Prophetic Fulfillment

I always, every once in a while, people ask me, would you give a prophetic sermon? And other people say, oh, please don't ever give a sermon to a prophet. Because, you know, some people don't like prophecy, some people say it scares me. But it is important. I mean, 25 to 30 percent of the Bible isn't somehow prophetic. Now, that doesn't mean they all have to do with the future.

There's a lot of prophecies in the Scripture that have been fulfilled. But it's there for a reason. And it's to show us that God does interact with human history, and God does interact with human beings. So it is important to, on occasion, go through some prophecy. Now, the last time I gave a prophetic sermon was probably five, six months ago, where I went through, it was actually a two-parter, I went through prophecies about Christ's first coming, and prophecies about Christ's second coming. That's the great theme of prophecy, is Christ's first and second coming, because that's the whole plan of salvation.

There's other major themes, and we're going to go through a little bit of one of the themes, because once you know the themes, you put those threads together, you can start to then look at other prophecies, and they can make sense. We also, as we'll look at today, we have to know a little bit of the history of the Bible, of the people, places in the Bible, to understand prophetic messages. There's a great, great danger in going through prophecy and just pulling out and deciding, oh, this means right now, today, 21st century America.

And it may or it may not. We have to be very careful about that. I mean, that's why every time there's a blood moon, what happens? It's the end of the world. The Internet's full of it. The Christian pulpits are full of it. It's the end of the world. This is one of the great signs that the rapture is about to happen, or Christ is about to come back, because there was a blood moon. And now there's been so many blood moons and so many scares, nobody takes it serious anymore.

But that's been going on for years. And it's because they take a few scriptures and apply it without the context of the greater understanding of Bible prophecy. What I'm going to cover today is a little complicated. In fact, I almost didn't cover it. And then I thought about it all week and I kept working on it.

And I thought, no, we need to cover it. So I created all the information I wanted to cover. And then yesterday I took about 60% of it out, because it was way too much information. How to take big ideas and bring them down into understandable, just small understandable principles so we can apply them. Many times in our culture, people know prophecies, but they have no idea how we came to the conclusions to interpret that prophecy the way that we do. So, unfortunately, you won't be able to see much on the slide here.

But what I want to talk about is when we look at prophecies, how do we interpret fulfillments? Now, a fulfillment means that a prophecy has happened. A prophecy has been filled up. It has happened. And we're going to talk about fulfillments because we're going to see that many prophecies have more than one fulfillment or have different ways in which they are fulfilled.

Now, we know that. I mean, when we went through the prophecies of Christ's first coming, we saw how there were scriptures in the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus Christ that the New Testament writers said, Oh, look! This scripture proves that Jesus was the Messiah. And yet the Jews of the day, or many of them, of course many of the apostles were all Jews, but many of the Jews rejected him as the Messiah, and many Jews today look at those exact same scriptures and say, That's not what that means.

And that's why, of course, the Jews don't believe in the New Testament. They see the New Testament as a perversion of the Old Testament in proving that this Jesus is the Messiah. So I went through and showed how the interpretation of that by the New Testament writers either absolutely proves that Jesus was the Messiah, or you could throw the entire New Testament out. Then we went through the Second Coming, and how all those scriptures are put together, this theme.

And we saw multiple fulfillments. I mean, there are certain scriptures that talk about his first and second coming in the same verses. We actually went through Luke's account of his first sermon. And Jesus got up and said part of Isaiah, and stopped in the middle of a sentence and said, This is about me.

The reason he didn't finish the sentence is because the rest of the sentence is about his second coming. But the first part can be applied to his first and second coming. So how do we determine the fulfillment of prophecy? Some of it's easy, some of it's not. And that's why there is so much controversy and discussion. And by the way, we don't understand all prophecy.

What we do know is God has given us enough information that when it happens, we'll understand it. When it happens, we'll understand it. Anyone who knew the passage is a revelation, or in Matthew that were used to prove the blood moons, really knew that the context of prophecy knew that those blood moons weren't the declaration of the end time. Because the rest of the prophecy will let you come to that conclusion.

In the context of it. So what I want to talk about are fulfillments. How is prophecy fulfilled? I'm going to walk away from the mic here, but I think it's small enough hall I can talk and you can hear it. Although it won't be recorded if I do that, will it?

So maybe I better stay here. I mean, I can take the mic off. Let's just look at those who can see this. One type of fulfillment is called singular fulfillment. Now what does that mean? It's a prophecy that has an obvious one-time fulfillment. It's a prophecy that you know has been fulfilled. Now here's an example. Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, sees the writing on the wall, brings in Daniel and says, What does that mean? And Daniel says, it means that your kingdom is going to be given to the Medes and Persians.

And that night the Persians invaded Babylon and it fell. So we have a prophecy that's given, and within a very short period of time it's fulfilled. Now that's a singular fulfillment. We study that as a proof of God's intervention, but we don't study it to try to figure out what else does it mean. Now this is very important because for those who see the Bible entirely as an allegory, then it would be like, oh, how does that apply now?

Well, I could take that section of Scripture and make it apply to, I could make up something. You could bring in a lot of different things happening in the world today and say, That is about President Trump. No, it's not. It's a singular event. And we see the prophecy, we see it fulfilled. There's lots of singular prophecies in the Bible. This is going to happen, and a lot of times we understand it because it's already been fulfilled.

