We were involved with a discussion earlier today with Mr. Wesam from the Muslim community. Seeing how they are approaching the Bible, he was trying to attack the Greek text that underlies our King James Version of the Bible.
This is a real easy thing to do today because there are many Bibles out there and these Bibles have statements in them, like the NIV and some of the other Bibles, which the earlier and better manuscripts do not have. They indicate that the earlier manuscripts do not have this verse or that passage or this portion of the Word of God, and Mr. Wesam was using that. He was quoting from the Bible, he was quoting theologians, and he was quoting scholars, and he kept going over it. He continued to indicate that the “earlier” and “more accepted,” the “better” manuscripts, do not have John 8 with the woman caught in adultery, nor do they have Mark 16’s ending, and so forth.
You can see how Satan has worked to undermine the authority of the Bible. He has worked through men, as he has always done, as he did with Westcott and Hort in the 19th century. These were Cambridge University people. They were diligent Bible scholars. They knew the Greek language. They were studying the over 5,000 manuscripts that the New Testament is based upon and they found a couple that, seemingly, are supposedly older, yet they differed with, say, the Textus Receptus.
The Textus Receptus is the Greek that the King James is based on. It is referred to as the Received Text, which really was mostly the Majority Text or the Byzantine Text, the Greek Text that was accepted for hundreds and hundreds of years, up until God moved in the world to have King James desire a Bible and to set Bible scholars to work.
So Westcott and Hort found a couple of old manuscripts that differed with the Received Text, and some experts have calculated that there are over 6,000 differences from those two texts that Westcott and Hort developed. Westcott and Hort claimed that these texts were the earlier texts and that they were more faithful because they were closer to the original text.
The Majority Text actually does have some early witnesses as the early church fathers—they were referred to as “church fathers”—quoted from this text as early as the 2nd century AD. However, Westcott and Hort claimed that the Majority Text was not the most accurate text. The problem is that there was not a majority of manuscripts or even a handful of manuscripts that continued to follow these supposedly more “faithful” texts, the ones that were supposedly closer to the original text.
If that had been the faithful text in 2nd century AD, would that not have been the one to be copied and copied and copied? Plus, we do not find any testimony from later manuscripts in support of those earlier and older manuscripts that were found by Westcott and Hort. Rather, we find what is called the Majority Text. It goes by several names. It is also referred to as the Byzantine Text, which became the Textus Receptus or the Received Text.
There are thousands of manuscripts, over 90% of those 5,000 manuscripts, which are in agreement. These are the manuscripts that the Bible scholars of old, Erasmus and other men, translated into the English, the King James Version. But Westcott and Hort used those other couple of manuscripts, manuscripts that had not been used at all until the 19th century.
So basically the Muslims that we were having this discussion with were saying that God had not given His most pure and faithful Word for over 1800 years, since the time of the Cross when the Greek was given, and that these two English scholars discovered the right text, that they discovered the original text. Actually, they do not even make that claim. They claim that the text that was used in the Westcott-Hort Greek translation is more trustworthy and more faithful, yet they are totally overlooking what God says in Psalm 12:6-7.
We read in Psalm 12:6-7:
The words of JEHOVAH are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O JEHOVAH, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
Do you see what God is saying? God is saying that His Word is pure, that His Word is perfect, and that He was going to keep it and preserve it forever. “The Word of the Lord endureth for ever,” the Bible tells us.
And this is what God did. He gave His Word to men of old, “holy men of God,” and He moved them to write down exactly what He said. This is just like what we read in Jeremiah 36, which is a wonderful testimony to how God gave the Word to prophets of old and how it is that we find it finally compiled in a Book.
In Jeremiah 36:1-2, it says:
And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel, and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spake unto thee, from the days of Josiah, even unto this day.
And in Jeremiah 36:4, it says:
Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah: and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of JEHOVAH, which he had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.
This is how God gave portions of the Bible. Of course, until the Bible was completed, He could come in a dream or in a vision, or He could even come in a tongue. But God moved these men—they could not do otherwise. They had to declare, they had to write, and they had to record exactly what God said.
