Questions and Answers: Introduction & Q&A 1
Vern Peterman · Jan 3, 2010
Questions & Answers, No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926151274809

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay. Let's take a look. We'll kind of walk our way through the handout all the way. As you may have noticed, I'm kind of fast. I don't just read the whole time. But we'll walk our way through the handout here. First question we have is one that I came up with. What are we doing here? In the months ahead and possibly to the end of 2010. In other words, we'll go as long as we have questions up to a year. And so that's why I say possibly at the end of the year.

I haven't scheduled everything out because I haven't gotten all your questions yet. And we'll be answering questions from scripture or about scripture or in some way related to scripture. The questions may be a bunch of different kinds, including questions like these. I will not read through all of them that are the bullets, but they're there to give you a sampling. One of them will be, there are a number of puzzling passages.

What does this mean? What does that mean? We're going to be going through one very soon in our study of 1 Corinthians. What on earth does it mean by being baptized for the dead? Those kinds of questions. What? We're even going to look at one this morning in the main message where in 1st Corinthians 14 and in 1st Timothy chapter 2 both places it says women are to be silent in the churches. So therefore we're having a zipper installation program. No. Anyway, we're going to take a look at puzzling passages like that. What's it talking about? And especially you get into these questions.

You know that as I go through things, I don't have every possible commentary out there. I know Amanda does. But anyway, I have a number of different commentaries on different things. three to six interpretations of about every passage out there. One thing that is quite certain is that the original author did not intend for you to understand the meaning. It could be six different things.

So we'll be going through it. How do I determine which one is which? What are the limits of our knowledge from scripture? Is there a place where Okay, after here it gets gray, after here it turns black, you know. What are the limits of what we know from scripture? What are the limits of certainty about God's word? One of the things I've alluded to just a minute ago was that it is possible to know with certainty what God's word means. What are the limits of that certainty? Where do we get to a place where, well, we're not sure, right?

So those will be something to look at. What does the Bible say about various political and economic systems? We've got a whole bunch of them around the world. There have been different ones over time. What does the Bible say about those? Should Christians try to make this a Christian nation again? Oh, and by the way, was it ever a Christian nation? Are there limits to how far I should be subject to the government? Should Christians passively resist government controls and obligations? When?

What about the things the Bible doesn't tell us much about that still seem to be part of the Bible or relevant to it? For starters, there is a 400 year gap between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. Why is that? And do you know that there are things in the New Testament that don't show up in the Old Testament anywhere. A quick one we just saw about a month ago among the Jews, Hanukkah. It's in John chapter 10, not by that name, but it's there. And it's something that showed up between the Old and the New Testament through that 400 year gap.

So we'll talk about that. How about, can a person lose his or her salvation willfully, or by neglect, or by any means at all? I have to tell you a little story. Our second son, Ed, I don't think he'd be upset if I told you this. Our second son, Ed, when he was in his late teens, said, do you mean to tell me that if I believed once, if I decide I don't want to believe now, that I'm still saved?" We told him, yep. Can't get out of it. He was mad. Well, now he's glad of it, but there was a period of time there when it was a little rough for him. Anyway, even if you wanted to be unsaved, could you?

Is it more important to love other people or to stand on the truth? Which is more important? We'll take a look at that. Should believers seek to clarify their understanding of things or give up on clarifying their understanding as feudal? After all, people believe three to six different things about every single passage out there. So do you give up or what do you do?

Why does the Bible offer lots of detail, even redundancy? Here you have the four Gospels, and there are some things that are in all four Gospels. And then other things, what happened to Jesus between the time he was born and the time he was age 12? What happened from the time he was age 12 to the time he was 30 years old? We don't even have redundancy. We have nothing, right? So why is this He was a teenager.

I didn't want to record that. Why does the Bible have a number of verses and even whole chapters on love, but also has other places where God tells the Israelites to kill absolutely everybody. Go to the city and kill every single one. Don't let one escape. I won't do that. Is that conflicted? Some people claim there is absolutely no evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt. Four centuries! Or went through the Exodus, led by Moses, or conquered the Promised Land, led by Joshua. How do we answer that? Are they right? The Bible's wrong? Or is there a good answer for that?

