Address—Bruce Conrad
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Start this afternoon by singing part of hymn #316.
3/16.
Just verses 3:00 and 4:00.
Of 316.
Thus far by grace, praise her.
It's all.
The game no one brings her.
Where I stand on.
Lord Jesus, we thank Thee for the prospect we have before us because of Thy holy work on Calvary's cross.
And because thy God, thy Father, has raised thee out from among all the rest of the dead, and assign thee that highest place in heaven.
We are.
Happy to look up by faith through the open heavens to see thee there.
We're happy to to ponder what has been put before us in my precious word.
That at the end of all things, this world shall be filled with thy glory.
And Lord Jesus, we thank Thee that we have.
The hope that is imminent.
That perhaps even today, faith will give way to cite. We shall be ushered into thy presence.
Shall see thee face to face, to be with thee, to be like thee. And in the meantime, we look to thee for fresh grace. Help us.
Day by day to put one foot in front of another, that we might be here for Thy glory. We might be kept through faith as we've considered today, that we might honor Thee in this very world where Thou was hated without a cause and cast out. So we ask Thy blessing as we open Thy precious word, that it would be for our profit and encouragement.
We look to Thee for Thy help in this, and we ask for Thy blessing, Lord Jesus, and Thy worthy and Thy precious name. Amen.
Well, let's just start with a I'd like to refer to a verse in the prophet Amos.
Probably a well known verse.
In the third chapter of Amos.
Verse 7 Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret.
Unto his servants, the prophets.
This verse probably reminds you of what was expressed to and about Abraham.
Back before the judgment fell upon Sodom, shall I hide from my friend Abraham that thing which I do? And what a great blessing it is that God has lighted up for us the end of the pathway.
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We don't know what a day will bring forth. None of us do.
But we do know where the end is and what a wonderful thing that is to have that assurance that whichever way the road takes or however long it may be, we're going to end up with. And like Christ, this is a comfort that He wants us to have. In the meantime, we have experiences.
We have experiences whether we're young or whether we're middle-aged or whether we're older.
We experience things in our life, in our minds. We experience other people around us. We experience the effect of organizations. We experience all kinds of things all day long.
And it is so helpful, one of the most helpful things about the possession that we have have received of this revelation from God, as it gives us, as our brother was saying in the earlier meeting, a context with which to understand and assign things their proper place in our lives.
And so I, it doesn't fall upon me if I'm, if I encounter an organization or a group of people or a request or a person or, or an attitude or whatever it is, my mind, as instructed by the word of God can process that and put it in the right context and then know how to deal with it. Often times it's just to yield to it. Oftentimes it's just to sigh.
Sometimes it's to take an action, but it's so important and we cannot probably stress enough.
How important, especially as we're young, to get God's thoughts, to get an outline of truth as our brother was putting before us earlier today, so that we know what we're about and we're not just empty or, or, or random spots in a three-dimensional, 4 dimensional universe. Just kind of figuring out as we go. That's not God's intent for us. And thankfully it doesn't have to be that way.
Now I'd like to turn to Matthew's Gospel in the 13th chapter.
And we're just going to with the help of the Lord.
Touch upon a few of my exercises to touch upon just, I suppose, the tops of the ways here, hopefully.
Of aspects about a line of truth that God has given us for a reason and it has to do with the Kingdom.
And I hope what Steven has brought before us about the mystery and it kind of brings back old memories to know, to remember the days when we were young and when that was a freshly discovered truth and how how much it helped us when we were dealing with the onslaught of of all the doctrines that are out there in Christendom. And it's been a stay in a stable, I'm sure for many of you, and it has for me over the years.
But also, I suppose we could assume from the fact that the word of God gives us ministry.
Teaching and instruction about the Kingdom, that there's a reason why we have this kind of instruction.
It's not just, you know, something stray on a on a bookshelf somewhere that we would take a fancy to and want to read. It is important for it's needful for us.
