Daily Bread  -  August, 2007

by Robert J. Wieland

Millions of Christians this week are pondering the story of Mr. and Mrs. Job—probably the oldest book in the world, written by Moses when he was exiled in Midian for 40 years. They are struck by the similarity this story has with the last book of the Bible, the Revelation.

The story of Job tells of a man who was “blameless,” a man whom God declared several times as “upright,” who refused evil.

Revelation climaxes with the story of a corporate group of people who are likewise described as “without fault before the throne of God” who “follow the Lamb [the crucified Christ] wherever He goes” (14:5).

This idea of perfection of character is intriguing; the entire human race as the descendants of the fallen Adam are repeatedly described as by-nature sinners (“all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), “there is none righteous no, not one” (vs. 10).

The idea is not that Job was immaculately sinless, sinless in nature; the idea is that God accepted him as blameless in character. Likewise, the Bible idea is not that the “144,000” are sinless in nature or immaculately, physically perfect (for example, who claims that Jesus Christ when He was a carpenter never bent a nail?). But they are “upright,” they still have a sinful nature but they have “overcome even as [Christ] overcame” while burdened with a sinful nature inherited from Adam.

In other words, Job and the 144,000 share the joy of learning to surrender self to be “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20). As such, they are privileged to honor God in a cosmic crisis when He is on trial in the most severe litigation imaginable in the universe: the issue is whether He, the Lord, is worthy to continue as the sovereign Ruler of the universe.

We have long understood “the hour of [God’s] judgment” in Revelation 14:6, 7 as the hour when He judges you and me; now enters the book of Job with the idea that it is God Himself who is on trial before the universe.

And poor little humble Job ends up with the task of defending Him in court.

He succeeds; he defends the Lord of glory. But now in the end of time, the great controversy between Christ and Satan can not be successfully concluded until this corporate body of people from the last weak end of the human race, after 6000 years of desperate sin and moral failure, again defend Him on the witness stand by demonstrating the same “blamelessness” that Job demonstrated. Again they prove Satan wrong! Come, join them in court.

We used to hear it said, “There’ll always be an England!” But an ongoing phenomenon raises doubts: English people are forsaking England in hundred thousands while Islamic immigrants flood in. This with their much higher birth rate makes the world wonder if the “England” to come will leave the grand buildings of Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, the Houses of Parliament empty of Englishmen but filled with Islamic people who have transformed the culture.

The prophecy of Daniel 2 posits seven nations that were once the Roman Empire as still in existence when the great Stone strikes the image on its clay-mixed-with-iron feet. There’ll be an “England” until the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation meet their end-time fulfillment before the world.

But another serious question: will there always be a “remnant” church of Revelation 12:17 and 14:12 that relates to the true Holy Spirit in this Day of Atonement truth? Could it be that beautiful church buildings will be filled with people who do not believe they are living in the time of the cleansing of the sanctuary; that our raison d’etre has quietly vanished while we’ve slept?

The question ceases to be a hypothetical future issue; even now there are sincere people whose hearts are moved by the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation, who treasure the unpopular truth of Christ’s righteousness, who don’t know where to go for fellowship in the Holy Spirit on the Sabbath day.

The true Holy Spirit’s first work is always conviction of sin, for example, “thou art lukewarm,” Rev. 3:16); and there is a counterfeit who ministers corporate and individual self-esteem and worldly self-satisfaction (“I am rich, ... in need of nothing”).

The true one ministers self-respect, a heart appreciation for the Price paid by the Son of God who has redeemed and saved you through His cross. Your individual faith in Him (“which works by love [agape],” Gal. 5:6) will sustain you with bread and water of life, even if the local church is “desolate.” But now, don’t stay home; you can bring the true Holy Spirit with you when you come to the worship and Sabbath School services. Do it!

Being a pastor has often challenged me to know what to say. Like when I was trying to give some marital counsel to a couple who had so much sandpaper in their relationship that harmony seemed impossible.

Finally they confided that their marriage had been built on the foundation of lust, beginning with fornication; there was rebellion against parents, against the church, against God. He had nothing to do with our marriage, they said; so it seems to us that our marriage has always been hopeless. It now seems duty to separate.

I sat there stymied; then I offered a silent prayer: “Lord, please help me know what to say!”

Then I thought of Psalm 87, which had always been obscure to me until I had chanced to read it in Moffatt’s translation: “Rahab [Egypt], and Babylon, ... Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.” What’s the point?

Then Moffatt steps in with his idea in translation: you were born in some heathen country around the world and grew up separated from the Lord God of Israel; but when finally you turn your heart to Israel, to God’s people, the Lord alters your very birth certificate and writes that you were BORN in Zion!

