A Review of Prophecy

Over the last six months, I've been giving a series of prophecy sermons, once a month, just to get an outline of biblical prophecy. And I skipped the month of April because of the Holy Days. So I was working on the sermon and I realized that we've covered so much material that to give the next sermon I wanted to give, I need to actually go back and review what we've covered.

Because as I've said, what we're looking at is templates. Now where do we start with the most important prophecy and then what are the templates that build on top of each other, not to fill in all the details? Because what we do is we get lost in the details. We're always looking for the details of prophecy when what God gives us, there are some details in there, but it's this overview. And this overview is built piece by piece starting in Genesis and ending in Revelation.

It's through the entire Bible. So what I want to do today is a review. And I thought, wow, they're going to get bored of reviewing material. But I think we have to. We need to review the material so that we can know what we're going to discuss next between now and the fall holy days, because some of what we're going to be covering is covered in the fall holy days. So we're going to do a review. And I know most of these sermons had a PowerPoint, so I made a new PowerPoint so you won't be too bored.

We're seeing the same PowerPoint. But where we started in prophecy, we started way back in Genesis and said, this is the first prophecy that all prophecies are built on. And it's the template where each next template connects to to start to fill in the outline of what God is doing. And the reason this is important is a lot of times when we look at prophecy, you know what we look at?

What Satan is doing. And we get all caught up in what Satan is doing. And so you hear people talk about, well, prophecy just makes me nervous. Prophecy just makes me feel with anxiety. Well, there can be some anxious things about the future from where we are, but there's a lot of fulfilled prophecy in the Bible between the beginning and us. And there are things ahead. But instead of zeroing in on just what Satan's doing, we should zero in on what God is doing. Because Satan loses, which is what prophecy tells us. He loses. And that brings us to our first template that we've talked about.

And that is Genesis 3.15. Now, when we go to Genesis 3, we know what happens. Adam and Eve, first human beings are in a perfect relationship with God. There is no sin. And there's no consequences of sin. Their lives are, as far as physical human beings, are perfect. God allows Satan to come in. He didn't sneak in. He allows Satan to come in because he gave human beings free will. Once again, we're just going over this ground again because this is important, understanding everything, including all the things we're going to look at when we get into Revelation.

And so what we have is Satan's allowed to come in. They, through their free choice, they choose sin. She's deceived. He goes along with it, knowing it's wrong, but, you know, in his weakness, Adam goes along with it. And so now their relationship with God is broken. And they are kicked out of Eden, and they are told you are going to have all kinds of problems. First of all, you're going to die. You're made out of dust, and you're going to return to dust.

And your environment isn't going to work right. In fact, you're going to have to work hard just to grow food. Before that, they didn't have to work very hard at all to grow food. Everything is messed up, and Satan was going to rule over them. In my pastor's update that I sent out yesterday, if you looked at it, there's a whole list of, I put in there, a whole list of scriptures that talk about either titles of Satan or things that are said about him.

And what's said over and over again is humanity is under his influence. That doesn't mean God's kingdom went away. God's still sitting on his throne, but he's allowed him a period of time to have influence on the earth. What we look at as prophecy is God interfering with that. Okay, you get this for a while, but you don't get total control.

God still is the creator of the universe. Jesus Christ is his right hand, through whom he created all things, reaches down and says, okay, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this. So at the end, my creation isn't destroyed.

So when we look at prophecy, a lot of times, yes, we're looking at what Satan's doing, but we're looking at what God is doing, as he just keeps interfering, not interfering, it's his anyways. He just keeps doing what he wants. It's Satan that's interfering. He just keeps doing what he's want to get the end result that he's going to have. And Genesis 3.15 is so important, because he tells Eve, and I will put enmity. In other words, your enemy will be between you and the woman. Now, he's saying this to Satan, that human beings which come from women, right, they're produced through the union of a man and woman, and it comes from a woman.

Human beings are going to be the enemies of Satan, and Satan's going to be their enemy. And they're going to live in this relationship, this toxic relationship. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. And he shall bruise your head, and you shall, or he shall bruise your head. In other words, this seed is going to bruise the head of Satan, and you shall bruise his heel. In other words, he's going to bother him, but this seed is going to win out. That, proto-evangelium, the first good news, that's what that means in Greek.

