June 4, 2005

Reading through the Bible in one Year: 2 Kings 1:17-4:7; John 7:14-36

Weekly Memory Verse: 1 John 1:6-7

Good Afternoon Brothers and Sisters,

I have been pushing the Promise Keepers conference coming up and encouraging you to take part in sponsoring Marines for $25.00 each.  Praise God for several of you stepping forward to meet this need.  We still have a large number of tickets that are waiting for sponsors.  For those going to the Promise Keepers, I will be posting phone numbers in the near future so that all of us can contact each other at the conference.  If you are going to the conference, send in your cell phone numbers.  On with the study.

Ezekiel 39 (NASB95)
¹ “And you, son of man, prophesy against Gog and say, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal; ² and I will turn you around, drive you on, take you up from the remotest parts of the north and bring you against the mountains of Israel. ³ “I will strike your bow from your left hand and dash down your arrows from your right hand. ⁴ “You will fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples who are with you; I will give you as food to every kind of predatory bird and beast of the field. ⁵ “You will fall on the open field; for it is I who have spoken,” declares the Lord God. ⁶ “And I will send fire upon Magog and those who inhabit the coastlands in safety; and they will know that I am the Lord. ⁷ “My holy name I will make known in the midst of My people Israel; and I will not let My holy name be profaned anymore. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. ⁸ “Behold, it is coming and it shall be done,” declares the Lord God. “That is the day of which I have spoken. ⁹ “Then those who inhabit the cities of Israel will go out and make fires with the weapons and burn them, both shields and bucklers, bows and arrows, war clubs and spears, and for seven years they will make fires of them. ¹⁰ “They will not take wood from the field or gather firewood from the forests, for they will make fires with the weapons; and they will take the spoil of those who despoiled them and seize the plunder of those who plundered them,” declares the Lord God. ¹¹ “On that day I will give Gog a burial ground there in Israel, the valley of those who pass by east of the sea, and it will block off those who would pass by. So they will bury Gog there with all his horde, and they will call it the valley of Hamon-gog. ¹² “For seven months the house of Israel will be burying them in order to cleanse the land. ¹³ “Even all the people of the land will bury them; and it will be to their renown on the day that I glorify Myself,” declares the Lord God. ¹⁴ “They will set apart men who will constantly pass through the land, burying those who were passing through, even those left on the surface of the ground, in order to cleanse it. At the end of seven months they will make a search. ¹⁵ “As those who pass through the land pass through and anyone sees a man’s bone, then he will set up a marker by it until the buriers have buried it in the valley of Hamon-gog. ¹⁶ “And even the name of the city will be Hamonah. So they will cleanse the land.” ’ ¹⁷ “As for you, son of man, thus says the Lord God, ‘Speak to every kind of bird and to every beast of the field, “Assemble and come, gather from every side to My sacrifice which I am going to sacrifice for you, as a great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel, that you may eat flesh and drink blood. ¹⁸ “You will eat the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of the princes of the earth, as though they were rams, lambs, goats and bulls, all of them fatlings of Bashan. ¹⁹ “So you will eat fat until you are glutted, and drink blood until you are drunk, from My sacrifice which I have sacrificed for you. ²⁰ “You will be glutted at My table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all the men of war,” declares the Lord God. ²¹ “And I will set My glory among the nations; and all the nations will see My judgment which I have executed and My hand which I have laid on them. ²² “And the house of Israel will know that I am the Lord their God from that day onward. ²³ “The nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile for their iniquity because they acted treacherously against Me, and I hid My face from them; so I gave them into the hand of their adversaries, and all of them fell by the sword. ²⁴ “According to their uncleanness and according to their transgressions I dealt with them, and I hid My face from them.” ’ ” ²⁵ Therefore thus says the Lord God, “Now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I will be jealous for My holy name. ²⁶ “They will forget their disgrace and all their treachery which they perpetrated against Me, when they live securely on their own land with no one to make them afraid. ²⁷ “When I bring them back from the peoples and gather them from the lands of their enemies, then I shall be sanctified through them in the sight of the many nations. ²⁸ “Then they will know that I am the Lord their God because I made them go into exile among the nations, and then gathered them again to their own land; and I will leave none of them there any longer. ²⁹ “I will not hide My face from them any longer, for I will have poured out My Spirit on the house of Israel,” declares the Lord God.^[1]

The massive mobilization of the nations against Israel were defeated by God in the previous chapter.  In this one, there is a great clean-up as the weapons of war are used as fuel, and it takes seven years just to bury all the dead.  Note the interest that Israel has in making sure that the land is clean, they send out a man to mark the spots where bones are still visible. 