People say, “Well, men wrote the Bible.” Who wrote the book of Jeremiah? Baruch was the scribe. Baruch is the one who recorded “the word that Jeremiah the prophet spake unto Baruch.” But Baruch did not write Jeremiah. Who wrote the Epistle to the Romans? Paul? No, Tertius. “I Tertius, who wrote this epistle,” we read in Romans 16:22. But, no, Tertius did not write it. It was the Apostle Paul. He dictated to Tertius. Tertius was only a scribe. It is the same with Baruch. He was only a scribe. Everyone knows that.
It would be the same with a CEO. He would dictate to his admin and his admin would write it down. But everyone knows that the message came from the CEO, that it is a message from the boss.
This is exactly the way that Jeremiah dictated to Baruch after God dictated to Jeremiah, and how God dictated to Paul who had Tertius write it down. God is the author. It is His Book. It is His Word. It comes forth from the mouth of God. These are, truly, Holy words. These are Holy words, and this is not like any other book in the world. There is nothing like the Bible because God gave this Word.
Now look what Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, does after some of his men heard Baruch speaking these words in the temple. It says in Jeremiah 36:20-24:
And they went in to the king into the court, but they laid up the roll in the chamber of Elishama the scribe, and told all the words in the ears of the king. So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll: and he took it out of Elishama the scribe’s chamber. And Jehudi read it in the ears of the king, and in the ears of all the princes which stood beside the king. Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth. Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the king, nor any of his servants that heard all these words.
This is natural man’s reaction to the Word of God. They do not like it. They do not want to hear it. They especially did not want to hear what Jeremiah’s prophecy was stating. Again and again, God was telling them that He was going to destroy Judah, that He was going to bring the Babylonians against Judah, and that the city would be destroyed.
It was judgment, judgment, judgment coming against the people of God, and this king dared to take the leaves—that is probably what it was made of, or papyrus or something like that—and cut it up. These were the words that God had commanded Jeremiah to write and Baruch had actually written down, and the king took a penknife and he cut it. He cut the Word of God. He cut it up and then he threw it into the fire, as though it were nothing. Notice that God even says, “Yet they were not afraid.” This is a statement from God, “Yet they were not afraid.” They dared to take the Word of God and to actually think so little of it that they cut it up and throw it into the fire.
The problem is that man tries everything to get away from the Word of God. Man will try everything under the sun to escape the condemnation of the Bible, to get out from hearing it, to get away and to try to make it disappear, to try to make the Word disappear. But they fail to realize that “the Word of the Lord endureth for ever.” No one can escape the Word of God. No one is going to be able to flee anywhere from the presence of the Lord.
Look at what God does following this. In Jeremiah 36:32, it says:
Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.
God just simply did it again. Just like the Ten Commandments, He wrote it again and He added more words. The Bible was not complete at that time, so God was still bringing revelation.
You see, it is God who gave us this Book and it is He who watches out for His Word. He protects His Word. He preserves His Word to make sure that man cannot interfere, that Satan, who is actually behind the scenes, cannot interrupt the process of God sending His Word out into the world.
God watched over the compilation of the Old Testament, and it is interesting that we do not really find too many accusations against the Old Testament. The Old Testament dates back to the Masoretic Text. Everyone knows they were super diligent in making sure that their manuscripts were accurate and faithful. People do not really try to attack that undergirding of the Word of God. Instead, they go for the New Testament, because Satan has been very busy and active there. He is trying to cast doubt upon the Word of God. If he can cast doubt upon one chapter or one verse, then that is a big deal.
Does anyone here think there is anything in this Book that is not the Word of God? Of course, in the English, in the King James, we can have some errors and we can have some mistranslations. But in the Greek and in the Hebrew, does anyone think this?
Has anyone heard these theories, like from Westcott and Hort, that a certain verse or a certain chapter or a certain passage does not belong? What about 1 John 5:7? Has anyone hear about that?
They really cast doubt upon that verse, and yet we know that everything belongs. In the Hebrew and in the Greek, there is not a mistake, not “one jot or one tittle” is in error. It is perfect. It is pure. It is holy. There are no mistakes at all.
What this leads to is what we read in Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is that great Psalm of God that really lays out how wonderful His Word is. In Psalm 119:42 it says:
So shall I have wherewith to answer him that reproacheth me: for I trust in thy word.
