GOD EXPLAINS WHAT TRIGGERS ARMAGEDDON--The Coming Invasion of Israel as Foretold in Ezekiel 37-39

but i want you to see one one of the most amazing little stretches of the scripture in fact one of the more hard to understand parts especially ezekiel 40 to 48 the temple and all that but the question was what is ezekiel 36 through 39 describing and actually what they wanted uh was the chapter 38 and 39 but since they asked about 36 i thought we'd get a running start what they want to know is who are the biblically described players in this event and are russia and iran part of them and i wanted to show you how how to meet the accusation people accuse us as believers of of uh reading things into the bible so i want to show you how you arrive at the geographic and geopolitical players of ezekiel 38 39 but but first of all let's go to chapter 36 if if i can go to 36 connection lost oh there connection unlost good uh number one it starts with god's promise to restore israel as a nation look at ezekiel 36 verses 22 through 24 now this this is god explaining his intentions and this is what he says therefore say to the house of israel verse 22 thus says the lord god i do not do this for your sake o house of israel but for my holy name's sake you see israel right now is an unwilling partner in this enterprise god says i am not protecting i'm not protecting israel from the whole world against them for israel's sake i'm doing it for my sake see that's what's shaping up in our world there is an entire group of people 1.2 billion of them who at the core of their belief system believe in the the the inferiority the the um destruction of and the the resist in every way the jewish people and that's islam islam is focused from its core against israel and god said i am going to protect israel not for israel's sake they are by nature quite proud people they are by nature you know sometimes mistreating people around them because they've been mistreated so much god is not vouching for the righteousness of the nation of israel when god does ezekiel 38 and 39 he's not doing it because they are the most good samaritan you know helpers of the poor in the world he's doing it i don't do this for your sake so house of israel but for my holy name's sake you see when god makes an eternal covenant when he sovereignly elects he doesn't un elect and god sovereignly elected israel that's the the literal lineage of abraham not the spiritual descendants of abraham that's us we are not israel israel is israel and god has a very clear plan for them which you have profaned among the heathen whether you went see the the jews have profaned the name of god among the heathen uh they are god's chosen people a promise and they denied their king when he came jesus christ himself so and i will sanctify my great name which was profaned among the heathen which you have profaned in the midst of them and he then shall and this is one of the most repeated in fact it is the most repeated statement in the book of ezekiel shall know that i am the lord shall know that i am the lord shall know that i am the lord the whole purpose of what god is doing with israel is to show the world that he is the lord and really if you want to know what the the conflict is if you remember on mount carmel it was is baal the lord or is it was a conflict between baal or jehovah yahweh and now and you know that elijah and the fire came down and all of that and so baal was proven to not be the lord jehovah yahweh was well today the conflict that is coming to a head is again is it allah and and i don't take allah to be a generic name for god allah is defined there are 99 titles for allah and he has his 99 names and many of them that's how salman rushdie got in trouble you know the author many of the names of allah are names that are more associated with lucifer and not with uh the lord god almighty and so the the great conflict right now in our world is is allah the true god or jehovah yahweh the creator god the god who eternally exists in three persons a father son and holy spirit or is it this this kind of what we would call a unitarian god this this one non-trinitarian god and by the way uh the muslims and the mormons have a lot in common they both are this this unitarian view of god rather than a trinitarian view so but the whole thing is shaping up so that the world will know who the lord is and i shall be sanctified in you before their eyes for i will take you so when is god saying this he's saying this 2600 years ago god said through ezekiel remember ezekiel i showed you all the church last week he was in the second you know daniel went in the first zekulet in the second babylonian uh captivity so 600 years before christ god said i will take you from among the heathen and gather you out of uh all countries and will bring you into your own land what countries was israel in in 600 bc well some apostate northerners from samaria were in assyria but when did israel get into all countries well it wasn't it and it wasn't in the babylonian captivity either they didn't go into countries they went into babylon which swallowed up assyria so they just did a lateral they went from one land to another when when did israel need to get gathered out of all countries it wasn't until aed 70 when the romans banned them from the land of israel and killed a million of them and took everyone else they could get and sold them into slavery all over the world and the jews were banned from the holy land from the holy city especially hadrian's time onward and were sent all over the world but look at this i will gather you out of all countries so 600 2 600 years ago 600 bc god said you're going to get sent to all the world and that took place 600 years later when they were thrown out of jerusalem and the holy land but he said sometime in the future i'm going to gather you out of all the countries and will bring you into your own land own land israel from 600 or 586 bc didn't have their own land they were always an occupied nation they never i mean they had a little rebellion in the maccabean time but they were still they were still occupied nation they just were fighting off for a while they're occupiers but rome finally came and crushed that rebellion so this what's interesting is this part of what ezekiel said it's only been since 1948 that israel got their own land you can put a date right there they didn't have a land that was their own for 2500 plus years almost 2 600 years so this is a fascinating uh if you want something fascinating ezekiel 36 is god saying i have promised i'm going to restore israel as a nation and he said that as they were being carried off to babylon uh secondly god gives us a picture look at chapter 37 i mean if you if you've read it you know what i mean uh the lord starts talking about when he does this when he brings see when he brings them back as we just were reading here when he brings them back from among the heathen it doesn't mean they're they're believers it doesn't mean that they're practicing servants and worshipers of the lord and so chapter 37 shows them in god's sight they were like bones that were all put back it's like a a big graveyard and he takes the bones and builds a body out of it but it's still dead it's just it's just in the shape of a body spiritually there's no life and so the restoration of israel they were brought back to life in the flesh they became a real living nation but they don't have the spirit of god within them they are trusting in their armaments and their expertise and their patents and their nobel prizes and their great riches but the the what the lord is doing is isaiah talked about too the lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people god always is looking for this remnant and and tonight nobody asked me about that but the remnant is what you see in zechariah 12 through 14 as god saves what paul talks about in romans 9 through 11 god saves all of israel all what is all to god all of the remnant all of those who put their faith in christ all of those who look up and mourn for the one that they pierced and so what's interesting is this the spiritual element is just starting to dawn in fact i have a very dear friend who has spent most of his uh recent adult life traveling a hundred and sometimes to russia and as you know russia has uh disgorged itself of many jews and and so that more than half of the population of israel today is from russia most people don't even realize that half of israel is from russia they have come out of russia in in all those waves of aliyah of of getting out of russia and going to israel in fact if you look at i mean just the facts of it are unbelievable how many of their prime ministers are russian i mean the only reason in 1948 that russia voted at the u.n for israel they thought it was going to be a communist place because they had these collective farms and they were living on kibbutz they all were from russia anyway they were going to come back to mother russia so russia just voted for him and didn't realize that they were helping god's plan to take place but what has happened so far is just the the unbelieving return and that was been fulfilled in the first half of the 19th century in 1948 in particular so the valley of dry bones has already been fulfilled in the sense of israel going back to its its uh land but the spirit of god has not i mean israel by the way israel is pretty powerful right now can you imagine when the spirit of god is breathed into them i mean they're they're whatever the third or fourth most powerful atomic power in the world undeclared but they are but can you imagine when the spirit of god starts fighting their battles okay now let's go to chapter 38 because this is the heart of what we're going to cover for the next 15 20 minutes uh and i'm just going to give you a little history lesson because remember my my major work both in undergrad and grad and post-grad was all in history uh church history and general history and history history i love history but but i want to show you how i see history i don't see history from our perspective i like to go back and see how they looked at historical geography so basically some of the the pieces we have if you look in chapter 38 it says the word lord came to me saying verse 2 of ezekiel 38 son of man set your face against gog of the land of the land of magog the prince of rosh um just i mean without without any prophetic books without hal lindsey's late great planet earth which is a great book um without all that what do the people that lived a long time ago say about this okay ezekiel was written ezekiel here's for perspective ezekiel was written in the sixth century bc the sixth century bc hessiad wrote in the 8th century bc he was writing 200 years before ezekiel this greek teaching didactic means teaching poet equated the magogians with the scythians or scythians now that's a biblical word in the new testament paul said for in christ there's neither barbarian jew greek barbarian bond are free and then he throws in scythian and that's the word that's usually used for barbarian but it's actually the word scythian and in some versions of the bible you'll see that actual word in the new testament also when you get to christ's city uh that that he ministered in called the decapolis cities remember jesus in the gospels is serving preaching in what is called the decapolis decopolis one of the cities of the decapolis and the only one that jesus ministered in because it was the only one that was on this side of the jordan river it's called schisopolis it's the city of the scythians so this man living 200 years before ezekiel if if you said the magogians the people of magog you don't have to read you don't have to try and read modern you know people say oh you're just pushing the russians into it no the magogians in the 8th century bc were the scythians now herodotus he's called the father of history just like we have the father of medicine everything else from the the greek world the father of history now a century after now look where we've gotten to this is a hundred years after ezekiel herodotus called the the scythians the ones who were associated with magex so for 300 years they have remained as as being associated and what he does herodotus tells us where they came from he said they're a 10th century bc warrior group and then we go into other greek philosophers and jewish ones josephus a historian he when josephus talked about what what we would know as the great wall of china he called that area where the wall was built the ramparts of gog and magog that the the chinese building their great wall were building it to hold out and hold back these northerners that were invading them that and they called the great wall the ramparts of gog and magog so another interesting little piece and this is from the first century now um when i used to travel uh teaching in bible institutes in in russia we always would you know fly through moscow we'd go to the kremlin and and uh just see another part of it if you go through the kremlin it's like the smithsonian it's their history of their people of the russian people in the last time i was in the kremlin in 1999 i'm sure they've changed it but the first exhibit in the kremlin was how they showed that their ancestors were the scythians who came from and these are the the russian words the srinaya and the adranovo uh people that and i'll show you a map of them that were from the uttermost parts of the north so but without coming to our time and pushing something back if you just look through history you'll find that that there has been a consistent description of the people now this is what the world looked like in the time of the bible this is world geography at the time of the book of revelation was being widely circulated in fact this is the view we as westerners have of the world this was the center of the world in the bible times of course rome dominated things right here you you all know that's the holy land right there uh and you can recognize egypt down here so where were these where were these scythians from they were from this part of the world right up here the scythians and that way going to the far north but they were known as the people that were these are the caucasus mountains and it's kind of like a little divider here on this this between the caspian and the uh black sea the the caucasus mountains were kind of like a divider and the scythians were on one side and the roman empire was on the other side now here this divider is parthia uh parthia think of the parthians you can think of the iranians you can think of the kurds you can think of the means that that whole area was never conquered by the the rome it was fought over and and a lot of of give and take but the parthian region was always uh kind of beyond the the scope of the full control of the roman empire so this is what the world looked like from the westerners view and uh for just a minute look in your bible so this would have been the map if you'd have gone to school with the apostle john you know it's a little after him it's trajan's time but it's very similar so look down at ezekiel 38 i want to show you something it says um verse five from persia uh from cush or ethiopia and from libya or if you have a version of