This is going to happen. Look, it's already happened. We see the singular event. There's also conditional fulfillment. Now what does that mean? Conditional fulfillment is simply a prophecy that God says, If you do this, I will do this. But if you do this, I will do something else. So I'm going to do something here. I prophesied something. Now, it's up to you how this turns out.

The most classic example of that is Jonah goes to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, and tells them to repent. And they have a very superficial repentance, but at least they try. And God says, okay, I'm not going to kill you. And Jonah gets furious. He gets depressed. How dare you not destroy our enemy? And he thought God was terribly unfair. When God's message to Assyria was, if you recognize me, if you at least recognize who I am, and repent that you do not recognize who I am, I'm going to destroy your country.

They did, and he spared them. And what we'll see is all through the prophets said to Israel, Judah was a message. I will destroy you unless you repent. And what's very interesting is the history of Judah and Israel is a recurring history of sort of repenting, and God doesn't destroy them right away. And then they slip back into rebellion, and God sends up another prophet and says, you know, my buddy who came before me told you if you don't repent, and I'm here to tell you God's going to destroy you, and he sort of repents, and he lets them go a little longer.

We'll give an example of this today. Conditional. There's sometimes the prophecies have conditions, and how they are fulfilled depends on the conditions. Eventually, Judah, both Israel and Judah were destroyed, just like God predicted. It didn't happen necessarily in the timetable that people thought it was going to happen because God was interacting with people. Then you have progressive fulfillment. Progressive fulfillment is the idea that a prophecy takes a series of events to be fulfilled. Okay. You know, when I went through a prophetic sermon a couple of years ago, I just went through the protoevangelium, the very first prophecy in the Bible, the first mention of good news, and the protoevangelium, the first good news.

And it's Genesis 3.15. God says, I will send the son of a woman, and basically to conquer Satan. Now, that prophecy is the single most important prophecy in the Bible because it says, I'm going to fix this. But we had to go through all the progressive prophecies that have to happen for that to be fulfilled. And it hasn't been totally fulfilled yet, has it? Satan is still the god of this world.

But then we had to go through Abraham. And through his seed, all the world would be blessed. And then what God had to do through Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the prophecies, he told him that he would do and fulfill to them. Oh, you're going to have a child. Now, that's a fulfilled prophecy. Sarah's not going to have any more children. It's a singular event. But it's a fulfilled prophecy. You're going to have a child. Oh, no, I can't. Hagar won't have the child. No, you're going to have a child. Now, that was a fulfilled prophecy that goes back to Genesis 3.15.

There's a whole progression. Israel coming out of Egypt. Israel going into the Promised Land. Which he told Abraham, I will take your descendants and bring them into this land. And he did, just like he prophesied. And as soon as they got there, he said, and you are eventually going to fail, and I will scatter you out of this land. And that happened too. And I will bring you back, at least some of them.

And some of them did come back. Prophecy after prophecy has been fulfilled, but not all of it. Christ came the first time to partly fulfill Genesis 3.15. He conquered Satan. It says that in the New Testament. He came to show you are conquered. But, he doesn't totally conquer Satan until a couple of other things happen.

One, he returns, right? He returns and binds Satan for a thousand years. Then releases him for a little bit, and then he's totally conquered. So Genesis 3.15 has not been totally fulfilled. It's just a progression of prophecies. And what's exciting, if you believe the Bible is true, you could go back through and see, Oh, this one's been fulfilled, this one's been fulfilled, this one's been partially fulfilled.

And you can see what God is doing. A fourth kind of... Let's see if I can get this to work here. Where do I point this? We're going to have a turn on. This is why on television, they don't let... They call it the talent.

The talent is not allowed to touch anything, because we tend to destroy it. Okay. Former and latter fulfillments. This means that there can be prophecies. That's part of what we're going to go through today, shows some prophecy on a singular theme that you can see all of these. A former fulfillment means, here's a prophecy, and it's partly fulfilled in history. But not all of it. Not all of it. So there's this former way in which part of it's done, but it's not complete. A lot of prophecies that were given to ancient Israel and Judah by the prophets.

It's very interesting when you go through, especially the might of prophets... Well, no. Jeremiah, Isaiah is the same thing. Ezekiel. They're talking to these people, and they're prophesying to them directly. And this is going to happen to you. This is what God's going to do. And then there's always this, but God will bring you back, and He will pour His Spirit out upon you.

Or God will have David reign over you. Now, Jews and Christians all look at those, and say, oh, those are messianic prophecies. Those are messianic prophecies. Those are about Jesus Christ. Well, Jews don't say it's not Jesus Christ. It's about the Messiah. We see it as Jesus' the fulfillment, the partial fulfillment of that. So we have to say, well, part of that's sort of done, and part of it's not.

See, it gets a little complicated when you go through and really understand what prophecy is. And then there's something. Now, this is very interesting, because this helps us understand. We're going to go through a passage in the New Testament that has been misapplied many, many times, because of not understanding this. There is what is called telescopic fulfillment. You know what a telescopic does? It helps you look out over distance. Here's the thing about telescopic prophecy. It's like you're standing on a mountain, looking at mountain peaks. Well, here's one mountain.