The first good news, that's the basis of all prophecy. The first good news is humanity is a mess. You know, I, it's amazing, you know, I have this conversation all the time. How can there be a God? Why does God do this? Why does God allow this?

Why does God, you know, and it's because of this, because He's not deliberately running the world right now. He's allowing Satan to do it. And so, there's a lot of evil. God didn't create that evil. We were born into it. It's reality, we were born into it. And God is saying, I want you to come out of it.

So, this is the first of all prophecies. Prophecy without this doesn't mean much, because this is the basis. This is the foundation. So, we know then, that there's all these messianic, let me go back here one, that there's all these messianic prophecies. So, if you start with prophecy in the Bible, we want to start with Revelation 13. And let's figure out who the beast is. Let's figure out what the mark of the beast is. 666. Okay, we'll discuss that. But that's not where you start.

The Old and New Testament contain hundreds of messianic prophecies. This is what God is doing, because He kicked humanity out of Eden, and then He spends all this time teaching humanity to do what? To bring them back to Him. Now, we would get into the millennium. We get into the great white throne judgment. When you get into those prophecies, that's when God brings it back to Him. He brings humanity back to Him, those who will willingly come.

So, these are the most important prophecies in the Bible, because they tell us what God is doing in this mess. And He also tells us about our lives, that we have been called to be part of what God is doing. And so, we actually become part of the prophetic message. We're part of what God prophesied would happen, that there's people He's going to call all through history to come to Him, to be prepared for the future, when He takes His final steps in bringing all humanity who will come to Him. It's still their free choice. So, these messianic prophecies show us, and you can start in, well, in Deuteronomy, you could go through all the prophets, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the minor prophets, all these prophecies that talk about this Messiah. And when you really read them, you realize He comes twice. That's what Isaiah 52 and 53 is all about. And when you get to the New Testament, what you find is both Jesus and all the apostles quoting those Old Testament Scriptures to say, the first part of it just happened. And then they'll talk about His second coming. So, they talk about the first and second coming, because this is what God is doing. And this should be our focal point, because it gives meaning to the bad of life, and it gives meaning to a future that looks pretty bleak right now in the many ways, doesn't it?

It gives meaning to it, because God is doing something. And through the grace of God, you and I are able to be part of that. You and I are able to understand it and participate in it.

So, we have these Messianic prophecies. Now, the Messianic prophecies are constantly foretold in a context of covenants. Now, when I talked about that, I showed that there's 10 basic primary covenants in the Bible. There are smaller ones, but there are 10 big ones. The first one is marriage. The first covenant God made with human beings was marriage, right in the Garden of Eden before Satan came along. And then He makes a covenant with them and says, here's all the good things, just don't eat this. They broke the covenant. He had to make a second covenant with them. Genesis 3.15 is part of the Second Covenant. Well, it's actually the third one. Marriage, first covenant with Adam and Eve, second covenant with Adam and Eve, which was, yep, you chose the hard way. I'm kicking you out of Eden. But here is what I'm going to be doing while you and your descendants are struggling. So, there's these series of covenants that come along where God keeps interacting with the lives of human beings. Now, remember these covenants aren't contracts. We have a real problem in modern...well, modern Christianity has this problem. We can have this too. We think this is a contract between us and God like we're equals.

Okay, God, I tithed. Where's my roles? Okay. I tithe. It's a contract. No, it's not. It's a covenant in which God determines all of the parts of the covenant, all of the interactions of the covenant, and we don't get to add anything to it. Don't bring a lawyer to the table. God may just kill him. Okay? That's being facetious. Nobody smiled on that. Okay. Um, don't...this isn't a...you know, we're not negotiating here. God calls people and says, I will work in you so that you will fulfill the next step in my covenant. We have a purpose. All the covenants have a purpose in fulfilling God's prophecies. And when we usually talk about the covenants, the three big ones we talk about is the Abrahamic covenant, the Sinai, or the Old Covenant, which was with Israel, and the New Covenant, which is with the church.

Now, it's very interesting when I went through this, once again, just every one of these contained a sermon. But let's go to Hebrews, chapter 8, and this will summarize why a new covenant was made.