We need to understand these things in order to process what we see around us. And if it were so that the truth of the one Body and the Body of Christ, as Stephen brought out partially, was the only truth that we needed in order to be able to walk here intelligently and in peace and in a way that's a blessing to others, that's the only truth He would have given us.
He would have said I'm the head, the risen head.
You're the members of the body. That's it. But he hasn't just. We all appreciate that truth. And there's probably 40 brothers in this room that could stand up here and give us a very solid exposition of the truth of the one body.
But we also have that Christ is our anticipated heavenly Bridegroom and that we are the espoused bride. There's a side of things there, we realize. And we've been taught that on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down and united us together into one body. I hope you got that.
Not to pick on you.
And the church was formed and so there was a laboring brother now with the Lord. And I was young and more impetuous than I am today. And he was at my my dining room table. And I said, well, what about John 20? And where the Lord breathed on them and said, receive ye Holy Ghost. And he scratched his head and he was a very well taught brother. And and I was just, you know, a young, young pup. And he says, well, I think that's probably just a picture.
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I went, oh, really, just a picture, huh? And he realized that was probably not a good answer. And we, we kind of had a discussion about it and I shared with him what I had learned, which was a thimbleful. But there are these other lines of things and we see that the Spirit of God brings them out so that we have this multifaceted way as our needs determine and the needs of our brethren to be able to put our experience and our work and service for the Lord into.
And an added one is the truth of the Kingdom. We're in a Kingdom.
And with with time racing on, we need to get right after it. Now I'm a big proponent of the 45 minute time frame, but I'm it's a challenge because I wasn't raised that way.
Especially in Palmyra, if you ever been there, they talk about Palmyra time and it's it's a whole another subject. But anyway, in Matthew 13.
Would just like to take up.
What the Spirit of God calls similitudes or parables of the Kingdom.
Now most all are familiar with the fact that a Kingdom headed up by Christ, the Son of David, was prophesied down through the ages by the prophets of Israel. It was their hope.
When the Lord Jesus came, he came as that one with all the bona fide, with the full resume.
And he displayed in what he did and said, and who he was, that he was that person to make all those promises good. And as you know, the people rejected him, the rulers rejected him. And so as we go through Matthew's Gospel, we see in chapter 12 That it kind of comes to a head and upon the.
Tipping point, if I could put it that way, in Chapter 12 of people just continually gainsaying him and challenging him and trying to catch him at his words.
That basically at the end of chapter 12, his mother, his brethren are looking for him, desiring to speak with him. And he says, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said of them, Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold, my mother and my brethren, for whosoever shall do the will of my father, which is in heaven, the same as my brother and sister, and.
And so basically, the Lord Jesus was closing down those those ties that he came to to fulfill and to enhance and to bring into the wonderful day of glory of the Kingdom on this earth. And so in the next chapter, he leaves in the first chapter. And I know this is a review for for most, if not many of you.
He leaves the same day out of the house and sits by the seaside.
And he begins to speak in parables. And the first parable, as you know, is the parable of the sower. The parable of the sower indicates that he's doing something new. We're not going to go look for fruit anymore from this fig tree or from this olive tree. We're not going to look for fruit anymore from this vineyard. We're going to do something new. I've got seed with me and I'm going to plant it. And we're going to do something different here.
And that's the beginning of Matthew 13. And as you know, the responses from the individuals, the seed was good, the seed is perfect. There's nothing wrong with the seed, but the seed fell in different ground, as you know, and resulted in a different response. The response and how that works inside a soul is not taken up in Matthew 13. We can read in John chapter 3. We can read in First Peter One or Second Thessalonians 2 like.
Had in the readings and we can read a little bit more about how the work of the Spirit of God in a soul brings life and what that life, how it displays itself and so on. That is not here in Matthew 13. It's not the intent of the Spirit of God to take that up.
But as we see as it goes down there, and we're just going to read a few verses here and there in Matthew 13.
Now the disciples asked him after hearing of this parable.
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Verse 10 Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because is given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given, and so on. And so now we have something revealed by the Lord that was different than what had been revealed, or what could have been expected in the profits down through the ages.