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” How do we trust in the Lord? We trust in His Word. We believe. We have faith in His Word. We have confidence and trust and lean upon it for our support. It is what lifts us up and keeps us. We trust in the whole Bible.
This is how we come to a passage like we have been reading about in Hebrews 6. We know that God never makes a mistake, that everything is absolutely perfect. So it says in Hebrews 6:1-2:
Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.
We have been going over these verses for a few weeks, and we have seen that God has a plan at the end to reveal, to open up the Scriptures, to teach true and faithful doctrine during the end time. And we are familiar with the verses in Daniel 12:4 and 9 where God tells Daniel to “seal the Book, even to the time of the end.” And then He makes the statement that “knowledge shall be increased.”
We also read this kind of verse in Luke 12. Similar verses are found in many places in the Bible, and in Luke 12:2 we read:
For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.
God has covered up many truths in His Word. He has closed them up, just like the analogy of the well that we read about in Genesis. The Philistines had stopped the well. They threw dirt into the well. Anyone going there, a traveler, would pull up the bucket and it would be a bucket of dirt. They would not find any water. They could dig down a couple feet, but they would not find any water because several feet of dirt had been thrown into the well. Finally in frustration, the weary traveler who was very thirsty would just go on to find another well.
But the water was still there. The well had a lot of water in it. Historically, you can find this account in the book of Genesis. Later this same well was unstopped and they drank from it. They drank from the same well that many people could have previously gone to and found it to be a dry well.
This is how it is with the Word of God. God stopped it up, the living water of His Word. He closed up the words. He sealed the words.
In generations past, faithful men of old were diligent Bible students, far more diligent then me or probably anyone today. They had to go into the original languages, and they did not have concordances. They did not have The Online Bible. Today it is so easy to pull up a verse and have the Strong’s number easily available to where you can parse it right there. They did not have all of these helps, so they had to do it by memory. They did it by digging into the Bible, hours and hours and hours, in order to remember these things.
If you could hear these men or if you ever read any of their writings, it is amazing how they were able to pull up the Scriptures and compare one verse with another passage. They had no Bible helps of any kind except diligence. They were diligent and their minds were sharper than ours, by far.
They also did not have the distractions that we have today. We have TV. We have computers. We have the whole world at our fingertips. And this really just amounts to one huge gigantic distraction that occupies our time and leads to wasting it so that we spend many of our hours in vanity and in empty things. Maybe we can find a half hour or an hour to study and dig in. But all of these things have also, to a big extent, led us to have less ability to diligently study the Bible to where we just do not have the intellect. It has rusted away I think in many of us due to years and years and years of abuse.
But even though these men did not have flashing lights or billboards on every road, they still had temptations. They could still fall into sin. As long as man is in this world, he can find something to lust after. But still, when these men went home to a quiet house, there was no radio, no TV, no computer. They could just pull out their Bible and study and study and study.
Yet in all of their study, they never figured out what God was saying about the end. They never learned it. They never understood Daniel. They never understood the book of Revelation. They never understood Matthew 24. They never understood these end-time passages. And now we are finding out that they never understood faith. They never understood repentance, as it says here in Hebrews 6. They never understood that man cannot bring up within himself repentance sufficient enough to satisfy the Law of God.
God says, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Okay, so I will stop smoking or I will stop drinking or I will stop drugs or I will stop lusting. Yes, we can do that outwardly, but what about inwardly? Where does sin come forth from? Sin comes forth from the heart. It flows out of the heart of man.
So really, in order to repent, we have to turn from our own heart. We have to cut off the sins of our own heart. Who can do that? No one can repent. This is why we read in Jeremiah 31, “turn thou me, and I shall be turned.” After God gives us the gift of repentance, then we will have a new heart and a new spirit and we will turn from sin. Even in our new born-again soul, it will be without sin as 1 John tells us. We cannot sin in spirit in that new soul, even though we cannot say we are without sin because then we would be a liar as it also explains. So we have that struggle that Romans 7 discusses between the flesh and the spirit.
These men could study and study about baptism and about the laying on of hands and about the resurrection of the dead and about eternal judgment. Yet we find that they got it wrong, and they got it wrong repeatedly.