But they were told this covenant, although it had elements that are forever...I mean, the Ten Commandments are...as long as there's human beings, there's Ten Commandments. There's lots of things in that Old Covenant that we still do. But the purpose of the covenant in the plan of God has changed in the New Covenant. God was working through a nation of people. God's now working through the church, which is not a nation of people. That's why they were told, you know, if you have a murderer, someone who commits first-degree murder, you're to give them a trial, and if they're guilty, the whole community is supposed to come out and stone them. That way, you will not have that kind of evil in your society. We are not a nation. We don't have those kinds of powers in the church.

Right? We don't carry out capital punishment in the church. That doesn't mean what they did was wrong. It's what that nation was told to do. The church is something different. And I went through the show how the church is made up of people of all ethnicities, all races. You know, God says, I'm inviting people from all over now to come part of this next step in my plan.

So we're part of a next step. We're part of a prophecy. Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel. I mean, there's these prophecies. Deuteronomy. I will have to make a new covenant. Over and over again, he said, okay, I'm going to work with you as a nation. And what we saw was he worked with Israel and Judah once they split into two. Now, he hasn't done with them yet. But we're talking about their purpose in that step in the plan was to bring about the first coming of the Messiah.

No matter what happened, no matter even how much Israel rebelled, right, the plan was always carried out. Israel rebelled, and those ten tribes got spread all over the place and lost their identity. Judah rebelled and got sent to Babylon, and 70 years later returned. Why? Well, because he had made a covenant with David that his descendant would be the Messiah. And actually, he's told, it says in the Old Testament, that he's going to be born in Bethlehem. That was already pre-planned. So Judah goes into captivity but doesn't stay in the captivity. Why? Had they been so repentant? Not really, because he says, they brought you back because of me, not because of you. That's what God told them. And he brings them back so that the Messiah is there. And so you have a young woman, probably an older teen, having a baby, not even married. Well, probably married at that time, but wasn't conceived in a normal way, right? Why is she there at that moment? Because it was planned in Genesis 15 that this is going to happen. That's why. And God kept working out through history to make sure it would happen. And it did. And she was there, and the Christ was born.

That's God's work, first coming. But there was a problem with that covenant. For the next stage. So we go to Hebrews 8 verse 7.

For that, if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. So what was the fault with the first covenant? Because finding fault with them, he says, Behold, the days are coming, says, the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, with the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant they made with their fathers in the day when they took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, because they did not continue in my covenant, and I disregarded them, says the Lord. And he goes on and he talks about this. And this is a New Testament, and how because of that, a new covenant was be made. And what did Jesus say when he sat down and did the Passover with the disciples? This is the new covenant. He's there exactly where he's supposed to be, doing exactly what he knew he was going to do, to say, okay, we're entering the next phase. Once again, that doesn't equate as some Protestant denominations will say, everything in the old covenant was done away with. That's absurd. What it means is we're beginning the next step in the plan. I mean, there's elements of the Abrahamic covenant that we don't do anymore, and yet the Abrahamic covenant wasn't done away with. Could have been. But the New Testament is not required to do circumcision. You had to be circumcised to be part of the Abrahamic covenant, period. You had to be. Or you could be part of it. So, same thing, actually, with the Sinai covenant. So we know the Abrahamic covenant hasn't been done away with, but there's elements of it that have changed. Now we are baptized, which Paul says is circumcision of the heart, right? And what do the prophecies say? Say, clear back in Deuteronomy. There will come a time when I will not circumcise you in the flesh, but circumcise you in the heart. So they're all there. All the prophecies are there, and I'm throwing out all the information because we covered this in detail. But I want to bring us back to this. So we are now participants in the new covenant, which is the church. Israel isn't thrown away, but there's a specific things. There are specific things in the plan of God that are being done through the church, and we've been called to be part of it. So we have God's plan outlined in covenants. Now we have God's covenant with Abraham. So God tells him, let's go to Genesis, can I cover six sermons in 55 minutes? Now the Lord said to Abram, Get out of your country from your family, from your father's house, to the land I will show you, and I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you. I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. That is a prophecy. It's a promise, it's part of covenant that God was making with Abraham. How is this applied in the New Testament? Because if you were a Jew, what we're going to read here was written by Paul. If before Paul was confronted by Jesus Christ, Paul would have told you what that meant. He would have said that he and the Jews, as the people of God, and the people through whom the Messiah was going to come, as the special people of God, they were a blessing to the world, as the descendants of Abraham. They were God's blessing to the world.

