Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003
Part 6: New Truths of the Kingdom Aristocracy
Chapter 1: The Heavenly Origin of the Church
Lesson 157 – Ascension and Session of Christ (continued), Review Faith-Rest Drill
11 Nov 2000
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org
Turn to Romans 8:28 again; we’ve gone over it a number of times so that you’ll be familiar with it just by sheer repetition. This is one of those basic promises of the Word of God, “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” You may have a translation that differs slightly because there’s a little textual difference, but it’s another example of textual differences don’t make doctrinal differences.
We’ve been going over the faith-rest approach; we said it consists of three steps and these can be done in a matter of minutes, seconds, or sometimes it takes hours because you’ll get hit with a problem that you have to struggle a little bit to walk by faith. But the steps are always the same. The first step is you grab hold of a promise in the Word of God; the second step you prayerfully examine it, and the third step is that you get to the point where you can honestly believe it. We have to be honest, sometimes we don’t get to step three right away. We say we can, but do we really believe it.
Romans 8:28 is a good illustration of why sometimes it’s hard to do to get to step three. What we’ve been emphasizing is that we’ve kind of added an aspect to this second step, which I’m going to call “closure,” because I want to illustrate how that process works. Let’s say we have a situation, you remember, maybe driving down the street, at your desk, out walking, whatever, and you remember Romans 8:28, “All work together for good,” or “God causes all things to work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose.” You remember that and then this situation that’s in your life, you begin to try to enclose that situation, that problem, that trouble, and encompass it inside the promise, so that the promise has larger dimension than the problem is, so it encompasses it. We went through some of this last time.
I want to take what we did last week and show how you can perform this closure on the situation. Clearly one of the prominent features of Romans 8:28 is the first part, that “all things work together for good,” qualified by a subset of people, those that believe in Jesus Christ. The question is, and where this problem gets difficult to trust, honestly trust, is when you have a bad thing happen. It could be a personal crisis, it could be a crisis in someone else’s life, but it’s something that challenges your ability to say that this nasty thing, this mess, is working together for good. It gets back to the fact that what you’re grappling with once again is the old evil problem. This thing comes up to haunt us, as it were, we’re all creatures in the fallen world; which view are we believing? The flesh is programmed by everything in the world to believe the second view, not the first view. The second view is that good and evil are inseparable forever, and they never have been separated, never are going to be separated, they aren’t separated now and the universe is not inherently good, it’s just a mix of good and evil.
Whereas in the biblical worldview, God originally created all things good. God Himself, never was a time, never will be a time when there’s any evil or injustice with God, that’s His character. He is the same yesterday, today and forever, He never changes. So that’s stable. In the creation we have a point of the fall; we also have a point of the judgment when good and evil are to be separated. That’s the big picture, but now when it comes to applying a promise in an actual situation, we’re trying to get to the point where we trust that there is a plan and that it is good, and that it is working in this circumstance, whatever the circumstance is.
Again going back to the Creator/creature distinction; we bring the Creator/creature distinction into all this. This is key to the whole thing, that’s the essence of the biblical view over against all pagan views. We have the Creator, we have the creature, and we have this line because there are two levels to reality. There is His level and there is our level, and you can’t mix them. In the mentality of the Spirit, when we do this the right way, and what we’re trying to get at personally is where we can say that there is a rational and ethical justification for whatever this thing is.
What do we mean by rational and ethical? Let me explain something. Rational means that it is logical and that it makes sense and can be thought through. That’s what we mean by rational justification; it’s not a pretend or make-believe, or some chaotic role of the dice. It is rational, can be thought through, discussed, a rational and ethical, meaning that it is right and true and just. The battle always is, you can think of Job, the classic illustration, Job’s struggle is is he or is he not going to trust that there is a rational and ethical justification for this crisis or this series of crises that he’s coping with. The argument is yes there is, but, and this is the big but, that rational and ethical justification is at the Creator’s level, and we may or may not be brought into it. Sometimes we can glimpse a lot of it, sometimes we can’t glimpse any of it, and the issue always is does He know what He’s doing, and is He a good God? That’s the whole point here, does He know what He’s doing and is He a good God?