Oh, I see another mountain. In the future, I see, oh, way out there, I can see another mountain. The problem is, you don't see the mountains. It's the time period between the mountains we don't know. So we can say, oh, this is a prophecy, and I can see, oh, yeah, this continues way out there, and it continues way out there. And so it's telescopic.

So we're always looking for all the details in the valleys, and a lot of times, there is a lot given to us between the mountain peaks. All we see is the mountain peaks. This is very, very important to understand. And much of the prophecies about Jesus Christ fit all of these. There's former ladder fulfillments, there's progressive fulfillment, there's conditional fulfillments, and there's telescopic fulfillments.

I mean, when I look out at the last prophecy about Jesus Christ, what is he doing? It's in Revelation 21. He's giving the family. He's giving the kingdom to the Father. Now, that's way out there on top of that mountain. And there's a couple of mountains between here and there. His return, the millennium. There's a couple of mountains between here and that distant one that we can just get a glimpse of. He gives it to the Father, and that's the beginning of everything. The end of the Bible is the beginning. So actually, the Holy Days are in very many ways telescopic and progressive fulfillments of the Scripture.

And even in some ways, former latter fulfillments. The Passover is a former fulfillment of Jesus' Passover, but there's still other things he has to do as the Passover lay up for the whole world. He died, but through his life, we receive eternal life. So there we get the Pentecost. You see what I mean? All the Holy Days have former latter... That's why the Holy Days aren't done away with.

What they represent is still there. It's still part of what God is doing. So I want to use one basic thing. Are you with me? I'll let you ask questions today. Any questions? This is so complicated that I thought some people are just going to say, wow, this doesn't mean anything to me. But this is important if we're really going to understand prophecy. Hermit Armstrong used to always talk about former and latter fulfillments. How many people remember and talk about that? All the time. Former latter fulfillments. Because he was trying to say, look, this one is only partly done. Part of this is in the future. And he really zeroed in on that. Well, there's other fulfillments, too, we need to know. We need to understand. For the way things are fulfilled. It still won't keep us from sometimes making wrong interpretations of prophecy.

It will help us not to make so many wrong interpretations of prophecy. We have to be very careful about prophecy because, you know, people make a lot of it. Even in our culture, we've made a lot of wrong interpretations of prophecy over there.

Although our basic core understanding of prophecy is remarkably, I think, is what the Scripture says. But the details we've got are wrong at times. So, what I want to do now is I want to go through a major theme where I can go every Scripture on this theme, but a few of them, in the Bible, which is called the Day of the Lord. Now, when I say Day of the Lord, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Anybody? Christ's return. And what did you say? The seventh trumpet.

The last great day. That is, we're looking out and we're seeing the Day of the Lord, which is... The Day of the Lord is a reference to God's judgment. So, any place you see in the Bible, the Day of the Lord, God's... There's a judgment taking place. There's a judgment taking place. So, we're looking out and we're seeing that future event. Well, I want to show you how we can better understand that event by understanding the Day of the Lord in the context of these different ways that prophecy can be fulfilled.

So, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go to the Book of Joel. Now, when I first came here at one of the... I think it was my first piece of the trumpets, I covered the entire Book of Joel in a sermon, as much as you can in a sermon, showing that it's about the Day of the Lord.

It's about that time when God pours out His wrath. It is about the time when Christ returns. But the Day of the Lord is much richer than that. It is actually bigger than that.

Now, we'll go to the Book of Joel to see that. Now, the Book of Joel was written around 835 to 796 BC, somewhere there. And it's written by Joel to Judah, that God is going to bring a judgment upon them. And they had become very selfish. They were very prosperous, by the way. Judah was at a height of prosperity. They were very selfish. Their whole society was not very just, in the way people were treated.

And they were involved in idolatry, and basically disobedience the law of God. So they had deteriorated as the people of God to the point that God sent Joel to them to tell them, I'm going to punish you. Now, this is important. As we go back and say, okay, what is the context of Joel to those people, then we can begin to understand what it means to us. So this is the world they go to, or that Joel goes to.

It's basically to Judah. He doesn't speak much to the rest of Israel. There's a few places, but mainly it's just Judah. And specifically Jerusalem. And he goes to them, and he's going to tell them that God is going to bring upon them a day of the Lord. That they are going to experience the day of the Lord. So we have to look at this and say, okay, if they're going to experience the day of the Lord, how does that fit in to the day of the Lord we're looking forward to?

And I've seen the book of Joel used for all kinds of things. The book of Joel entirely means the future. There's nothing in the past in the book of Joel. That's not true. Because it admits something to the people who got it. The book of Joel is all about the rapture. That one's always been sort of strange to me.

Of course, there is no rapture, but to force the book of Joel even into the rapture concept just doesn't fit. So the book of Joel is looked at all different ways prophetically. But let's start with the people who got it. Joel shows up, he preaches, it gets written down. And he tells them something very important.

He says in Joel chapter 1 that there is that they are to look around if something had happened to them. This is a current event to them. Something currently had happened to Judah. And he says, I want you to look at it and understand what happened. Now when I gave the sermon on Joel and Feast of Trumpets a few years ago, I went through what happens with these locust plagues that go through the Middle East. They don't have them as often as they used to because they've been able to kill them off.

The worst one of the last little over a hundred years was in 1915, which destroyed, I mean destroyed what is now Israel. Of course, Israel was not there yet as a country, but it destroyed that area. The locusts were so thick, they not only ate everything. I showed some pictures from the National Geographic magazine from 1915, where there's nothing left.