In the Old Testament, as we call it, that the Kingdom was now not going to be the way it was prophesied of a time when the children would play in the streets and, and, and, and. A man who died at 100 years old would be like a child dying when the knowledge of the Lord filled filled the land and sickness and disease were rolled back in. The bent of animals was changed and, and, and all those natural earthly blessings would be realized, no.
The Kingdom was going to take a different form, and that's why it's called here the mystery of the Kingdom.
This is not the same mystery that Steven was speaking about in his in his in his address. That is a more technical New Testament term for what he described as the truth of Christ and the church. This is the mystery of the Kingdom, and it is a different aspect of things. And I should say in advance because I kind of feel like I might be.
Confusing some of the younger ones who are maybe not used to hearing what you heard from Steven and maybe not even used to hearing this.
But I look at it this way, you know, when I was a little boy, my mom thought I should play the piano. It didn't work out that well, didn't, didn't go on for very long. But I learned enough that there's all these different notes. There's the white keys and The Black Keys. I never got to The Black Keys, but I learned that there's scales and there's notes that belong to different scales and people who read music, which I really don't.
Can look at certain things and notations and know.
What notes belong to that scale to that? Is that the right word scale? And, and so if it changes and there's four little bees there or something like that, then people who know music say, okay, these Black Keys belong and these white ones don't. It's the same piano.
It's the same keys. They don't change them out, but it's a different key for that particular melody. And the Spirit of God has given us New Testament believers these different melodies that are to be played as you will.
In different keys. And so we have the truth of the Kingdom that we're in. We have the truth of the one body. We have this wonderful truth that is really a higher thing than I'm taking up this afternoon.
Of the mystery. And we have the truth that we're the bride espoused as chase virgins for Christ. And we are also part of the House of God and in the House of God. And there are other figures that don't come to mind right now, but they're all needful for certain experiences or things that we see around us, whether in the world or in Christendom or, or or with Jews or Israelites that we may know.
And enable us to properly understand.
Where everything is headed, where it has come from and what we should think about it so.
It was a sentence of judgment upon these persons that were hearing this from the Lord. He put it in parable, not to make it clear, but to make it less clear. He obscured it, as he says there in verse 12. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance, and whosoever hath not from him shall be taken away, even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables.
Because they seeing see not and hearing they hear not.
Neither do they understand, and in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah.
Which saith and then he quotes the passage from Isaiah. I think it says 43rd chapter.
And so we have a new thing here. We have sewing. We have a switching of gears by the Lord himself.
And so the apostles Paul and others take up. Well, what does that mean for Israel? Is Israel all done?
Is is is now the church? Israel's out, The church is in. Is it the same position? Is it slightly augmented? Steven addressed all of this in his.
Much of that in his address, but as we go on through, we hope to see that that is certainly not the case if we turn quickly to the Prophet Hosea.
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We shall see that in advance.
God predicted and prophesied.
Trying to think with that Hosea chapter 3.
He predicted as we were saying this morning, knowing the end from the beginning. He predicted what the what the response would be from the by the nation when the Messiah finally came. And he also predicts what will be The upshot after the nation in governmental blindness is set aside for a while and we don't have time to go into this much as I would like to, but right now, right today and for the.
2000 years or so, God has written a sentence upon Israel of Loami, not my people, they are not my people and his dealings with them are suspended if you have a device.
A tape player or something like that, there's a button on there that you can put boom just to kind of not wipe everything out, but just to kind of suspend it or stop it and hold it right there. And in a certain sense, that's what God is doing and that's the present situation.
Now they are still under his eye.
But as to actual events and working like the Potter does with the clay not happening right now, something new is happening. Hosea chapter 3.
In verse.
For for the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a Prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without tariff him. That's the present day. Afterwards shall the children of Israel return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days.
And so that is the suspension you might say we have over here.
With Israel.
And so, getting back to Matthew 13, we start now into a series of of parables of similitudes, I suppose is the proper way to speak of them. They're seven in the 13th chapter, but the six?