So we are looking into this and we really are amazed because we know that Israel, the Old Testament Israel, got many things wrong. They were wrong about how to get right with God, but that was understandable because they had far less information than the New Testament believers.
For instance, let us go to Genesis 17 and we will read how Israel failed and misunderstood the Gospel. In Genesis 17:1, we read:
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.
And that is God’s command to every one of us.
In Matthew 5:48, we read:
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
The only way that we can be “perfect” is through salvation.
Going back to Genesis 17, we read in Genesis 17:2:
And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.
This word “covenant” is one of those words that is kind of mysterious. At least the churches use this a lot, and we wonder what they are talking about. Really, they do not know themselves. They say that they are a covenant church, that they are a covenant family, that they have covenant children. Again and again and again, covenant, covenant, covenant, and they do not understand what the Bible means by covenant.
The word “covenant” is a synonym for the Law. It is a synonym for the Word, the Bible itself, the Gospel. The Gospel is the covenant. For instance, let us go to Exodus 34. We will come back to Genesis 17.
In Exodus 34:27-28 [note: the speaker said Ezekiel here but intended to refer to Exodus] it says:
And JEHOVAH said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel. And he was there with JEHOVAH forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.
“He wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.” He wrote on the tables the words of the covenant, and the covenant is the Law. It is the Bible. It is the Word of God.
He says in Genesis 17:2-7:
And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly. And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant,…
It is an everlasting Law. “The Word of the Lord endureth for ever.”
This reminds us of the statement that we find in Revelation 14:6:
And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
The everlasting Gospel or the everlasting Covenant is one and the same. There is no distinction. They are synonyms that are stating the same principle and the same truth.
Continuing on in Genesis 17, we read in Genesis 17:7-8:
…to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.
God is talking about Israel or the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. He said that it would be theirs forever, that they would possess it forever, that it was an “everlasting possession.”
We can see why, even up until the present day, many Jews think that they are the people of God. They think that they are the chosen ones and that they are God’s people because it was an “everlasting covenant” because God had given them an everlasting land as a possession. Yet no; they are not the people of God. They have it all wrong. They misunderstand what God is saying here.
Let us keep reading in Genesis 17. It says in Genesis 17:9:
And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.
In the next verse, God is going to explain the covenant. It says in Genesis 17:10:
This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.
That is the covenant, “Every man child among you shall be circumcised.” They shall have the foreskin of the reproductive organ cut off.
So the Jews were diligent in obeying this command, even up until today. Maybe not all of them, but many of them will still be circumcised in obedience to their tradition and to what they think the Bible, the Law of God says, and yet they miss something.
Look at Genesis 17:11:
And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.
It was a token. It was a sign. In other words, it was not the reality. It was a figure and a type. The Jews were to be circumcised to picture something.
What was it to be a picture of? It was to be a picture of the cutting off of their sins. They were to take upon themselves physically this sign in order to paint the picture that their sins must be cut off and to show that in order for their sins to be removed, there would have to be the shedding of blood.
This would point to the Lord Jesus who did come through the line of the Jews. He came “when the fulness of the time was come.” The Lord Jesus, the Messiah, entered into the human race and became a man.
This helps us to understand the Judaisers that we read about in the New Testament. For instance, in Acts 15:1 after the Gospel was first being declared in and around Jerusalem, certain of the Jews believed. It says in Acts 15:1:
And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.
This thought process was even getting into the New Testament churches and congregations. We see the mind set of the Jews. If you are circumcised, you have the “everlasting covenant.” You have Canaan as your “everlasting possession” and you have salvation. You have salvation through circumcision.
This is why it was so hard for these Jewish converts. They could not deny that Christ was magnificent in all that He did and performed. With all of the miracles, it had to be from God. Like Nicodemus said, “We know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” Yet they were still trying to hold on to some of the old ways, the old laws that they grew up with and were engrained in them. They thought that they could never do away with this. The Law said that they must be circumcised. This is why in Romans 2 God moved the Apostle Paul to write a little bit about this. We read in Romans 2:25-28:
For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision. Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision? And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly;…
How do you become a Jew? If you wanted to convert and go worship in a synagogue, how would you do it if you were a man? You would be circumcised. You would take upon yourself the sign of circumcision. So outwardly, in a real physical way, you are a Jew. But God says that this is not what a Jew is, not by the definition of His Word. You may be a descendant of Abraham. You may be in the bloodline. You may be able to trace your heritage to the Jewish nation. In that sense, you are a Jew.