Let's look at Galatians 3. This same thing is said in Acts by one of the apostles, but we'll just look at Galatians 3.

And verse 15. 15.

Brethren, I speak in the manner of men, though it is only man's covenant, yet it is confirmed. No one annals it or adds to it. He said, so, you know, there are covenants made by human beings, and once it's agreed to, once the signatures are on there, you know, it's a covenant. So he's talking about the covenant of God. Now to Abraham and his seed where the promise is made, he does not say, and to seeds, as of many, as of one, and to your seed, who is Christ.

The whole earth is blessed through Jesus Christ, the first coming. And this started in Genesis 3.15, and it went through the covenant of Abraham, and your seed, yet your people will be blessed, but in your seed, everyone will be blessed. And God made sure all that was carried out. It was carried out through the covenant He made with him at Sinai. I'm going to make you a nation. I'm going to take you in the Promised Land, because that's where the Messiah will come. And David, he made a covenant with him and said, and he will come through your family. And that's exactly what happened. This is the prophecy that some of the times we forget, because all we're looking at is who's the beast. And we should be looking at revelation, but these templates are what we build on before we even get the revelation.

So we did a whole sermon on that, and that gets us through two templates out of five that we've done. This helps us understand, then, the third template, and that is God's purpose for Israel and God's purpose for the Church. They have some of the things that are similar and some of the things that are different. So, once again, that was a whole sermon, but let's just look at what we talked about. God chose Israel as the family that was to produce the Messiah. They were a family. Although, that doesn't mean they're all genetically the same, because if you look through the history of Israel, anyone who converted to the worship of God got brought into the family. So it wasn't just one genetic group, but a Mexican genetic group. But, you know, the primary genetics were from Abraham. The farther back you go. Israel was to be a witness of the true God to all people. Israel was to preserve the teachings of God. In fact, in Ephesians and in Romans, Paul does say, by the way, you think I'm putting down Jews. Let me tell you why Jews are important. He has a whole list of things. These people God's been working through to do something, and one is to preserve the teachings. We have what is called the New Testament, because for thousands of years, Jews kept that. Well, thousands of years. Yeah, it has been thousands of years since Moses wrote the first books in the 1400s BC.

They died to preserve those books that we have. So those teachings. And physical Israel will be restored at the time, I misspelled time, when Christ rules on earth. There are all kinds of prophecies about how He gathers all those people together, brings them to the Messiah, and Christ says, you failed me all those times. You won't this time, because you're going to be right here with me. And they are going to serve Him physically. And we'll talk about that when we get to the prophecies about the millennium. So that's God's purpose, prophetic purpose, and they were to bring, of course, the Messiah, which they did the first time. The church, God chose the church as a community. We are a community. We are a people. As Peter says, we're a people who weren't a people, playing off some scriptures that are in Hosea. God chose the church as a community called to become these spirit-filled children. We didn't become part of the church because of active birth. And by the way, you who grew up in the church, you were also called. You were not made a member of the church by active birth. But you were called by God by being here. Understand, you were called. But it's not like, oh, I was born into it. If you were a Jew and you were born, or an Israelite, and you were born in Israelite, you were part of the covenant. Well, if you were a male and you were circumcised on the eighth day, you were now part of the covenant. Women were just automatically, if they're male family members were circumcised, they're part of the covenant. You were called to be part of the covenant, but you're only part of the covenant when you receive circumcision of the heart, when you receive circumcision of the heart, which is baptism. The church is to preach the gospel and make disciples of all peoples. The church is God's example to the world, just like ancient Israel was God's example to the world. The church is to be prepared to rule with Christ at His return as resurrected human beings. So there were a whole lot of purposes for Israel and the church. I just put down a few. Okay, this is the framework. This is prophetic framework of what God is doing.

Okay, I'm doing fine. We get two more templates today.

Then we went through Daniel 2.