Satan tried to attack Adam and Eve on that point, right from the very start of history—God is a bad mean God, and if God was a good God He’d let you do anything your heart desired and He’s after you so He set some bounds and limits, bad God. It’s always the character of God. So the issue is, and we quoted Abraham in Genesis 18:25, “the Judge of all the earth shall do right.” That’s a good Bible verse. That’s a good promise to remember because it makes sense, it’s clear, it’s easy to remember and you find yourself reverting back to that, “the Judge of all the earth shall do right.” Abraham had to cope with that when he was doing intercessory prayer over Sodom and Gomorrah. God, will you save it, Lot’s there, his family is there, are you going to save the city? Finally after all the bargaining, Abraham comes to a resolution where he can trust a promise of Scripture. But he comes to that, probably through a lot of thought and prayer, he finally gets to the point where he can say “the Judge of all the earth shall do right.”
That’s where it is, that’s the anchor and that’s where the battle is. To get to that point the Bible gives us help. We have on the graph two areas where you’ve got a lot of help in Scripture. One is at the cross itself, because one of the arguments against Christianity and one of the satanic temptations is to say God is sovereign, everybody agrees, oh yeah, God is sovereign, He can do anything, omnipotent? Yeah. Does He love you? If He is sovereign, and He is omnipotent, and this mess is happening, how can you say God is a God of love? Don’t you have, in other words, a conflict internal to your whole belief system that there’s a conflict going on here between God’s sovereignty and His omnipotence on one hand and His love on the other? It’s a classic place where non-Christians attack with vehemence our position, because they allege that there’s a conflict between the attributes that the Bible claims God has. Inherently in the Scripture, faced with this tragedy or this circumstance that’s bugging you, you’re thrust against this temptation to believe there’s a conflict going on.
One partial answer to that is look at the cross of Christ because in the cross God resolved an apparent conflict to Old Testament saints. Old Testament saints could not resolve the issue of justice and grace. They knew on the one hand that their sins couldn’t be forgiven without blood atonement; they knew on the other hand “God be gracious to me,” you’ve got to be gracious to me because no man can stand in your sight. They had no real answer as to how those two attributes come into play. That’s the trouble with every non-Christian religion, whether it’s Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhism, Hinduism, whatever, they all suffer right here because they can’t get forgiveness and justice together.
Islam always makes Allah forgive you if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, but that’s just an arbitrary forgiveness, what’s the basis that Allah can do that? Well, he just does it. Why does he do it, how can you claim that Allah is holy and righteous and uncompromising his justice if you’re going to argue that without blood atonement he forgives you. It’s no problem, just a bloodless thing, nobody pays anything, no sacrifice, nothing. But my good works … no, suppose you have zero good works, suppose you have a million good works, the issue is over here what about the violations to Allah’s holiness?
In the Old Testament, how did the Old Testament saints have to cope with life? They had to trust that the attribute of God’s justice and the attribute of His love manifested in grace somehow worked together, and they didn’t know how. But this side of the cross as New Testament saints we can say, yeah, with Paul, “He can be just and the justifier.” He can be just, that is His attribute of justice remains unthreatened, and he can justify, that is He can be gracious to us and give us righteousness and forgiveness. We know that now because of the cross.
So why does this help us in a problem up here? Because it shows us that once there was an apparent conflict and God resolved it in an amazing way. Therefore, do we suppose that maybe someday we’ll see how those things play together in this particular tragedy that we’re talking about? Yeah, because the precedent for diminishing these apparent contradictions has already been worked out in one vast area by the cross of Christ. Since the precedent has been set over here, we can trust it over here. That’s the way our God works. It’s a battle.
Then the Bible, as we said, there are at least nine rationales as to why a particular tragedy happens. People always say why does this happen? We gave four reasons why tragedy happens that are directly the consequence of human actions: the fall is one, genetic defects, death, physical, the mess in the environment, all of that was the result of a human choice. Don’t blame God; it was the consequence of the human choice. Well God shouldn’t have put Adam there and set it up like that. Why not? He gave us responsibility. Everybody wants to flee responsibility, it’s always somebody else’s fault, not mine. The four rationales that are direct consequence rationales mean number one, there was a fall, Genesis 2, God said in the day that you eat you’re going to die. Does God mean what He says or not? We’re not going to have a recount to go over the fall again because somebody screwed up and couldn’t understand what the word meant.