The the second on through the 7th in chapter 13 in two groups of three are all called similitudes or parables of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven.
And they are parables of the Kingdom in its mystery form. When I say mystery form, I'm I'm distinguishing it from what's going to happen when the Lord Jesus returns from heaven in power and glory. And one of the things he will do through the process of judgments is he will bring a remnant of that nation into the blessing that was always part of his purpose.
As Steven said earlier, God has one purpose, and it's to exalt his beloved Son in the sphere of heaven and in the sphere of earth, and it will be done.
If we start to get fancy and start to spiritualize away, I looked the other day in my Bible, I have over 400 or 350 or 400 pages of prophetic scriptures, verse after verse, page after page from 16.
1617 prophets that all speak of the fact that they that the Messiah is going to be rejected, he's going to be cut off.
He's going to suffer, but lo and behold, that suffering would end up being for the blessing of his people, and he's going to bring them into blessing, as a matter of fact, without turning to it in Jeremiah. Jeremiah, what else can Jeremiah say? Says if the if, if the if the stars in heaven, if the sun and the moon and daylight and night stop from being an ordinance forever, so are my people not going to be brought into blessing in that day?
And the Apostle Paul, or the writer of the book of Hebrews, I happen to think it was Paul.
He speaks of this future blessing and calls it the new covenant, not I like the old covenant that I made with their fathers. God made no covenant with your Father in mind except his over there. But he made no covenant with with you and I, no matter what nation of the Gentiles we're from. We have no claim to this. But he says not the new covenant is not like the covenant I made with their fathers.
And then he describes what the New Covenant is with the House of Judah and the House of Israel. It could not be plainer.
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And you start getting fancy and saying, oh, it's spiritualized or oh, he, he changed his mind. This is this is the most absurd, borderline blasphemy.
'S excuse for a doctrine that I think I have ever heard.
Because pretty soon we say, well, God, he got, he got busy with something else. This is like the mockery that Elijah said to the prophets of bail. Oh, he's sleeping or he's busy.
We know that's not the God of glory, the God of the whole earth. He keeps the planets and everything perfectly.
And all the everything in your body and Everything Everywhere.
No, it's going to happen.
It's going to happen. Meanwhile, getting back to our topic, Matthew 13.
And so in these first three parables and I won't read them all.
We have in verse 24.
We have the Kingdom of heaven likened to a man which sowed good seed in his field, and while men slept the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat.
And then the servants say, what do we do? Should we tear them up? And he says no, let them grow.
Tears are not good. It's not what you want. But the instruction here is let them grow together until the harvest. We'll deal with it then. And so these first three assimilitudes really have to do with negative things.
I work in a in a company and when I was younger, one of my responsibilities was to make sure we recruited entry level usually was engineers. And and so you, you know, you give them the propaganda and, and have somebody talk to them and, and no, nobody brings in a young just about kid graduating out of college.
And says, you know, it's, it's really, we have a great business plan, but.
It's really not working out that well and there's a lot of problems and we got some guys that don't do what we ask them to do. And we got some guys from the other company that infiltrated our company and, and we've got viruses all through our computer and our maintenance system on our cranes doesn't work. Nobody does that right? This is what God does, honestly, and he's done it in these first three parables, he said.
The the the the the field.
The field is the world and the tares of the children of the evil one. And then the next parable is.
The mustard seed, which properly would make a little mustard plant, but instead we have it's the least of all seeds. Verse 32. But when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. This is not a good thing either. This is the picture of undesirable, whether it's wicked spirits.
Or what have you. It is not what you want this little seed has has become.
Abnormally large in a way that is not intended by nature, and it has become thereby the host of undesirable birds, fowls of the air. And this is what the Kingdom of heaven. I don't mean to disappoint you or discourage you, but this is what the Kingdom of heaven.
Of what men commonly call Christendom or Christ's Kingdom is today and has become, it has become this a long time ago. And Scripture doesn't say it's going to be different. We'll get to that, Lord willing. The next parable is the three measures of meal, though the 11 hidden 3 measures of meal. And as Bible expositors have have labored as I've read over the years many times, 11 in Scripture is never a picture of anything good.