the bible it could say put you see that in verse five if you see those words like persia ethiopia or kush and libya or put say yes you have those okay now if you're going to school back then this is libya this this region up here on the north part of africa on along the shore actually uh it would encompass what we would call libya and algeria and even tunisia uh it was that north shore um cush was what the region that was south of egypt here's where egypt ended down here was cush in fact you remember moses had a what wife kush ait wife she was not egyptian she was from south of egypt which is called cush do you know what's down there now sudan do you know what sudan thinks of israel not very much so so look back at this list in verse 5 persia that's this this parthian uh area over here that to this day is not very happy about israel libya or put which is algeria and libya and tunisia again part of the north african muslim group of people that are not real excited about israel's existence kush down here sudan actually is manufacturing missiles for iran so you can tell where their loyalties are um and then it starts naming off in in up here in verse two set your face against gog and magog the princes of rosh and meshech and tubal you know basically it's talking about this whole region here which would be modern-day turkey and the people from beyond the caucasus which are these scythians okay so that's just how western civilization looks at it now this is interesting this is if if you are oriental if you're chinese and you look at history china was always building you know i don't have room for the great wall over that way but this is why they were building it there were these people that were such skilled riders that they could ride at a full gallop with no saddle holding onto the horse and they could turn around in their horse at a full gallop and they could shoot their bow and arrow at the people behind them they were the most feared fighters of the ancient world because and they had these secret nobody knew how they got them silk vests now silk was not bulletproof but when an arrow hit silk it didn't penetrate the silk it just went in and they were able to pull the arrow out and they didn't get infected they only got injured and those silk shirts were which they they had learned how to uh um you know in the in the chinese guarded the silk secret for centuries but the scythians were these fearsome warriors that would come down from this region up here that's called the steps it's just gradual higher and higher hills and again you can see the caucasus mountains here and so they didn't come down this way because the parthian kingdom and and some of these you know the the tribal areas that are in modern afghanistan and all that they would come up this way and would come into the land and come down and would bother all of the babylonians and assyrians and they they did make it by the way the scythians made it to right there that's where scathopolis is that's their furthest south penetration they came from up there into the holy land right there so that's how the chinese would think about it this is how uh if if you look at the world empires this is basically alexander the great remember alexander's uh he was from somewhere his father was the king of macedonia but but he was from somewhere over here i don't know where i've been to his grave but somewhere over there in greece and and he took his father's empire and just whirlwind took it all the way to india but again you notice what he didn't do he didn't go past here and he didn't go past here why because that's where these scythians were and they were so powerful that they just kept up there so that's just another view of the empires now this is what's fascinating this is a russian map i love it this is what they had in the um kremlin and see the sribnayas and the androvos and you can see the colors and these two groups merged into uh this is talking about just after the time of of abraham those two groups were merging together and became the scythians but you notice this is moscow and these are the steps of russia so and this is siberia so i mean let me ask you like i said last time if i said uh it's between lake huron and lake michigan and south of you know lake superior what would i be talking about well if you say it's from the far north it's the scythian people it's the people that live north of the caucasus the people that live north of the description that that we would have of turkey without any prophetic writer you can figure out who they're talking about they're talking about these these people from the far north that were such fearsome fighters who became today known as the russians but back then they had all these other terms so who participates in ezekiel 38 and 39 well this what the event is and if we had time and we don't tonight to read the whole account it's fascinating god himself stops an invasion of israel and who's invading israel magog who all the ancient writers associate with these people that live up there beyond the caucasus mountains and eastern anatolia you know the they even broke in so far as eastern turkey but it's not clear when it happens that's the only thing we're not sure i mean no bible scholar disputes that it's going to happen it's just we don't know when it's going to happen but who is it well it's i mean look in your bible we'll list them off verse 5 has persia aka iran um the the uh kush is next which you know your bible might say ethiopia but that's really south kush if you want all kush you gotta have sudan too put which is the north shore i mean the north part of africa the south shore of the mediterranean which is libya algeria might even be tunisia uh gomer which is an and uh um another term for turkey and then togarmah which could easily be all of these uh what we call the stands you know the the uh tajikistan and kazakhstan and all the stance which are basically um muslim today and then meshech and tubo which are the ancient scythians and modern russians so who participates wow right now every day if you if you follow google they are threatening to destroy israel these people today are making missiles to destroy israel these people are giving all their armaments now that muammar gaddafi is gone to all i mean most of libya's armaments are now in the hands of the the the antagonists surrounding israel uh turkey uh you know they keep they're part of nato but they they keep wish-washing on us the it's interesting right now the central asian muslims are not really against israel in fact they're letting them base their airplanes there right now which is fascinating but they'll change their mind and of course russia has warned israel flatly to leave syria alone so back to when is ezekiel 38 and 39 i don't know but whenever it is it's very interesting what happens and what happens is if you read this god wades in and and stops this group from attacking israel and it appears if it's before the tribulation if it is here and we're right there on this chart so if it's any time in the near future then it appears from what it says that israel suffers so greatly in this battle even though the lord fights for them they they suffer and they have to surrender uh some of their it could be that they even give up their atomic weapons which would be the bottom line for israel um you know they have submarines they have missiles and they have airplane delivered atomic bombs if they do that that's when this covenant gets when when they as we saw last time when a ruler of the people that destroyed jerusalem who destroyed jerusalem the romans so when a continuation of the roman empire ruler makes a covenant with israel and what it could look like is that europe says we will make a a seven year promise to you that russia iran china you name it if they attack you they're attacking us so we will guard you israel but in order to make the muslims not be so upset if you'll give up your 250 nuclear thermonuclear weapons we will defend you and it appears that this antichrist is so winsome and and makes them feel so secure that they make a seven year promise to let him defend them and that's that's what kicks off what god calls the tribulation the 70th week of daniel and in the middle is the abomination that causes desolation by the way a temple is rebuilt in here somewhere because there's a temple at the midpoint of the tribulation and that's basically the what ezekiel 38 and 39 so whoever asks that i don't know when it's going to take place but boy it could take place this week the way things are going i don't know if you noticed but the russians gave the syrians one of the most powerful surface-to-surface missiles there is it is so hypersonic that even america can't stop it it travels uh so rapidly it's an unstoppable missile that's just across the border in syria okay um if you look at back at ezekiel 38 6 just one last little clue here what we're talking about 38 6 it says uh that that they are from the far north so what what i've shown you is right here is the holy land and so this is north and this is north and this is north and this is north and this is further north and this is further north and this is really far north you understand if if your orientation is israel then then the all of these this coming group is from the north even these what we would call the stands that are right across here uh those with russia are all what would be in verse now look at verse 15. i mean it's just repeated over and over again isaiah or ezekiel 38 15 then you will come from your place out of the far north you and many people with you and then it says the same thing at the beginning of chapter 39 verse 2 i will turn you around and by the way this is what is fascinating this is god's intervention chapter 39 verse 1 and you son of man prophesy against gog by the way gog is is kind of like pharaoh it's not really a name it's a title it's this high up person like a pharaoh and say thus says lord god behold i'm against you og the prince of raj meshech and tubal and i will turn you around and lead you on bringing you up from the far north and bring you against the mountains of israel now it's interesting there's a variant here if you have a king james it says the sixth part of you and and that textual variant is very interesting it could mean and this is what is fascinating that whatever army comes uh from the north onto uh from the north let's say that an army of uh 60 000 comes down let's say that they they get a iranian um you know inter-independent states of uh across here these muslim states and some russian troops and some turkish troops and all the rest of them let's say the 60 000 of them come the variant in that second verse that says in the king james the sixth part actually what it means is that five sixths don't return so it would be if an army of sixty thousand came only ten thousand would survive the attack on israel and so it it in the old king james it's very interesting that whatever happens whatever the lord does is significant and it defeats them and uh then if you read verse three he knocks the bow out of their hand they fall on the mountains of israel and then he starts talking about what he sends the the the pestilence and everything that comes upon them and then what's fascinating is if you look in verse 9 and this is just what's very interesting in our terms those who dwell in the cities of israel go out and set on fire and burn the weapons both the shields and the bucklers the bows and the arrows the javelins and the spears and they will make fires with them for seven years and they will not take wood from the field nor cut down any from the forest because they will make fires with the weapons that they will plunder those who plundered them and pillaged those who pillaged them says the lord that is really interesting what what what weaponry could come from the north that would burn for seven years and it's interesting to think about i mean even how lindsey brought that up that the half-life of radioactive material is seven years and it's very possible they just pull all the warheads out because the lord actually sends pestilence and kills all of these soldiers one last thing that's just fascinating to look at verse 11 it will come to pass in that day that i will give gog a burial place in israel and the valley and those who pass by east of the sea will obstruct travelers because they will bury gog and his multitude and they will call it the valley of haemon gog and for seven months the house of israel will be bearing them in order to cleanse the land and then it talks about there's going to be these people that are going to go out and set up markers look at verse 14 and they will set apart men regularly employed with help of a search party to pass through the land and bury those bodies remaining on the ground in order to cleanse it and they'll set a marker by it and haul it off to that spot and if we get back to a little enlarged map of israel here what it's talking about is it says east of the sea this is the the dead sea right here you can't see it it's really small but they want them buried east of the dead sea because the people of israel live here what would you call that you call that isolation you would say that the bodies are contaminated this is exactly if there was any kind of weapons of mass destruction event the cleanup of it from the mountains of israel would be taken over into that desert area they wouldn't want it near the populace and so it's just i mean you know if if it happens into the future you know maybe we'll get away from atomic weaponry but if it happens anytime now and all of these armies come down converging from russia with their tactical nuclear weapons and god stops them here israel cleans them up takes the contaminated bodies and that the lord kills with plagues buries them east downwind of the dead sea and takes the radioactive fuel and powers israel that's just one scenario the other scenario is it's very interesting that in the last few weeks israel has been found if we export to them our fracking technology that's you know controversial in america israel will have 250 billion barrels of oil if they can frack saudi arabia has 260 billion isn't that interesting i mean that's not prophetic that's from bloomberg uh israel is amazing so it's open to the second to the last book of the old testament the prophet zechariah it's the 38th book the old testament or just go to the new and back up from matthew back to the through malachi to zechariah the 12th chapter this morning there's one city there's one place there's one word that god said if you always keep your eye on that place then you'll always know what i'm doing in this world the holy holy god we're just saying about god has has set one place as his place he calls it my city he calls it the place where i dwell he said this place belongs to me he said the nations try and divide it and take it but he said always keep your eye on one place and that place is the city of jerusalem and this morning i would like to share with you from the book of zechariah chapter 12 and verse three that that we should especially as we're continuing remember where we are this is the third week we're looking at the biblical doctrine of inspiration and there are seven reasons