What does that mean?

Even before you knew Him, He knew you; Christ redeemed you since your mother’s womb. Even though you went about things in the wrong way, the Lord overruled because of His much more abounding grace. He has “covered” you since the womb; you DO belong together, it was He who overruled and brought you two together; now stay together and be happy in the Lord who has saved you both.

The last I heard those two are still together, and happy.

If your soul is tempted, strained, pulled this way and that, bewildered, confused, take heart because God’s true saints have had those same trials for 6000 years. But they have also been relieved, un-confused, saved from despair, by choosing to believe Good News truths like these:

(1) Are you convicted deep inside that you are a sinner? Listen to “the Pharisees and scribes” tell you the one true thing they ever uttered: “This Man [Jesus] receiveth sinners” (Luke 15:2). Jesus has said, “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). Good news! The Holy Spirit has brought that conviction of sin to you; this is prima facie evidence that the Lord Himself is working for your salvation. Yes! Grasp that, realize it, and you will be singing the Hallelujah chorus for eternity.

But that paradox starts gnawing at your soul immediately: how can you be happy when you are constantly reminded that you are a sinner? The answer: the Holy Spirit’s conviction of your sin includes the conviction that the Son of God is your Savior from it. Therefore your attention is being constantly drawn away from looking at yourself, and fixed on Christ. So, next:

(2) Salvation is yours by looking at Him. That’s not the thoughtless glance: listen to John the Baptist’s impassioned cry to the multitude: “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus emphasized this same truth to Nicodemus in that late-night interview: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever [you!] believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (3:14).

Look again: the “believing” here is the same as “beholding” because that was what the Israelites in the wilderness had to do: look at that serpent, and that meant look, and look, and look, intensely, as for their very life! That means put away your remote and let the Holy Spirit call you to dig in the Bible; now dig. Not as a “work,” but let faith do the work (Gal. 5:5, 6). Let your soul become obsessed with how good the good news is in the pure, true “gospel of Christ,” God’s message for today, which is the “present truth,” the “third angel’s message in verity” (Rom. 1:16; 2 Peter 1:17, Rev. 14:6-14). Learn truth as for your very life!

This weekend millions of Christians will be giving special study to Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel. She knew exquisite sorrow; a first wife of Elkanah and truly loved by him, she was childless and deeply pained by his taking a second wife, Peninah, in order for him to have children. It was a solemn duty for every Israelite man to have some male progeny, otherwise there was an idea that his name would somehow be blotted out of the book of life.

Hannah was the “fall guy” in this drama. For a wife not to be able to get pregnant was tantamount to a slap in the face from God. Hannah bore this disgrace humbly, which was sorrow enough for any woman to endure; but now with fecund Peninah mocking her and strutting over her even at the dinner table with taunts and ridicule, it became more than Hannah could bear.

Husband Elkanah tried to comfort her with his love but did not know how to comfort her with God’s love; so Hannah took a desperate step. She challenged God with a vow: if He would give her what every Israelite wife yearns for, a male child, she would give him back to the Lord. For any mother this was a prodigious, life-long sacrifice to make!

It happened; and in her joy she wrote her magnificent poem of triumph over Peninah who to her represented the taunts of Satan (1 Sam. 2:1-10).

Another woman in the Bible story later appropriated Hannah’s poem of gratitude over humiliation reversed, and re-wrote it as her “Magnificat” in Luke 1:46-55, expressing her burst of joy over the reversal of what had been her particular “low estate” (tapeinosin, Greek). The human mother of our Savior was herself already “acquainted with grief.” Jesus is the divine Son of God; but He is also in a very intimate sense “the Son of man.” Close to you.

Our delineation of the differences between the Islamic Allah and the Christ of the Bible has brought a good response. Thank you, one and all. Yes, you are right: it was Islamic Turkey banging on the gates of Vienna time and again that diverted the attention of the papacy from their attempts to annihilate the Protestants; Islam proved to be a cover for the truth of the Reformation. In that sense, Islam is indeed “God’s forgotten blessing.”

And yes indeed, Islamic discipline is closer to biblical Christianity than the apostasy of “Babylon.” Islam is portrayed in Revelation 9 as a “star fallen from heaven” which became the “bottomless pit,” a divinely appointed scourge to the “little horn” of Daniel’s prophecy.

The Fatiha is chapter one of the Quran, notable for its lofty language but no mention of love: “In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, the beneficent, the merciful owner of the day of judgment, Thee alone we worship, Thee alone we ask for help. Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou has favoured, not the path of those who earn Thine anger, nor of those who go astray.”