Why do you think that this mass burial was important?  Remember, a few things took place in Israel.  First Israel had returned to the Lord, and recognized Him as Lord and as Savior.  The second thing that took place is God blessed the land of Israel and it turned from a fruitless desert to a fertile land which grew tremendous crops.  Israel recognized that God was behind the prosperity and they sought to keep the land pure so that the blessings from God would continue to come their way.

One part of the prophecy concerns burning the weapons of war for fuel.  This causes me to wonder what these weapons are made of.  If this war were to be in the very near future, most of the implements of war today are constructed of steel, with exotic materials used for canvas, tents and such.  This causes me to think that this is in the distant future, and somehow the construction of implements of war will change drastically.  I have heard that they have found a way to compress wood and make it stronger than steel, but haven't seen anything on that in years. 

On the other hand, perhaps the way that the people use the weapons of war as fuel is not through burning as we would think, but perhaps through recycling.  Perhaps the fuel that is stored in the vehicles is used, and every part of the war machines is melted down and recycled.  Imagine the value in the scrap metal alone, not to consider the various exotic metals that are included.  It would go a very long way in paying the gas bill.  Considering the possibility of nuclear weapons, perhaps these are recycled and the nuclear  stuff is used in power plants producing electricity basically free of charge.  At any rate we simply don't know how this prophecy is going to be carried out. 

Consider also the angle that if the Jewish people are raptured from their graves and restored to the land of Israel, then they will still maintain the ideas that they originally had in the Old Testament times.  These people will not be hardened by modern thinking, but will willingly spend the time burying the dead.  Consider this reference to the life of Christ:

The earthquake opening the graves of righteous men prepared for the third supernatural phenomenon that accompanied Jesus’ death, the most formidable display of the significance of Jesus Christ’s death, for after His resurrection, many deceased saints left their graves and appeared in Jerusalem. This fact depicts the victory over death which Jesus sealed with His resurrection. Significantly, only the tombs of the righteous were opened—Jesus Christ’s death holds no hope for the unrighteous. Note that the corpses which lay in those graves were only resuscitated after Jesus’ resurrection. They lay exposed from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. Is it not remarkable that they remained in their graves until Jesus was resurrected—He is the firstfruits of the resurrection (I Cor 15:20–23), so, axiomatically, He had to be the first human to experience the resurrection! I stand in awe of the wonder of the perfection of God’s ways in all their small details. On Friday afternoon sin was conquered; on Sunday, at daybreak, death was conquered.

It is ironic that the Jews were in haste to get the three bodies off their crosses in order to avoid desecrating the land of Israel, yet numerous tombs were laid bare at the moment of Jesus’ death and thus desecrated their country to the ultimate degree. In this God showed His contempt for insincere religion.^[2]

The main gist behind this chapter is that Israel will be fantastically delivered by God, and it will take seven years to do the cleanup following the war.  The other thing that is interesting in this chapter is the counter attack.  God spoke of giving their carcasses to the birds of the air, and the beasts of the fields.  Then He spoke of attacking their homelands with fire.  Therefore the battle was not just limited to the land of Israel, it also included the homeland of the attackers.  By the way do the promises of God to Gog sound familiar?  Look at the story of David and Goliath:

1 Samuel 17:43-47 (NASB95)
⁴³ The Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. ⁴⁴ The Philistine also said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field.” ⁴⁵ Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted. ⁴⁶ “This day the Lord will deliver you up into my hands, and I will strike you down and remove your head from you. And I will give the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, ⁴⁷ and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not deliver by sword or by spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and He will give you into our hands.” ^[3]

A side thought here, the attack against the people who come against Israel is not through a nuclear device because if it were, there wouldn't be an opportunity to cleanse the land with removing the dead.  This battle will be fought in the conventional way.  On the other hand, check out the idea of a high-altitude nuclear blast:

More from Moscow.

A report from Moscow estimated an even greater magnitude of the blast. The Associated Press in Moscow reported on Jan. 31, 1980:

The blast was so strong that horses were knocked to the ground more than 640 kilometers away. The estimated strength of the blast was 272 million tons of TNT, which leveled trees over a several-thousand-square-kilometer area and presumably killed all living things. For weeks after the explosion, the night sky glowed with a luminescence visible in western Europe.