And if you remember, that was a long... I mean, that whole sermon was just a PowerPoint on Daniel 2. And then we did a Bible study on Daniel 7. Because that is the template which now comes on top of all the things that have happened, all the prophecies in the Old Testament, of what's going to happen at the end time with Satan. What's going to be happening at the end time, what Satan's going to be doing in humanity, in his plan. Now we get to see his plan as revealed to us by God. You know what happened? Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. He doesn't know what the dream means. He's absolutely terrified by this dream. He calls in all the wise men from all over the empire, and he says... because that's what they did. They took people that they considered to be wise or religious in all parts of the empire, brought them to Babylon, and made them advisors to the king. That's why Daniel was there in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were there as advisors to the king. Because, well, the Jews know something, right? They had a big temple. So you had some Jewish people there. Plus, we can propagandize them into becoming Babylonians. That was part of it, too. So they're there. He has this dream. Nobody can tell him what the dream is. So he starts killing off all the advisors. And then Daniel says, hold off, let me pray. God will give me an answer. And God told him. He came back and said, let me tell you what the dream is. Now, once He told him what the dream was, he said, okay, I'll listen to this guy. This guy got in my head somehow. He knew what my dream was. And, of course, what the dream was of the statue in which its head was the statue of a man was gold, the chest was silver, the belly and thighs were bronze, and the legs were made of iron, and the feet were iron mixed with clay. So we covered that. But let's go through that now, because what we've been looking at in the first templates, the first three templates, is what God is doing in this plan. Now He's going to tell us back in the 600s BC, He's okay, now let me tell you what's going to be happening between now and the second coming of the Messiah. Now, I'm not sure if Daniel knew about the first and second comings of the Messiah. He didn't write about it. He didn't write about the second one.

I would assume he knows he knew something about the first coming, but I don't know. And we know he knows about the second one, because he talks about it here. So this now tells us what's happening through the framework of what He tells him this represents, which is four successive empires. The Babylonian Empire, you know, around 600 BC, Babylonia, which was today modern-day Iraq. The Iraqis don't like to be seen as Arabs.

Neither do the Iranians, because the Iranians are ancient Persia. They're Persians. Call them an Arab and they'll probably get punched. So it was the kingdom, of course, that ruled when Daniel lived. And it was at that time the most powerful and wealthy kingdom in the Middle East. Amazing place.

Their architecture, their mathematics, just amazing what the high level of things that they were doing. And so this is, He tells them this is the head of gold. This is Babylon. And then right after, not too long after this, in 539, the Persians took Babylon. I went through how that happened. We know from Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, at least what we think knows what happened. Herodotus, you can't tell the difference between real history and legend and myth. He just sort of mixed it all together. We think we know what happened. He says, this is it. You are. Your kingdom is the first kingdom. So this was followed by Persia. We know that. The Medio-Persian Empire. And what happened during this empire, which includes now the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, is that they send the Jews back.

What's interesting in the Old Testament, Cyrus is mentioned by name long before he was born. Because God said, I will bring a man called Cyrus up, and he's going to send you back. And he did. And we know that from, this is one of the cylinders that it was written on. And they can transcribe this. They know what it says. And basically he said, you know what I'm doing? The Babylonians just took people and brought them here as slaves or moved them all over the world. That's how they kept control. They moved people around out of their homeland. And what Cyrus did is, I'm going to let you go back. And it's interesting because in the Bible it says, because God told him. So he not only sent the Jews back. He must have thought, well, if the God and the Jews is upset over me, maybe I better send everybody back. So it appears he just started sending everybody back. Just go home, folks. Just, you know, I mean, this God came after me. I don't want any more other gods coming after me. And so he sends them back. And then we know that Persia was eventually destroyed by another kingdom, which would have been the silver on the statue. Alexander the Great shows up. I always have to whisk him in there because he came in so fast. You know, he conquered the known world so quickly. So Alexander the Great now brought Greek culture clear into India, all through what is now Europe, the Middle East. And he changed the culture. He never really set up a ruling empire the way the Persians had. The Persians literally tried to rule an empire through administration. It was the biggest bureaucracy, probably. Well, I don't know. The United States is bigger. But it was an enormous bureaucracy. He comes in and tries to rule through culture. And then we know what happened to them is that Julius Caesar becomes a dictator of Rome in 45 BC. They kill him. The Senate does because they don't want a dictator, but it's too late. They now have a dictator. And they have an emperor that rules for about 500 years.

Different emperors rule for about 500 years. And you have the Roman Empire. And this is the legs of iron. The Romans collect... they took the the culture of Greece and made it theirs.

