The First Prophecy

We're going through the series on the Beatitudes. I also said I was going to start a series this month on prophecy and probably give at least a sermon a month for the rest of this year just going through basic prophecy. So I was going to start with Daniel 2, and then the more I thought about it, I thought, no, if we're going to do basic prophecy, let's go back to the very basic prophecies. I mean, let's start with the things that are commonly known, but let's lay that foundation of let's look at prophecy from the huge picture, then we'll get down to the specifics. We want to talk about 666, we want to talk about the mark of the beast, but let's start with the big broad viewpoint of prophecy, because that gives us the foundation for God's viewpoint. So if I had to say to you, I keep wanting to reach in for my classes. Well, let me see. I may have to borrow them in a minute. Let me see if I can read without them. But if you had to pick one prophecy, and say, okay, this is the foundation for all prophecy, what is the one place you'd go and say, this is the foundation for all prophecy. Let's go to Genesis. Genesis 3. Because this is why we are where we are. God made Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve chose to follow Satan. They sinned and turned against God. And God made proclamations against them that we're still living under today. But in this, there is a very, very important prophecy that lays the foundation for all prophecy. Verse 14, this is where God finally comes to them and confronts them with their rebellion against him. He says, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle. He's talking to Satan here. He's actually talking about the serpent that he used. So the snake is used as a symbol now. I see a snake. It reminds us of Satan. And then verse 15, he says, and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, and ye shall bruise your head, and ye shall bruise his heel. Then he says to the woman, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain ye shall bring forth children, and your desires shall be for your husband, and ye shall rule over you. In other words, he said this isn't going to work the way you thought. Once you leave Eden, all of creation begins to deteriorate, including your own bodies. Childbearing wasn't supposed to be as difficult as it is, and it wasn't supposed to be this painful. He said you're going to begin to deteriorate. And of course, we all live with deteriorated bodies, and they're continuing to deteriorate, right? None of us are going to live to be 120 years old in this body. It's just not going to happen. He said also your marriages won't work right.

There'll be problems in your marriages because your own human nature has now become corrupted. They didn't understand that yet. But they should have at least known something. Well, they knew something had changed because after they sinned, what did they do? They hid themselves from God. We're ashamed now. There's something wrong with us. Yeah, their nature had changed.

And he says everything in your life now, you had the perfect marriage up to this point. It's not going to happen anymore. And having children is going to be difficult. He says to Adam, verse 17, because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree, on which I commanded you, saying you shall not eat, cursed is the ground for your sake.

All of nature began to deteriorate immediately. It was still better than it is now. It's been deteriorating a long time. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles that shall bring forth for you. And ye shall eat of the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

He said so now even the creation is going to deteriorate until it's going to be hard for you to even produce food. You have to work your whole life sometimes just to eat, just to survive.

And that's been much of human history. You and I have lived in a time where we didn't have to spend all of our time just trying to survive. That's unusual. Most of human history is people just working to survive. And then he said, you will die. You're going to die. He wouldn't have known exactly what that meant either. Verse 24, so he drove out the man and he placed caribbean at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

In other words, you cannot receive eternal life now. I'm driving you out away from me. And Satan became, as we know, the God of this world. Now in all that gloom and doom there is the foundational prophecy. It's verse 15. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. And he, the seed of the woman, shall bruise your head, Satan, and you shall bruise his heel. That wouldn't have meant much to them. But that's the foundation of all prophecy.

In fact, it is called, if you want to know a few Greek words, the Proto-Evangelium. Proto-Evangelium. Proto means first. Evangelium meaning good news. It's the first good news. It's all bad news. And this is the first good news in the Bible once Adam and Eve are kicked out of Eden. You're gone. You're left. You're separated. But I will set forth in motion what will fix this.

A seed of Eve will conquer Satan, but he will bruise his heel. In other words, the seed is going to suffer, but he will conquer Satan. This is the foundation of biblical prophecy. Everything fits in this framework. Because from this point on, all we read about is the deterioration of humanity. Until at the end of the book of Revelation, before Christ returns, humanity is literally going to try to kill him and reject God entirely under Satan's rule.