No leaves, no grass, it's just dirt. And people couldn't lay a baby down because the locusts would actually eat babies. Okay. This is what had happened to Judah. Something catastrophic had destroyed their economy and destroyed their food and resources.

So let's go to Joel. Go to Joel here and look at a few places. So we're going to spend time here in Joel and then in a few places in the New Testament. I just picked Joel. I could have picked Amos, Isaiah, that talks about the day of the Lord. But Joel, the entire book, is about the day of the Lord. But notice what it says here in Joel 1, verse 1. The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Matthew, well, Hear this, you elders, and give ear all you inhabitants of the land. Has anything like this happened in your days or even in the days of your fathers?

So it's a current event. So when we start with Joel, we start with, oh, what happened somewhere around 800 or so? B.C. What happened 2800 years ago that led God to bring Joel to these people and say, now I've got your attention? He says, tell your children about it. Let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. He says to them, God wants you to take this event and pass it on. It's actually written down. They passed it on through this book. This book ended up in part of the scrolls that were in the temple.

And eventually as they created the synagogue system, this book ended up in the synagogues. It ended up in all the twelve of what we call minor prophets read one book. That's why they're called the minor prophets. The major prophets took one scroll because they were long. The minor prophets were short enough they could put all of them on one scroll. It's not because they weren't somehow important, it's because they were short. So they're the minor prophets because they all ended up with a scroll. So this ended up on a scroll containing the twelve minor prophets and ended up in every synagogue.

Generation after generation after generation was to read this. They were to pass this on verbally as part of their verbal history about what had happened. What the chewing locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the crawling locust has eaten. And what the crawling locust left, the consuming locust has eaten.

And so this terrible event had happened. So this is how this book starts. It starts with a current event, and he's got everybody's attention because obviously God had stopped protecting them. But God wasn't destroying Judah yet. So if we go to verse 15, I'm jumping around because I'm giving you context here. If you read the rest of the verse 15, basically what he's doing and describing what happened and telling them, wake up, you people! This is a message from God. Verse 15 says, Alaska for the day, for the day of the Lord is at hand, it shall come as destruction from the Almighty. He says, so let me tell you, you think this is bad. There is coming a punishment from God on Judah. And this is just to get your attention. So in chapter 2, he talks about this coming day of the Lord in which the locust now represent an army. The locust represent an army. Now they had just seen this happen. So they understood the utter devastation that he was predicting. So we have a current event, and this represents the day of the Lord. But notice verse 12. Now therefore says the Lord, turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and mourning. So rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and he relents from doing harm. The next few verses are all about a conditional fulfillment. But you don't have to have this happen. You don't have to have an army come through and do to you what the locust did. Only it's going to be all at worst, because they're going to kill you, and they're going to take you into captivity. You don't have to have that happen. So you have a conditional fulfillment here to this. Because of repentance that could happen to them. And once again, what did it mean to them? Now, this obviously means something more than that. We're going to have to look at that in a minute. What we're looking at is, okay, what did it mean to them? See the locust? Look at the devastation. God is going to do this to you with an army if you don't repent. But if you repent, he will not do you harm. He won't let this army come upon you. And of course, it was to be a foreign army. I'm not going to go through that. There was a lot in here about it being a foreign army. But it is contingent upon their repentance.

Now, then it skips to something else in chapter 2. It skips to verse 18. Then the Lord will be zealous for his land and pity his people. So in other words, there's a promise that no matter how bad this gets, God is going to save them. So we have a prediction. If you repent, this won't happen. If you don't repent, it will happen.

But God will save you. Here's a promise. This is a prophecy that contains a promise that God will save them. Now, Joel sometimes is used in the evangelical world to say, God will save you. In the evangelical world, to say, this is about the church. Joel's prophecy is now about the church. There's no reason to believe it's about the church because the people who read it didn't believe it was about the church.

Now, there are certain aspects here that are about the church, but we have to look at the various ways it can be fulfilled. So he says he's going to save them. He's going to bring them back. So, oh, we're going to go into captivity.

Eventually, they were going to go into captivity. Interesting is, during the lifetime of Joel, they didn't go into captivity. It was about 200 years later that they went into captivity. When you go through the prophets, you see that Judah, even more than Israel, would sort of go through sort of a repentance. And God would say, okay, I'm not going to destroy you today. And then they'd get back, right back into idolatry and just violence, you know, violence society. And they would get right back into sexual sins.

They'd get right back into greed and all these things. And God would say, okay, another prophet would come along and say, God, he's not warning us. He's going to destroy us. And then he'd go through sort of a little bit of repentance, and it would last a little bit longer. See, there was a conditional part to this, but God knew eventually they just, it would wear out. Eventually, they would become so corrupt they wouldn't repent. But during the lifetime of Joel, this did not happen.

It was almost 200 years later than him. Did you? Now, when Joel died, I don't know what he thought. Maybe it was like, oh good. They repented, or oh no, maybe it's good I'm going to die because it's about to happen. We don't know. We don't know what happened to him as a prophet.