A little leaven leavens the whole lump is not a good thing. It pictures moral evil, it pictures doctrinal evil, it pictures things that spread insidiously that you don't want. And so doctrines have come into Christianity that are.
Dishonouring to Christ, into God, and in profoundly negative effect upon professing Christians.
And so this is the first three.
It's not a pretty picture, but it's reality. And that's why it's it's really striking that God starts out this way and says this, this, this is what's going to happen. And if you stop and think about it, even in the early days of the church before the apostle Paul was off the scene, if you think of how he wrote to Timothy and said in the second epistle and said.
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Perilous times will come, and he gives a list of moral degradation.
Which I assume is degradation inside the Christian testimony already at that time, which was basically very little different from the degradation seen in the world described in Romans one and two. But that's what had been had come into the testimony very, very early. And so in Acts chapter 20, when he meets with the elders from Ephesus, he says the same thing to them very early on. He says, I know that after my departure.
Grievous wolves shall enter in. Of your own cells shall men arise, taking disciples after them, not sparing the flock, and so on. Peter writes about mockers in the last time about false teachers. There were false prophets before, there are false teachers now. Jude writes about a scoffers in that line of things. Who am I leaving out? John in his epistle writes about.
Yes, you've heard about the Antichrist. Even now, there are many antichrists.
And so you have this complete testimony to what the Lord before all this is saying in these parables. But everyone, if you turn to second Peter, if you turn to Jude, if you turn to all those epistles, let's just do one. Let's just do Jude. You say this is a pretty disheartening picture.
I have a cousin who was as a kid a champion sailboat racer.
I always tried to get him to teach me how to sail. We never got very far with that.
But I learned from him that even though the wind is coming at you.
There's a way to tack and to go this way and to go that way and to go that way and to go right upstream into the wind. If your destination is that way and the wind is coming at you, you can still sail into the wind. And if I could put it that way, everyone of these epistles describes the wind in very plain terms and then says, oh, by the way, you have all the resources to tack right into the wind and achieve.
Spiritual success.
When Joseph allowed his brethren to go back to Jacob.
It says he gave them provision for the way.
And that's what he's given to you and me. We have provision for the way. Everyone of you young lads over there, all of us older ones, we all have provision for the way.
But then Joseph said to him, see that you fall not out, by the way. That's the responsibility, sorry. And so in Jude, just to pick one.
At the end after this description of things in the in the epistle from Jude.
What does he say here in verse 20? But but ye, beloved.
Building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. He ends with this doxology in verse 24. Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, they're literally stumbling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.
To the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
That's not discouragement, that's not depression, that's not resignation. That's just reality of this is what's coming at us, but this is what we have, as the Lord told his disciples before he left.
In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world, and greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. And every one of these testimonies to the dire reality that we encounter, not just in the world, but in Christianity or in Christendom, always ends with this encouragement and this positiveness, as if Paul says in the language of of modern American, you can do this.
You can do this.
And you have the resources to do this, and you got this. And here's the way. And so it's so encouraging. Now let's turn back to Matthew 13.
I'm sorry if I sound rushed.
Now the next three are also in this chapter.
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And we've passed over for the moment.
The end of this negative element and how God is going to deal with that because he's going to deal with it. It's not going to go on forever. This is always a challenge.
The entrance of sin into the world.
Is in a certain sense a reproach to God.
He made the world, and if you give the gospel out to your classmates or to your friends or to your workmates.
I'm sure you've had people say, well, if there is a God, how come there's so much suffering in the world, right? Everybody's heard that and it's a reproach.
Because.
God in his wisdom has allowed this to enter into the world. He allowed sin to enter into the world and death by sin, and he has allowed these forces, He created Satan. He has allowed this to happen.
And meanwhile, it is, it is a secret with men and women of faith all down through the centuries and Old Testament in New to know the secret that yes, it looks like evil is triumphing. It looks like things are out of control. It looks like there is no resolution of anything. But you just wait. You just wait.