But it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is because of the Proto-Evangelium. The first good news. And so when we look through prophecy, we're always going to start with this. God has a plan, and God's plan is through the seed of the woman. And he would conquer Satan, and he would save humanity through that. So that sets the foundation.

When we get to the Daniel 7 and Revelation 13, when we get to all those Scriptures and we go through them, we're all going to be building off of this. We're going to be building every time off a new set of understandings. Once we accept this as the beginning of prophecy, something else comes into focus. And it's the other foundation that's going to take us a couple of sermons to build.

And that is, God then interacts in this deteriorated humanity and deteriorating creation. He works in this with Satan being the God of this world. He works in this to carry out his plan. God never abandoned humanity. We tend to think of the Millennium as the Kingdom of God as the same thing. No, the Millennium is the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth. God's Kingdom exists right now. God never left His throne.

God's still in charge. He's always been in charge. He just let Satan have rule for a while. And he keeps breaking into human history to make sure the end is what he says is going to happen. I mean, the end of prophecy is New Jerusalem coming to earth. He doesn't take us beyond that. He just says, when we get there, I'll tell you what happens next.

So the end of prophecy is New Jerusalem coming to earth where God comes to live with His children who are spirit. So that's the end of prophecy. The beginning of prophecy is, here's how I'm going to do that in this deteriorating humanity, creating creation under the rule of Satan. So prophecy's relevancy now has to always be seen in the same context of God's plan, not Satan's plan.

See, we usually study prophecy in terms of Satan's plan, except Christ comes back. Okay, we know Christ comes back, but all the things Satan's going to do, bring ten nations together and all these people are going to die, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, those things are going to be eventually stopped and controlled through God's plan. And once we recognize that, we start to see prophecy in its hope instead of just its fear.

So how does He do that? How do we know what God's doing step by step by step? We're going to have to go through some of the covenants of the Bible. Now, we're going to briefly mention it today, but we're going to have to get into the depth of it. We tend to think of two covenants, right? The old covenant made its Sinai and the new covenant that came with Jesus Christ. And then we try to figure out what's the continuity between the two of them. I mean, some things carry on, some things don't. The Ten Commandments obviously carry on between one and the other. The Holy Days obviously carry on between one and the other.

Animal sacrifices don't. We see that continuity and discontinuity. But there's a whole lot more than two covenants in the Bible. In fact, there's ten major covenants. There's ten major covenants in the Bible. Now, we will briefly mention those in some future sermons. We're not going to go through everyone in detail, but we'll go through some of them in detail. So to really understand what we're going to look at as Genesis 3.15 as the foundation of prophecy, we have to understand some promises made in a covenant God made with Abraham.

So let's go to Genesis 12. Genesis 12. We go through these things and I told Kim, I said, somehow we have to refocus as a people on the importance of this kind of information. We have to understand that this isn't just intellectual knowledge. This is understanding what God is doing. And we actually have a part in this because God has made a covenant with every one of you.

You're part of a covenant which is part of prophecy. These covenants were supposed to each one new covenant was to come along, contain elements of all of them. You and I still live under elements of the covenant God made with Noah. You know, I know, he's not going to destroy the earth with water ever again because that was a promise in a covenant he made with Noah.

You and I know about a lot of things in prophecy because of the promises made to Abraham in the covenant he made with Abraham. So these covenants tell us all through history, this is next step in God's prophecy, next step in his plan, next step in his plan. And you're part of it. All Christians called by God today with his spirit are part of it. So we don't think of ourselves sometimes as part of prophecy, but we are if we understand our calling. Here's what God told Abraham. Now the Lord said to Abram, get out of your country from your family this is chapter 12 of Genesis verse 1, and from your father's house to a land that I will show you and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Now we will have to go through a little bit more detail when we go through the covenants about the Abrahamic covenant, but this is very important. This is the foundation because God renewed that covenant with Abraham, kept adding to it, explaining what he was going to do, but this is where he starts. In you all nations will be blessed.