We just not only told him, we just know that he used this current event, and what God did, and told him to tell these things. And then, he makes this remarkable statement, or these statements, where he starts to say, but I'm going to save you, I'm going to bring you back, I'm going to take care of you. So, I guess we are going to fail at some point, but he is going to take care of us. And then, verse 28, And it shall come to pass afterward, after he brings them back, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions, and also on my servants, and on my man's servants and maid's servants, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.

Now, this is another theme. We don't have time to go through it, but there is a theme through the Old Testament, that when the Messiah comes, he is going to pour out the Spirit of God upon Israel. He is specifically talking to Judah here, but it is going to be all of Israel, physical Israel. He is going to do that. But that is when the Messiah comes. It is really interesting, and we don't have time to go through this, but once again, if you have this theme, you start to understand how different things are fulfilled.

When this Holy Spirit was poured out on Pentecost in 31 A.D., Peter said, wow! What was promised in Joel was happening! Now, it wasn't poured out in all flesh yet. This hasn't been totally fulfilled, but a little bit of it was, in 31 A.D.

So, here we have a whole part of this book that hasn't happened, and in fact, it is predicted to be afterward. It is way off in the future. So, there is another day of the Lord, or there is going to come a day of the Lord on Judah, and then afterward they are going to be brought back under the Messiah, and the Spirit is going to be poured out.

So, in a very real sense, Judah in 586 B.C. experienced their day of the Lord. Because what he said what happened to them did, Jerusalem was destroyed, and the army came from the north, the Babylonians, because the Assyrians came from the north and did it to Israel first, came from the north and destroyed them.

Totally destroyed them. So, the day of the Lord can have progressive fulfillments, it can have former and latter fulfillments, and it even has telescopic fulfillments. So, did those people receive a message from God to tell them to repent, or the day of the Lord would come upon them? Yes. Did they repent? Sort of off and on for a couple hundred years. Did that day of the Lord come upon them? Yes, it did. God's judgment came upon the day of the Lord as He told them came.

But the day of the Lord in the greater context did not come. The latter fulfillment of the day of the Lord hasn't happened yet. And yet, we're going to see that there's more than one day of the Lord yet to come. Remember, the day of the Lord means God's judgment. So, God's judgment came on Judah or Israel, and God's judgment came on Israel or Judah. But it wasn't totally fulfilled. But to those people, they received their day of the Lord, and that their nation was destroyed. So, we have this jump. What's really interesting here is Joel 3.

Because now He's going to expand into this day of the Lord that's not just on Judah. He says, for behold, in those days, and at that time, I will bring back the captives of Judah and Jerusalem, and I will gather all nations. Now, once again, verse 1, people say, well, that happened at the Babylonian, you know, when the Jews came out of captivity, after the Babylonian captivity.

Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, you know, lent them out of captivity and back. Others say, well, this was fulfilled in 1948 when the Jews were allowed to go back to their homeland. But if you read the rest of it, those two events are valleys. This is one of those mountain peaks. So those valleys aren't what this is all about. It's not a mountain peak. For behold, in those days, He will bring them back, and I will also because so God says, when He does this, He's going to do other things. I will gather all nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will enter into judgment with them there, on account of my people, my heritage, Israel, who they have scattered among all the nations, and they have divided up among themselves right in the land.

Verse 9, proclaimedness among the nations. So here's this time of judgment that's coming on not Judah. Judah's being saved. Judah's being brought out, being brought to fulfill, being brought to the true Messiah, brought to the true God, and having God's fear put upon them, physical Jews. But something else is happening among the nations. Proclangeness among the nations. Prepare for war. Wake up the mighty men. Let all the men of war draw near. Let them come. Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong.

Assemble and come, all you nations. And gather together all around, because your mighty ones to go down there, O Lord. And let the nations be awakened and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat. For there I will judge all the surrounding nations. Put in the sickle for the harvest is right. Come, go down, for the winepress is full, the vats overflowed, for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision. For, huh? Good one says, for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. This has nothing to do with what happened to Judah in 586.

Now, this is what we think of when we think of the day of the Lord. Right? We read this, oh yes, this is the day of the Lord, and it is the day of the Lord. Although, in the former fulfillment, chapter 3 wasn't fulfilled at all.

And chapter 2 was fulfilled in a very limited way when the Babylonians came in and destroyed, like a locust infestation, destroyed Judah. So we start to see that this fulfillment has a former latter fulfillment. It had a conditional fulfillment. That's why it took 200 years for Joel's prophecy to come about. It had a progressive fulfillment. It had a telescopic fulfillment. One little, one of the mountains here is Israel and Judah back, you know, clear back, this is 2800 years, well, 25, almost 2600 years ago.

Judah suffered their day of the Lord as he told them they would. That prophecy was fulfilled, but only in part because it's the greater day of the Lord. It's the next mountain peak. It's the next mountain peak.

So, when we go through Joel, here's what we see. Joel's prophecy has conditional fulfillment. There is conditional fulfillment. Israel did, or Judah did suffer some repentance and was allowed to exist for a period of time. Eventually they were punished for their sins, just like he said they would. There was a former latter fulfillment since he predicts that Judah was going to have a day of the Lord, they did. But that was only, that's a former fulfillment.

And you know, remember I went through types. A type is very important in Scripture. The sacrifice is done in the temple, or a type of Jesus Christ. And the type is always inferior to the reality. It's the same way with former latter fulfillments. The former fulfillment is inferior to the latter one. The latter fulfillment is always greater. So this day of the Lord to Judah was minor compared to the day of the Lord of the whole world.