When Habakkuk complained to the Lord about look at what your people are they they are a train wreck.
And the Lord says, OK, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to raise up the Chaldean and they're going to thresh through them. And you were not you. You won't even believe what's going to happen. And and then he's like back like this. And and then he says, but but Lord, why would you have a people more evil than than your own people? Be the judge of them. And then the Lord says, I will judge the Chaldean.
And the Lord graciously works with Habakkuk.
And to the point where Habakkuk soul, I could say he's like a weenie child. And at the last chapter of Habakkuk, he just prays to the Lord. And at the end of the book, as you know, the short little book of Habakkuk, he says he's my feet are like Heinz feet, and I walk upon mine high places his beautiful.
Beautiful.
The other shoe is going to drop.
The other shoe is going to drop.
And the scripture says he must reign, and he will.
In every renewed heart.
Is stirred by that.
God will make sure.
That it happens and that it's seen and it's displayed from the rising of the sun to the going down of the seam, every country.
Every people, everyone who's been given any responsibility, the Gentile power, the Jew, the 10 tribes, the Edomites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Philistines, you can read in the prophets. Everyone 1 by 1 by 1, they're going to have the proper response from God.
And the Lord will be glorified in his grace. And He is, and He's displaying in you and me the riches of His grace.
He's also going to display the glory of judgment because those people that say, well how could God be just or how could God be love? He allows you suffering. You'll see how God is just and you'll see how God is righteous and you'll see of his nature when he bears the lighting down of his arm.
The three parables.
That are joined together as the 5th, 6th and 7th in Matthew 13 start in verse 44.
The Kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field, which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath.
That field.
I believe the treasure speaks.
Of the of the preciousness to him, of each one of us as individuals, We're part of that treasure.
And he bought the whole field. Sometimes we say, oh, does so and so belong to the Lord?
We really mean is are they saved right. And you feel like saying everybody belongs to the Lord. He bought the whole field.
He bought the whole field.
Purchase. I think Bruce has written a nice pamphlet on this. Purchase is different than redemption.
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And he's but he's bought the whole field. But it's those with faith that can say that they are amongst the redeemed.
In the next parable, it's the Pearl of great price, which is us together as the Church of God, that he loved and gave himself for.
And then in the next parable we see.
The Gospel net, if we could call it that. Verse 47 The Kingdom of heaven is like unto a net. It was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind.
And so, and they sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, and cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end. Should be of the age. I believe the Angel shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and so on.
And so those are the six that are in Matthew 13. Now there are at least four others in Matthew 18. Just to take a minute or two. In Matthew 18, we read a parable of the Kingdom in verse 23.
And this is the parable made where the man is forgiven a great debt and then he goes and fails to forgive his fellow servant who had a little tiny debt.
And I believe that parable brings before us the proper.
Moral state of you and me in God's Kingdom.
That we show the yielding this, the graciousness to our brethren and realize we've been forgiven such a debt. And if we fail to do that, there is a governmental response by God in this life that we will experience because the forgiveness that this man had was revoked. Judicial forgiveness is never revoked, but this kind of what we say.
Governmental forgiveness, if I could put it that way, can be revoked and the person is delivered to torment.
And you and I know that if we fail to forgive our brother, our sister, the real person who suffers from that is ourselves, because we start to experience a torment that is allowed emotionally or in other ways through the government of God. In Matthew 20, we see another one, if I can, the first verse of Matthew 20. The Kingdom of God is like unto a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard, and so on. This is where we get the expression, the 11Th.
And here we see the encouragement for us that we're all kind of come in at different times and in different ways and with different backgrounds. The apostle Paul didn't write. The Corinthians say such were all of you. He said, such were some of you. And some of us have been brought in late, and some of us have been brought in early.
I wasn't saved until I was in my early 20s and when I was brought into the assembly and began to attend the conferences and other things like that, and I met my peers who had been raising Christian homes, saved at three or four or they can't even remember. It's been so long for them. But they didn't look at me and say, oh, this guy, you know, he missed all, all the challenge of trying to please the Lord in high school. He just skated through as an unbeliever. I didn't get that attitude from anyone.