But there is love in Islam—love for fellow Muslims. It is often enjoined in the mosques. But “if ye love those who love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?” asks Jesus.

When the world comes to the final issue of the “mark of the beast,” there will be great humbling of hearts on the part of all who remain faithful and true to the end. A huge proportion of those who now appear to be genuine Christians will prove to be plastic instead of the solid gold they had appeared to be; and surprising inroads of now-at-last-enlightened-Muslims will respond to the New Covenant truths that will be the Light that lightens the earth with glory. That final burst of soul-winning truth will judge the world.

It’s everywhere in the media, with graphs and charts explaining the collapse of the housing boom, with horror stories of foreclosures. Some couples are left with debt and no assets to account for it, for they have lost the house and still they’re in debt because they had furnished the house they couldn’t afford to begin with. Credit was too easy.

One lady, when finally the dust settled, was forced to scrounge and discovered that when it was so good an enthusiastic sales agent had her down with income of $4000 a month when in fact it was hardly more than half that. Things were so good she could hardly believe that young as she was she had this huge new house with room for three cars and a pad for a boat. Some couples barely out of their teens with modest resources had housing fit for semi-millionaires, all on easy credit, and sometimes with expensive vacations also.

But painful foreclosures may be God-given good news, evidence of the blessing of the Holy Spirit. Trouble may be needed to teach us how to get our feet settled on “solid rock,” not only economically but spiritually (cf. Psalm 40:1, 2).

The apostle Paul has a good lesson in godly economics. He writes young Timothy to “withdraw yourself” from the “gain is godliness” teaching (1 Tim. 6:5, KJV). “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content” (vss. 6-8, NKJV).

There is something basically immoral about reveling in materialist wealth on this great cosmic Day of Atonement. The argument is vain that your personal self-denial can’t really help someone in Darfur, so why not revel? If you are a multimillionaire by inheritance, you can’t help yourself on that score. But you can do what the Lord Jesus tells us, “sell what you have and give to the poor” (Matt. 19:21). The biblical idea constantly is, beware of this world’s empty wealth. To get obsessed with it can lead to losing the eternal. Let’s live and have our being in the light of the love revealed at the cross as agape.

Because of immigration and the high birthrate of Muslims in the Netherlands, serious thinking people realize that in a few years the Netherlands (and much of Europe) will be virtually Islamic.

In what is a sincere effort to achieve a religious peace, some seriously propose that we drop our word “God” and substitute the word “Allah” for Him. After all, in Arabic the very word for “God” is Allah, whether you are Muslim or Christian; Allah is the name for God in the Arabic Old Testament and in their Arabic New Testament.

Muslims in Europe would be delighted for us to do that because the change would be virtually an abandonment of Christianity and an adoption of Islam instead.

There is a wide gulf between what the Bible word for “God” means and what “Allah” means.

“God” in the Bible means the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ; this truth is anathema in Islam.

“God” in the Bible is Himself love; love is not merely an attribute of God, one of His many characteristics; “God IS love,” says the statement in First John that is the highest point of inspiration in all the Bible (4:8).

“Love” is not mentioned in the Islamic Fatiha in its description of Allah. “Love” is a word that is out of place in Islamic thinking. The biblical idea of love is the gospel in a word; when the apostles fanned out to proclaim the gospel of Jesus, their enemies accused them of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6); but they couldn’t do that; it was their message that did it And the message of the apostles was encapsulated in their one Greek word translated in our Bibles as “love (agape), but it meant infinitely beyond what our common word for love conveys.

Agape is the word that describes the self-sacrifice of God. “God so loved [with agape] the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” and the giving was for eternity, and it went even as far as hell. When the Son of God hung on His cross of shame and cried out in heart-rending agony, “My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He was “tasting death for every man” (Heb. 2:9), even “the second death” that is described in Revelation 2:11 and 20:12-19.

Islam knows nothing of this revelation of truth; honest hearts there are waiting for someone to tell them.

Jesus appears in the Bible as often taking action without asking permission. For example, in Matthew 12:11-13 He healed the man with the withered hand without asking him first if He had his permission. And in 14:13-21 He fed 5000 men besides women and children without anyone asking Him to do it. In Luke 13 He meets a woman who was bowed down for 18 years and could not straighten herself. Again He took action entirely on His own initiative: “When Jesus saw her, He called her to Him and said unto her, Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity” (vs. 12). He did not ask her, Would you like to be healed? Instead, “He laid His hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God” (vs. 13).