So how do we interpret that? It is so important for us to understand the reason that those who believe in Judaism cannot accept Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God is because they don't believe in the New Testament. They just don't. If you don't believe in the New Testament, you believe Jesus was either some kind of really liberal rabbi, but why? Because he was tearing down Orthodoxy. He's some strange, weird, liberal rabbi, or he's a heretic claiming to be the Son of God. So in Judaism he can only be one or the other.

A good teacher, but a little strange, or he's a heretic and rejected. Orthodox Jews, for the most part, reject him as a heretic because he claimed to be somebody he's not. You and I interpret the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus Christ through the New Testament, through the New Testament. And we're going to look at some Old Testament prophecies about the seed of the woman and how they're explained in the New Testament. Now we can spend hours and hours doing this. I'm just going to pick a few because this is an important part of prophecy.

It is amazing in the New Testament how many prophecies in the Old Testament are used to prove who Jesus is.

And of course, if you ask an Orthodox Jew, they'll look at those and say, you Christians don't know anything about the Bible. Remember, it's our Bible. It's the Hebrew Bible. You don't know it at all because this is a bunch of junk. This isn't what it means.

Now what's interesting, I have not personally, I haven't talked to, I've read, actually I watched some videos a while back. It was a video of Jews who had become Christians and why they did.

In every case, it wasn't because of what Jesus taught. In every case, it's because they looked at the Old Testament prophecies. They looked at the New Testament and said, oh, he did fulfill those prophecies. It's the prophecies that lead them. So we could go argue the teachings of Jesus all you want to a Jew and it won't mean much. But if you argue the prophecies and God's working with them, that's the way they come into the belief of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It's through these prophecies and it all starts in Genesis 3.15. Let me show you what I mean. I just read there in Genesis 12. Let's go to Galatians 3. I read this in a sermon probably six months ago, talking about a totally different subject, but I'm going to read it again because it is so important in Galatians 3.15. Paul says, brother, and I speak in the manner of men, there is only a man's covenant. It is confirmed. No one acknowledges it or adds it. You know, when you go and you make a covenant with somebody, you know, you buy a house, you do a business deal, and it's now legal. You can't change that unless you both sit down and agree to change it. It's now, you know, I've decided not to pay you my house payment this month because, yeah, I don't like the agreement. And they'll come take your house away, right? You do that long enough, and pretty soon there's a policeman at your door saying, I'm sorry, we have to evict you because you've broken your contract. So he's talking about the covenant that God makes with human beings. By the way, all covenants that God makes with human beings have elements of response from us, from human beings. We don't get to add or subtract anything from it. It is not negotiable. It is not a covenant ever between equals. It is a covenant between God and created beings. We must always remember that. When you entered into the new covenant, it wasn't because you were making an agreement with God, you're making, you know, negotiating with Him, you're just saying, yes, Lord, I agree, where do I sign? That's what baptism is. You sign it. It's the sign of the covenant.

So, he's talking here about the covenants God makes with man. And then he says, verse 16, now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made, right? And Abraham's seed, all nations will be blessed. He does not say to seeds, plural, as to many, but of one, and to your seed, who is Christ?

Genesis 3, verse 15 finds its next greatest fulfillment. Well, its next greatest fulfillment was Noah. I told him I would save them. I've got to start over, or they're going to end up destroying themselves. So, I've got to wipe them all out, but here's one family I'll save. Why?

Because Genesis 3, 15 promised that would happen. That prophecy is a promise. I will supply the only solution to your problem of having deteriorating human nature and a deteriorating creation under the rule of Satan. I'll supply that. And that's why Noah was saved.

So, the next step. And what's the next step? Abraham, he says, your seed.