I didn't get that attitude. I think brethren were just happy that another like that woman that showed up here in the morning, another brand plucked from the burning, another trophy of his grace and and and and such were some of us. And so this this is, I think what we get in this parable, just the gracious way that we are happy with the portion that we've received from the Lord. We don't begrudge another and we serve together.
Happily and the Lord of the harvest.
He does what's right. Matthew 22 is the next one.
And here's the Kingdom of heaven verse two, Like unto a certain king which made a marriage for his son, He he, he makes, he makes this wedding, he makes this feast. My oxen and my fatlings are killed and all things are ready. And this is a very common theme in the Gospel message. All things are ready, but there's resentment and resistance and they even kill the messengers.
And so he goes ahead with it anyway. And perhaps the lesson here is that we're going to have resistance.
We're going to have that headwind against us. Keep doing that which is right. Keep bringing the gospel before souls. Some are going to come in because we know He's going to compel them to come in. And finally, the lesson at the end of this is that those that do come in, they need to have a wedding garment because I failed to mention that one of the distinctions between the Kingdom of heaven and the Church of God is the body of Christ.
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Is that entrance into the Kingdom of heaven is merely by profession?
Merely by saying I'm a Christian. Yeah, I'm a Christian. You know, I go to I go to the Methodist Church or what have you. And and you like assigned baptism to that as well. A sign that in this world we are a Christian. We profess Christ and a person who makes that profession is responsible and accountable for that profession. And it's a serious thing to do. But the body of Christ we only enter into by faith.
And we're joined as Stephen brought out.
By the receiving of the seal of the Holy Spirit when we believe the gospel of our salvation. And so there's the danger here in a world of profession and this is one of the things that Kingdom truth helps us it helps us understand how to respond and how to understand and how to interact with those that profess Christ that are in the Kingdom of the of heaven, which is the heavenly rule of of of this earthly administration while the king.
Is unseen in heaven, and so that.
We're not going to go trying to root tears out of town because they the guy down the street, I don't think he's real. I think he's a fake Christian. We need to go deal with him. I mean that it sounds ridiculous, but but the Roman Catholic system has the blood of martyrs are are at her feet for having done that for perhaps many centuries.
And so we need intelligence to know how to respond. And the last one in Matthew 25 of these of these 10.
Is of course the ten virgins, where again you have a mixture. All profess, all have some sort of an invitation they've received, and that's why they're there. And they're dressed and they got their lamps. And then as the bridegroom tarries, they all slumber and sleep. And then at midnight a cry. Behold the bridegroom. And some have oil and some don't, and the ones with oil arise, and they go in to the wedding.
And obviously this is a clear.
Picture of you and I as believers, hopefully have come out and we are waiting, we are watching, hopefully we are working for him, but how the Lord values not just waiting, but watching for him. And this parable brings the importance of that before us. And so we've just touched very briefly and very rapidly on these.
Parables or similar tools of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Kingdom of heaven began when that rejected Christ was raised, as someone once put it, God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead in defiance of man. Man said we will not have this man to reign over us. God says, well, no matter what your opinion is, he's going to the very highest place in heaven. That's what I think. And he's raised him in defiance of man and that's where he is. And that's when the Kingdom of heaven started, when he went off on high.
Kingdom of Heaven will not be forever in this character of a mystery of a mysterious form. It'll end not at the rapture, but when the Lord Jesus comes out of heaven with 10 thousands of his Saints.
In Revelation 19 and other places, we read about how the Lord comes out His vesture dipped in blood on a White Horse.
And he will defeat and he will bring, He will show the glory of God in the manifestation of God's holy nature, in the judgment of everything that offends in every aspect of this world. I wish we had time to take that up. We don't. You and I will be riding along, but I don't think we expect to do very much.
I think we'll be riding along in awe.