In fact, they took a lot of cultures and mixed them together. What Rome is known for is a military might that had never existed before. You know, they could lose a battle and you think it would destroy the empire. Three years later, they'd have another army formed, trained, and equipped, march against the foes that had defeated them, figured out everything that they had done, and destroy them. Except for the Germans.

The barbarian Germans, it was like they're not even worth fighting. Them and the Picts, I mentioned them. I won't go into those stories. But they just conquered everybody else. Well, there's one other, the Persians. The Persians did it through just sheer power. So they sort of checkmated each other for hundreds of years. This are the legs. Now, it's interesting that torso turns in the legs.

The Roman Empire was split in two. The Western Empire fell in 476 because invasion from the Germanic tribes. The Eastern Empire did not fall until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople. See, we think of the Roman Empire just, well, that's only the West. The Eastern part, that other leg, that other leg existed until 1453.

And there have been attempts to reunite the Eastern Western halves of Europe for a long, long time.

It's still going on. So they fight wars with each other. I mean, what's going on in Russia is simply Putin trying to recreate old imperial Russia, where he can be a czar and rule over an empire. It's not communism he wants. It's, I'm a czar. He's not driven by philosophy. He's driven by, I want to be a czar. Before he dies, he wants the old Russian empire back. That way he's equal to anybody in Europe. This attempt to reunite these two things has been going on for a long time. What we know is, though, is that according to Daniel II, this statue representing these four empires is destroyed by God, by the coming of the Messiah, to set up God's kingdom on earth, the Second Coming. So that means when we get into Revelation 13, whatever that beast power is, it has to be some form of the old Roman empire. That has to be at least some context of it. Now, I don't know. I can't tell you how that's going to be. I don't tell you who the 10 kings are. I don't know. There's a lot of things I don't know. I just know it's in the context of that Roman empire. I don't know who their allies are. I don't know what, but I do know that's where to be centered because it's what we're told.

That's where the impetus will come to create this, what is known as the beast in Revelation 13. So this is the other template. This is template number four. Okay, template number four. Now, template number five, which I covered again, but once again, but we're going to cover this again. So think of this. God's template starts with how I'm going to save humanity from the mess they're in. Packed on top of that are all these messianic prophecies which we can find fulfilled. The first one, all the things that happened. The second one is in the process of being fulfilled, and it will happen. You put on top of that, you know, you have the covenants that God makes to make sure all this happens. Then you have Daniel 2 and Daniel 7. I just mentioned Daniel 7 real quick. Remember, we went through Daniel 7 and 8, and when you go through that, you realize it's just a further explanation of Daniel 2. How do we know that? Well, for one thing, Greece is mentioned specifically. Persia is mentioned specifically. Persia and Greece. They're not mentioned in the first one. In 7 and 8, they're mentioned. So now, we know who the second and third are. Rome is the only one not mentioned, but we know who the next one is historically. So that brings us into those four beasts of 7 and 8, which I won't go through now, but we went through in great detail. And that tells us this. We put Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Daniel 8 together, and we have the same story, just different elements of it. And this will tie in, and we'll have to look at this chart when we get, again, to Revelation 13 and the beast there. So there we have how we put all those together and came up with the same information, except a lot more details. Okay, this brings us then to our fifth template that we've talked about, Matthew 24. This is the Olivet Prophecy, Matthew 24.

I know we're covering a lot of the ground we've covered, without all the details, as we take six sermons and cram them into one. But this gives us, once again, the context by which we're going to move now into anti-prophecies, because the next three months, the three sermons will be about anti-prophecies. Matthew 24.

Now He sat, Jesus said, verse 3 on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, tell us when will these things be? What will be the sign of your coming and at the end of the age? When will we know when you're going to come and the age is going to stop? This human age with Satan's rulership is going to end. And Jesus answered, said to them, take heed that no one deceives you, for many will come in My name, saying, I am the Christ, and will deceive many. So the first thing He says is, there's going to be a lot of religious confusion and deception in the name of Jesus Christ. So there will be all kinds of confusion in the name of Jesus Christ.

And He says, don't be deceived by that. We're going to talk a little bit about that next week. I'm going to talk about, I've been asked about this a couple of times, I'll do a sermon on it. What are the doctrines of demons? Okay, we'll talk about that next week.