Some people also claim the book of Daniel was written several hundred years after the time it claims to have been written. Similar claims are made for chapters 40 through 66 of the book of Isaiah. How do we answer that? There are those who say that Christ wasn't actually raised from the dead, but instead simply swooned and then recovered. Others claim that his body was stolen by the disciples, and still others that it was just a case of misidentification of the location where Jesus was buried. So what sort of answer would we have for them? Well, they have lots of questions, don't we? And I've just kind of sampled my way through these. And I'm actually hoping that you'll have even more.

Because here's what we're going to do. Here's the approach we're going to take. I want at the top of page two there. What approach will we take? There are two parts of the answer to that question. And those are, how will we select the questions? And then two, how I go about answering the questions. We'll select the questions in three ways.

Okay. We'll have some questions chosen by the elders to start. We've got the very last page. We've got six of them, including today's question. You may have some more that we'll spell out as this is some that we're going to go through. Next, I will have some questions for you to pick from. It'll be your choice. That's probably the next week or two. I'll let you pick which ones out of a list that you want to go through, and then we'll have room for you to come up with additional questions of your own.

And if questions keep coming, We'll continue to answer questions all the way through the end of the year if we go that far. We'll probably cut it off in order to make something somewhat organized, cut off at a quarter point up through the end of the year. Okay? Sound fair? So, one of the things I want you to do is to begin thinking of questions you've got.

A question that showed up not long before I came, not long after rather, I came here was what about babies that die? What happens to them? They didn't even get old enough to hear the gospel. What about them? What are the answers? So, lots of questions, lots of questions.

And so you'll have plenty of opportunity. Begin thinking about those now. We'll give you a chance. It'll be probably this next week or the week following. I'll give you something where you can take it home, think up more questions, think of all the puzzling Bible passages. And so there will be that third opportunity for you to come up with questions beyond the ones that we come up initially. beyond the ones that we let you select from from a list. And so ponder away. OK. Any questions about the questions? All right.

The next thing. how we go about answering the questions. Our approach to answering the questions will be in keeping with the Holly Hills Bible Church doctrinal statement. Now, that's not because we're just really bullheaded and stubborn, and that's the way we're going to do it. It's because the approach that's spelled out there is very well thought out. And let me point out what that is.

First of all, you have the 66 books of the Bible. We're going to use the Bible as our starting point to answer your questions. In some cases, there will be things where we have to step outside the Bible for at least part of the answer. What I mean by that, when we start talking about things like history, archaeology, things of that sort, it'll be stepping outside the Bible. But the central authority will be the Bible itself.

The next thing, we call it dispensational interpretation, and before anybody gets too confused with that, all it means is we look at things literally, we look at the grammar, we look at the elements of language, we look at word definitions, we look at the historical context, we'll look at things like maps, what was the culture of the day, And the thing is, once we start understanding these things, a lot becomes very clear. Let me take a quick example.

Paul, in three different letters, said that we have the adoption of sons as believers. Very interestingly, each of those three letters was either, in one case, Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, or was written to a church that was a Roman colony or had substantial Roman influence. He only wrote that to churches that had substantial, if not almost total, Roman influence. Why? Because the term adoption of sons was a term that came out of Roman law. And it came out of Roman law right during the early New Testament times. So it fits the culture exactly. It fits it beautifully. What we know of the culture and what we read in those books fits together in love. It makes perfect sense.

Okay. Yes? Is the term Roman and Italy somewhat or synonymous? He asked the question, is Roman in Italy somewhat synonymous? Not exactly. And here's why. Rome was initially started, believe it or not, about the time of Isaiah. Just when Isaiah was a youngster, Rome was initially started as a city. It initially, as it grew, had first to take over Italy itself. And then expanded beyond the borders to include ultimately at its largest expanse, and this is almost mind-boggling, Rome extended from Britain all the way down to the Persian Gulf at its greatest extent.

Mind-boggling extent. I mean that includes a lot of countries right now. And they did it without cell phones. It's amazing. So here is this massive empire, but it started with the city. And the city of Rome, that's ultimately how it began. So the answer to your question is, yes, there's certainly Rome is in what we call Italy and what they called Italy, but it initially started not as a country that was taking over, but actually a city, a large city. And so therefore the distinction, they don't call it the Italian Empire, they call it the Roman Empire. Why? Because it started from Rome actually as a city.