But look what it says in Romans 2:28-29:
For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.
So what is God saying? You have to be circumcised in your heart, spiritually, and then you are a Jew. This is wonderful! God really explained it far better in the New Testament than in the Old. But actually, they had this same information here in Romans 2 in the Old Testament.
If you go back to Deuteronomy 10:16, we find this commandment:
Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.
God is telling Israel to circumcise their heart, and they, of course, would say, “How do you do that?” No one can do that. You can try. If you actually get a scalpel or a sharp knife, you will die. So how were they to do this?
Well, go to Deuteronomy 30:6:
And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.
You see, this is exactly how it is with repentance and this is exactly how it is with baptism. We can experience water baptism, but it does not save you and it does not make you a covenant son or daughter. Outwardly, during the Church age, you could be associated with the church through baptism, but it was not going to save anyone any more than circumcision was going to save anyone. You could be dunked, immersed, or sprinkled in a thousand different churches and it would not save anyone. It can wash away physical dirt, but it cannot wash away spiritual filthiness. It cannot cleanse anyone spiritually.
So this is why Jesus speaks of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and why He says to the Disciples, “Can ye…be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” And they said unto Him, “We can.” And Jesus said unto them, “Ye shall indeed,” indicating that when Christ took upon Him the sins of His people and God poured out His wrath upon Him, all those sins were purged away by the wrath of God, and then He was washed. And since we were in Him, He was bearing our reproaches. If we are truly one of God’s elect, we have been washed, we have been baptized with the baptism that He was baptized with, and it was the same thing with circumcision; it was the same command.
God does this all the time. He points to something outwardly, but He has a deeper meaning. That is how He wrote the Bible. “Without a parable spake He not unto them,” we read in the Gospels. And so the circumcision was a physical outward sign that pointed to the necessity of having a circumcised heart. To be “born again,” you had to be washed from your sin.
I just want to explain why I went into this and where we are going with this. We have been studying Hebrews 6 and we are finding that the church misunderstood baptism. They misunderstood faith, that we are not saved by our own faith but we are saved by the faith of Christ. They misunderstood repentance. They misunderstood the nature of the resurrection, and they have misunderstood eternal judgment.
We just shake our heads. How could this be? How could it be possible that the church has been so wrong? Well, the answer is that God gave three covenants. He gave three covenants.
We have to be careful with this because in Galatians God speaks of two covenants, and there are two covenants when it comes to man’s relationship to the Law of God. There is the covenant of grace and the covenant of works. God gave an Old Testament and a New Testament.
The word “testament” is again a synonym for covenant. He gave the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and that is it. That is all the written Word there is. We are not to “add” or “take away from the Words of the Book.”
But the third covenant—if we can call it that because I think God does in Hebrews 8—the third covenant is the opening up of the seals, the revealing of that which is hid and the giving of His people insight unto a more perfect understanding of the whole Bible and of the Scriptures. So when we are learning here in Hebrews 6 that we are to “go on unto perfection” and we are to dig into the deeper things, the “meat” of the Word of God, then this is basically saying that we are going to learn about the third covenant, the third revealing of God’s Word.
Let me put it this way: when God gave the Old Testament, was it clear? In many cases, it was not. They did not understand completely when God would speak of the Messiah being born of a virgin. When God would say that the Son is The Everlasting Father, they could have some understanding of this. God’s people, the elect of olden time, would have had a better understanding than the rest, that is for sure. But still, when we get to the New Testament, God opens it up. Jesus enters into the human race. It is very clear, very clear on that level.
But still, the New Testament was unclear in the sense that our eyes were covered. Our eyes were hid, in a sense, from the truth of the Word of God. Now we have gotten to the end now. We are a few years from 2011 and the end of the world. So God is opening up and revealing these things to His people. We are all able to testify how much truth God is opening up in these days. This is His third revealing of Himself, which will be at this time. He will let us know everything, everything that He wants us to know. We are not going to understand many things because God did not want us to understand them. But whatever He has measured out for His people to know, He is going to reveal that to us. These things are what we will know. This is what is going on.