Someone from your family, all through this salvation history. That's what we're going through now, salvation history. All through salvation history, it gets more and more specific until it gets down to Mary, a virgin who will bear it. There's prophecy about that. So, all these prophecies get more and more specific down to this focal point, because this is the focal point of all salvation history, is this Messiah, the seed. And Paul says, we know who that seed is. It's Jesus Christ. And it's one. It's not every Jew. It's not every Israelite. It's one. Now, there's promises made to other physical descendants of Abraham, yes. Not only to Israelites. You know, there's promises made to some of the Arabs.

There's promises God made to Ishmael and Esau and others, who were descendants of Abraham and his family. But there's specific ones made to Jews and specific ones made to Israelites. But this one, that all nations will be blessed, which is the core of salvation history, is Christ.

And before we study any of the rest of it, we have to know this.

We have to understand what he's doing. Now, let's go back to Deuteronomy 18. We're just going to look at some Old Testament prophecies and then look at how they're used in the New Testament.

Deuteronomy 18. Here is a prophecy. Verse 15. Deuteronomy 18.15. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me. Now, this is what was given to Moses.

So Moses is saying sometime in the future here of Israel, he's telling Israel, there will be a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren, him you shall hear, according to all you desired of the Lord your God in the day of the assembly, saying, let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, nor let me see the great fire any more lest I die.

And the Lord said to me, said to Moses, What they have spoken is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you, like Moses, from among their brethren, and will put my words in his mouth, and it shall speak to them all that I command him. And it shall be that whoever will not hear my words which he speaks in my name, I will require it of him. So he says, you just tell them something a prophet's coming, and this prophet is going to tell them all that they need.

There's no, I don't believe in any Jewish writings, there's anyone that they say fulfills that, because nobody has ever fulfilled that.

Let's go to Acts chapter 3. We'll see how this is used in the New Testament. You know, if you ever want to do an interesting study that will take you a long, long time to do it, if you have a set of reference or the bottom of a page where you have the little numbers and letters and you can look up, I have entire books dedicated to that, tying in all the scriptures that are tied into a certain verse, what you will find that the Old or the New Testament, hundreds of places, 70, at least 70 in Romans alone, hundreds of places is a quote from the Old Testament. It's just bits and pieces of it. Sometimes it's, sometimes there's three different quotations in one verse, especially Paul. He just throws them out. And like Jesus, sometimes Paul quotes the Septuagint, sometimes he quotes the Mesaretic text, and well, it wasn't then, it was the Old Hebrew because they had the Hebrew. Sometimes he paraphrases, especially Paul, who just paraphrased it because he's just quoting the Bible. But all the time you'll see, oh, they're always tying the Old Testament into what's being said and done especially prophetically. What we have here in Acts 3 is that Peter is teaching on at the temple. And a lame man had just been healed. So we've got to get the context of what he says this. Now as a lame man who was healed, held on to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the porch, which is called Solomon's, and they were greatly amazed. And Peter starts talking to them. He says, man of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Why do you look so intently at us as though by our own power or godliness we have made this man walk?

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers glorified His servant Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate when he was determined to let him go.

But you denied the Holy One. Now that's a Messianic prophecy, or Messianic term. So he is now saying, you denied the Messiah. Genesis 3.15, Genesis 12.1-4, scores of other prophecies about this Holy One that was going to come, and killed the Prince of Life, another Messianic prophecy, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witness. And in His name, through faith in His name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know. So he goes on, and he talks about how the prophets... Let's go back to the prophets. The whole core of prophecy in the Old Testament is about the coming of the Messiah.

And of course, what the Jews thought at that time, He was coming to restore them as a nation of rulership over the world. They did not understand something about His coming that's quite obvious to us only because we believe in the New Testament. He says, verse 22, because He says Jesus is the Messiah, He was resurrected, He's now with God in heaven.

This is it. This is what prophecy is all about. It's about the coming of the Messiah.