Also, at the village of Nain He met a funeral in process, a widow’s only son. He asked no questions, no permission; He “said to her, ‘Do not weep. ‘ Then He came and touched the open coffin ... and He said, ‘Young man, I say to you, Arise.’ And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak” (7:11-15).

When we read in Philippians 2:5-8 the story of how Christ condescended to take those seven steps into humiliation on our behalf, we do not read that He asked any permission of the inhabitants of this lost planet. He simply took those steps, “even to the death of the cross.” God’s plan of salvation has been on His part a one-sided exercise of initiative.

On His cross, the Lord Jesus took our place without asking us if He could do so; the Father asked no permission from the inhabitants of this earth before He “gave His only begotten Son” for them (John 3:16).

But before the great controversy between Christ and Satan can be successfully closed, God must change His plan; now He must ask permission!

This time He cannot unilaterally do what He wants; He has elevated those who “overcome ... as [He] overcame [to] sit down with [Him] on His throne even as [He] overcame and sat down with [His] Father on His throne” (Rev. 3:21). Thus they share with Him executive authority in bringing to a close the great controversy between Christ and Satan.

He tried once unilaterally to pour upon His people the “beginning” of the latter rain and the Loud Cry of Revelation 18:1-4 without their previous permission and it was in a great degree a sad failure. Far from their since having to beg Him (reluctantly?) to grant that blessing He has been more than willing to give it if they would humble their hearts to receive the gift and the message that comes with it.

Millions of Christians around the world this last weekend have been studying the fascinating story of Ruth in the Old Testament.

But many are probably missing another story that is part of the picture—how “the harlot Rahab” of pagan Jericho has a significant role in the story. In his genealogy, Matthew tells us that someone named “Salmon” married Rahab and became the father of Boaz, who married Ruth, and thus Rahab came into the genealogical line behind Jesus of Nazareth, the world’s “nearest of kin” who alone could “redeem” us from sin (cf. Matt. 1:4, 5).

Many scholars have concluded that the evidence suggests that Salmon fits into the picture as one of the “spies” who stayed at Rahab’s place before the destruction of Jericho.

Rahab was a most unusual character; she would interest and appeal to any Israelite whose heart was sensitive to the workings of the Holy Spirit. Rahab had thought through the issues of the day; her heart was convicted: the one true God, the LORD, was with Israel; the truth was there. She experienced a corporate repentance for paganism. Rahab was converted, she yielded her heart to the Holy Spirit.

Salmon evidently noticed her in a special way, and later married her. The story is engaging for several reasons:

There is more “Gentile” ancestry in that of Jesus than we may have been conscious of. Salvation has always been of grace, through faith, not of “works,” and physical ancestry is “works” because it’s of the flesh. Israel was always called to be the missionary nation through whom the whole world should be “blessed.” Abraham was always called to be the “father of all who believe,” and believers were always to include both Israelites and Gentiles.

The attraction that Boaz had for Ruth included romantic love; their union was not merely a legalistic maneuver to settle a genealogical puzzle to satisfy Moses law; the relationship between Ruth and Boaz was romantic love as well as a “just happened” familial tie.

Romantic love in Christ is pure, for it is God-given; the author of Steps to Christ declares that such romantic “love is a precious gift which we receive from Jesus.” God has seen fit to include in the Bible an entire “book” devoted to it (the Song of Solomon). It is not to be despised; but it is to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is the rule of self-denial “in Christ.”

One of the world’s most fascinating architectural wonders is a new Hindu temple being erected in the heart of America’s Protestant Deep South: Atlanta. No frame stucco this, that only looks imposing; this is the old fashioned kind of stone structure built to last a thousand years, its builders say. The wealth going into it seems unbelievable—19 million dollars.

Now the Bible faith of Jesus Christ won’t have to emigrate to India in order to chip away at the Gibraltar of heathenism; the Bible Belt’s mission field has moved into its own back yard. Hinduism claims to be the oldest religion on earth; it also claims to embody all the doctrines of all religions. It will have mass appeal to the modern public.

It will be useless to combat this new eruption with more expensively built churches intended to dazzle; and more artist’s imaginary pictures of Jesus won’t help (are they actually a form of Hindu expression? Hinduism has no end of pictures of “Jesus”). “The truth of the gospel” in its utter simplicity (cf. Gal. 2:5, 14) and its profundity, must confront heathenism. Preaching “Christ and Him crucified” is vastly more than the most ingenious PowerPoint program we can invent. Our clever creations can be deceptive if they leave us imagining that we have been successfully “rich and increased with goods” in our task of enlightening the earth.