why every born-again believer should trust the bible as inspired and authoritative the first of the seven reasons is because only the bible of all the religious books of the world of all the world religions only the bible dares to have prophecy and prophecy is detailed descriptions of the future that are given in the past that are verifiable and they're not fuzzy and murky they're actually verifiable factual descriptions of future events that only god does and here's an example in chapter 12 in fact the whole 12th chapter of zechariah through the 14th is one of the most fascinating prophetic passages of scripture and in the third verse the lord says this and it shall happen in that day and what day is it uh it's the the time when the end days that verse 1 and 2 talk about when the whole world is getting upset and and focusing on jerusalem it will happen in that day a future day in the last day that i the lord says will make jerusalem a very heavy stone for all people and all who would heave it away will surely be cut in pieces though all the nations of the earth are gathered against it now when zechariah wrote those words it must have been the hardest thing for him to write on paper zechariah in fact often about every year i stand in his tomb and look at jerusalem his tomb is on the mount of olives and you see jerusalem but when zechariah was looking at jerusalem he probably was on the mount of olives because jerusalem had been completely destroyed by the babylonians and the rocks were blackened and and tumbled and the walls were all down and the temple was raised and there was really nothing there it's just a mess a heap of rubble and he's writing and he's saying and he knows who's talking god and god says i'm gonna make that blackened pile of rubble a heavy stone for all people and then when he was writing the end of that verse and all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it jerusalem at 3 000 feet in elevation not near any major road not near any major highway it's not near any major river it's just kind of out there you know on top of a hill very there's no natural resource there's nothing really interesting about it's just there and he's writing all the world is going to come here huh i'm glad god knows what he's doing well if you think about it when jesus told his disciples about the future jesus built every word remember i told you this matthew 24 mark 13 luke 21 jesus preached three versions of a wonderful sermon on the future every word of his sermon he built it all the future of the earth about around that one spot jerusalem he says his second coming is tied to jerusalem jesus said keep your eye in jerusalem i'm ascending from the mount of olives that's the center of jerusalem the mount of olives is the center of the hills of jerusalem he says i am returning to the mount of olives and according to the lord the center of the world in the history of the world revolves around jerusalem now it doesn't to us to us the world's history has revolved around rome for a while and it revolved around london for a while when the british empire was the mistress of the seas and and the sun never set upon it and right now briefly the world centers around washington and in the future it's going to center around other places but you know what to god the world centers around jerusalem the history of this world the most mentioned place in the bible is a city called jerusalem jerusalem should be your favorite city because it's god's did you know that in first corinthians or first kings chapter 11 in verse 13 god says this he says for the sake of jerusalem which i have chosen i will not separate it from the house of david god says my chosen place my favorite place you might have one i i've heard that it gets wintry here and dark sometime in the year i haven't seen it yet because it's raining too much but sometime it gets wintry and dark there you laughed i can tell my funny story yesterday i was i was in an elevator in denver i was a friend of mine called a few weeks ago and and mike gendron from proclaiming the gospel and he says i can't go and speak at this conference would you please your friend go and i said i said i don't want to but i will because you're a friend and so i agreed and i flew in and out of denver through the hurricane and so i was in this this huge hotel in denver and there's this huge conference there and people were standing in the elevator and they all had their little conference brochures you know the the people that come to this conference they're looking over and i was rushing because i had to speak at nine o'clock and it was eight o'clock and i had to go set up and everything and someone said who is that at nine o'clock oh don't know him i'm not going here i'm in the elevator with him and i didn't say a word and uh and got to the conference and um and it was a blessing but then this morning i got here and by the way we were delayed and all of our flights and everything was canceled and we got to dallas we were there late last night and finally they find a flight to detroit we got to detroit in the monsoons last night our car is here at the kalamazoo airport doesn't everybody fly out of kalamazoo we landed in detroit at 10 o'clock at night in the rain so i'm in this little tiny rental car driving you can't drive very fast because there's so much water on 94 that never seems to be finished being repaired and they need to put drains on it and so here we're driving along so i finally and i'm here this morning i'm in the lobby shaking hands with people and they look at me and they say why do you have that thing on your face i said i said it's just a microphone they said who are you well i had already asked them i mean i thought they'd been here 30 years i wrote them in the back of my bible it was their first sunday and so i felt like i was in an elevator in denver i'm glad they stayed for the service so so but back back to jerusalem jerusalem is the city that god says keep your eye on it now why am i even saying that because this week i told you that that when when you start seeing things that are mentioned in the bible coalescing and coming together you know something's going to happen and i told you about keep your eye on that four-letter word iran do you know what happened this week iran converged with jerusalem and the president of iran said i am going to keep up my resistance and my attack until jerusalem is liberated from the jews now that's really interesting stuff because that comes right into what god says jerusalem is god's time peace the final events of world history will culminate at jerusalem with the glorious return of jesus christ mentioned over 800 times in god's word jerusalem is an important place but this week jerusalem came alongside of iran we already know that god has told us not the united nations and not the strategic central command of the pentagon but god said that there is in a future time going to be an invasion to liberate jerusalem coming from the north and the the leader of the band is going to be iran and they're going to be allied with russia now i'm you know i'm not blowing smoke the bible says that but what's amazing is when you're reading that in the new york times and the usa today and bloomberg report and when they say the iranians are serious about this they're spending most of their domestic gross domestic product on developing as many weapons system as they can they're getting indigenous in their submarine warfare their ballistic missile and they're making drones they're doing anything they can with one goal you know what the goal of iran is to annihilate israel that should get our attention because if you look at god's radar screen and now i want you to turn with me to ezekiel now if you're in zechariah just keep backing up okay it's not very far ezekiel we're going to look at ezekiel 36 to 39 this morning because this week iran stated their total dedication was to give strategic depth to the jihad to liberate jerusalem let me show you iran doing what they said i don't know when they're going to do it it could be a thousand years from now hard to believe could be a hundred years from now hard to believe that too but it could be anytime but this is what the bible starting in ezekiel 36 and it builds up to it it tells us that israel is going to be attacked but let me give you a little history israel has not controlled jerusalem until recently think about this babylon you know nebuchadnezzar handwriting on the wall lion's den fiery furnace babylon okay that's old testament book of daniel babylon took over jerusalem 2600 years ago it's a long time 26 centuries ago we're so myopic we think about just now but just think back 2600 years most people don't like history but just at least do the math that's a long time ago 2600 years ago babylon wrestled jerusalem from israel persia the empire the medo persian empire persian you ever heard of the medes darius the mede do you know how you say meads in 2008 that's kurdish stand it's the same people i was just speaking at uh the seminary in amman jordanian evangelical theological seminary and i was meeting the students like i meet you here and i was shaking hands and i said hello and what's your name he says my name is barbara and i said where you from he says i am a median i'm a mede i said you mean like in the bible he says yeah he says i'm a mede i said wow and i shook the next hand i asked this guy says and what's your name and he told me his name he says and i'm babylonian i said you mean babylonian he says i live in babylon in iraq i went you guys still the next guy was an assyrian i thought we had a time warp did you know all those places are still here and the people still identify in those ethnic groupings there are still all these different people and that happened 2500 years ago when the persian media empire took over jerusalem they held it just for about 200 years and then the greeks took it remember alexander the great 2200 years ago jerusalem went from the control of the the medo persians to the greeks and then rome took it you know rome the emperors the caesars 2100 years ago rome took over jerusalem and and their the great general pompey took over and he got that city and hit what became under roman they they started working on building it then the muslims got it thirteen hundred years ago they beat out the romans and and if you know anything about the whole conflict back then you know the byzantine empire and it finally fell and the muslims thirteen hundred years ago at jerusalem then the ottoman turks at the same time as martin luther 500 years ago the ottoman turks the people of turkey the ottomans they're kind of asiatic people that migrated down there became muslims and they took over the whole jerusalem area in 1512 500 years ago you say what's the history lesson for well then 90 years ago the british took over palestine but 40 short years ago god allowed israel to once again have jerusalem as their capital for the first time in 2600 years so this what we're reading about in in zechariah in ezekiel could not have happened for 2600 years because there was no jerusalem for a coalition of nations to come against that belong to israel until 40 years ago in 1967 you remember the great six day war and israel began kissing the ground of the temple mount they had actually taken the city of jerusalem and that caused a lot of angst around the world because god allowed israel once again to have jerusalem as their very own capital and then a series of events god's word describes surrounding a group of nations seeking to attack israel and liberate jerusalem written 2600 years ago they all of a sudden are no longer fuzzy now we have ezekiel possible it wasn't possible since ezekiel wrote it when ezekiel wrote this the babylonians were encamped around taking jerusalem when ezekiel got done writing this there was no jerusalem that needed to be taken it was gone and yet he predicted that in a future day far away it's called in the distant future jerusalem would be surrounded by nations trying to take it away from israel the series events in god's word described surrounding that group of nations written in detail 2600 years ago has gone from murkiness and fuzziness to clarity well let's just walk through ezekiel 36 if you're there in your bible probably my favorite verse in the whole 36 chapters 26 and 27 you'll hear me say this often at communion it's a good verse to memorize this is the new covenant i will give you ezekiel 36 26 a new heart and put a new spirit within you i will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh i will give you a heart of flesh i will put my spirit within you i will cause you to walk in my statute you'll keep my commandments and do them that's the new covenant by the way the new covenant was made first of all with israel and this is a future event when israel is going to get a new heart a new spirit they don't have it now they're very secular very pagan they think they're winning the war themselves but in the midst of this description of what god's going to do in the future he brought up this great new covenant promise which is what the new testament writers began describing is what happens in us when we're saved we get a new heart in fact this morning if you're a born-again believer you've had a heart transplant you want to shock someone if you're younger you know talk to group people and they're all talking about their knee transplants you know and their hip transplants and everything you say i've had a heart transplant especially if you look like you're in your 20s or something look at you and say what say oh yeah i have a heart transplant they said what is that look at verse 26 a new heart also i'll give you a new spirit i'll put within you and you can explain to them that the only way to have peace and joy and everlasting life and and to have tranquility in your life is to get a heart transplant that's what god does the new birth is not joining a church or getting baptized or you know repeating a prayer after me it's when god gives you a new operating system when he reaches in and takes out the old stoney as it's talking about in 26 and 27 and puts a brand new operating system in us we are brand new from the core of our being we have a brand new orientation in life and spiritual life but that's the 36th chapter but surrounding all that is something else let me just walk through it with you ezekiel 36 pictures the exiled israelites scattered around like a pile of bones by the time we get to chapter 37 look what it says there at the lord came upon me and brought me by the spirit to a valley and he saw this valley of dry bones so in chapter 36 is the run-up to the pile of bones in 37 and 36 talks about it because of their disobedience and sin and because of their idolatry god causes judgment promise judgment from the pentateuch to fall on israel so by the time we get to 37 there's this dry and dead pile of bones in this desert valley it's almost like an old western you know you can imagine death valley and a pile of steer heads you know and that's what it looks like that's what i see in my mind that's how god looked at israel and then chapter 37 describes the call of god that begins to stir and draw jews from all over the world and and what it says is that that