He says, and you will hear of wars. So this is continuing then, okay, there's going to be all this religious deception. There's going to be wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. Now there's always been wars and rumors of wars. Always. This is going to intensify. This is something that intensifies and intensifies. It starts and just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

For nation will rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom, as there will be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in various places. He said, so what you're going to find is chaos. The breaking down of, well, that's exactly what happened in 476. When the Roman Empire, which had created a globalism, collapsed, it ended up in chaos. And all these things happened then, by the way. They happened when, as I gave a sermon a while back in 1914, when the globalism of the seven empires that ruled the earth collapsed, and we ended up with World War I, the Spanish Flu, the Depression, and World War II.

The globalism of the United States is collapsing.

And this will be the result.

And I'm setting dates. I'm saying this will be the result. Nation against the nation, kingdom and kingdom, chaos, economic chaos, and there'll be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in different places. Now, if this is making you feel really depressed, his next statement will make you feel even more depressed because he said, all these things are just the beginning of sorrows.

In other words, how will we know you're going to come? Well, first of all, there'll be a total collapse of the world. That's just the start of it. This isn't what's going to come later. That's just the start. See, so much better when you start with Genesis 3.15 because there's a whole lot of hope and there's a whole lot of God working through history. You see what God's doing. There's a lot God's still doing now. There's a lot God's going to do in the future. We'll have to go through all that when we go through end time prophecies. We're going to have to look at the rapture and why that doesn't quite work. But what does God promise? But we first have to see what God's doing. Life every day has meaning and purpose and joy, even in these, you know, with our sicknesses and our problems and all the things we go through. This life has meaning as we prepare for what's coming and God has shown us for all these thousands of years that His plan is working out just fine.

Satan keeps doing these things. We kept... humanity keeps falling along. We've been called out of it. That's the greatest joy you can have. Can you imagine facing a collapsing world without God? You know, really, this is what life is. You either face life with God or without God. That's our only choice. You could live in a fantasy world and say, no, I want to change it. But you can't change this mess. You can only live, change the mess around you. And how do you do that? Either with God or without God. You have been called to do this with God. So the beginning of sorrows. And I've mentioned before when people say, ask me, are we in the midst of the end times and the tribulation? I'll say, no, we're not in the tribulation. We may be very well in the beginning of sorrows. How long that lasts? I don't know. I know it's not bad enough yet. I mean, right? Did you have water this morning? Did you have fresh coffee this morning? Did you, were you able to drive over here in a car?

I have a fan bowl over here. Life is good, okay?

So we need to look at what God's doing today and have trust that he's going to do in the future. Now I bring this up, this beginning of sorrows, because that's what happens next. And I've already talked about that, but understand how this develops. Because when you look at these things here, there's one other place in the New Testament where these things are described.

It's the exact same series of events. Revelation 6.

Revelation 6. I remember when I covered this, I showed the slides from when we did the Beyond Today program on the Four Horsemen and showed you all the mistakes in the slides. Because we had cheap costumes. You know, Revelation 6. I mean, yes, Revelation 6. Let's go.

Revelation 6, verse 1. I saw the lamb open one of the seals. So this is the beginning, this is the first of what's called the seven seals, which we'll need to go through in the future. And I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice, come and see.

There is another white horse in Revelation, and it's Jesus Christ. Remember what He told them. There will be false religion in the name of Christ. So we have a white horse that is Christ riding on a white horse. True religion. At the end of the book of Revelation, at the beginning, we have false Christianity. A false religion probably will end up even more and more ecumenical, because that's the direction it's going in. We think Christmas is Easter, of course, is pagan, which it is. We'll look back and say, oh, if they only just kept Christmas in Easter, not all this other stuff, it's going to get that bad. It's going to head into pagan and power-based, because it conquers. So we're going to watch a religion form that has some form of Christianity in it that is paganized and even more than it is now, and will have power behind it. Same things. So what Jesus says, they say, what's the beginning of this? He says, oh, the beginning of sorrows is this. He's describing what would be the first four seals in the book of Revelation. So he says in verse 3, And when he opened the second seal, I heard in the second living creature, saying, Come and see. Another horse, fiery red, went out, and it was granted to one who sat on it, to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another. And there was given to him a great sword, wars and rumors of wars. Okay, same thing. This is the beginning of it, the beginning of sorrows.