The second thing is “whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap,” Galatians 6:7. So we have disobedience leads to suffering, self-induced misery explains a lot of suffering … a lot of suffering. Then we came upon the fact that you can have self-induced misery by association with others that are involved and you’re kind of corporately adhering to them, etc. so there’s number three which is a second version of number two.
Then there’s the fourth rationale, why there is hell. Why is there hell? Why do people wind up in hell? The consequence of a decision, a decision to say that I don’t need a substitutionary blood atonement, I don’t need Jesus Christ, I don’t need God’s grace. Why am I in hell? Because I made a decision. Did God twist my arm to make that decision? No He didn’t, it’s a decision that I have made. Those are four parts of the positive rationale.
We had five reasons why tragedies happen and they cannot be directly traced to anything you do. This blows people away to even think this way because we are so groomed, like the disciples, Lord, did this man sin that he was born blind? In our rationale we want to somehow say this tragedy is due to that cause and there’s a connection here between them. But the Bible says there are at least five reasons why tragedies occur that are not related directly to something in the immediate environment.
One of those is because God is trying to wake somebody up to believe in Jesus Christ. That’s the evangelistic call. Paul was an example of that. Did he suffer on the Damascus road? Yeah. Why? Because God was calling him. Did people in the Old Testament suffer because God had to get their attention? Yeah, it’s the old 2 × 4 on the side of the head to get attention. That’s one reason why and it’s not related to an immediate disobedience, it’s just we’re fat, dumb and happy non-Christian’s waltzing along and God says time to wake up, and wham. That’s one of five reasons.
There’s a second reason why, Psalm 119:71 which says “It is good that I’ve been afflicted that I might learn Thy statutes.” The idea there is that God will bring suffering and trials to grow us. It’s not related to some sin that we’ve done, it’s not because you disobeyed yesterday at 3:00 o’clock and today you’re clobbered. It isn’t that simple. It may just be that that is to nudge further spiritual growth, and it’s a loving act, to train.
A third reason, the third, fourth and fifth are all witnessing reasons; think of to whom we witness or to whom this can be a demonstration. Point three would be a witness to non-Christians and we gave 1 Timothy 1:16, and example to them who will believe in the future. So a non-Christian may be looking at you in the middle of a suffering situation and you may not even realize that they’re looking at you. But they are, they’re trying to observe what you are made out of, and when the see the spiritual adherence to Scripture, the manifestation of the life of Christ, then they’re attracted to Christ and the gospel. So the third reason a witness to a non-Christian.
A fourth reason is a witness to other believers to encourage them. That’s 2 Corinthians 1; comfort others with the comfort wherewith you have been comforted. Because you’ve gone through a tragedy, you’ve through life, you’ve got knocked in the side of the head and here’s this other Christian in a mess and you can kind of come along side of them in a way that nobody else can. Somebody else can’t do what you can do because God had you go down this path, suffering this, suffering that, learning this, learning that, claiming this promise, claiming that promise, falling down, picking yourself up, confessing sin, moving on, going through all that. And do you know what? It fits what’s going on over here. That’s the fourth of the disconnected reasons as a witness to other believers or as a help to other believers.
The most mysterious one is Ephesians 3:10 which we’ll get into more as we delve further into the Church Age and that is the manifold wisdom of God is being learned by angelic observers to us. In some way they are standing by, invisible, watching us and learning by watching us and the Lord work with us about the manifold wisdom of God. So there’s nine rationales here as to why that suffering may be rationally and ethically justifiable. These are all the tools that are available in the text of Scripture. You don’t need a book on psychotherapy; you don’t need a course in psychiatry; you don’t need all the gobbledy-gook that goes on in the name of counseling. All we really need is this fundamental tool of the faith-rest approach and working through this and you get better at it as you go along, until the Lord gives you a bigger trial. That’s the nice way of doing it.