What we'll be looking at is we will be taking the Bible literally. We will find that there is a point of distinction between literal understanding of the Bible and a great many of these other interpretations, that by the way will allow a lot of the interpretations to fall out. Why?

Because a great many of the interpretations within Christendom, I will call it, a great many of the interpretations are allegorized. That is, they lay an allegory over the top of the scripture. Rather than taking it for what it literally says, They impose a figurative meaning. They use the term spiritualized. Let me give you a for instance. We went through in this very same room here earlier, well that was last year, can you imagine that? Last year we went through the book of Revelation.

In Revelation chapter 7, in the first half of the chapter, it says 144,000 Jews, okay? of the tribes of Israel, it lists all 12 tribes of Israel and gives the literal number of 12,000 for each tribe. So it says that they're of Israel, it says they're tribes, it lists the 12 tribes by name, it gives the total 144,000, and then 12,000 for each. So you would think that meant 144,000 Jews of each of the tribes. 12,000 each, right?

That would seem to make good sense. However, in the allegorical interpretation, which is used by a great deal of Christendom, that is interpreted to mean all the denominations of the church. Set aside the fact that it says they're Jews and gives the tribes by name. By the way, there are 30,000 denominations of Christendom. 12 tribes are explicitly given. 12,000 is the number in each tribe. So they set aside the Jews, they set aside the tribal names, they set aside the numbers.

None of that means anything. That's what I mean by allegorized interpretation. You ever hear about a pre-trib and a mid-tribulation and a post-tribulation rapture? You know that the mid-tribulation and post-tribulation rapture have to allegorize, just like I told you, in order to include the mid-tribulation and post-tribulation approaches. They use a different method of interpretation in order to allow that.

So it's not a, I wonder which one is right. It's the approach is quite different. We will be sticking to what does the Bible say literally? What did the original author intend? We will not be imposing an allegory on the passage. We will call it an allegory if the author calls it an allegory.

The details of how we'll approach it were given in an elective, a one-quarter elective we've had at the end of 2007 and 2008. That's available on the Holly Hills website. And you can download the classes and the material if you're interested. But anyway, that details the approach that we'll be taking. Now, with that, let's look at page three, which gives our first question.

It's a question that perhaps a few of you have heard me address before, but I think because it keeps coming up, We will address it again and perhaps make some clarifications too. My response is not verbatim what it was before in order that I might clarify things. Okay, first question.

Why is the church not the kingdom? Anybody ever hear somebody say that the church is the kingdom? Got to get them saved and into the kingdom? Ever hear that? Okay. The one thing we're going to say is the church is not the kingdom. And why doesn't Holly Hills Bible Church refer to Christ as my king or our king? I'll answer this question in three ways, from history, from the Bible, and by referring to other writings by Holyville's Bible Church. Some history about the Church as the Kingdom and Christ as the Church's King.

1. The Church as the Kingdom and Christ as the Church's King came not from the Bible, but rather came to prominence in the 3rd and 4th centuries. It's not in the Bible. It came to prominence a couple, a few centuries after the New Testament was completed.

Yes, he is the king. Of who? The Jews. Why are we different than the Jews? We're under grace. We are the church. And we'll step through that, because that's a very important point. He will, and as a matter of fact, one of the things we're going to do, it starts at the bottom of the page, there are three ways in which it is proper to call Christ, or God, the King.

Okay, first point here, number point, the church adopted a forced allegorical interpretation upon scripture based upon admiring the pagan Greek philosophers. That's how it got started, okay? And their allegorized approach to Greek myths. Here's the deal, guys like Plato, They didn't believe their Greek myths, you know, all the Greek myths about Sisyphus and Atlas holding up the earth and, you know, Icarus flying and they got too close to the sun and his wings melted because they were made of wax, all that. All those myths, Plato said, well, those are useful, but they're really just allegories. They forced an allegorical understanding upon them.