And what's interesting, in the day of the Lord to the whole world, Judah's being saved during that one. Although they still suffer war, don't they? Once again, we have to put all the Scriptures together. Let me just turn to one here. Zechariah 14. How many times have we read this? Verse 1 of Zechariah 14. Behold, the day of the Lord is coming. So this is part of that thread that you'll find is the theme that runs through the Old and New Testament.

Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst. And I will gather all the nations to do battle against Jerusalem. We read about this in Joel. We read about this in Isaiah. We read about this in Revelation.

This day of the Lord, while we gather all the nations to do battle against Jerusalem, the city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the women ravished. Half the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city. And then it says, the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as he fights in the day of battle.

It says his feet will stand on him out of olives, and it will split in two. Now we know that this is Christ that does this because of the New Testament. He says he's going to do this. So, when we get to the day of the Lord as we see it, because we're not looking behind us, we're looking in front of us, we're looking at this. This great and terrible day of the Lord. If you were a Jew in 800 BC, you'd be saying, oh no, if we don't repent, God's going to destroy our nation. The day of the Lord's going to come upon us. But he promises to save us. He promises the poor, our Holy Spirit.

I'm not sure how he put all that together. But we have this greater context for the Book of Joel. We have this greater context. So we see this former latter fulfillment. We also have a progressive fulfillment. You think about it, Judah's told, look at this giant, curved event that's happened here, this local is playing. I want you to repent. They were given time to repent. See, there's a progressive here. Eventually, they didn't repent, and they were taken into captivity. Now, there's a future captivity that takes place. But I want you to think about something.

We're looking at Judah going into captivity. They had their day of the Lord. The future day of the Lord, Christ comes back to the Mount of Olives, and who's there? The Jews. That means in this valley, they have to go back. And that's why the Babylonian return from their captivity was so important, which is prophesied in the Scripture. And also, that's why 1948 is so important when the Jews went back and reestablished Israel, the nation of Israel. Because they have to be there.

He doesn't tell us how they're going to come back in 1948. We just know they have to be there to go into captivity again. And half of the city of Jerusalem goes into captivity, and half of them don't because Christ comes back before they're totally destroyed. Christ, the Jews, are basically scattered throughout the...

as is Israel, scattered all over the place today. Israel, of course, has lost even who its identity is. And then we have the telescopic fulfillment. The mounts we're looking at. As these things progressively happen, we don't always see what leads from this event to this event. We just see the events. And of course, we try to guess what's going to happen between these events and these events. That's why there are a lot of people in England for many, many years that were trying to get the Jews to go back. They wanted to establish a nation in Israel, especially in the 1800s, and up through the early 1900s. You know why?

They got to be back for those prophecies to take place. So they wanted to set it up so that they would go back. Because they knew they have to be there. And so a lot of what happened with the Jews going back was part of the Zionist movement that wasn't just Jews, it was English people trying to get them to go. Religious people. Not necessarily politicians, but religious people. Because they understood they have to be there. But that's part of the Valley.

We don't know how it was supposed to happen, but it happened. So the second day of the Lord comes upon Judah again, but this time he's saving them. And he's pouring out his wrath and all the dations. So this is the book of Joel in 27 minutes. But I just wanted you to see that Joel seems absolutely inconceivable if people read it and say, this doesn't even make sense. Until you realize, oh wait a minute, these events actually happened.

They were told, I mean this locust plague actually happened. They were told, repent? Or an army's going to do this to you. They sort of repented, went back to idolatry, repented, went back and finally 200 years later they were just beyond repentance and God said to the Babylonians that day the Lord happened.

But all the rest of what's in there didn't happen. It's going to happen again. As an army from the north comes into modern day Israel. The Jewish nation, against Jerusalem. And God gathers all, in that day the Lord, he gathers all the nations together. In this great battle, they fight Jesus Christ. So, any questions about Joel? Okay. I take it that everybody's so confused they have no idea.

So, if you don't, you probably never knew what Joel meant anyways. Or you had a very simplistic view. Oh, Joel's only about the end time. It has to be about more than that. Or the people that were told this is going to happen to you, it didn't happen. But it did happen to them. Their day of the Lord came. But they also knew there was going to be a future day of the Lord.

Because this future day of the Lord involves the Lord standing on the Mount of Olives. And that's the one we look at. So now let's look at the New Testament. It's got a first test on the inside. I still ask a question. Yeah. You said Jerusalem would be 50% occupied. It says, in Zechariah, it says half will be destroyed and half won't. So that's where that is. The Zechariah 14.