The blast’s effect on the trees directly below the explosion was puzzling. Although their bark and branches were stripped clean, they remained in their upright position. This same phenomenon occurred in the World War II atomic blasts over Japan. The buildings directly under the blasts remained standing, though structures in all directions were leveled. Scientists found no traces of radioactivity in the area, but unusually lush vegetation now grows there. Since 1908, trees around the devastated zone have grown 10 and 12 times their normal rate. Could there be a connection here? After the terrible destruction coming upon the world during the Great Tribulation, we are told there will be the Millennium when growth and fertility will abound—even in desert places. Presently, much of Siberia is a frozen desolate wilderness for many months of the year. It seems the world’s climate will again undergo a dramatic change.…

Mock Nuclear Whirlwinds.

In 1963, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed a nuclear test ban treaty in which each country agreed to cease high altitude nuclear testing. The U.S. quickly installed a network of sophisticated air pressure sensors to detect above-ground nuclear blasts. The sensors immediately began registering air shocks with a force of a half-megaton in force. Scientists soon determined the source of the shocks: small meteorites exploding high in the atmosphere—with the power of nuclear warheads.

Although such explosions are not powerful enough to be felt by people on Earth, they do remind us “the big one” is not out of the question. If it happened once, it can happen again.

The explosion which occurred in Siberia, the backyard of Russia, may be a statement from God about the type of destruction which will take place when the armies of the North attempt to descend upon the country of Israel. God’s heavenly arsenal can destroy a massive land-army in one mere blast.^[4]

In closing the chapter, notice the way that the chapter ends.  God not only gathers His people, He also frees them from the bondages that they were under.  Think about that for a moment, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit comes after Israel recognizes the Lord as God.  This is contrasted with Ezekiel's time when the people are sold into idolatry and into worshipping everything that is not of God.  The call to people to know that God is their God goes further than poetic words because the people of Israel at this point are not recognizing God as their God.  He is more of an article of entertainment that men like Ezekiel entertain for the purpose of their enjoyment.  They really didn't take the words of Ezekiel seriously.  Check out this reference on the idea of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit:

Accordingly the great promise of the Scriptures especially in reference to the Messianic period was the elusion of the Holy Spirit. "Afterward," said the prophet Joel, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh" (Joel ii. 28). The effects which the Spirit was to produce prove that something more, and something different from the power of the truth was intended. The truth however clearly revealed and however imbued with supernatural energy could not give the power to prophesy, or to dream dreams or to see visions. The Old Testament abounds with predictions and promises of this gift of the Holy Ghost, which was to attend and to render effectual the clearer revelation of the things of God to be made by the Messiah. Isaiah xxxii. 15, "Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful Beld, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest." Isaiah xliv. 3, "I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and Hoods upon the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring." Ezekiel xxxix. 29, "I have poured out my Spirit upon the house of Israel." Zechariah xii. 10, "I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications; and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son."

After the resurrection of our Lord He directed his disciples to remain at Jerusalem until they were imbued with power from on high. That is, until they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit. It was on the day of Pentecost that the Spirit descended upon the disciples, as the Apostle said, in fulfilment of the predictions of the Old Testament prophets. The effect of his influence was not only a general illumination of the minds of the Apostles, and the communication of miraculous gifts, but the conversion of five thousand persons to the faith at once. It is impossible to deny that these effects were due to the power of the Spirit as something distinct from, and accessary to, the mere power of the truth. This is the explanation of the events of the day of Pentecost given by the Apostle Peter, in Acts ii. 32, 33, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." This was the fulfilment of the promise which Christ made to his disciples that He would send them another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth who should abide with them forever. (John xiv. 16.) That Spirit was to teach them; to bring all things to their remembrance; He was to testify of Christ; reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; and he was to give the Apostles a mouth and wisdom which their adversaries should not be able to gainsay or resist. Believers, therefore, are said to receive the Holy Ghost. They have an unction from the Holy One, which abides with them and teaches them all things. (1 John ii. 20, 27.) ^[5]

I am going to close here, all comments are welcomed.  I apologize for the length of today's study, the references that I ran across were facinating.

Father, as we consider Your word, open our eyes so that we can understand them.

In Him,

Joe Turner