Modern children and youth will be impressed by America’s Hinduism, especially its “spirituality” which is meant to constitute another “holy spirit,” and Krishna of course is another “christ.” Hinduism is not original; it rides piggy back on a distortion of the truly original faith of Jesus that dates from Eden through Genesis 3:15 where the Lord promised to “put enmity between [the serpent] and the “seed” of the woman.

Islam is also taking advantage of the American Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, coming in “like a flood.” Now youth can’t rely on tradition to keep them grounded in a “post-Christian” kind of traditional faith; they must survey the field of religions that are in the world and make choices for themselves. That’s good, because the Lord Jesus is not honored by mindless, tradition-bound followers. But this influx of Islam and Hinduism is not all bad news: it creates the context for fulfillment of a glorious promise: when falsehood “comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against [it]” (Isa, 59:19).

That “standard” will be the message of Revelation 18:1-4 that does “lighten the earth with glory.”

Ram Gidoomal is a former Hindu who is now a believer in Jesus. He has thought through what the Savior has accomplished for the world and has come to a profound conviction: on His cross, Christ has paid the karma debt of all humanity. Here, for vast numbers of Hindus in the world, is an exit from Hinduism into the beginnings of faith in Jesus.

Hinduism believes that we all come into the world with a karmic account. If we live evil lives, we increase our karmic debt so that when we leave this life we will have this mountain of karmic debt that will necessitate our transmigration into a lower form of life.

That’s a distorted spin-off from a basic biblical truth: we do come into the world under a burden of debt imposed upon us by our fallen father Adam and handed down to us in our DNA as the judicial “condemnation” we inherit from him. True, we did not ask for this burden but it comes with the gift of human life we have received from fallen Adam.

But something else has come to us all that we did not ask for: the lifting or reversal of that burden of judicial condemnation; it’s in the “last Adam” or second Adam—Jesus Christ. This former Hindu has seen something, blind as he may be, significant: Christ is a cosmic Savior who has rightly earned the title the Samaritans gave Him—“Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

Like the ancient Jews who couldn’t bring themselves to grant salvation to the Gentiles, many of us professed Christians back off from the truth that Gidoomal has seen: we are hesitant to grant that Christ has accomplished something for every human soul, given something to every human soul; as far as many of us are willing to go is to concede that Christ has accomplished only the right to offer every human soul salvation but many insist that what He offers doesn’t do us any good unless we first accept and believe: the idea is that He hasn’t given the gift of salvation to every human soul, He has only offered it.

Sounds great: we are afraid to let Jesus open the gates of the New Jerusalem and let people in who are undeserving.

But He doesn’t need our help; He knows what He is doing. Not one unbelieving soul will walk through the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem, not because the gates are closed against him but because in his unbelief he has chosen to reject the gift that Christ has given him. A widely distributed little book tells it right: “The sinner may resist this love, may refuse to be drawn to Christ; but if he does not resist he will be drawn to Jesus, ... to the foot of the cross in repentance for his sins” (Steps to Christ, p. 27). It helps people to realize that Christ has paid their karmic debt.

Is it a sin to live under the Old Covenant? Whether we can say yes or no to that question, we know the Old Covenant led the ancient people of Israel to crucify their Lord and Savior, and for sure that was a sin!

The Lord gave His New Covenant promises to Abraham, and he “believed” (cf. Gen. 12:2, 3; 15:4-7). He walked in the light for a time, at least until his wife Sarah persuaded him to abandon the Lord’s promise to give him an heir through her getting pregnant and bearing him a son. Sarah was down on herself and on God; she was Old Covenant in her unbelief. She blamed God: “The Lord has kept me from having children” (16:2, GNB).

We can all recall our multitudinous variations of Old Covenant thinking and experience. It was when we walked in “bondage,” for it produces “bondage” (Gal. 4:24). We make mistakes in unbelief and then we blame God for the resultant unhappiness, just as Sarah did.

It’s not fair to say that Abraham would have lived happily had it not been for Sarah dragging him back into unbelief, because when she suggested that he take a second wife, Hagar, he readily agreed. He chose to go back into Old Covenant unbelief!

Yet God had promised that he should be “the father” of “many nations,” and forever be known as “the father of the faithful” (Rom. 4:16). By taking Hagar who bore him Ishmael, Abraham had taken upon himself dark unbelief that he must overcome before he can be worthy to have that glorious title, “father of the faithful.”

Now, unless you are ready for translation, you and I have the same unbelief to overcome before we can acquire that glorious title of being “the faithful” in these last days.