First and lastly, it's 5. Paul says, but concerning the times and the seasons, brother, you have no need that I should write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as the thief of the night. Now, he's not talking about the day of the Lord that happened to Judah in 586 or the day of the Lord that happened to Israel. In 722, 721, Israel had their day of the Lord. It was called the Assyrians. Because God said, I'm going to punish you the day the Lord is going to come upon you. But in the greater sense, it did not happen. Nations were gathered, the Messiah didn't come, they weren't saved. Israel has never been brought back together in the way that Judah was. And so, here, this is what we look at. It's what Paul looks at. He's looking at the day of the Lord in front of him, the second mountain peak. See, if we turn around, we can see the other mountain peak. We can see the other one. It's behind us. Now, if we turn this way, we see the one that's in front of us. And that's what we're centered on, because we're headed towards that one. We just have to be in a valley here. We're not sure what's going to happen before we get to the next mountain peak. And so, he tells the church, you know, it's still going to catch everybody by surprise. We can see it, it's sure going to catch the world by surprise. For when they say, peace and safety, then suddenly destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape, but you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this day should overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of the day, where not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, in other words, it's spiritual sleep. He doesn't mean death here. He says, let's not just become complacent and sleepy in what we're doing with God, as others do. But let us watch and be sober, for those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk or drunk at night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but obtained salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep now they are asleep means death, that we should live together with Him. Now, verse 11, very interesting. Therefore comfort each other and edify one another just as you are so doing. So he says, look, he's looking at the... he doesn't know when that day of the Lord's going to happen. Joel didn't know exactly when his day of the Lord was going to happen, and he sure didn't know how the second part of it was going to happen. Paul doesn't know exactly when this is going to happen, but he says, you know, as we walk towards that mountain peak, we gotta stay focused, stay right with God, be in the light, and we've got to a comfort and encourage each other. We have to help each other towards that point, because we are not called to wrath. Now remember, the day of the Lord is always God's judgment. It's always God's wrath. It's God's punishment that's happening in the day of the Lord.

What's interesting here in this day of the Lord is who carries it out. Who carries out this? Who represents the Father and carries out the day of the wrath on humanity in that second day of the Lord, which we've already mentioned, is, you know, it's all about the Feast of Trumpets, it's all about the seven seals, the seven trumpets, specifically the seven last trumpets, which is God's wrath poured out in the world. How does that culminate? Let's go to Revelation 19. Revelation 19.

Whenever I do PowerPoint, I have two great fears. One is it won't work, and the second is I'll have a small screen.

And today, my fear came upon me. Revelation 19, verse 11. This is at the end of the seventh trumpet. So you have the seven trumpets which are the pouring out of God's wrath on the earth. This is the day of the Lord. This is the day of the Lord, that's the mountain peak we're looking at. Now I saw heaven open, behold a white horse, and he who sat on him was called faithful and true, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. He makes war. His eyes were like the flame of fire, not his head where many crowds. He had a name written that no one knew except himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. This is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is loving, and Jesus Christ is caring, and Jesus Christ is gentle, and so is the Father. It isn't like Jesus Christ is different than the Father. But, when God says, enough is enough, it's enough. And Christ is coming back this time, not as a baby. He's coming back to make war on an evil world. And this is the day of the Lord. And the armies in heaven clothed and fine led white and clean, followed him on white horses. Now out of his mouth was a sharp sword that he should strike the nations, and he himself will rule them with the rod of iron. He himself treads the winepress of the fiercest, the wrath of Almighty God. And he has on his robe and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. Well, we go back to the book of Joel, we go back to the second round. I'm just cherry picking here. The day of the Lord's scriptures. And we can look at it and say, oh, now this is the day of the Lord Paul's talking about. It's also the day of the Lord, that latter fulfillment of Joel. So you go back and you read Joel 2 and 3 now, and you say, oh wow, that's describing this war. It's describing what's going to happen to Judah at the end as they get invaded. It's describing what Joel 3 says when he gathers all the nations to the valley of Jehoshaphat, because it is the day of the Lord. We see it happening right here. So we have that other mountain. The mountain we look at behind us, that helps us understand the mountain that's before us. But you know, if you look way off in the distance, beyond the day of the Lord that we're all looking at, there's another mountain out there. There's another mountain out there. And this is where people misunderstand and can come up with some very strange prophetic scenarios with what Peter says in 2 Peter 3. 2 Peter 3.

Verse 10. Peter says, But the day of the Lord will come, as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and the works that are in them will be burned up. Oh! So when Christ comes back, the earth must be burned up because that's what happens at the day of the Lord. So there's people who believe that. That when Jesus Christ comes back, it's actually the end of the millennium, and He burns up everything. And of course, part of that is an understanding that the day of the Lord can only mean one thing. It meant something different to the people at Joel's time. They were looking at one mountain peak and saw beyond that, hey, there's a second one out there. There's a second sort of day of the Lord, and He gathers us together, and He brings the nations together. They had no idea what time span was in there, what happened between those two mountains. Well, there's another mountain, and we actually know a lot about this, this day of the Lord. And here's how this is supposed to motivate us. Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, so during the day of the Lord, the whole service of the earth is dissolved. The whole creation goes through a change. What manner of person sought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hasting the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness dwells. But that's not what it says in Revelation, or all the prophecies about the return of Jesus Christ. He establishes God's kingdom on this earth. He gathers the whole world together. He converts everybody. He brings about a new world religion, a new world government. He brings about, He heals the whole world. It says He heals the world, doesn't say He dissolves it. He stands on the mountain of all of us, what we're reading in Zach, or Zacharias, we read the next couple verses. Waters go out and heal the nations, heal the environment. It says in Amos that people won't even be able to keep up with the food that they'll just be producing in the world.