Going on to Hebrews 8:6-7, it says:
But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless,…
And that would be the Old Testament, as it was not complete. It continues:
For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.
Or the New Testament, the new covenant. Then notice what it says in Hebrews 8:8:
For finding fault with them,…
I always read that and thought that He was talking about Israel, but does not God find fault with the New Testament church also? Did He not find fault with their understanding of the Word of God?
For finding fault with them,…
And it goes on:
…he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make…
This is actually a word that means “finish”; I will finish:
…a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:
And it goes on. So this is why we are referring to a third covenant. God is now, at this time, just taking off the wraps. Just like if you have ever been working on something and you did not want anyone to know about it so you kept it hidden, maybe even under cover, under wraps. Then when it is done, when it is finished, you reveal it. You show it to everyone. You just want everyone to see it.
This is what God has done patiently, long-sufferingly. He has the truth in His Word, but He did not open up the eyes of His people until now. Now His people are seeing many things that they never imagined, things that they never even thought were possible.
1st Question: According to this covenant, it seems like this is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. How does this relate to the Great Tribulation?
Chris: Good question. Remember in Romans 2, we saw who a true Jew is. It is not the physical descendants of Abraham over in the Middle East. Some of them might be true Jews. God could save a Jew as well as a Gentile. But God uses this picture throughout the Bible, which is why in Matthew 24 He speaks of Judaea and says, “Let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains.” Well, where is Judaea? Outwardly, corporately it is the representation of God’s Kingdom on earth, in the churches and in the congregations, and we are to come out of it. God does use it in a couple of different ways to identify outwardly the corporate people of God. Or He can use it, as He does here and in other places, to identify exclusively with true believers.
2nd Question: As to the question about the Jew, just as you have been teaching, it occurred to me that a good source in the Bible to talk about who a Jew is, is in Revelation 3:9 in one of the churches. Revelation 3:9 says:
Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie;…
Chris: God is not talking about Israel here because this is the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible before God will close His communication to mankind. So God is identifying the churches and congregations as again Judah, Jerusalem, and so forth, and those that are in them as “Jews.” But here:
…I will make them of the synagogue of Satan,…
“Synagogue” can be understood as the church, and Satan has always been in the churches and congregations. He has always been there; only now in our time, he has taken over them all. That is the only difference. He is reigning in every church and in every congregation in the world, from the biggest denomination and all their churches to the smallest house church that only has a few members on a poor street.
So He is saying that they “say they are Jews.” In other words, they profess that they are Christian, “I am really saved.” “But do lie” because God has not saved them and there has been no transformation. There is no new heart.
And this goes for all of us. Anyone of us can say, “I am a Christian.” Outwardly, that can be our profession, but let us go to James 2 and read what it says there. It says in James 2:17-19:
Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.
So the demons believe there is one God. So do we, and so do many, many people. Professing does not make someone truly saved. God has to do the work. He has to save a soul. No individual can get himself or herself saved in anyway.
2nd Question (continued): What about that church in Philadelphia which got the least scathing comments from the Lord?
Chris: From the 1st century up until the 21st century, there have always been those who are unsaved within the congregation, the “tares.” Satan has always been working through them. They are his emissaries, his “ministers of righteousness,” that we read about in 2 Corinthians 11, those who come looking like Christ but are not truly of Christ.
3rd Question: Back to Hebrews 8 and where we were with that third covenant, I am assuming there might be a mistranslation in the King James and maybe you have looked at this, but when you read Hebrews 8:7-8, it says:
For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them,…
“Them” is referring to the first and second. Then Hebrews 8:8 goes on to say:
…saith the Lord, when I will make a new…
So the “new” is referring to that third. But let us go to Hebrews 8:13, which is why I think there has to be a mistranslation:
In that he saith, A new…
So that new must be the third again. Hebrews 8:13 continues:
…he hath made the first old…
Why did He not say the first and second? In other words, I am thinking that the word “first” must be mistranslated. Is it?