Now let’s look what a mess it is if you try not to do it that way. Let’s look at the mentality of the flesh. Here’s an example of what I want to introduce tonight. Here’s an example of closure. What I’m going to do is show you why the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. Up to now we’ve said we have a promise and the battle is to trust this promise. The problem is that as we are battling this we can be tempted to look off, wandering if there’s another possible approach - what does the world have to offer here? It can be peripherally in our vision and as long as it’s peripherally in our vision we’re not focused. That’s why I’ve added this, this closes off that kind of stuff, because the best way of coping with that if that’s the problem is to turn right around and say okay, what does the world system have to offer? Let’s confront it eyeball to eyeball. You want to tempt me, okay, what have you got to offer here.
What we’re doing here is we’re looking the world, the flesh and the devil right in the eyeball, eyeball to eyeball and we’re saying what do you have to offer in this situation? If you divide the population up statistically and they saw the issue of evil, suffering or sorrow, probably less than 1% would say well that’s okay, I don’t really believe in evil, it’s just an imagination. There really are some people like that, in the Christian Science area, Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy, she denied the existence of evil, denied this thing of sickness, it’s all in your head, until she had her teeth filled. The point is that some people do believe this, but not many, and if they do, then they don’t have a problem because they’re not bothered by it.
But most people see a tragedy, they see a heartache, a disaster, a mess, they’re going to say it’s wrong. Watch this! If somebody is facing a disaster they may be angry at you, they may be angry at God, they may be angry at the gospel, they’re ready to blow you away with all kinds of argument and flack, but do you know one thing—they’re mad at the presence of evil. You may never have thought about this but this is very encouraging, because if they’re mad at the presence of evil, what they just admitted? They’ve admitted to the biblical worldview that evil is abnormal. They’ve admitted that it isn’t just passive and oh well, the universe just evolved over millions of years and it’s going to be evil, it was evil, it always will be evil so I just have to ride the sled. No, they don’t want to ride the sled. This is something BAD, and when they get mad that something is bad, guess what they say? That it’s evil. It’s not by a vote, it’s not because 51% of the people say its bad, you get that slick answer in some academic classroom somewhere, it’s the corporate morays. Bologna it’s the corporate morays. If you step on your toe and they say it’s wrong, and the whole class votes it’s okay to step on your toe, does that make it right for you? No, you’re going to protest that because you know somehow it’s wrong and you’re mad at it.
So you know it’s not by vote, you know it’s not private choice, it’s not that you don’t personally like it, it’s bigger than that, it’s that it’s violating some standard of justice, something’s wrong, and it’s not just social convention. So there’s a secret admission of Bible truth every time somebody gets mad at evil. Every time somebody says it’s bad and I’m angry and I want justice, that’s a good sign because it means at least the conscience is going, “Bing, bing, bing, bing, evil is abnormal, evil is abnormal, evil is abnormal You should be mad, you should be mad, you should be mad.” Take heart, that’s not the problem. The problem isn’t that they’re mad or that you’re mad, if you’re in this mode of thought, there’s something else at work here. Now watch.
Inside the soul there is a tremendous conflict that develops right here. This is, as the old saying goes, this is an irresistible force meeting an immovable object because there’s no resolution to this particular conflict. As long as this conflict goes on in the soul there is absolutely no answer to it. While admitting that it’s bad that evil and tragedy is a violation of some standard that is not by vote, by private choice or by convention, there’s a desire for a rationale and ethical justification. Why is that? Because God’s given us a mind and a conscience and it’s working, it wants to know why did this thing happen and it’d better be a good reason this baby died or this poor child suffered like he did. That’s the cry of a person with a mind that’s active and a conscience that’s active. But what happens in the flesh and where sin enters into this is that whatever rational and ethical justification that goes on, it’s got to be justified to the creature. It’s got to be down here; You got a reason God, You bring it down here and I’ll check it out. That’s what’s wrong.