Third seal. When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, Come and see. So I looked and behold a black horse. And he was set on it, had a pair of scales in his hand. Heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, A quart of wheat for a denarius, three quarts of barley for a denarius, do not harm the oil and the wine. Now, when you're talking about wheat and barley, you're talking about food staples. A denarius was a day's wage.

So what you have is food shortages, famine, and incredible inflation. You can't, you know, to buy food is going to cost you a day's wage to get a day, one meal.

Remember what he said? Oh, there'll be famines. Everything that Jesus said is said here. But he said, that's not the worst part. That's just how it ends up being there. Verse 7, when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, Come and see. Behold a pale horse. On the name him who sounded it was death, and Hades followed him. Jesus said, diseases.

It's interesting. Pale horse is not an exact translation, because no one had ever seen a light green horse.

That's what is, you know, I mean, you talk about a sickly color, you know, when someone's sick, he's like, oh, you look green.

This is gruesome, you know, light, a green color. Pale made sense, because the Old English, you know, and it's just been that way ever since. We've never, never seen a green horse, so they just left it pale.

It's everything Jesus said. But this is the beginning of sorrows. Okay. We will know when the tribulation starts. I mean, I don't mean the day it starts, but we'll know what happens when these things keep getting worse and worse until something very specific happens. And this is the end of verse four. I'm sorry, end of verse eight. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and the beasts of the earth. Jesus added earthquakes and natural disasters. One fourth of the world dies. This can't happen in secret, by the way.

I don't know if this will be concentrated in certain areas, probably some areas worse than others. You can't hide to death of two billion people. One fourth of the earth.

So what's going to happen is this collapse of globalism and an attempt to recreate it is going to create conflicts, wars. It's going to take a lot of more lives. Overthrowing of governments, nation against nation, kingdom of kingdom, civil wars.

It's going to, and there's going to be famine. There's going to be disease epidemics, and there's going to be more natural disasters.

And it reaches a culmination point when 25% of the earth dies. See, if we only talk about the Olivet prophecy and stop there, it's pretty discouraging. But the Olivet prophecy doesn't stop there. Neither do the seven seals. They both end up with Christ coming back the second time.

They both end up with, this is the mess Satan's going to do, God fixes it.

So we're on that trajectory where we know what Satan's doing to a certain extent. Oh, as I said before, here's where Satan feels he's at his best in chaos, and he's going to create all the chaos he can. And he's going to create all the chaos he can in your life, and in society all over. That's what it's going to be. Chaos. We find we can step back from that chaos simply because of God, and because of Jesus Christ, and because you and I are still blessed. They have 80 people in our congregation where we can come together, and we can worship, and we can serve, and we can help each other.

He's going to give us everything we need.

So that brings us up to, now what we're going to do, I told Kim, they're going to be all bored. I'm covering material I've covered over the last six months. But I have to do this. I have to focus in, because here's where we started. We're getting more and more focused into the end time. And it does get a little negative for a while, because there's a lot of bad things that are going to happen as Satan tries to carry out his plan. So we're going to have to talk about the rise of the end time beast. We're going to have to talk about the great tribulation. We're going to have to talk about the abomination of desolation, and the day of the Lord. And then it gets good. It gets good again. But those things, that the rise of the beast, the great tribulation, the abomination of desolation, the day of the Lord is only three and a half years long. It's only three and a half years long.

But it will be Satan's attempt to destroy humanity. So that gets us caught up.

And sometimes next month, I will try, I will do a study, either a Bible study or a sermon, sometimes both, to take us through the next steps of what's going to happen in that three and a half year period. Because we have a huge amount of information about what it's like. And that'll help us focus in and not know exactly what is going to happen, but you'll know it as it happens. It's like that 25 percent death rate. When you get the 20... That's a marker point. Okay, this means... Uh-oh. This means the three and a half years are going to start. Now we have a starting point. So the negatives give us points where we can look and see, okay, this is how close we're getting more and more closer to Christ's return. And then we'll talk about the millennium and the Great White Throne Judgment. And I'm hoping to be there at... So that we're in those subjects at the Feast of Tabernacles. So we can go to the Feast of Tabernacles, really looking forward to, ah, yeah, God's got this. He's already told us in the Holy Days what's going to happen next. And that'll give, hopefully, a deeper appreciation of keeping the Feast of Tabernacles and that last Great Day, that eighth day, what those meanings are.