Therefore, because many of the early Christians after the New Testament era respected the Greek philosophers so much that they took the Greek philosophers' approach to their scriptures and applied that to the Bible. It came out of admiring the Greek philosophers, even to the point where some of these early Christians said that the Greek philosophers were just as inspired as the Bible. So the idea that you allegorize scripture, you impose an allegory, is something that actually came out of pagan Greek philosophy, and not out of the Bible itself. The Old Testament and the New Testament have allegories, but what it does is it says it's an allegory. opposed to taking something that was written and saying it's an allegory. There were Jews in Philo who lived in part during the time of Christ. He died in the early part of the New Testament era. Philo was a Jew who lived in Egypt who tried to impose allegory on the Old Testament.

You know, for example, when it says in Genesis 2.24, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, he didn't take that as about father and mother and husbands and wives at all. It was all about leaving the old things behind and embracing the new and those kinds of things. See, he forced an allegory on the passage. He didn't take it literally as this is about a father and a mother and a husband and a wife.

However, the Jews rejected that idea, but the church embraced it. The church did not understand that Christ had voluntarily died in our place. Now, this is mind-boggling, so brace yourself. For the first 1,000 years of church history, and we have, by the way, printed out, there are like 38 volumes. of these church fathers. For the first 1,000 years of church history, we cannot find one evidence that anybody during that time understood that Christ died in my place. Can you imagine that? They thought, and this was commonly thought, two things. One, is God made a deal with Satan. And two, and this was the most prominent thing, that the Jews are to blame for killing Christ, and they are the Christ killers.

It was even taught, this is out of John Chrysostom, we have 8,000 of his sermons. So I'm not talking about something where there's scant evidence. It was taught, God hates the Jews for killing Christ. And if you're a good Christian, you would want them dead too. because that was taught, and it's based on not understanding the gospel. Those people, it wasn't an understanding that Christ died in our place voluntarily, which is what scripture says, but a matter of those people taught, because they didn't understand that Christ voluntarily died in our place, taught that Jesus was born the King of the Jews, but because the Jews rejected him, He is now the king of the church. So when someone says Christ is my king, they don't understand the history behind it, most likely. It's based on God hates the Jews. And if you're a good Christian, you'll hate them too. Luther wrote, kill them every place you can. He wrote the book called The Jews and Their Lies and that's what he said in the book. Kill them every place you can.

Why? It's because of the teaching that Christ is my king and our king in the church because the Jews rejected him and they are the Christ killers. Doesn't John MacArthur hold his view? John MacArthur doesn't hold the hate the Jews view. He has some confusions in his teaching about the Kingdom, and a great many churches do.

You'll hear this teaching very commonly. It's true of the Catholic Church, it's true of many of the other churches in Christendom, the old line churches, and that's where the teaching came from. If they didn't understand that Christ died on the cross voluntarily to take our sins upon Him, It wasn't until the year 1100 that we have any record that a Christian wrote that Christ died in our place. Can you imagine that? And so, the thought was, the Jews, they are the Christ killers. They even had penalties for Christians who would befriend the Jews. You could get kicked out of church and lose your salvation for befriending a Jew.

So that's where that teaching comes from. What is very interesting is that truth that Christ died in our place, we find no record of it in the first thousand years. So very interesting. It may well have been in place. Pardon? It was in the scripture, and repeatedly. It's Isaiah 53. By his stripes were healed. He bore our sins. It's in the scripture, so if people saw it, and read it, and understood it, then it was there.

But what's interesting is of the records that we have, and we have a great many, but certainly it's not exhaustive, it was in great part lost. Strangely enough, they would even write commentaries where they would copy those words, but their commentary did not reveal that they understood it. Yeah? What was the literacy rate Well, what's interesting, obviously it varies, but there was enough literacy for people to write and to have some that could do so. Even in the New Testament times, there was a lower literacy rate than what we're accustomed to.

Example, we just talked about Revelation. It says in the beginning of Revelation, blessed are those who read and hear this book. The reading is singular. The hearing is plural. But there are always those who could read a certain percentage varying over time.

But the idea of Christ as my king as a part of the church and Christ as our king is based on understanding, this is how it became prominent, that the Jews rejected him, therefore the church is now the kingdom. therefore Christ is my king, therefore Christ is our, the church's king. That was the understanding that was commonly in place. Yes?