There’s an amazing sub feature to this. Let me play with this for a few seconds and then I’m going to show you something even more startling. The desire is to bring down whatever this reason and justice is and we’re going to plop it right here on the table, I want to examine it and I’ll decide whether it’s right or wrong. That’s the battle, that the creature is going to be the judge of God here, and God has no right to … whatever reasons He’s got, He has no right to withhold those reasons from my investigation. Think about the book of Job. In the beginning of the book we get a little insight as to why Job had his trials, with Satan, etc. But does Job ever find that out in the rest of the book? What is the end of the book of Job? Does he say oh, I understand now, Satan came in and had a conference with You yesterday. No, Job’s never brought into that discussion. How does the book of Job end? He said I’ve just been uttering words without knowledge, I shut my mouth, I don’t know what I’m talking about. What has happened to Job? Boing, he suddenly realized that justification may always be unavailable and he’s got to trust the Lord with it.
We want to pull it down and we want to justify it to the creature. Here’s the coup’de grace with this whole process. Think of what in our flesh we want to do. We want to bring God’s plan, we want to bring His whole rationale down here on the table so we can check it out. What did Eve do in the garden? When faced with Genesis 2, “in the day that you eat thereof you’re going to die” and Satan says “in the day that you eat thereof you’re not going to die.” So Eve had God and she had a creature, and she wanted to make both of them equal, of equal authority and lay them on the table so she could check it out. Here’s where the coup de grace is, this action in our rebellious sinful hearts is precisely a replay of the fall of man in Eden. That is exactly what Eve did so in the cry in the battle that’s going on it’s a replay of the original fall.
So somebody that’s angry because something has happened, rightfully so, but at the same time they’re angry that something’s happening makes the simultaneous argument that they are not going to trust God or anything else until He answers to me. And the moment they do that they have part of the evil problem right there, they are the problem! So ironically in objecting to evil, they create some more, because all they’re doing in their hearts of hearts is redoing and replaying Adam and Eve all over again. This shows that there is not an adequate answer to cope with these tragedies outside of Scripture. This is what I mean by closure. It’s a self-refuting argument; it’s internally contradictory on a way and a plain that is way beyond anything that the Bible has.
We’ve been dealing with the ascension and session of Christ and we’ve looked at some of the Psalms where the New Testament authors have brought in this material. There is a correction on page 9, where it says “Paul in application alters the verb ‘receive’ in Psalm 68:18 to receive,” it should be “give”. Another error, page 14, there is no Hebrews 2:26 no matter what version of the Bible you have you won’t find Hebrews 2:26, it’s Hebrews 9:26.
We dealt with Daniel 7, now let’s turn to the book of Psalms and look at Psalm 2. What are we doing? We’re going to Old Testament passages, very key Old Testament passages that the New Testament authors appropriated and used to explain the session of Christ, because again to draw the picture, we have the mount of ascent, the Lord Jesus Christ ascends, a cloud takes Him up and He disappears. The resurrection appearances cease, there are not more resurrection appearances of Christ walking on earth, He disappears and invisibly moves somewhere to the throne of God. Since this is not observed historically, this aspect to the Lord Jesus after the cloud receives Him has to be taught to us through imagery given in the pages of God’s Word, and the images that the New Testament authors have picked, Daniel 7; Psalm 2 and Psalm 110. There are others but these are three key ones that we’re looking at.
Many of you will be familiar with this but the key passage is Psalm 2:6, “But as for Me, I have installed My king upon Zion, My holy mountain.” That’s God speaking. In verse 7 the speaker, it alternates between the king and God, and in verse 7 it’s the king speaking, whoever this king is, this royal son, “I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to Me, ‘Thou art My Son, today I have begotten Thee.’ [8] Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Thy inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as Thy possession, [9] Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, Thou shalt shatter them like earthenware. [10] Now therefore, O kings, show discernment; take warning, O judges of the earth. [11] Worship the LORD with reverence, and rejoice with trembling. [12] Do homage to the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!”
The picture of Psalm 2 is that of the royal son of David; to the west of the mount of ascent you have Mount Zion, the valley Kidron runs between them, and on that western mountain is where the temple was. We saw the picture of David taking the ark up there at the end of the conquest period; Jehovah came up in the form of the ark. David started meditating on that and the Holy Spirit spoke to him, and it took David down the corridors of history over centuries of time until he could see the Messiah and the Messianic age. It was connected to him because God had promised what in the Davidic Covenant? What kind of a dynasty would David have in contrast to the dynasties of all the other kings of the earth including Saul? It would be a dynasty that would never end. There’s only two ways you can have a dynasty that won’t end. You can have an infinite number of successors or you can terminate the dynasty in a person who has eternal life. So the Davidic Covenant promises the son of David will one day come and the dynasty will be forever protected and will become the world dynasty.