Welcome to our universal battle with unbelief! Not one of us was born with a sinless nature, naturally believing; even the Virgin Mary inherited from our common fallen father Adam the DNA of our fallen, sinful nature; but she chose to believe God’s promise (Luke 1:45), and so can we choose. All around the world there are people just now choosing to “overcome, even as [Christ] overcame” (Rev 3:21), and thus to become part of the 144,000 who will glorify Christ by following “the Lamb whithersoever He goeth” (Rev. 14:4, 5, KJV). Let’s make those choices today!

Is it possible that a sinful man could be right and God could be wrong (or at least appear to be wrong)? Could a man be reverent and rebuke God? Or correct Him? If that were to happen, would God be angry with him?

If God were like the Islamic Allah, the answer would be yes, God would be very angry with such a man.

But there was once such a man and God was pleased with him—Job.

He did not know about the altercation in chapters one and two between God and Satan over him. God told the truth about him, he was indeed a “perfect and an upright man, one that fear[ed] God, and eschew[ed] evil” (1:8; 2:3). In Job’s innocence, he could not understand why it appeared that God had treated him unjustly; his three friends pressed this thorn deeply into Job’s heart, telling him that God had not punished him as much as he deserved—Job was a terribly evil man, or all these calamities could never have come upon him.

Job knew positively that was not true, about him; he knew that he had been “a perfect and upright man, one that feared God and eschewed evil.” That was plain, solid truth. To him in his innocent honesty, God was going back on His true character of righteousness and justice.

So Job did what any honest person should do under that circumstance: he called on God to repent and return to His true character of love and righteousness!

And God loved to hear him say it. Job proved that God was right when He told Satan that Job was “perfect and upright.” In the end God vindicated Job and honored him as a man who anticipated the people in Revelation 17:14 as the group who are “with” “the Lamb of God”[openly and bravely on His side in the great controversy!] and “are called, and chosen, and faithful.”

The Lord Jesus is even now calling His “144,000” out of “every nation, kindred, tongue and people” (Rev. 14:6). The story of Job is a great blessing, for it helps us understand that immense developments are happening behind the heavenly scenes when it appears to us on the surface that God has abandoned the great controversy with Satan. When probation closes, there will be a people who will “taste” of the “cup” that Jesus drank down when He cried on His cross, “My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Their hearts will be knit with His in eternal union!

Romans 11 is the commentary inspired by the Holy Spirit that explains the constant turmoil that is Israeli/Palestinian current history. The famous Six Day war was thought to have established the state of Israel for all time to come; but now some thoughtful observers see it as a disaster so far as Israeli security is concerned. How can you sleep feeling safe when your next door neighbors believe you should not even exist, who want to drive you into the sea; you can’t indulge an innocent desire for recreation at a sidewalk café for fear of more suicide bombers, with the stock of youth supplying them increasing, not decreasing. Is dwelling in constant military fear what Abraham wanted his descendants to experience?

The apostle Paul has just discussed how ancient Israel were a “disobedient and rebellious people” (10:21), but he now insists that it was not God who cast them off in spite of the horror of their rejection and crucifixion of their Messiah; they cast themselves off. They are in a state of disconnect, which is “cast off” (11:15); but Paul’s point is that they “disconnected” themselves, “cast off” themselves; God was faithful, they were not.

All during the post-Pentecost explosion of soul-winning among the Gentiles, God had this “small number” of Israelites who were like the “seven thousand” that He had in Elijah’s day at Mt. Carmel when the prophet thought he was alone (1 Kings 19:10, 18). So today.

Modern secular “Israel” is a far cry from the spiritual nation that the descendants of Abraham were called to be (Gen. 12:2, 3); his descendant nation were to be God’s missionary agents to save the world through proclamation of the gospel, but they very largely forgot the vision. There is among them today still that “small number” who are thinking and pondering sacred history. The political and military world around them may (and will) crumble, but this “small number” will yet prove to be loyal to the Holy Spirit.

Jews who have learned to appreciate what Jesus of Nazareth accomplished on His cross will have a prominent part in the movement that “lightens the earth with glory” in fulfillment of Revelation 18.  They will repent of their corporate age-long impenitence; they will repent of their ancestors’ rejection and crucifixion of their Messiah even though they were not personally present when it happened. No modern Israeli was physically there, but that “small number” will see themselves there.

Their repentance will be corporate; when they begin to understand the cross, they will see that they would have done the same had they been there, for our human nature is the same in all ages. Modern Jews will learn to understand corporate guilt.

So will we, Gentile Christians, for the Holy Spirit teaches it and convicts of it (John 16:8).

There’s a passage in Job that is pathetic, but it probes the inmost depths of human anguish.

