Bride of Christ, that eternal city, that “continuing city” in the “the new heavens and the new earth.”
Let me just read this passage in Lamentations, because this gives us tremendous hope. We read in Lamentations 3:21-29:
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of JEHOVAH’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. JEHOVAH is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. JEHOVAH is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope…
Three times now, He has spoken of hope. It continues:
It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of JEHOVAH. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
The Bible has a lot to say about those who are young, because they need salvation as much as anyone needs salvation. Wonderfully, we know that God is “no respecter of persons.” He can save the baby in the womb. He can save the little toddler. He can save the teenager. It is all just based on God’s mercy.
It continues:
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him. He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope.
So we see these constant references that God makes to hope.
We are living in a day that is like no other day because of the fact that God is saving so many people from all over the world. This is just like the Ninevites and what happened in Nineveh when God sent Jonah with a very brief message. It was a very brief message and yet God used His Word, which is like spiritual dynamite in that it can produce life out of something that is spiritually dead.
We know that this is what God specializes in. He specializes in the impossible. He can take a situation that is a horrible and sinful situation and He can turn it around for good. This is what God specializes in. He specializes in producing life because He is life. He is able to do this because He has already orchestrated everything that is going to take place.
This is why we trust Him. We trust Him because He is absolutely trustworthy. There is no reason not to trust Him. In fact, when we do not trust Him is when we get into trouble. We get into trouble the moment that we take our eyes off of the Scriptures, off of everything that He does perfectly.
How wonderful is this? How wonderful is it to know that everything that He does is perfect, that we cannot improve upon it? All we can do, as He works in us, is to humbly submit, obey, and just give Him all of the praise and all of the glory for it because He is absolutely worthy of it. May this be the prayer on our lips.
Let us close.