all of a sudden these bones start start coming together they're they're instead of being scattered over the whole valley they're starting to coalesce and and join and merge and all of a sudden the skeletons form into human skeletons just a very kind of halloween picture i guess but what really is happening is that's describing the events that began in the late 19th century jews began migrating to the area now called israel by the mid 20th century they became a recognized nation called israel so chapter 37 actually has happened in some of your lifetimes and and it's in recent history for the rest of us this happened in 1948 that they that the bones came together and there there was this nation of israel then you know that what happened 48 started israel 56 was the great war where all the arabs decided they were going to get rid of them after eight years then 67 was the next great war 11 years later and all of of the world watched as they thought israel was going to be annihilated and israel defeated the combined armies of all those nations this is all history but look at chapter 38 because directly following this description of this this nation of israel all of a sudden we have ezekiel 38 it follows the description of this return of the nation israel to to becoming a country and in ezekiel 38 and 39 there's a war described by god through ezekiel's eyes that features armies coming from what we would describe as an islamic coalition now remember this ezekiel is talking from the co from the context of 2600 years ago so he's going to describe places that were geographically recognizable 2600 years ago and if you get an old map just find a map that describes what the world was like pre uh rome and pre you know the modern times and look back at the ancient world and what you find is ezekiel is pitching picking out geographic sites that are still identifiable on the map and if you look at that today those geographs see what's neat about the bible is it takes a place from then to identify a geographic location if you overlay today's geopolitical map over it you find that everywhere ezekiel describes would be an islamic nation or russia every one of them so we call it an islamic confederation allied with what today we call russia but back then there were the scythians and there are a lot of other words in there this event is described this this war starting in chapter 38 look what it says ezekiel 38 1. now the word of the lord came to me saying so we know this is going to happen because god's saying it the word of the lord that's code 4 god says and if god says it's going to happen son of man verse 2 set your face against gog in the land of magog in the prince of rosh and meshech and tubal the prophesy against him and thus says the lord and he keeps going down and look at verse 5. this is what i keep talking about the the leader of the the ban verse five persia that's iran they're the start of this list that's coming against israel so basically 38 and 39 describe a massive attack launched against whatever the nation is in 36-37 36-37 clearly describes israel 38-39 clearly describes israel being attacked from without by what we would say in the 21st century an islamic coalition so the first question we have is when would this happen to be and so you do a bible study over the years various bible teachers have looked look at look at what it says in verse two gog and magog so obviously there are two unusual words you can search in the bible and what you find is that there are three times gog and magog occur in the bible so we have to identify when exactly would this chapter 38 happen the first place that gog and magog show up in the bible is in revelation chapter 19 and 1911-21 say that gog and magog come up in a battle called armageddon but the interesting thing is the armageddon is seen to be at the end of the seven year time of trouble that's called the tribulation and when when this the battle of gaga magog and armageddon ends the world as we know it ends there's no seven years of if you read ezekiel 38 after this war they're cleaning up for seven years after the war of chapter 38 and 39 they're burying people for seven months there's so many people that are killed in this war it takes seven months to build massive graves and get all the bodies in it and cover them up and then it says it takes him seven years of reclaiming all the stuff from the battlefield and using it they're actually burning it and and using the war gear so this can't be revelation 19 11-21 this could not ezekiel 38 cannot be the battle of armageddon if it is then then god is is making a conflict there and so what we know is that the bible never conflicts itself and so if you look at it at revelation 19 11 to 21 the battle of armageddon you see it clearly ends with jesus christ coming in the clouds at the head of the heavenly armies as the king of kings and lord of lords and he says enough is enough and he just ends it all and sets up his kingdom so we know it's not then what's the other time gog and magog show up well it's just the next chapter in revelation 20 7-9 and ezekiel is not describing that gog and magog because that gog and magog is at the end of what we call the millennium now the word millennium is never in the bible but the number seven times of one thousand years is and the bible describes a period of time one thousand years long seven times in revelation twenty we call it the millennium uh that's just the latin word for a thousand and so the greek word is kilial achilles we're called kilius because we believe in the thousand-year reign but that thousand-year reign is ended if you look in revelation 20 and verse 7 you don't have to right now but write it down it ends with satan being released from prison he's in prison for a thousand years and he goes out and stirs up all the nations to come against jerusalem again and all the nations of the earth converge and god just says we're not going to have a battle and it says he just he just destroys them all and that's when we go right into the great white throne judgment so obviously ezekiel 38 back to where we are cannot be the battle of armageddon because of the seven year cleanup afterward it cannot be after the millennium because again there's no cleanup afterward it's the great white throne so this is a third gog and magog battle the final one is at the end of the millennium the middle one is at the end of the tribulation when is this one we don't know and increasingly biblical scholars are saying that ezekiel 38 and 39 could happen at any time now think that is a sobering thought especially when you have what's going on right now around the world well let's go into some of the details walk with me through chapter 37 i want to show you starting in verse 18. the first thing we see that identifies what's going on here to identify when exactly this battle is we find that a united israel is attacked it says in ezekiel 37 18 it says in the children of your people come and speak will you not show me what you mean verse 17 join them one to another for you yourself are one stick ezekiel 37 17. what is this well if you read 15 16 and 17 you know that israel was a divided nation you remember king saul was the camp first king king david was the second king david's son solomon was the third king and he reigned over the twelve tribes of israel from dan to bear shiva but his son ria boam was a rascal solomon's son and the elders said your dad was tough on us a lot of taxes and stuff what are you going to do and he said give me three days and he came back and he says my dad's legs are going to be like my little finger i'm going to be so tough on you you're going to pay more taxes than you ever paid in your life and the people rebelled and split in two and the northern half of israel became known as israel the southern half became known as judah and that's where yehuda jews that whole concept comes from judeans the southern they were loyal to the lord in jerusalem and all and the worship of god the northern kingdom had a series of kings and they went off worshiping calves and idols and everything else and the nation in 931 bc split in half so israel has not been united as one nation since solomon's son a thousand years bc so three thousand years israel hasn't been united but look what it says in 37 from 15 down through uh 18 and 19. it says that this stick is going to be joined together and basically to a jew what that meant is the northern kingdom manas and ephraim and the southern kingdom judah are going to be united in one nation did you know when that happened in 1948 israel became a united it isn't two parts anymore they don't have northern israel and southern israel they have israel it's one nation so the first thing that that tells us when the battle of gaga magog is going to be it's going to be united israel look at ezekiel 38 8 secondly it's going to be a secure israel in ezekiel 38 and verse 8 it says after many days you will be visited in the latter years you will come into the land brought back to the word and gathered from many people on the mountains of israel who had long been desolate they were brought out of the nations and now all of them look at the end of verse 8 dwell safely a secure israel you know israel has one of the most advanced security systems they have 200 and some million arabs seeking to annihilate them and they have very few incidents there's so few that we hear about all of them did you know that that it is unbelievable the level of security they have the level of surveillance and electronic stuff they are advanced they are very secure in all their stuff well the only thing the bible says is it's going to secure israel when this comes that they're going to feel like they have the security thing look at at verse 8 of chapter 38 also another thing it says in that verse it says after many days you will be visited in the latter years you will come into the land it's also a prophetic israel it's not only secure uh israel and not only uh united israel it's a prophetic it's a future israel see when ezekiel wrote this he says you notice what verse 8 starts with after many days some people try and put 38 ezekiel 38 into the past they say well this happened in daniel's time or this happened you know in malachi's time no it says after many days when israel's back dwelling in the land secure another thing is it's going to be a hated israel look at verse 12. in verse 12 of chapter 38 it says to take plunder why are these people marching on israel why is this gog and magog thing coming it's because there's going to be a growing number of people who hate israel if you read the news 90 percent of all the united nations resolutions do you know what 90 percent of all the united nations business has involved for the last 60 years resolutions against what group of people one of the smallest nations on earth postage stamp size israel most of the united nations stuff is against israel you just add up the resolutions that have been made in the united nations it's like the whole world hates them it's a hated israel but look at at chapter 39 here's another thing that's going to be about this 39 and verse 12 of ezekiel when the gog and magog battle happens it says that this is going to be a protected israel because israel is attacked and it's not israel's atomic bombs that that wins you see they don't really have enough stuff to stop what's going to come against them if you get the russians and the iranians and all the united muslim people coming against israel they don't really have enough stuff without destroying themselves to stop it all and so what it says in 39 12 is if you look at the words it says for seven months the house of israel will be bearing them in order to cleanse the land god stops them if you read 39 and the end of 38 god supernaturally sends earthquakes and fires that's what the bible says finally it's a deceived israel because israel thinks that they do it themselves well basically i want to tell you that so much has happened so fast that just to summarize this so you can remember ezekiel 36 and 37 talk about the return of israel as a nation they were divided in 931 bc they were conquered from 586 bc for 2 600 years they've been without sovereignty in 1948 they became a sovereign nation in 1967 they got jerusalem that started a countdown because it said in zechariah 12 and verse 3 that all of the world is going to be fixated on jerusalem there are more news reporters in jerusalem than anywhere except washington dc there is more news coverage about jerusalem and the palestinian issue and the the partition wall and all of the the arab-israeli conflict more than any other issue in the world that is covered in the news why because god said in zechariah 12 and verse 3 jerusalem is going to become a heavy stone for the whole world in terms of recorded history so much has happened so fast that we need to pause and look at the big picture of what i just read to you these chapters are remarkable now because they all happened in the last 60 years you understand everything i just said about the return of israel just happened in the last 60 years and yet for 2600 years since ezekiel penned them there was no regathered nation there was no israel to be a target of an islamic coalition century after century of bible teachers looked at these two chapters and they said they're so remote they're so vague they are impossible that they will ever happen until 60 years ago and they happened and they continue to unfold before our eyes when ezekiel's bones of 36 and 37 grew into a living breathing nation 50 plus years passed and no one seemed to join into this coalition until about ten years ago and all of a sudden the drum beat of russia and iran started really wasn't last week or last month it actually started about ten years ago and god described in detail what would happen and every time god has declared what will happen it happens it happens literally just like he said so what should we have as a lesson this morning from a little history we just went number one for those of you that take notes you want to write something down here's the first thing to write down trust the god who sees israel as a nation in the last days only god could predict that israel would become a united nation 2600 years in the future when ezekiel wrote down what he wrote down he said there's going to be united both houses of israel are going to be united into one nation and they are going to be a sovereign nation in the future that's going to be attacked by all the nations of the world trust the god that saw that 2600 years in the future nobody else ever would have predicted that would happen ezekiel 36 and 37 tell us start look at chapter 36 verse 10 of ezekiel this is what god says i will multiply men upon you this is the land all the house of israel all of it and the city shall be inhabited and the ruins rebuilt the return of the jews to the holy land after centuries of exile is predicted you probably don't even know how serious the exile was when the romans when the romans got fed up with the jews in a.d seventy they not only killed a million of them in the city of jerusalem and they butchered them and they put them on crosses and thousands of people and they just it they starved them and then they crucified