Job doesn’t know the prologue that we know in chapters one and two; all he knows is that God has turned against him suddenly and has apparently become his enemy. All the good things that God gave him He has now taken away (poor people who have never known a moment of prosperity can endure their destitution more easily than rich people who lose it all). Job appears to be a lost man in hell.

Then his three “friends” come and in utmost sincerity try to help him but succeed only in multiplying his pain exponentially. Here’s the passage he tells his “friends”:

“In trouble like this I need loyal friends—whether I’ve forsaken God or not” ( 6:14). In other words, Job says, even if I’m in hell itself with no hope ever, I need someone to have compassion on me!

Suppose you knew that someone was in hell, had committed the unpardonable sin and was indeed lost (which you don’t know and you never will know of any person and you dare not judge!), but suppose everybody agreed that this person was lost (a multiple murderer for example, an unrepentant child abuser, etc. etc.). Could you say something to comfort and encourage him? Could you manifest some compassion?

Once upon a time there was such a person who had publicly let it be known that He was indeed in hell, utterly forsaken by God. The religious leaders of the one true church on earth condemned him (yes, the scribes and Pharisees were the leaders of what was still that true church then—it remained the true church up until the 490 years [the seventy weeks] of Daniel 9 had run their course).

But all those people could do was to continue to curse Jesus and torment Him unmercifully; He’s a human Write off, why not amuse ourselves like boys throwing stones at a wrecked, abandoned car.

I’m sorry to say that even the Eleven were mystified so much that not one of them brought Him a drink of water.

Oh Father in heaven! Save us from being Job’s three friends; save us from misjudging someone who is so Christlike that he/she is suffering like Jesus did apparently under the curse of heaven.

The most precious message of Christ’s righteousness exalts the cross of Christ and what He accomplished there for the world. He reversed the judicial “condemnation” that our fallen father Adam brought upon the human race and as the second Adam pronounced upon us instead a judicial “verdict of acquittal “ (Rom. 5:15-18). By His sacrifice upon His cross He gave the Father the legal right to treat “every man” in the world as though he has never sinned!

You may have thought about this a thousand times, but each new morning it’s a fresh new revelation of grace. The Father demonstrates what “be ye therefore perfect” means by “mak[ing] His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and send[ing] rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45, 48). And so, by His much more abounding grace (Rom. 5:20) which He bestows on us “in Christ,” He enables us to treat others the same way; and to our amazement, we discover that we begin to win souls! We discover in the most unforeseen places someone who is hungry and thirsty for the bread of life and the water of life that we can now share, and what a joy it is to meet that person.

When you know yourself and confess yourself to be empty, that you are eternally hungry and thirsty, you are prepared to be “filled” (Matt. 5:6), and no one is ever “filled” without at the same time his “cup runn[ing] over” (Psalm 23:5). Then everybody who comes in contact with you is blessed. You are continually exuding that much more abounding grace; there’s no end to it. You’ve found a new life.

What’s happening is that God’s New Covenant is playing itself out in you; all the promises He made to Abraham are being kept and fulfilled in you as a child of Abraham (you know, of course, that not one human soul will enter any of the gates of the New Jerusalem except as a child of Abraham [cf. Rom. 4:1-16], and that is what you are if your heart has just begun to “comprehend ... the breadth, and length, and depth, and height [of the] love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you maybe filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19).

It’s real! You are not the water of life but you are a channel through which it can flow.

There are two books in the Bible that the Lord Jesus has especially appealed to His followers to “read” and “understand.” And very likely, no matter what church you may attend, you probably never hear a sermon that explains those two books. The appeal of Jesus seems to be almost universally disregarded, even among His professed friends who say they’re the church that keeps the commandments of God and has the faith of Jesus.

Those two special books are Daniel the prophet in the Old Testament (see Matt. 24:15), and the last book of the Bible, the Revelation (D&R; see 1:1-3).

The problem is that “ Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen,” but Babylon is what the world loves; and what the world loves is too often what we love, too.

The great user-friendly mega-churches soft-pedal D&R. The Enemy in the great controversy between Christ and Satan has two methods of attack on this truth: (1) minimize attention, neglect the two books, make people think the prophecies are impossible to be understood; (2) inspire fanatics to invent ever new and fantastic “interpretations” of the books that are senseless and self-contradictory.

Let the Lord deliver you from both of these heresies: (1) Daniel declares that his prophecies were unsealed as “the time of the end” began (cf. 11:35; 12:4); (2) Christ Himself pronounces a special “blessing” on the one who either reads or listens to someone else read, the prophecies of the book of Revelation (1:1-3).