Chris: That is a good question. I wondered about that too:
In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old…
Why did He not say both? Well, He did but it goes into chapter 10. If you continue to read, He is talking about making the first old. From Hebrews 9:1-8, God is referring to the Old Testament types and figures. They were shadowy. It was unclear. There was not definite light on the subject. Then beginning in Hebrews 9:8, the Holy Ghost is signifying that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle was yet standing, which was a figure. Then God goes into explaining what the New Testament, the new covenant or that second covenant, revealed about the first.
Then look at what it says in Hebrews 9:15:
And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.
We have to follow the whole discussion, and it actually goes into Hebrews 10 where God says, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days.” Then this leads into the context of “not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,” which we know is referring to individuals gathering together with Christ Himself, with God Himself, as well as the lack of salvation in the churches in Hebrews 10:26.
So this is not easy to see, but if you continue reading, you can actually make an outline where God goes into the old, into the new, and then He gets into the third.
4th Question: Please look at Galatians 4:24:
Which things are an allegory:…
You were in Genesis 17:1. The Almighty God shows up in a covenant with a man. In Genesis 16:7, Hagar is addressed, and that would be an angel of the Lord in a covenant with a woman. Now back to Galatians 4. Galatians 4:27 identifies another woman, which would be your third that you are looking at. She is going be a barren woman:
For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not;…
Ishmael’s mother bore. Isaac’s mother bore. In Genesis 25, Abraham’s third wife, she bore. Her name is Keturah.
Chris: I see where you are going with this. You have some very good points about Ishmael and the covenant. In Genesis 16 when Hagar ran away because Sarah dealt hardly with her, God came to Hagar and said, “I will make him a great nation.” This ties in with Hebrews 8 with the third covenant where Ishmael was circumcised when he was 13 years old, the same day that Abraham was 99, and this is pointing to 13,000 years of history. At that point Ishmael, will enter into the covenant.
1988 was the 13,000th year of earth’s history, which ended the Church Age and got us into the Great Tribulation. Now during the second part of this Great Tribulation, God is saving a great multitude. The promise to Hagar and also the promise to Abraham are coming together and we can expect that many of the descendents of Ishmael, of the Arab nations or the Muslim people will come to salvation during these days.
In Galatians 4, there are two (actually there are three) barren women. The barren woman is Sarah (no, because she had a child named Isaac). Well, this is before Isaac was born. God came and gave Sarah a promise that she would conceive the following year. Remember she laughed and Abraham also, because she was 89 going on 90 and she would be 90 when the child came.
So God is picking up the picture that there are two covenants. There is a covenant of works. This is what complicates things, because there are two covenants. As far as man’s relationship to the Law of God, there are two covenants. There are only two ways that someone can get saved. You can keep the whole Law. You can do everything perfectly that the Bible says, in thought, word, and deed, and you will be right with God. Of course, no one can do this. The second way is by grace, where God saves us totally and completely by His own mercy and will.
These are the two covenants and Hagar is a picture. It is interesting that it says “allegory.” It is an allegory. Most people think that since this is just history, you cannot get any spiritual meaning out of what the Bible says in these passages. But God says it was an allegory and yet it takes up several chapters of the Old Testament in the book of Genesis.
The allegory is that Hagar represents Sinai where the Law was given. Sarah represents the grace and the children that come forth by God’s magnificent salvation plan, we could say, through the Gospel of the Bible. These are the two covenants here.
Our relationship to the Law of God—in Hebrews 8 it is not talking about our relationship to the Law of God. It is talking about God giving the old covenant and God giving the new covenant. Now He is going to give understanding, and that is the third covenant.
5th Question: Please look at Isaiah 53:8 woman and Luke 23:29 woman:
…and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living:…
Isaiah 54:1:
Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife,…
And she will represent the Gentile nation?
Chris: Well you quoted Isaiah 54:1 pretty accurately. God has used many women in the Bible as this type of picture. You notice all the problems the patriarchs had in child bearing again, and again, and again. They had to wait on the Lord for the Lord to bring forth a child.
But Isaiah 54:1, historically, is going back to the account with Sarah. Spiritually, it is painting that beautiful truth that God is going to bring forth many, a great multitude of people from around the world. So there will be a tremendous spiritual seed of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Gospel. Thank you for that question and those verses.