them the romans were so angry at the rebellion that they just they did the first holocaust they just just really were very angry in the destruction of jerusalem but they didn't stop there they banned jews from being in the land they said you may no longer live here you get out and the roman empire pushed them out of what is called palestine today the nation of israel and they pushed them to the furthest reaches of the empire now a few of them stayed but most of them left what ezekiel says is look at chapter 37 and verse 12. therefore i prophesy and say to them thus says the lord god behold my people i will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves and bring you into the land of israel what happened in 1945 the the liberation ve day you know the victory in europe day and the whole opening up of the holocaust crematoriums and everything and all the death camps and what happened is people started looking like walking skeletons this literally happened 37 12. i opened up your graves have you ever seen the picture of when they opened up those those death camps and those emaciated rag covered jews began walking they looked like walking skeletons and where did they walk to they walked were drawn by the millions to israel the one spot they could call their own and when they got there they they began to do something they began look at chapter 36 36 ezekiel 36 36 the nations which are left around you will know that i the lord i have rebuilt the ruined places do you know what those early settlers did when they left the holocaust death camps do you know what they did they went back and they moved to biblical cities they moved to bethel they moved to gibeon they moved to and they started naming these cities after what they were called in the bible god says in ezekiel 36 you're going to rebuild the ruined places you're going to rebuild the cities that are mentioned in the bible and they did it did god make the early settlers name their cities after biblical sites no they wanted to tie themselves to the bible they wanted to tie themselves to the past they in fact i love going over to israel when you go there you'll find there's people from over a hundred different countries they're all jews they're they're they have one unity they're jews but they come from a hundred different countries and when you ask the average jew on the street what are you doing here they all say i want to be here it's hard i don't know why i left my home but i just want to be here that's god pulling them back our guide that we've used for 15 years his father was the district judge in new jersey had a big big position lots of money his son was a a musician and making lots of money and he's a jew and he was at the height of his career in the late 70s and all of a sudden he just put his guitar down in new jersey and he went and moved to kibbutz picking carrots and i said ellie what do you do that for he said i don't know he said i was making so much money and having so much fun in jersey and he said i just felt compelled to come back here and you know what he did he bought a little property and he lives in in on the hillside overlooking bethlehem and he every time i visit him he takes me out and he says look at that he said that's the bible he's everywhere i look i see things from the bible he's not a christian he's not a believer he doesn't believe the bible like we do but yet he is drawn there because god drew him back look at ezekiel chapter 36 and verses 8 and 9. trust the god who said they will rebuild the ancient ruins they will come back to the land and they will cause the land to bloom like a rose look what it says in verse 8 but you o mountains of israel you shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to my people israel for they are about to come verse 9 for indeed i am for you i will turn you and you shall be tilled and sown when the romans destroyed jerusalem you know what else they did they cut down every tree they used it in the siege ramps and then when the ottomans came in after a few centuries they further the desolation of israel and they taxed every person that lived in the land and said you're paying tax for every tree you have on your property if you were charged tax for every tree on your property and you didn't have much money what would you do to your trees yeah cut them all down so israel was totally deforested for 500 years the romans started and the ottoman turks continued it to the end today if you go to israel any trees you see were planted recently because the land became so desolate it just looked like death valley when mark twain went there in the 19th century he said this is most god forsaken swamp of a and he used a lot of other coarse words it was nothing you know what god says look at 8-9 i'm going to cause you to be tilled and sown i'm going to verse 30 look at ezekiel 36 and verse 30 i will multiply the fruit of your trees and increase your fields okay in 1920 israel had no tillable arable land it was just swamps malaria and nothing today the prime supplier of fruit and flowers to europe is israel they sell billions and billions and billions of dollars of fruit and flowers why because god says i will multiply verse 30 the fruit of your trees and i will enable you to dwell and the ruins will be rebuilt verse 34 the desolate land shall be tilled verse 35 the land that was desolate will become like the garden of eden that's the modern agricultural miracle of israel did those agricultural engineers irrigation pioneers and desert scientists devote their lives to israel and its wasteland condition just to make ezekiel come true they have perfected the art of drip irrigation we in america are starting to use israeli techniques the world is finding as water supplies decrease that if israeli engineering techniques are used you can cause incredible crop yields with just drips of water do you think all those scientists figured that out because they wanted ezekiel to come true no they probably never heard of ezekiel god was doing it because he said i want you to know that i'm the god you can trust because i promise that israel would re-blossom a desolate desert land and produce abundant food fruit and foliage but look at 37 10. here's the last thing trust the god who can do this ezekiel 37 10. god says the nation of israel is going to crawl out of their graves they're going to look like skeletons they're going to be just nothing but they're going to become this 37 10 so i prophesied as he commanded to me and breath came into them and they lived and they stood up in their feet an exceeding great army let me ask you this did the atomic scientists and the military weapons engineers and the businessmen that listened to them and wanted to fulfill ezekiel do you think that that all of the scientists that that are so advanced that are israeli scientists developed a neutron bomb israeli scientists developed the atomic bomb israeli scientists are at the forefront of technology your cell phone you have in your hand was developed uh at a motorola facility by a jewish scientist most all of the nobel prizes the majority of them have been won by jewish scientists do you think that they're doing that because they read ezekiel no they were trying to protect themselves defend themselves and make a living but in the process they became the third or fourth most powerful military in the world when atomic weaponry is factored in and god was watching over his word to fulfill it i only told you all this to say this everything i told you is impossible to cause to happen humanly to take a nation that's been desolate for 2 600 years put them back into the land that you said they would go and have them rename every city like in the bible to have that desert turn into a rose and for them to become an exceeding great army in one generation is physically humanly impossible god says i'm going to do this so you would trust the god who watches over his word to perform it but let's let's go to ezekiel now chapter 36 because i would like to give you a biblical in fact i heard the wonderful announcement about the new member class coming up and if you went to the new member class one thing you would see is that calvary bible church has historically for 80 years stood for the literal grammatical interpretation of the scriptures which you may have heard called the dispensational view which is predicated on god making a clear distinction between israel the nation and the church as the body of christ and that those two are not to be confounded confused intermingled commingled blended together or replaced by one another and that that is a very clearly and dearly held point of truth but let me show you why you know because many people aren't from that background if you're from uh presbyterianism methodism lutheranism all the branches of the reformed church or catholicism you were never brought up with that because that historically since saint augustine in the fifth century has been uh you know it was said that's why luther said kill the jews there's no reason for them you know there's no future for them it's you know too bad for martin luther i mean i'm glad he got everything else right you know and only made that mistake you know most of us make a lot more mistakes than that but what ezekiel says in chapter 36 is this for all the centuries since what we are going to read starting in chapter 36 ezekiel a prophet he was an exiled prophet he actually jerusalem in 586 way back in period one you know most people don't like history and dates and all runs together but just jerusalem the temple was destroyed 586 years before christ nebuchadnezzar you remember you know the fiery furnace and the lions den daniel and all that nebuchadnezzar the babylonians are the ones that came but they came three times they came in 605 took daniel they came in 597 took ezekiel they came in 586 wiped the place out and freed jeremiah so there's three people you've heard of daniel goes in 605 ezekiel goes in 597 and jeremiah is allowed out of the prison that the israelites kept him in jerusalem in 586 so that's kind of a span of prophets but ezekiel the one in the middle in 597 was taken to babylon and he writes letters prophetic letters back to the people living in jerusalem and he wrote those letters between in fact his ministry he was born about 623 bc and he died about 560 bc which those you know that's the jewish chronology it doesn't say that in the bible but the jewish people have said that in the encyclopedia judea but what he talks about and i'm going to show you here never happened in his lifetime never in fact it's never happened for 2600 years in fact ezekiel describes israel as being a valley filled with dry bones kind of think of death valley and think of some 20 mule team you know borax thing going and the mules all die and and all the bones are bleached and just laying out in the desert and that's the picture that ezekiel sees of israel and so that's that's what we're going to look at this evening and this is what the lord says god god is looking over his word to perform it and and basically i i just when i think about this uh there was nothing for 2 600 years to make israel a target of what it talks about in zechariah rome came against jerusalem but all the nations of the world remember we just read that because there there was not a nation to come against there was no israel to be the target of a coalition of islamic nations or of all the nations of the world when ezekiel wrote in 600 bc all the way through to what we call the times the gentiles till 1948. by the way that's why 1948 was way back on those slides that's the end of the 2600 years in 1948 israel for the first time in 2600 years returned as a nation there was no israel nation from the time of ezekiel all the way through until 1948 which is only 65 years ago i mean it's amazing to think that for 2600 years the scriptures slumbered along god was watching over his word to perform it and a lot of things happen uh this this is the the basic overview that ezekiel 36 and 37 give a series i'm going to show you these and you can mark them in your bible a series of little little promises that god made for the nation of israel and if you look closely at their history none of those promises came to pass until modern times so i'll go through those with you number one the miracle of the rebirth of israel ezekiel's bones grew into a living breathing nation in 1948 and for centuries bible teachers had looked at ezekiel 36 and 37 in fact i collect and i've told you this many times and i'll never forget my oldest commentary that i have on the bible was printed in 1610. now i know there's older ones but it's the only oldest one i have and and when i read that and when i look at what people are saying when they looked at if they even bothered to look at ezekiel 36 they said this obviously can't mean israel because there was no israel in the land of israel the israelites were scattered all over i mean they were living in india they were living in in persia they were living all over europe i mean they were the bankers of italy they were the bankers of of central europe they were just everywhere except there now there was a handful there's always been a handful of them that were die hards and and they lived next to the wall and they would scrape away the dirt to try and touch it and pray near it but there was never a nation in fact mark twain went looking for him in the 1860s and 70s and he couldn't find him and he said it was a god forsaken desolate place a swamp he said and it was fit for nothing no human habitation well then as ezekiel's bones grew into a living breathing nation god continued to watch over his word what happened well basically in the late 1800s people started talking about making a place for the jews why because the russians were always having pogroms you know what pogroms are they would come in and they would drive the jews right off their farms and they would kill them if they could get near them and they would burn everything and they'd throw them somewhere else the crusaders were doing that hundreds of years for the russians they'd just like to pick on the jews and if there was ever a problem in the town you say the jews did it and then you string up a few and and confiscate all their property that's just history in fact there are many many books written on the the succession of pogroms and and many holocausts before hitler but in the late 1800s finally people started saying we ought to make a place for the jews and you know who we're saying it is the british and and others along uh those veins of thought and so what they what they did is they they allowed the turkish empire allowed jews to come in and start making little farms but they taxed them heavily and they weren't allowed to be a nation and they just basically made a lot of money off of them but then uh when hitler struck so savagely and when the world after 1945 and as the life magazine photographers and other european magazines went in and showed the pictures of those emaciated barely alive skeletal jewish people sympathy not love for god but sympathy began to rise in people's hearts and so hitler was actually uh kind of like a precipitator of of this movement and the incomprehensible carnage caused the world to be moved to do