So this is the fulfillment of that. To you first, God, having raised up His servant Jesus, said Him to bless you in turning away every one of you from your iniquities. He said, so it's going to go to everyone, all nations, all peoples. He just started... You get to hear it first.

You get to know who the Messiah is. I will say this. There is a minister who some of you... I won't mention his name, but some of you will know.

His history goes back into the worldwide church of God who claims to be that prophet.

He is a heretic and a liar. Jesus Christ is that prophet.

There's sometimes you just got to say things for what they are. He's a heretic and a liar.

Jesus Christ is that prophet.

And I just said, if you know who He is, you know my opinion. You understand my opinion.

Okay. Let's look at a few other prophecies. Psalm chapter 2. Now Orthodox Jews...

The Jews, there's more than Orthodox Jews. They're broken up into different groups, too. And they have different teachings about Psalm chapter 2. It's about David. It's about David and the Messiah. It's about the Messiah. We know that David wrote it, and so it's personalized by David. But how is it used in the New Testament? That gives us our reference point. Psalm 2. Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?

Yes, I have set my king on the holy hill of Zion. So here we have a prophecy about this king. Now we're going to come back to this. I want to go to Acts 4. Go back to Acts 4. Let's look at how this is determined and interpreted in the New Testament. So it's a prophecy.

How do we understand this prophecy in the context of the New Testament?

Verse 23. What happens here? Peter and John are forbidden by the Sanhedrin to preach about Jesus.

And verse 23. They're let go.

And they went to their own companions and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. And when he heard that, they raised their voice to God with one accord and said, Lord, you are God, who made heaven and earth and the sea, and all that is in them, who by the mouth of your servant David has said. So now they're going to go back to something written by David to talk about prophecy. Why did the nation's rage and the people plot vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand. The rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ or His anointed. So they're taking what we just read in Psalm 2, and they're saying they don't want us to preach about Christ, which is what Psalm 2 says is going to happen. Then verse 27, for truly against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together.

So here in the New Testament, they apply Psalm 2 to Jesus Christ. So when we read Psalm 2, we see, ah, the king, the special anointed one who comes as king. As we go through this, we begin to understand that there are two comings of the Messiah.

That's where Jews don't quite know how to explain that. Some Jews believe there's two messiahs, because there's two different major prophecies about someone who's anointed who does different things. Well, how does the New Testament solve that for us? Let's go to Isaiah 11. Isaiah 11. So we're just doing prophecies here.

Oh, it may not be as exciting as 666. But you know, those prophecies have no relevance without this.

Really. Because this is God's plan. Isaiah 11. You hear this many times read at the Feast of Tabernacles that is about the reign of Jesus Christ on earth.

And so these first 11 verses here are read many times, like I said, or 12 verses at the Feast, because it's about the coming of this anointed one. And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

You know this passage. Okay, how is this used in the New Testament? Well, let's go to Romans 15.

Romans 15. And here we have Paul do a typical Pauline explanation that leaves our heads swimming.

Because he dumps so much information into a short number of statements that just to study it and really understand it would take a long time.

He says in 15 verse 8, Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the circumcision for the truth of God to confirm the promises made unto the fathers. So he's going back to prophecies.

The circumcision is Israel. Prophecies made to Israel and to the fathers.

And Jesus Christ is a fulfillment of the prophecies made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and to Israel. And it's through Israel that he came.

And then the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. Now when we get into the covenants, that's going to make sense. And this is what Paul is saying now. He's saying there's all these different covenants and there's a covenant to all the nations. There's a covenant to the nations.