Where do we get the Jews are God's chosen people? Out of the Old Testament. So, I think the Old Testament Yeah, and as that designated ethnic group, God's chosen people, and even Paul writes, they're the ones to whom the promises are given. They're the ones by whom the Old Testament scriptures were written. So God was faithful to them.

In fact, here's what's interesting. In the Old Testament, here's Moses writing, and he says, God did not choose you because you were a great nation. And he doesn't answer the question why he chose them. Is that interesting? He says, you're a small nation, but God chose you because he loved you. Is that something? Did he love them because they were so lovable? Not so much. He chose them as his chosen people because he loved them.

And then you have to come to Paul's writing. Here's Romans 9-11 where he talks about the Jews. Beginning of chapter 11, has God rejected his people Israel? No. I myself am a Jew, Paul says. God has not rejected them. God does not hate the Jews. And Christ, yes indeed, did die in our place.

And he was born King of the Jews and his pilot asked him, are you the King of the Jews? It is as you say. even hours before his death, he still said, yes, I'm the King of the Jews. It was never transferred. It was never changed. When he comes back, he will be King of the Jews, and he will be King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And we'll look at that here in a minute if we have time. I have a question. Yes. What was the time period of Luther? The time period of Luther, he made his declarations in the first part of the 1500s. Oh yeah.

Basically it continued into this last century where those, for example, you may recall, have any of you seen Fiddler on the Roof? At one point in time the guy who was kind of the magistrate, the military magistrate over that area is told He needs to go and persecute these Jews in Anatevka, the little Russian town. Why? Because these are the Christ killers. It's that teaching that even came out in that movie. These are the Christ killers. You need to go and persecute them. They're evil, awful people. Which movie?

Fiddler on the Roof. Hitler, interestingly enough, used Luther's writings as part of his support for doing in the Jews. He said, here is Luther. Of course, a lot of people in Germany are Lutheran. Here is Luther, who said, tell them every place you can. If you get a chance, do it. It's pretty amazing to survive. It's pretty amazing that they survived. Well, it is in fact miraculous that they survived, but why would they survive?

It is because God made a promise to Abraham. And that is in fact one thing that somebody says, and it's been said before, I'm not the first one to come up with. Somebody says, what proof is there that the Bible is true? The existence and prominence of the Jews. You know, here's Jacob and Esau. Which one was born first? Esau. Jacob was the usurper.

The last evidence that we have of anybody from Esau's descendancy surviving is 70 AD. That's the last record that we have of anybody of Esau's line living. I'm not saying that none of them now live. But that's the last record we have. Herod the Great was from Esau. His line was killed off. Now, 70 AD was the last of the line of Esau.

How many Jews have we got around now? Well over 10 million. One in every five Nobel prizes has been given to a Jew. Isn't this amazing? This is miraculous. When people, because we think of the Holocaust of Hitler, it went on constantly. Because the church, and I say that as the organized official church, taught that these are the Christ killers, you ought, as a good Christian, to hate them too. Because God does as well. Okay?

They would do things like the crusades. You heard about the crusades? The first crusade before they ever got to Jerusalem, they went through a valley in Europe, in Eastern Europe, where there was 50,000 Jews in this one valley. They slaughtered everyone they could find on the way before they ever got to fight the people in the Middle East.

We have one other instance where they gathered all the Jews, forced them into the synagogue, locked the doors and lit it on fire. I'm going to tell you something, this may be shocking. It is with rare exception, because I just told you brief accounts where people called Christians killed the Jews. It is with rare exception that any Christian killed a Jew unless they believed that Jesus is my King. It is the ones who taught and believed, Jesus is my King, who slaughtered the Jews by the thousands and tens of thousands. I don't want to get too sidetracked, but if you look at Christianity, it has been a prominent and dominant perspective here in the United States.

We are, as they call it, the people of the book. We have the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. It's in New York. And the second largest is in the apartment building where Nancy and I used to live. But, that's ultimately why. We stand for things that stand against what they believe. We have a prominence of Christians and Jews in this country that make us the great Satan. We support, historically have supported Israel as a nation. And by the way, woe to us in the United States on the day when we do not.