Both Daniel and Revelation make clear that “the time of the end” began at the end of the 1260 years of the Dark Ages, the time of papal oppression, in 1798. It was then that Daniel’s prophecies were unsealed. The understanding of these prophecies of D&R that was held by those who emerged from that darkness is the understanding that Jesus declared would confirm God’s people unto the end. He said: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matt. 24:34). The glorious light of that “other angel” of Revelation 18 was a gift that God gave to “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans” and the gift was within the lifetime of those pioneers; but the light was in a great degree kept away both from the church and from the world.

The truth of why Christ has not come yet is so simple that even a child can understand!

It’s everybody’s nightmare become reality: the solid steel and concrete beneath your car’s or truck’s wheels suddenly collapses and throws your vehicle like a toy into the murky waters of the river. Now worldwide those millions who daily drive over these steel and concrete spiderwebs that are Interstates in our glorious cities will wonder anew how secure they are. Just three years ago engineers who inspected Interstate 35 over the Mississippi saw nothing that worried them: they gave the huge bridge a clean bill of health.

The Interstate 35 bridge was just an integral part of Minneapolis; it was there, like the great Temple was an integral part of Jerusalem, to Christ’s disciples. He shocked them in Luke 21, telling how not one “goodly stone will be left ... upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (vs. 6, REB). Those “stones” were unbelievably huge; what He said seemed totally impossible. Coming history could never prove Him right, they thought; this apparently impossible prophecy astonished them with a burden of belief that weighed on them just as they entered into the cataclysmic events of the crucifixion, when their hopes in the Messiah would be dashed.

“On earth nations will stand helpless, not knowing which way to turn from the roar and surge of the sea. People will faint with terror at the thought of all that is coming upon the world; for the celestial powers will be shaken” (vss. 25, 26, NEB).

But the frightful news in the lips of Jesus is not Bad News: He adds, “Not a hair of your head will be lost. By standing firm you will win yourselves life. ... Stand upright and hold your heads high ...” (vss. 18, 25). There’s something to hope for.

We sympathize with Minneapolis today; their baseball game got mixed into all this turmoil, life for many is turned upside down. Let’s not treat the news as another ho-hum disaster, but let’s read again that pivotal chapter in the gospels, Luke 21, and its counterparts in Matthew 24 and Luke 13. The bridge began to shake before it collapsed; you don’t have to look far to see signs of things shaking all around us.

The great plan of salvation that engages Heaven’s attention is winding to its close on this planet; you and I are being “called” to “follow the Lamb wherever He goes,” to be among His loyal “bodyguard” of 144,000 who will share with Him His cross on which self is crucified with Him. Give all for the treasure of oneness with Christ; know your inheritance.

A recent issue of Newsweek devotes its lead article to “Muslims in America.” Filled of course with statistics of their growth and power (“Islam in America is a success story”), our brief look at the article is not concentrated on statistics (we deplore the one that says that 26 percent of our Muslims age 18 to 29 believe that suicide bombing can be justified). Strange as it may seem, we here are hooked on the cover picture.

It’s a gathering of American Muslims looking you in the eye, faces sober, serious, very human but very different than almost any similar group of American faces would be. Nobody is grinning, no flashing white teeth; the photographer hasn’t been telling jokes to get the people to look hilarious. The young women are as beautiful as ours in our post-Christian culture. But you are looking at thoughtful people who tell you they are resigned to living for a sober purpose, which in their thinking is “holy.”

Is there some way these people can be granted at least a glimpse of what it means that the Son of God became one of us, took our nature upon Himself, redeemed the world by His sacrifice on His cross and will yet win the great controversy with Satan?

When the Bible says that the proclamation of His message must go to “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” and “lighten the earth with glory” (Rev. 14:6, 7; 18:1, 2), does it embrace the world’s billion plus Muslims?

It has to, because “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” and He is “the Savior of all men, especially those who believe,” and is “the Savior of the world” (John 3:16; 4:42; 1 Tim. 4:10). These Muslims looking you in the eye have hearts that have not as yet been stirred and melted by the self-sacrificing love of that Savior; to them the idea of agape is strange even if they could comprehend it; but Jesus Christ is their Savior just as much as He is yours—they just don’t understand the truth about Him.

“The everlasting gospel” in this biblical “time of the end” proclaims that we are living in the world’s solemn cosmic Day of Atonement. All who will recognize that final “enlightening light” will be the world’s most sober-minded people in history. They will be delightfully happy but at the same time in a Christlike way, serious. Muslims will hear and see; some will believe with honest hearts. May the message to be proclaimed be so clear that it will fulfill its divinely inspired purpose—to grip every heart that will survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died. Hang on, don’t give up; there has never been an hour on earth like the one just before us.