And he's saying that covenant's starting now. And then he does typical Pauline. Let me just throw out a whole bunch of verses from the Old Testament. And if you didn't have an Old Testament, you have no idea what he's talking about. He says, For this reason I will confess to you among the Gentiles and sing to your name. And again, he says, he doesn't say according to Isaiah, according to Jeremiah. And remember, there's no verses and chapters in the Hebrew Bible at this point. So he's just quoting. And you can look up every one of these places. Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people. Rejoice with the children of the fathers, the fathers who are being Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And again, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, laud Him, all you peoples. And again, Isaiah says, it's interesting, he actually mentions Isaiah because Isaiah is a major source of Messianic prophecies. And remember what we just read. And there shall be a root of Jesse, and he shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, and him the Gentiles shall hope. We just read that in Isaiah 11, about the Messiah reigning on earth so that all nations can come to Him. There's Isaiah, I think it's 42, talks about, all people will come to Him. This is God's plan.

No matter what Satan does, this gets thwarted. This works. It's just Satan does everything he can to stop it from happening. But this is what works. The Messiah comes, and He comes to rule over the earth.

But He comes twice. The prophetic message is He has to come twice because of God's judgment on His sinful humanity and His love and His justice and how all that works together, and it's all part of Genesis 3.15.

The seed of the woman would conquer the serpent, but the serpent would bruise His heel. In other words, the serpent would do in some harm. Isaiah 52.

It's interesting that I told you I watched a video of Jews who had converted to Christianity, and a number of them said it was Isaiah 52 and 53 that changed their minds.

Because two messiahs don't make sense.

So if there's not two messiahs, He must come two times.

He must come twice.

Let's look at verse 52 and verse 13, because most of 52 and all of chapter 53 are prophecies about this servant anointed by God. He says, verse 13 of chapter 52, Behold, my servant shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled very high.

Okay, He's going to be above everything.

Then verse 14, And just as many of you were astonished at you, so his visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. He said he is going to be beaten to the point you can't even recognize him as a human being.

Wait a minute, the Messiah comes to reign over the earth. The Messiah comes to destroy armies.

He comes to rule with a rod of iron. Oh, I mean, here the servant is being tortured.

And here's why, verse 15, So he shall sprinkle many nations, and kings shall shut their mouths at him. For what he had not been told them they shall see, what they had not heard they shall consider.

He said that even the kings of the earth will reject him, as he's going to be marred. If you go through chapter 53, which we read a lot of times before the Passover, we see torture and death of this servant. Verse 3 says, He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief, as we hid as it were our faces from him. He is despised, and we did not esteem him.

Surely he has borne our griefs. The death of this servant is for us.

He's taking upon himself what we deserve before the justice of God, willingly saying, I will take what you deserve so that you can have an opportunity to be a child of my father, to be my brother and sister, and carried our sorrows. Yet we have seen him stricken, smitten, by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. His chastisement for our peace was upon him. You and I can't have peace with God unless we accept Jesus Christ in this role. And then we can have peace with God. For as by his stripes we are healed. And then he goes on and talks about the terribleness of this torture. And then in verse 10 he says, yet it pleased the Lord, now listen to this, it pleased the Lord to bruise him. In other words, this is part of the plan. Genesis 3.15. He's going to suffer, but it's all going to work out. He has put him to grief. And when you take his soul, an offering for sin, when you take his life back to you as an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, or back to that, he's the seed of Abraham, but he's the seed of God.

He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

You can go on and read the rest of it.

Christ comes twice. You and I take that so much for granted. We don't understand. It's the whole basis, foundation of all prophecy. It's God's plan in all this. It's what God was going to do for the foundation of the earth, decided by he and the word at the foundation of the earth. This is what we're going to do. Right? Slain for the foundation of the earth. As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, that's it. It's all put in motion. We take it for granted. 1 Peter 2. 1 Peter 2. 2 Peter 2.

I'm breaking in in the middle of a thought here, but I'll show you how he uses the Scripture.

Christ has left us an example. That quote right there in verse 22 is from Isaiah. It's from Isaiah. That means Isaiah 52 and 53 in the New Testament is a prophecy about Jesus Christ. It's the only thing that makes sense. And they use it that way. They use it that way. It's very interesting that in Isaiah 61 there is a Messianic prophecy. Well, let's take it. Let's go ahead and do this. We'll finish up with this. Isaiah 61.