Remember Genesis 12, 1 through 3. The last part of that says, He who blesses you I will bless, and he who, what? curses you, I will curse. And God takes that seriously, proven by the Jews are still around, Esau is not. Yeah? But the replacement theology where they say that the church replaces Israel is really anti-Semitic. That's true. And then they go by Romans 9, where they say, we'll not call it Israels, or Israel and then they allegorize He saw in Jacob, right? They allegorize He saw in Jacob and start making it...

Well, and here's another place where the allegory is. Remember in Isaiah where it says, you know, it describes the monial kingdom and it says that, you know, you'll have the child will play by the hole of the asp and the, you know, we say the lion and lamb because they both start with L, but it's really the wolf and the lamb, you know, will lie down together. That's the description of the monial kingdom.

What it talks about is a situation in nature in which the animosity ceases. That's allegorized to mean that people that used to fight get along together. That's what that passage is allegorized to mean. It's just people that used to fight get along together now. It doesn't mean anything about how things will be in the coming millennial kingdom. An allegory is four stones.

That's true and here's the other thing is what it does since it says that the church replaces Israel it pushes the Jews out of the picture and causes us to be more inclined as a people to oppose Israel which puts us in a position of being cursed by God as a nation. So this is not minuscule in its significance.

This is one that will affect us as a nation. As Christians, how I'm blessed. I'm blessed in every place in the heavenlies, in every way. I have every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. As a nation, how we treat the Jews as a people does have an impact on how we as a nation fare.

And that's by a literal understanding of scripture. If I understand that the church replaces Israel, if I understand that Christ is my king, and our king as the part of the church, if I understand that the church is the kingdom, it leaves me to go ahead and say, Israel doesn't matter. Or even say, God hates the Jews. And if you're a good Christian, you ought to as well. So that's the significance. That's one reason why. You'll find us singing about Christ as the king. You'll find us singing about God as our king. And that's kind of the next part here. But we look very carefully at not calling Christ our king.

Yes? Does this still exist today? So-called Christian churches? It has been toned down in various ways in terms of hating the Jews. But that's simply a matter of rejecting the history of where it came from. Some of the examples, PCUSA, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, of course long ago adopted this. They're basically out of the Calvinist line. And so now they have, as official policy, declared that we're going to not take on any investments in Israel. opposed to Israel, we won't take any investments in Israel, we won't have a friendly relationship with Israel.

Yes? Will God look upon us as individuals or as our government? I think the answer is yes. That he will look upon us individually But as a nation, what you're going to see is, for example, during the tribulation period, a whole bunch of nations who are opposed to Israel as a people and as a separately established nation. Those nations are going to come against Israel. Because currently our new administration is appearing to be very anti-Israel. That, you're correct, that's the appearance that I see, and I say that is hazardous to us as a nation. Now, we individually can live in contrast to that, so we don't, as individuals and as a church, we don't have to go along with that to the extent that we have choice and opportunity.

Let's continue on here. With the adoption of Christianity as a religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, Christianity as the kingdom seemed to make literal sense. Why not the church as the kingdom? Because now that Constantine has adopted Christianity as official religion, here's the kingdom. We're there. Christ reigns then through the church in this, the Roman Empire, which is the kingdom. It all seemed to make good sense.

As a matter of fact, we don't need to interpret the Bible literally anymore. And one of the reasons why they began to reject what had previously been the understanding was that there was a literal kingdom coming, coming in the future. They rejected that, and one of those reasons why was because they thought that what was described in the Millennium, because when we went through Isaiah, it describes all kinds of prosperity and just abundance, places in the desert that are extremely fruitful, and they said that sounds too good and too pleasurable. There's too much pleasure in that, that can't be, so we're going to allegorize it.

Make it an allegory. Number four, based on the above teachings, it was commonly taught by those of this persuasion, but not universally, that God hates the Jews and good Christians ought to do the same, since those hateful Jews are the Christ killers. Also, since it was understood that Christ is the church's king and the church is the kingdom, then the church is to operate under principle of law rather than grace. Because after all, the king has his law, right? Those differences are not just theological quibbling, but impact how a person is to live, us as individual believers, and by what power they live, and how they are blessed by God, where their hope lies, and the Church's eternal relationship with Christ.