In all of what we see in this, this man, Christ Jesus, the Son of the Father from all eternity, finally coming to this world and taking his rightful place. I wanted to speak a little bit, but we don't have time about the coming judgments that will fall upon Christendom.
If I could just take a minute, there was a brother. I, I, I have certain responsibilities that that require me to drive. And so I listen to meetings at times. And the question was asked which, which everybody here will probably give me a, a straight answer. The question was asked, will the church go through the tribulation? Now if I asked all these brothers here and sisters, they'd all say, well, of course not. The church goes out before the tribulation. The church could go out today at the rapture, but his.
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You know what his answer was? Yes and no.
Yes and no. And I thought it's like 5:30 in the morning. I'm driving along.
Wow, What's where is he going to go with this? And then I saw yes and no. Yes, the true church goes, every one of us goes up at the rapture. But when you use the term church for this vast professing system of things.
Those folks, those people will not go at the Rapture. They will be here.
And that whole religious system will just blossom and blossom and blossom and ripen until it's a great, admirable thing in this world, just like the Western powers that that that this country is probably part of. And just like apostate Israel back in the land with riches and wealth and and pride in the chest puffed out. And just like the Arabs had come down and the king of the north and the king and all these other entities.
And they will meet.
A surprise that they will never recover from, and to whom much is given of the same as much required. And there is no people in the face of the earth that have received the blessing and privilege of hearing the gospel of the grace of God.
We speak about the great white throne, which is the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the unjust, and they stand before God that a great white throne.
And it's a terrifying thing to put yourself in, to think that you could be in that situation. But we don't often speak about the judgment of the living.
But the judgment of the living will take place towards the end of the seven years of Daniel's 70th week.
And the angels will go forth. I'm not sure whether it's directly or with human instrumentality.
But they will gather out of the Kingdom all things that offend.
In the Western world that has been so privileged will be decimated.
If the if the providential judgments that fall aren't enough.
With famine and pestilence and civil war and all the rest aren't enough.
What will it be?
When angels gather out of the Kingdom all things that offend, little wonder the prophet said that a man will be scarcer than the gold. The gold of Ophir and a man will be rare in this privileged Western world. Sobering, isn't it? Sobering.
But so must it be the glory all belongs to him. He will be glorified. He'll either be glorified in US and the riches of His grace. He'll be glorified in His judgment, because the judge of all the earth does well. Well, I hope just a quick touch on this line of truth as to the Kingdom that we're all in as subjects to the King who is unseen in glory.
Is is a helpful aspect of the truth and that we're not confusing one another, but there are these.
Different keys and different.
I guess their keys on the piano and some of the notes are in a bunch of them and some are only in one or two. I guess I'm not a musician, but God would have us learn the scales and know where things fit. It'll enable us to be here more for His glory and to be enjoying these things before they come to pass. And that's one of His desires too. There's a crown for you and me if we love His appearing.
We just in our heart, just walking your dog someday and you just think it's going to be wonderful when the Lord comes and takes his rightful place. You get a crown for that.
Quite something, isn't it? What a wonderful day to be able to look beyond the long dark night.
And hail that coming day. Let's just pray.
Our God, our Father, we.
Thank you for the grace that has reached out to us. We know.
We had no thought towards Thee. We were traveling down a broad Rd. that leads to destruction. We thank Thee for the love on my part that has arrested us and brought us to Thy Son in sovereign grace. We thank Thee for the by keeping grace over us day by day and look to Thee for.
Thy help in giving us an appetite for the things which concern Thy Son. Help us to be diligent and to find ourselves searching the Scriptures regard to these things that we might lure. Jesus, bear fruit for Thee in this world while we wait for Thy soon return. We thank Thee for lighting up the end of the pathway for us. We thank Thee 2 for.
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The lamp for our feet that we have in thy precious work. We commend ourselves to Thee. We thank Thee for Thy love. We look forward, Lord Jesus, to that scene of coming glory, when every eye shall see Thee and every knee shall bow. Lord Jesus, we look forward to that day with happy anticipation. We thank You for Thy love and Thy worthy and precious name. Amen.