But the day of the Lord is God's wrath and Christ coming back. So what is this? Remember the day of the Lord is the time of God's judgment. It's the time of God's judgment. Now I want you to think about where we stand again in the concept of telescopic fulfillment. By the way, I didn't make telescopic fulfillment up. Is that... what did he say? You gotta tell me, you can't mumble like that because I get to come back, okay? I know. I haven't made that up, okay? Just like I didn't make up former latter fulfillments. I always thought that in the Master College, right? Telescopic is a viewpoint that some people who study prophecy, I got it out of my Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy.

Okay, that's where I got it from. And it made sense. It's like, oh, you could see the mountains. If the first day of the Lord was on Israel and Judah when God passed judgment on them, and they were punished. But it was only a former fulfillment.

It didn't contain everything. The great day of the Lord is when Jesus Christ returns and God punishes the whole world and then sets up God's kingdom on this earth. Is there another time of judgment of God on humanity? What is it? What is the last judgment of God on humanity? You all know it. It's what? Lake of fire.

I think that's what some of you are saying, but my hearing must be going bad. The lake of fire. This is what Peter called the day of the Lord. Doctorally, there's no problem here. We stand to look at the mountain behind us. Those days of the Lord, if you will, between Israel and Judah.

We look forward to the great day of the Lord, which there's a lot of things in the Bible about that. And then if you stand where Peter is, you can see way beyond that one another day of the Lord. With the final judgment. Now, you know how we really know that? And what it amazes me is Peter didn't have the information. It's in the book of Revelation. The end of the book of Revelation, chapter 21, talks about after there's that second resurrection and third resurrection. It talks about the lake of fire. God's final day of the Lord. The final judgment on those who will not accept Him.

Who will not obey Him. And this is what Peter's talking about. So we don't have to try to cram, you know, man Peter and Paul don't even match. Peter doesn't even match anything in the Old Testament. No! Because he's not talking about that specific day of the Lord. He's talking about the last one. The last judgment of God on humanity.

When all incorrigibly wicked people are destroyed in the lake of fire. The final judgment of God. He doesn't have anything to judge after that. You're either spiritually in his, get born into his kingdom, or you're gone. There's no need for another day of the Lord. And so suddenly, telescopically, we can see the mountain peaks. And Peter wasn't inspired to give us all the information. I mean, it's like, Peter, how did you come up with this? Until you read Revelation 21. And then you have a description. So once we do that, we can begin to see we have these three prophetic fulfillments of the day of the Lord.

The day of the Lord for Judah. Actually, for Israel too. Because Israel was told that they were going to suffer a day of the Lord and they were going to be destroyed. The day of the Lord for Judah. The day of the Lord at Christ's return. Joel, Zechariah, 1 Thessalonians, Revelation. And you know, you'll find all through the Old Testament Prophets, prophecies about that great day of the Lord. The time of Jacob's trouble. There's prophecies about nations, there's prophecies about Israel, there's prophecies about Judah. That's all these prophecies about that day of the Lord.

But you also will see, when you go through there, oh wait a minute, he's also telling those people either you repent or a day of the Lord's coming upon you too, right now. It's going to happen to you. Or to your descendants, or your descendants before or after you. I find it interesting that in Joel he said tell this to your children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren.

Keep telling it because sooner or later nobody's going to listen to the locust story. Now when they stop listening to the locust story, that'll be it. And then we have the day of the Lord when the surface of the earth is burned.

And that is mentioned by Peter in 2 Peter and described in the book of Revelation. So telescopically, now we can understand that the day of the Lord has a huge meaning in the context of God's judgments on the earth and on people. And eventually what he's actually going to do in the final judgment is destroy anyone who does not return to him and follow him. So to understand Bible prophecy, we must know history for one thing. You have to know biblical history. You have to know a little bit about Joel. You have to know a little bit about things that you have put together.

We also have to look for all those themes. The first one being Messiah. God's plan of salvation. But then there's the day of the Lord which is a theme. There's numerous biblical themes that just run through the Bible that are prophetic. Then we can begin to look at singular fulfillments, which there's a lot of. Conditional fulfillments like Nineveh. Progressive fulfillments, just event after event after event, like Abraham. Or like, you know, the seat of a woman is going to save humanity and conquer Satan.

And boy, there's a lot of events that lead up to that. In fact, it is completed until at the end of the millennium. It's during the great white throne judgment that Satan is finally, or right before it, that Satan is finally, you're out of here. So that prophecy hasn't been totally fulfilled yet. There's a former latter fulfillments which helps us understand something that happened at part at one time, but it's not really completed until another time.

And then there's this telescopic fulfillment. We just look at mountain peaks. We get these pictures of what God's doing, and we don't get a one-on-one happens between the mountains. So when you struggle to understand biblical prophecy, which we all do, there are certain prophecies, by the way, I won't cover. Because I have no idea what they mean. I don't cover. I figure the ones that we do know enough about that can be covered, that takes a lifetime to do, so don't worry about the ones I don't.

So, when we struggle, remember why it's put there. We don't always have to understand it. We have to know why. God inspired prophecy as His proof that He's involved in human history. It's the proof that He's there. It's the proof that this plan works, because He's just coming along and touching human history to make sure it works out the way He says.

So prophecy is important. And that's why He even fulfilled prophecy so important, because we can see what God has already done. And secondly, as Peter said, we are to study this. We are to know it. Because in doing so, it motivates us. It motivates us to know, as he said, what manner of people we should be in holy conduct and godliness.

We'll try to get a bear screen.