What will our relationship with Christ be? Are we the bride, or are we subjects? We are the bride of Christ. Scripture from the end of the gospel where Christ began using marriage terms for total terms from from the Last Supper and around that time We have the indication Paul as we'll see in 2nd Corinthians will say I long to present you as a pure and spotless virgin before the Lord in the book of Revelation chapter 19 marriage supper of the Lamb Chapter 21. Let me show you the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb. It is a theme from the end of the Gospels to the end of Revelation. We are the Bride. Not the subjects. Not under the King's law. We have a unique relationship with the One who is indeed King of the Jews. Not as subjects, but as the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb.

Here are the ways in which the title King is fitting for God or Christ. God is king over the universe. And we give several Old Testament passages here. His reign in this regard is from heaven and includes his reign from heaven over Israel and the nations. So we will sing songs about God as king over the universe. We will. And we've done that. Page 4 here.

Christ is King of the Jews. That was what, remember, what did the wise men come asking? Who is he who is what? Born King of the Jews. That's what they came asking. They knew to look for this guy who was King over the Jews. All the way to Pilate's question and what was posted over Christ's head on the cross. Are you the King of the Jews? It's as you say. Alright, that's what we're going to put on the plaque above your head. This is the King of the Jews. He is the one promised to David.

We give the references there in 1st Chronicles 17 as the king. Isaiah, as we studied through it, the king. He is also king of kings and lord of lords, which is a term for being king over the Gentiles as well. When Christ reigns in the coming millennium, which may be as close 2017. When Christ reigns in the coming millennium, he will reign as King of the Jews and King of Kings and Lord of Lords over all the Gentiles. King of Kings. Now, what's interesting is the Bible continues all the way into the last chapters of Revelation 22 times from the Old Testament into the New Testament, we keep seeing the term Kings of the Earth, plural. He's king over those kings. He is lord over all the lords and authorities. King of kings and lord of lords is his title as the one who reigns over the Gentiles.

Okay, I think we're about run out of time. Let me switch over to page 7. I'll invite you to read through the rest of this, and feel free to do so. And you can come up with more questions, believe it or not. Here's the schedule that we have. We address the question that we did today.

What are the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven? The Kingdom of God is a passage, is a term rather, that shows up in the Gospels and shows up in even the letters of the Apostle Paul. The Kingdom of Heaven is a term that only shows up in the Book of Matthew. And there's a reason why.

So we'll take a look at that. Just because something was said to the Jews, does that mean it's only written for the Jews? And one or more of you may recognize that as a question that has been asked before. And thank you. What does the Bible say about worldviews and political systems? We're going to have two sessions on that because there's quite a bit to cover. Worldviews and political systems. We've got a whole spectrum of different political systems and worldviews around us right now. What does the Bible say about this? And then finally, do Christians have a mandate to take over the U.S. government, influence voting, and enforce a Christian culture on the U.S.?

That comes across sometimes very aggressively. It's known as Reconstructionism. It sometimes comes across more subtly, but still is there. What's often quoted is a passage out of the Old Testament. If my people will humble themselves and pray. Then God will heal their land. Now that's often quoted and it's quoted with regards to prayer meetings or days of prayer and things like that for this country. Am I saying we should not pray for a country? No, I'm not. But the point is that particular verse, as we'll see, was for the Jews.

Because it also says, I will heal their land. Why does that matter? Because the promises, and even the threats of cursing, were about the land. Which land? The land of Israel. And the healing, the healing was the healing from the curses which God said would come if they disobeyed the law.

Anyway, we'll be taking a look at this. We've got a lot of neat stuff to cover. Be thinking of questions. All sorts of questions. Well the truth is we could keep going and going and going. What we've determined, we've made one exception and we regret that we did, is we basically have a maximum one year on these electives. Otherwise things kind of can easily just sort of drift. People start to get... disoriented almost.

So anyway, we'll go through the end of the year if questions keep coming and I'd be happy if they did. I think that there are all sorts of really good questions that ought to be asked. But here's why I'm pleased to have us do that. I think there's some really good answers. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for the good answers that you have in your word. We thank you for the fact that you love us so much. You loved and you gave. You loved and you gave. we gave your only Son, not only that we would be just saved as an insurance policy, but that we might indeed be the bride of Christ for all eternity. Thank you for that precious romance. In Jesus' name, amen.