something so in 1948 the league of nations that woodrow wilson and others had so valiantly worked on morphed into 1948 the united nations and in 1948 the united nations can as a goodwill gesture at behest of the soviet union they're the ones that move for this they're the ones that that thought they were going to have a foothold in the middle east because they thought israel was communistic because they had collective farms and so many and i don't know if you know anything about the makeup of modern israel almost half of all jews living in israel today are from russia just under half in fact uh 13 of the last 14 prime ministers have been russian immigrant descendants of russian immigrant prime ministers of israel and so russia thought they had an inside in the soviet union and so they prompted in 1948 and the united nations voted and established a homeland for the jews and the nation was named israel and in that short period of time what happened in 1948 was for the first time since nebuchadnezzar's 2600 years ago for the first time in 2600 years there was actually a nation you could attack called israel before that there wasn't it was part of alexander's empire it was part of the roman empire it was part of the seleucid empire it was part of all the different muslim groups it was part of the tug of war between the turks and the british and finally it was the british mandate but then in 1948 britain moved out and the arab nation said let them move out let them make them a nation the day they become a nation and you all know this is history all of the arab league all of the the arab nations began marching and they said we're going to drive every jew into the ocean until they drowned and the combined armies of all the surrounding nations you know iraq and syria and egypt and jordan and all of them just started coming into the land the little tiny strip of israel and you all know history it was an unbelievable battle they didn't win the jews they just held off the combined armies of 100 million people and there were only three million of them which was kind of a david and goliath thing so the world you know wondered what was going to happen well 50 plus years passed and bible scholars were looking at especially chapter 38 and they said 50 years from from 1948 passed and iran never i mean iran was america's ally in the shah of iran and the whole thing until 1979 and then it got a little dicey over there but they never began to be talking about destroying israel until about the last five or six years and now if you do google news searches you can't find a week going by where iran doesn't say something about annihilate exterminate or whatever israel and that's exactly what the bible says the god who watches over his word was waiting and directing the rulers of the world to do his bidding that's why 1948 came now there's hardly any day that doesn't have some new item about israel's annihilation and other nations now i mean syria has started to say it too and hezbollah and the muslim brotherhood that is fighting right now in egypt and all of them say either they're going to do it with with their missiles and their drones or whatever or they're just going to do with their armies but why is everybody so against israel there been more resolutions in the united nations against them than any other nation on earth by a hundredfold i mean why does everybody hate israel well god has already described in detail what will happen in the future and every time what god has declared will happen always happens and by the way every time prophecy is fulfilled in the bible as in when daniel was calculating as when jeremiah was calculating as when each of the old testament prophets were calculating anything about prophecy all of them happened literally even down to christ's birth i mean they didn't know what that meant but when it happened it was literally what it said would happen and so god has a track record of literal fulfillment and so when we examine closely those involved and see what the people of this world are saying it's going to be fascinating to to look at what the lord has planned well basically the lesson tonight is we need to trust the god who wrote down in i mean and you can read these words we'll look at them tonight trust the god who told us in his word and promised israel would return now jesus told us but he told that 600 years after god had said it god the the father had said it through his spirit in the old testament god the son said it when he taught on earth they were saying the same thing that there's a future for israel so basically what is that future well in ezekiel 36 and 37 you can get down to verse 10. i'm going to read it in just a minute the god who rules the universe tells us that israel will one day be reborn as a modern country the jews will pour back into the holy land after centuries of exile the jews will rebuild ancient ruins i want you to think about that if you go to israel they're naming all the places the same thing that they are in the bible in that interesting that god said that all the ancient cities of the bible would be rebuilt and i mean they're very excited about it and doing it all the time they would make the desert bloom like god promised israel would develop a vast and powerful military it actually says that in the bible that israel would develop a powerful military by the way who was albert einstein a jew yeah how about uh all the other atomic scientists that worked alongside of him who developed some of the most powerful weapons in the world the jewish nobel prize winners they have a higher percentage of nobel prize winners per capita over all nations on earth the israelis do god just even in their own belief has remarkably blessed them and finally ezekiel 38 tells us that israel will become remarkably wealthy if you've been listening to the news isn't it fascinating that within the coastal waters that belongs according to the whole world to the nation of israel in the mediterranean just so far in the last two years they found 1.7 billion barrels of of oil just off the coast of israel nicely placed it would be nice if it was placed right off the coast of egypt they're starving down there it'd be nice it was placed right off the coast of turkey because they're buying their stuff from everybody else it'd be nice it would help italy if they had it right there because they're always in debt you know what i mean but isn't it interesting that in the whole basin of the mediterranean the first place they found unbelievably huge resources of of petroleum products is right there and it says that in the bible that that israel ezekiel 38 12 and 13 would be vastly wealthy and a lot of people attribute it to banking but it's it's not well here we go number one here's god's first promise and you look at it with me verses 10 11. god promised this the return of the jews after centuries in exile now when did they get exiled well their first exile was in the babylonian time but that only lasted 70 years and then they came back rebuilt their temple and and we know zerubbabel we know ezra we know nehemiah we know that haggai telling them that they should build god's house before they build their own houses and all that's in the old testament but they never became a nation they they were under the greeks alexander came through they were under well actually the persians first then the greeks then the romans and they were under the romans all the way until they got under the muslims but they never were not under someone but look what the lord says i will multiply men verse 10 upon you all the house of israel all of it and the cities shall be inhabited in the ruins rebuilt i will multiply on you man and beast and they shall increase and bear young and i will make you inhabited as in former times and do better for you than at your beginning now now look at what it says in verse 36 in that 11th verse it says and then you shall know that i am the lord that is repeated and repeated and repeated in fact that's one of the themes of this book it's repeated over 60 times the whole purpose of what god is doing in israel is so that israel and the world will know who the real lord is that he is not allah that he is jehovah but here's look at verse 12 same chapter because it's the same theme the return of the jews after centuries in exile was promised by god therefore prophesy i say to them thus says the lord god behold oh my people now look at this you you might have said well that was the return you know in the time of the persians letting them out or that was the return when rome led a few of them back but look what it describes this return i will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves did you know that's how the secular world looked at the death camps when they when they brought out those people that couldn't even walk out of hitler's death camps the the commentators the journalists said that it was like people coming out of the grave and that that i don't think one of them ever had read ezekiel 36 but god said this return is going to be when it looks like graves are opened and people come up from the graves and this we're talking about the 40s now and bring you into the land of israel look down at verse 21 then say to them thus says the lord god surely i will take the children of israel from among the nations wherever they have gone and will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land that has never happened until modern times when the babylonians came only 50 000 of them want to leave you look at the numbers in ezra only 50 000 of the hundreds of thousands that were living in babylon it was too good to leave babylon was that's why they're still living there they're still in iraq they're still in iran they're still jews in iran of all places they're still living there they don't want to leave 50 000 of them came back to israel but look what the lord says here it's not just from one country it says this surely i'll take the children of israel right in the middle of that verse from among the nations wherever they have gone and will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land this is describing the event of 1948 it's when the graves opened and when people started streaming in i mean they were riding rusty leaking sinking boats they would do they used to run the boats ashore aground on the shore and the people would just swim ashore they would do anything because finally there was a place in the whole world that was their land verse 22 and i will make them one nation in the land in the mountains of israel and one king shall be over them all no longer will they be two nations nor shall they ever be divided into two kingdoms again and this is speaking of them becoming a nation when did israel become a nation in 5 16 when they got out of persia no uh how about in a.d you know the time of christ 30 were they a nation no pilate roman pro-curator they were occupied when did they become a nation with the you know the byzantines no the romans still ran them how about with the moslems do you think the muslims made them no they were never the turks no they were never a nation until 1948 they never were a kingdom a sovereign nation well doesn't end there look at chapter 38 this is another part of the promise after many days you will be visited in the latter years you will come into the land of those brought back from the sword and gathered from many peoples on the mountains of israel which had long been desolate when the jews began arriving in israel pre-world war ii the north was malaria ridden it was so infested with swamps and with all kinds of diseases that the many of those early returnees died draining the swamps trying to make this land come back it was completely desolate by the way the reason that israel was desolate was the turks had a great idea you know they were ruling from turkey they controlled israel and they said we're going to make taxes simple we're just going to tax you for every tree you have on your property every year you know five bucks or whatever it was for every tree on your property well if you lived in israel and you knew that are in this land that that the turks ran that is now modern israel if you lived there knew they were going to only tax you on trees what would you do and they did they cut them all down and that was the the greatest blight to and we're talking about from 1517 when the turks instituted that all the way through 1917 during those 400 years israel began to look like a wasteland the the mountains just there was no forestation and the it just washed all the top soil off in fact when you go to israel today it looks just like the moon i mean it's it's hardly it's just rock no topsail it's just rock except in the valleys and basically which had long been desolate see when when jesus was walking around israel it seems like everywhere he walked something was growing he was as he was talking he was pulling off grain and eating it and his disciples were getting in trouble and everything is agricultural it wasn't like that for centuries it just became more and more desolate and then it says look at the end of that they will be brought out of the nations and now all of them dwell safely did the jews dwell safely under the persians no they murdered him whenever they wanted to the persians did did the turks were they nice no they murdered him too were the crusaders very nice no they killed any jew they could find in jerusalem when the crusaders came through nice folks you know just go through the history but look now all of them dwell in safety it's very interesting to think about and there's one more jeremiah if you want to turn back jeremiah 31 which is talking about the new covenant that's what we were celebrating this morning a little shocker is that god made the new covenant with israel and were allowed in instead of it being replacement it's us the bible says true theology says in romans 9 10 11 that israel is the root and the trunk and we christ church are grafted into israel read romans 9 10 11. it's not the church is the trunk and israel is this little branch we're going to clip it off israel is the root that the church has grafted into and what's interesting is the new covenant in chapter 31 was given to to israel and christ instituted for his church but look what it says in verse 7 thus says the lord sing with gladness for jacob shout among the chief nations proclaim give praise and say oh lord save your people the remnant of israel look at verse 8. behold i will bring them from the north country and gather them from the ends of the earth did you know that just in the 80s one million russians migrated from russia to israel in the 80s one million we take tours over there every year i mean you couldn't go without running into a russian i mean they were doing their little you know how they they do that little dance with you know crouched down and kicking out their feet and they're playing their violins and they all are russians look what this says behold i will bring them from the north country but not just the north country verse 8 says and gather them from the ends of the earth israel today has citizens from 100 other countries of the 180 on the planet they have people from more than half of every country in the world is there any other