At this point we have to sort through things very carefully because there are those with various prophetic viewpoints that insist that Jesus Christ today, sitting at the Father’s right hand, is actually fulfilling the Davidic Covenant reigning from Mount Zion. Obviously He’s not in Jerusalem. Jesus is not on Mount Zion tonight. Therefore Jesus is not on Mount Zion tonight but He’s fulfilled the Davidic Covenant, now all of a sudden the Davidic Covenant has become spiritualized and turned into a metaphor. No, it’s going to be a literal Davidic Covenant, it’s going to reign on earth. The one thing that we noticed about this Psalm is in verse 6 when it says “I have installed My King on Mount Zion” it means Zion of David, it doesn’t mean the Lord’s throne. That’s Zion, the physical literal Mount Zion that you could fly an airplane over or you can see on your approach to David Ben Gurion Airport. That’s the Mount Zion meant in verse 6. That is not being fulfilled today, the King is not on that mountain reigning.
However, verse 7 speaks, again in its vision way, “I will tell of the decree of the LORD … Thou art My Son, Today I have begotten Thee.” The idea is that whoever this king is, we’ll call this king the ideal king, this ideal king carries on a conversation with God, and Psalm 2 while it looks at this king as he has come back to Mount Zion also adds the fact that God has decreed certain things to happen through the king. In verse 8 one of the things that is to happen to that king is the king is supposed to pray and he is supposed to ask the Lord to give him the earth. He is supposed to be asking the Father to give him his inheritance. And when the king gets the inheritance then he will rule. Verse 9 says you will “break them with a rod of iron, you will shatter them like earthenware,” in other words, there is to be a physical, political military, as it were, takeover of all the nations by the son of David.
You have to be careful here, do you see why we prefaced what we’re doing here; we went through premillennialism, amillennialism, postmillennialism and I warned you about something. Do you remember when I said beware of Replacement Theology. What did we say Replacement Theology was? The church takes the place of Israel; the church replaces Israel. If you look at verses like 9, if the church replaces Israel you can very easily get a triumphalism in which the church conquers the world for Christ, and postmillennialists believe that. There are many postmillennialists that believe right now the Mosaic Code is the only law to be respected on this planet, it should be imposed on America, it should be imposed on all nations, and we should revert back to stoning. We should do everything according to that Mosaic Law Code because it stands for all time. And they will not be content until they politically … it’s almost like Islam and Jihad. There’s something true about what they’re trying to do. There’s something true, we’ll get to it but that isn’t it.
Verse 9 is talking about Jesus Christ when Jesus Christ returns to set up His Kingdom that is what He’s going to do; He’s going to judge the world. There’ll be no doubt about it. So what are we saying? We’re saying that Psalm 2 depicts the greater son of David, who we know is the Lord Jesus Christ; it’s saying certain things about the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s saying in verse 6 that one day He will reign from Mount Zion on earth physically. Verse 9 says that He will have a global reign and power. But, in verses 7-8 there’s something that Jesus does with the Father and in prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ in prayer is asking the Father to give Him the nations as an inheritance. Quite obviously the Father hasn’t given Jesus the nations as an inheritance yet. So verses 7-8 point to something. Between the time of the session, the session of the Lord Jesus Christ when He sits down at the Father’s right hand, until the time when He reigns, full power with all of His crowns so it’s manifested on earth, there is a time interval. And during that time interval God the Son is asking God the Father to give Him the nations for an inheritance. He’s praying that prayer.