There's just so many Messianic prophecies, and how they're used in the New Testament.

I mean, if you read Psalm 22, you know, it means David's suffering.

If you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John's account of Jesus' suffering, you realize it's a prophecy down to his last words. No, not his last words.

He starts that with, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

But it's interesting, that's not his last words. His last words are, I commend you, my Spirit.

I'm coming home as he slipped into that sleep of death.

It's like I said yesterday at the funeral. I said, you know, we don't have to worry about Kirk and Coco. God took them with him. Now, they're not awake. They don't have an immortal soul, but they're not erased yet either.

It's not the second death. It's not annihilation. They wake up. And if you've ever been put under, I remember when I had cataract surgery, I looked at the doctor and said, when does this stuff kick in? Because it's taken a long time. Because he said, we're going to give you something, then we have to wake you up in the middle of the operation.

Oh, okay. How many have had cataract surgery?

It's weird when they wake you up, because you're in the middle of the operation. And he goes, let's see, right about now. And I remember waking up and saying, wow, does that stuff work? And I heard the doctor very calmly say, Gary, I'm operating in your eye. It's best you don't talk. Okay.

Between right now and why does that work, there was nothing in between that.

We're just shocked, like, whoa, you know, man, I'm in the middle of an operation. Of course, I wanted to talk about it, but they weren't interested in me doing that. You just shut up and let us work on you, okay?

That's what it's like.

You wake up.

How did I get off on that? Anyways, it's on my mind.

We have here in Psalm, Isaiah 61. Oh, I was in Psalm 22. I was talking about Psalm 22. You know, he starts with, by God, by God, why have you forsaken me?

And then you read through the New Testament accounts, and that's not how he ends.

He ends with, I commend to you, my spirit, hold on to me. See you in three days.

That's, you know, we know God keeps us for that day. Second death is a whole different experience.

Second death is the annihilation and the erasing of that life. It's gone. That's second death.

Isaiah 61.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor, to preach the gospel, prodo even get jellium. He says, I'm supposed to, let's start it there. I'm here to preach it. This is a prophecy.

He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim the liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prisons to those who are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God. God's blessing and God's cursing on humanity.

Now, this is seen even in many Jewish explanations. It's a Messianic prophecy.

What's fascinating is Luke 4. This is what Jesus read in his first sermon.

He got up and read this and said, this is happening right now with me. Now, you can imagine if you are a strict Jew today and you read this and Jesus says, that applies to me, Jesus is what? A heretic. Where's the Messiah? One or the other?

We took the New Testament. We look at that. We believe He is the Messiah. We believed He got up and He said that and it's who He is. It's who He is.

So what we've seen as we go through prophecy, I want to start here. This is just the foundation.

There's a lot that we can put together here, but you can see it just from the things we've gone through. We have the first prophecy and when we look through the entire Old and New Testaments, there's a thread. The thread is the Messiah is someone who comes from God. It's not just a normal human being. He comes from God and He comes twice. Once is the suffering servant. Second is the King of Kings. Now we have to look at and what we'll start to look at next, how did God make covenants throughout history to do that? Back years ago when I first came here with young adults, we did a series of Bible studies just on the covenants. I think we did four Bible studies. Remember those? Four Bible studies just on the covenants. We won't cover that in that depth, but we'll still cover it to show that these covenants is how God's carrying out His plan and therefore they all become prophetic. Every one of them become prophetic and every one of them then leads to something in the next step of what He's doing. Once we set that foundation, we understand, okay, we have the gospel. Actually, the gospel is the prophecy of what God's doing in His plan through Christ versus His second comings, how He works through covenants. And then we can start through Daniel 2. We can start, look how that builds off of that. Not independent of it, it builds off of it. As in Satan's world, he continues to do things and God says, yep, he's going to do this, this, and this, but I will always keep it. No matter what he does, I will always keep it so it ends up with what I want in the end.

And that is why prophecy then can be so hopeful, not just something that brings us fear.