place like that there's only six million of them and yet they represent more than half of all the countries now what does the bible say i will gather them from the ends of the earth is there any other i mean yeah there's a lot of people living in new york but they're there just to make money you ask people like our guide we always ask our guide in israel why did you come here and he says i don't know i just wanted to he said i left a high-paying job to pick carrots and a kibbutz he said i left the security and comforts of of the new york city area to live in a commune and work all day long and and to to break my back but i said why did you come he says because i felt inside that i wanted he's jewish it's right here i will bring them look what verse 8 says from the north country i'm going to gather them from the ends of the earth among the blind and the lame the woman with child the one who labors with child great throngs shall return there they shall come with weeping you got to see how these planes land in tel aviv they come they're bringing them even today i mean i get a little note every time new plane you know and i because i get the jewish newspapers and they show a picture and the people come streaming down and they just fall down at the bottom of the gangway coming off the plane and they kiss the tarmac i mean why would you do that because they they they come with weeping and the supplications they can't believe they're there i will lead them i will cause them to walk by the rivers of water in a straight way which they won't stumble i am the father to israel ephraim is my firstborn verse 10. hear the word of the lord o nations and declare in the far isles and far off he who scattered israel will gather him and keep him as a shepherd does his flock what happened since 1948 i know israel's cocky and i know israel thinks that you know they've invented everything and they're best fighters in the world but if you look i remember when billy graham was preaching about in the old days the 1956 war in israel and the 1967 war did you know that that israel was was caught off guard in 1973 almost got defeated by the the muslim forces coming but in every war 48 56 67 73 every one of those four great wars israel even commentators would say there's something supernatural about this that that they were able to defeat the combined armies of 100 million people and there's only three million to start with are actually two and then there's three and then there's four and there's five now there's six million but why is it because he look at verse 10 who scattered israel will gather them back now this isn't by the way i'm not reading from hal lindsey or jack van impe or you know whoever john hagee this is god talking and he says i am going to bring israel back i am going to shepherd them okay jesus also promised look at matthew 24 and i want you to see this is a second passage of jesus promise and we'll get back to ezekiel but i want you to see christ's orientation and and it really helps to see ezekiel in light of this the bottom line is jesus promised the rebirth of a nation called israel now of course he promised it because he's one that inspired the old testament peter says that all the old testament prophets including ezekiel and jeremiah spoke by the spirit of christ that was in them so literally you can say that that the spirit of christ was speaking in the old testament that's what the bible says but look what jesus says in the new testament the bottom line is jesus told us that when he returns there will already have been a return of the wandering jews back to their homeland jesus said that in matthew 24. that jumps out clearly when you notice the orientation of christ's words in verses 15 and 16. and this is what jesus said he says when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by daniel the prophet we've already looked at that that's in chapter nine he's talking by no it's not just in chapter nine it's also in eleven and other spots but clearly in nine and jesus said you're gonna know it's the end when the jews are living back in their homeland when they have built a temple now that's what gets interesting about this how on earth with tens of thousands of missiles pointed at israel from every muslim nation how are they going to lift a finger up on the dome of the rock area something has to happen to offset the the kind of trigger that's set right now well jesus says this standing in the holy place that's the the hit ron that the temple the place uh that was very clear i mean everybody that read this in the first century knew he was talking about the temple in jerusalem whoever reads let him understand verse 16 then let those who are in judea flee them out you know what the lord said he says yes the romans are going to come they're going to butcher everybody they're going to put a trench around they're going to siege and they're going to destroy jerusalem but in the future they're going to come back they're going to live there they're going to build their temple they're going to inhabit biblical judea and he says that's going to be the sign of the and you know we've already covered this of the antichrist okay back to ezekiel 36 or we'll never get done and i know you want to go home because it's labor day and you want to celebrate um ezekiel 36 36 promise number two number one is they would return to their homeland number two god says they would rebuild they wouldn't just come back they would rebuild the ancient ruins and it says this then the nations which are left all around you shall know that i am the lord have rebuilt the ruined places and planted what was desolate and and what i think uh is amazing is do you think that the settlers the early settlers who named their cities after the biblical sites that they were building on were doing that because it said they were supposed to in ezekiel do you think that the people that came to to you know all of the cities like bet el which is bethel or caesarea which is caesarea or any of the other little towns that have been shaloa which is shiloh do you think that they said um ezekiel 36 says we got to rebuild the ruined places these are in obscure places and they search for them till they find where shiloh was where bethel was where and they just they find where it was in the bible times and they plant what you hear on the news a settlement there why are they doing that because god says they are doing it because look at the end of verse 36 i the lord have spoken it and i will do it why why is the whole world so upset that israel is building these little towns in the land that is theirs that they conquered in battle i mean uh do you think that we're gonna give back you know the what we paid all those 50 000 lives for in korea that is now south korea we're going to give it back to china or korea i mean it's fair and square they want it we're defending it but israel won it nobody wants to defend it take it away from them don't build your cities why is everyone bothered by that because god says i'm the one that's behind the settlement building stuff i'm the one that wants the towns from the bible rebuilt but it doesn't stop there it's very interesting third promise god said the re-blossoming of desolate desert lands to produce abundant food in chapter 36 look at verses 8 9 but you owe mountains of israel you shall shoot forth your branches you will yield your fruit to my people israel for they are about to come for indeed i am for you god said i'm for you israel even though all the other nations in the world aren't i'm for you i will turn you you will be tilled and sown and verse 30 continues i will multiply the fruit of your trees now israel today supplies billions of dollars of fresh fruit and flowers to europe and the arab world they have to remark the boxes because none of the arabs will buy it from israel but if they put some other word on there they'll buy their apples isn't that funny and and what is amazing is the land of israel side by side where the jewish farmers are farming it is it looks like florida's old citrus groves before they all died from whatever bug got them and it looks like california used to look before they knocked all the trees down and built houses over it that's what israel looks like today you know what's interesting you can have a muslim farmer and you can have a jewish farmer and the jewish farmer with its drip irrigation in the middle of the desert it looks just like the garden of eden and the poor muslim farmer's farm looks just like it used to look just like nothing but then the muslim farmer comes the jewish pharmacist could you show me how to do that and can you believe it they go yeah i'll sell it to you and they sell them and all of a sudden the muslim farm using the jewish technology begins to just beautifully produce billions of dollars of fruit did those agricultural engineers those irrigation pioneers those desert scientists devote their lives to israel turning it from a wasteland condition to make it ezekiel 36 89 30. do you think that all those drip technology engineers did it because they said verse 9 you will be tilled verse 30 i'm going to increase the fruit of your trees that's why i'm doing it no it's because god promised and he causes it well real quickly look at chapter 37 of ezekiel just some more here's a fourth promise this one's interesting god said i'm going to create in israel an exceedingly great army now i keep mentioning you know there are 7 billion people in the world israel just hit seven million that means one out of every thousand people live there on the whole planet earth but look what it says in ezekiel 37 god says so i prophes so i prophesied as he commanded me ezekiel is the eye god is the he so ezekiel prophesied as god commanded him and breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet an exceeding great army now it's very interesting the word that's used there and i ask you this did the atomic scientists and the military weapon engineers that have devised nuclear weapons the neutron bomb and the finest and only 99 accurate anti-missile defense system in the world which you read about the news every day called iron dome i mean even us americans we don't have that i mean we have our arrow thing but lob a few motor mortars that are soldiers and we won't blow them up we can't yet we're trying to buy the technology from israel but those little six million people god for some reason has given them such genius do you know what it's like to get a projectile coming that you didn't know when it was going to come and you track it and you triangulate it and you find out whether it's going to hit a field with plants or if it's going to hit a house with children and you do that in less than 10 seconds and in the meantime you shoot something to meet it and destroy it before it hurts anything amazing the technology they have no they weren't doing it because ezekiel said it those scientists were just trying to protect themselves defend themselves and make a living but in the process israel has become the third or the fourth most powerful military in the world how many nations have atomic weapons submarines thankfully not very many us russia france england israel now recently india you know bought a soviet one china bought a soviet one and but who who has the who can do it on their own they're an exceeding great army because god is watching over them well before we go and we'll pick up here next week we need to trust the god who describes russia as the leader of the anti-israeli coalition that's described in ezekiel 38 and 39 look at 38 8 after many days you will be visited and this isn't a good visit in the latter years you will come into the land of those brought back from the sword this is israel brought back from the sword of all the pogroms all over the world and gathered for many people on the mountains of israel which had long been desolate we're talking about the same thing and we're brought out of the nations and now all of them dwell safely so here's israel back in the nation and look what happens 38 1-6 now the word of the lord came to me saying son of man set your face against gog now gog is kind of like pharaoh pharaoh is not his name if you went with joseph and says i'm looking for pharaoh you're you're talking about a title gog is a title it's not a person their name is gog it's it's a person that is a title like pharaoh they're like the president you know our president's name is not president it you know it's barack obama it's not president you can call him president but that's not his name it's a title that's what gog is but he's of the land of magog and he is the prince or the ruler of rash and meshech and tubal prophesy against him and say verse 3 that says the lord god i'm against you og the prince of rosh meshech and tubal i will turn you around i will put hooks in your jaws i will lead you out in your arm and your horses and your horsemen all splendidly clothed the great company with bucklers and shield all of them handling swords verse five persia ethiopia and libya those three nations never contemporaneously ever were armed and attacking israel any time persia did the ethiopians came up with a million man army but now while kurt persia was in existence you understand that that this that this is a historic event in libya with them and all their shield and helmets and not just them but gomer and his troops in the house of togarmah in the far north and his troops and many people with you we'll pick up there next time because when you see and wait to see and it's going to be interesting when you see a map and you overlay it with herodotus the father of history he was contemporary with ezra he lived 500 years before christ he names all these places that are named here because ezekiel was living in the same time period and herodotus a greek historian tells us where all these gomer and meshech are and when you look at that on the map you know what it looks like it looks like the new york times because exactly the nations today that are rattling their sabers and saying destroy israel for the first time in history every one of them are exactly lined up with what ezekiel 38 says jerusalem is god's timer for the end of the world and if you understand the fight for jerusalem you understand the god who made all these promises and is causing his word to come to pass trust the god who promised that israel would return as a nation and you know uh we we went through all of that last time ezekiel 36 and 37 talks about the god who rules the universe and tells us israel one day be reborn as a modern country that the jews would pour back into the holy land after centuries of exile which they have but the problem is that was written 600 bc and it didn't happen until modern times so trust that god but secondly if you trust him and if you believe he's done all that which i do then then he wrote two more chapters that even get more fascinating because he says after you see a group of people coming to a desolate land making a bloom like a rose living in unbelief like dry bones that come together but they don't have life in them yet but they're just collected together like individual pieces brought from over a hundred countries if that happens and it has then what 38-39 says is going to happen will also