So the Church Age is in here. This sets up something for the Church Age. We saw a little bit of that when we dealt with Psalm 68. Ephesians 4 uses Psalm 68. Go to Ephesians 4 again; hold the place in Psalm 2. Ephesians 4 is Psalm 68. It says in verses 8-11, when it’s talking about gifted people to the church it says, verse 8, we said this is a good example of apostolic exegesis. The apostles didn’t give book reviews, they went to the text of the Old Testament and they taught it word by word. “Therefore it says, ‘When He ascended on high,’ ” he’s quoting the text of Psalm 68, “ ‘He led captive a host of captives, and He gave gifts to men.’ ” We said that’s a picture of Jesus Christ ascending in victory of some sort and He gets booty from the defeated foes and instead of receiving booty like an ancient god would have been dramatized to show, instead of receiving booty He takes the booty and then He gives it to the church. What constitutes the booty? Money? No, what is the booty? Gifted men.
So what this is is that the Lord Jesus Christ is asking the Father for this future Kingdom, and these prayers are being executed every moment of the Church Age. Every time someone trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ he becomes a POW away from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Jesus Christ has just captured another one. The picture here is a war going on, with the gospel and that as one person trusts in Christ they are translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, they become a prisoner of war, the cosmic war that Jesus is reigning, and He is waging. And what does Jesus do? He takes these prisoners of war and He gives them gifts and He gives them back to His church. So we have something going on in this Church Age.
That’s Psalm 2, and while we’re looking at Psalm 2 notice it talks about I will reign and “break them with a rod of iron.” Turn to Revelation 2:27 so you can see how that same imagery, the rod of iron is used by the New Testament authors. Verse 26, “And he who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end,” and in the context this is all the churches of the book of Revelation in Asia Minor there, and He’s giving them promises about the future. [blank spot,]
… you will see in the margin, in fine print, and we’ll have to use the bifocals to see, you will notice that that is Psalm 2 that is quoted there. “… to Him I will give authority over the nations, [27] And He shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the vessels of the potter are broken to pieces, as I also have received authority from My Father.” To make sense of that verse, go back in your mind to what we did with Daniel 7. What did we say the Son of Man referred to? Remember those visions of Daniel and we saw the Son of Man, and the Son of Man equals the leader plus the people. All those images are dual images, they include Jesus but they mean more than that. And here you see in verses 26-27 how closely the people, the saved people of the Church Age are identified with this King.
The point I’m making right now is in verse 27 there’s the rule with the rod of iron, it’s not happening today, it’s happening at the end time, in the future. So that’s the idea of Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is an image Psalm for this process all through the Church Age.
Now let’s go to Psalm 110. This is the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament. The New Testament authors dwell on this Psalm again and again, they went back to it. It is just loaded with all kinds of prophetic material. We’re not going to even come close to exhausting it. All we’re doing is skimming these to get the general idea of the imagery that the New Testament authors used to understand Jesus in His session. Who wrote the Psalm? David. It was written at the height of the kingdom. If David is the highest authority in the kingdom, who was David’s Lord? Jesus, this verse in the Gospels, He played with the Pharisees with this one. He said who do you think Psalm 110:1 is? Huh? Who’s David’s Lord?
Psalm 110:1, “The LORD says to my Lord,” so there you have the Old Testament instance of plurality in the Godhead that people say doesn’t exist. They haven’t read Psalm 110:1 carefully. “The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand,’ ” now look at this, “ ‘Sit at My right hand, until’ until ‘I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet.’ ”
So here’s a picture of the Lord Jesus at the Father’s right hand, staying there in Heaven, not on earth, until something happens, “until Thine enemies are a footstool for Thy feet.” [2] “The LORD will stretch forth Thy strong scepter from Zion, saying, ‘Rule in the midst of Thine enemies.’ [3] Thy people will volunteer freely in the day of Thy power” and now it goes into an exposition of getting Israel involved with it.