happen trust the god who describes what from a map looks like russia as a leader of an anti-israel coalition described in ezekiel 38 and 39 so the question we have is who exactly is coming against israel well if you put ezekiel 38 and 39 on a map there is uh one map you would see that it's a coalition made up of the coastal areas of northern and eastern africa which are quite dominantly of one religious persuasion and also the the central eurasian hinge which uh sadly lost their bid for the olympics even though they were working really hard on it and in buenos aires last week turkey isn't going to get it but that's a real muslim nation and then from the north and also sweeping in from the east all and that's what ezekiel talks about now it's interesting if you put words on a map and especially a lot of people don't realize that if you really believe the bible and i do genesis chapter 10 is kind of the index for the it's called the table of nations and what's interesting is if no matter what your view of anything is uh you know the people that believe you know that humanity's been around half a million years but god indicates it hasn't been what's interesting is all the modern nations especially of europe all in their national archives go back to genesis 10. those names aren't just in the bible those 70 people groups that genesis 10 describes and and you see a lot of them here these names that god is using are are tran they just they just completely transcend all the geography changes of of thousands of years of history there where the original people groups went out after the flood and god says where those people landed those are the areas i'm talking about see he gave us something that wouldn't change we know where they overspread the earth and where they went to and that's recorded in history so basically you can see on the map the red areas uh the green areas the purple persia the gray areas the yellow uh kush and then put is the blue so so basically as i'm reading ezekiel with you and you can follow along you'll see these places showing up that that non-christian people like herodotus and like josephus and like uh even modern day in fact i when i was speaking at an institute in in russia they dropped us off the kremlin said you can spend some time you know get some history and so we went around the kremlin of course i went right to the museum the russian museum do you know what the first exhibit is in the russian museum in the kremlin in modern day russia today the scythians they're proud that they're scythians and the scythians are biblically identifiable people groups in this man and they're from the area that is mentioned so let's go to ezekiel 38 1-6 who's coming against israel here's what it says now the word of the lord came to me saying son of man and and that's ezekiel remember there were three three groupings that went in 605 and 597 and 586 with the babylonians bc and ezekiel went in the middle daniel in 605 ezekiel went 597 and then the rest of the captives that weren't decimated and martyred and armenian massacred were taken at 586. so ezekiel is there and he's in babylon and the lord is giving him these prophecies and he's saying son of man ezekiel set your face against god he's thinking remember peter tells us the the biblical prophets most often didn't know what they were writing about they just did what they were told searching what or what manner of time the spirit of christ which was in them signified when he testified beforehand the coming of christ and the glory should follow peter says these prophets and so ezekiel is writing along he says against gog against the land of magog hmm the prince of rosh meshech oh oh genesis tubal oh okay and prophesy against him and say verse 3 thus says the lord god behold i'm against you og prince of rosh meshech and tubal ezekiel is sinking you should be against the babylonians you know what i mean i mean he did have a mind and okay but you're against them you know and because he's watching the the dissolution of his nation and god is prophesying against people that aren't even in babylon but it's okay it's something he was supposed to do verse four i will turn you around i will put hooks in your jaws i will lead you out with all your army and horses and horsemen all splendidly clothed a great company with bucklers and shields all of them handling swords persia that's close ethiopia that has nothing to do with our problems that zika would have said libya where is that you know what i mean i mean this was a challenge for the prophets are with them all of them with shields and helmet gomer and all of its troops the house of togarmah from the far north and all of its troops many people are with you now if you and and i didn't have time again uh to fix these but again you can see this basic group from the table of nations uh rash you know basically what what would be the baltic area magog is the area uh between the the caspian around the caspian sea and and north of persia and you see persia it's kind of the pink one there cush is the turquoise one down below i mean there's really no dispute about the majority of these cush has always been down there it's it's the the people between the second and the third cataract of the niles nile river i mean it's very clear historically put i mean did you know that that the libyans were called the puttites look it up in the i mean they were called that for a long time that's one of the sons of noah and and or one of the grandsons of noah i mean this is all very biblical meshech he's over there somewhere north of turkey you know over there and then something to do with the edges of turkey but turkey's kind in the center because this is where they went out from the tower of babel after the flood and overspread the earth and so basically that map would show you where rash and magog and persia just generally and meshech and put and kush are all from now if you want to look at it a different way you know with more modern boundaries you'd see the northern africa libya coming and below it's interesting who's left out in all these things egypt is never mentioned as being a an aggressor yet they've been in every one of the four wars egypt has 48 56 67 73. they've but now in the future war they're not it's very interesting and of course this the scythians the the russians who were from the steps of russia you see them north of the black sea and and also the caspian sea um another way to put it uh would be here you know just the the idea of the ethiopian the south and and uh libya from the the far west and and persia from the far east and then the northern ones turkey and up into the steps of russia and you know i mean about every bible commentator has her own favorite map but it doesn't end there the bible keep going in chapter 38 and and let me show you what else the lord says he says who's coming against israel and by the way i'll just read to you you can look all this up uh if you look in between the encyclopedia britannica uh usher you know the james usher the chronology guy they'll tell you gog is is a title like pharaoh or czar magog according to josephus the mega gogites uh the greeks said were the scythians i mean that's go back there the the magogites are the scythians the green part and going up above them where they came down so that clearly i mean that one is about the clearest that that they are the uh what we would call the the russians and and also the satellite states of russia but keep going if i can keep going sometimes it doesn't like me to go fast there we go god declares that this whole group the meshech who that's the sixth son of japheth now according to herodotus they were dwelling in phrygia and anatolia that's modern turkey but herodotus also says some of them were above the black sea see we're going upward seed they they weren't content to stay down there near where they settled they were always kind of pushing out like america out in the frontier and where they pushed is up into that beautiful the steps you know the the and they were they were horsemen and they loved to ride their horses up there and there are too many mountains and valleys in turkey so they went up there toward russia and then tubal by the way we have a two-balls and a two-ball river and by the way that's all in russia uh today which is interesting uh persia that's that's uh no trouble it was iran was called persia till 1935 kush uh that's the the modern black african peoples between the second and third cataract that's clearly sudan and ethiopia put as i said as modern libya used to be called they used to be called the puttites but it would include the algerians the tunisians the moroccans the mauritanians north africa gomer is challenging it could be turkey it also is a term for germany and austria and i've thought about that because the more you look at the birth rates modern western europe is declining that zero population growth thing is working they do have zero population factor going the wrong way and the immigrants are coming and most of them are muslims and it's interesting that western europe if the lord tarries we won't even have a question about this gomer is germany because they're all becoming muslim through conversion and population growth beth tagarma is armenia that's the turkic speaking peoples of central asia i mean those are the stans you know kazakh and all those other stands sheba and didan are the grandsons of abraham in genesis 25 2 by his third wife katura remember he was pretty active fella he he raised a lot of arabic peoples and shiba and didan would be they're not from ishmael they're a separate line they may be the classic arabic dwellers they're seen as as living out in what we would call the saudi arabia that whole area that is that is so much un happy about israel tarshish was the grandson of japheth he's the second son of javan uh he's the father of greece and how greece fits into this again you know it's it's very much wondering whether it's where the people first migrated or where they went but basically god says in ezekiel 38 5 trust him he declares the destruction of this entire russian iranian syrian lebanese whatever it is islamic military force it comes like a storm against israel and look what it says in verse five persia ethiopian libya are with them verse 18 it will come to pass at the same time when gog comes against the land of israel says the lord my god that my fury will show in my face my jealousy verse 19 the fire of my wrath i have spoken surely in that day there will be a great earthquake in the land of israel verse 20. so the fish of the sea the birds of heaven the beasts of the field all creeping things on the earth all men who are on the face earth shall shake at my presence and on and on he goes and basically verse 22 says i bring him to judgment with pestilence bloodshed i'll reign down on him and his troops many people are with him flooding rain great hailstones fire and brimstone basically what the lord is saying there is i'm watching over my people i'm going to protect him and it's in the future because those people never have marched against israel well basically the details of ezekiel 39 are if you look at verses 9 and 10 whatever this event is the weaponry from it is burned for seven years now it's interesting even and who am i to dispute with him but my very dear friend uh who wrote my favorite study bible and who i worked for says this is this is revelation 20. this is the millennium i think wow that's interesting what are they burning stuff weapons for for seven years when they don't even have weapons when they've beaten their swords into plowshares but you know he has great reasons for it but whatever it is for seven years they're burning it what's interesting that's the usable life of atomic weaponry you know the half-life and everything you know you can only store those things so long that's why america we spend so many billions you always have to take those little nuclear warheads off and redo them they aren't good for they don't have a long shelf life and it's interesting that uh atomic material is very usable what's also interesting is look at verses 11 through 16 i'm not going to take a long time on it because we don't have more than a minute and eight seconds but basically i'll say this that they are doing what we would call cleanup after a disaster that has radioactive and chemical warfare implications because they're taking them downwind if you read 11 to 16 the area described as downwind east of the dead sea it sounds like a quarantine like a hazardous cleanup like a radioactive contamination procedure so back to the beginning i mean it this could be before the tribulation this could be in the tribulation this could be at the end of millennium doesn't matter it's going to happen see that's what we don't fight and and dispute but what jesus said is this is all going to happen what are you asking god to do jesus says i collect your prayers we talked about this this morning you know what we should do we should pray jesus says i multiply mark 12. you ought to read it jesus measures our gifts not by how much we give by how much it costs us jesus says i will multiply your sacrificial gifts i will make them a hundred fold that's ten thousand percent give jesus says i count the souls you lead to me i mean keith can't even talk about evangelism without tearing up when's the last time you gave a verbal witness of jesus christ to someone you say well we have missionaries and evangelists for that when's the last time we did it jesus said all believers are supposed to go into all the world we're all supposed to share and and if keith's over in england he's not going to get your neighbors in portage you understand why i mean we're all supposed to be doing this and jesus says i count in fact daniel 12 3 says the more people you lead the lord the more you'll shine forever and paul said the only thing i'm looking forward to taking to heaven with me are the people i lead to christ so we should win people we should try we should give out a track we should pray jesus said i remember humble service that nobody knows about that that is that is the least and the most faceless where no one recognition serve and jesus said i love believers that do outreach go so prophecy should encourage us to love follow and serve god now see that's the effect the net effect that prophecy had on the early church was they weren't all selling everything sitting on mountain tops and counting down they were trying to lead every person they could meet and point them to christ they understood you

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Keywords: Bible, God, Jesus, Christian, teaching, biblical, teach, sermon, trinity, church, lesson, traditional, truth, true, divine, theology, freedom, guilt, testament, pure, interpret, spirit, holy, John, Barnett, christ, father, heaven, hell, doctrine, doctrinal, sinful, forgive, forgiveness, history, teachings, chapters, verses, discover, the book, ministries, dtbm, Dr. Barnett, controversial, repent, helpful, sin, the, book, dr, john, doctor, barnett, training, videos, series, resources, savior, god, jesus, holy land, pilgrimage, spiritual renewal

Id: _Amjq4rcT0s

Length: 141min 19sec (8479 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021