Verse 4, “The LORD has sworn and will not change His mind, Thou art a priest,” notice this, verses 1-3 are kingly duties, and now in verses 4 and following he’s talking about being a priest. Was David a priest? Was he in the tribe of Aaron? No, he was in the tribe of Judah. He wasn’t a Levite; he couldn’t have been a Levitical priest. But the fact of the matter is David seemed to exercise quasi priestly authority when he sacrificed to the Lord when the ark went up, but he did so not because he was trying to compete with the Aaronic priesthood, it was because he was exercising another strange kind of priesthood, this one. “The LORD has sworn and will not change His mind, Thou art a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”
That’s very illuminating that the Messiah, which would be the object of Psalm 110, His priesthood is a Gentile priesthood. That’s strange. Not a Jewish priesthood, a Gentile priesthood, because Melchizedek was who? Melchizedek preceded Abraham. What was Melchizedek doing in history when he blessed Abraham? It was like he was handing the torch of God’s light from whatever kind of administration God had in the dispensation from Noah to Abraham, however His Word was transmitted, however the believers were organized, something changed as the civilization became paganized. Abraham was called out to start a counterculture, and the guy that handed the baton was Melchizedek. Melchizedek is an emblem of the Gentile original core of authority in civilization because Melchizedek was a king and a priest together. Remember, he had bread and wine, but he also was the king. So you had, so to speak, originally in civilization the church and state were kind of together in these people. That’s probably one reason why it paganized very rapidly, not separating the powers.
By the way, just a footnote, you are about to witness in our nation’s history, probably, a debate over the existence of the electoral college, because the two-bit commentators and talking heads all think that it’s an evil. It wasn’t an evil. The electors are a feature, a wonderful and marvelous feature in our country’s history put there by men who were consciously biblical. Some of them were unconsciously biblical, they were unbelievers personally, but the Word of God so influenced the generation of the founders of this country that they realized that everybody was a miserable sinner and left to any of ourselves we would wind up debauching ourselves and wrecking government and becoming a little two bit kingdom like they had just come out of in Europe. And they were not interested in perpetuating that mess.
Therefore the founding fathers said because we are all depraved miserable sinners we’re going to put controls in the government. We are not going to have a direct democracy. A direct democracy comes out of pagan Athens and the Greek city states. It is not American, it is pagan direct democracy. And the reason its pagan is because it exalts the deity of the mob. Democracies always wind up degenerating into the rule of the mob, and the founding fathers knew that they did not want this country ruled by mobs, therefore they broke it up to make it difficult to do. So they formed a republic in which these powers are separated. If you read Francis Schaeffer you’ll see what he says about Switzerland, they were so serious about separating the executive, legislative and judicial they separated them geographically, put one in one city, one in another city, and one in another city. They wouldn’t even have them all in the same city because they didn’t want the guys conniving with each other. That’s how suspicious they were of the political system.
So our country was founded with a deep and profound suspicion of the political process and what fallen men would do with it, so they put all these road blocks in there. Some people don’t like the roadblocks now so we have a couple of Senator elects wandering around the country going to try to campaign to get the electoral college … but that’s a direct assault on a biblical understanding of human nature. A true believer in democracy does not believe in the sin nature of men. Think about that. If you believe in a pure and simple democracy you have a very naïve view of man, you probably believe in the goodness, everybody’s got good in their heart so everybody’s going to vote good. That’s not biblical so the founding fathers built that in, they built a constitution which acted actually … do you know what the whole idea of the constitution was? It’s really very parallel to the early Puritan churches.
What do you suppose was the analogue to the constitution in the church? The Bible. They got the idea that you had to have an abiding law so that one generation could save it for the next; you could have cross-generational communication because this didn’t change. So enamored with this they decided they’d have sort of a political version of the Bible which was the constitution. And they set up all kinds of problems in it so you couldn’t amend it very easy, and that was to sort of act … you know a flywheel, so that you couldn’t have jerks like this in society, the flywheel kind of smoothed things over so it’s very, very difficult to mess with it.
The diabolical thing in our day is that this and the constitution have both been sort-changed by a very simple satanic tactic and the tactic is to interpret everything allegorically. Once you interpret the Bible allegorically it’s useless, you might as well chuck it. And once you have a group of lawyers who do not believe in a literal hermeneutic of the law, the constitution is worthless because it means whatever the court said it meant last week at 2:00 o’clock. It’s just plastic, it’s rubber. So the Bible and the constitution can be turned into rubber and into useless documents by a foolish hermeneutic or an approach to how you interpret it.
Psalm 110 is the definition of Jesus Christ’s priesthood and that priesthood and the kingship can be legitimately combined; the powers can be legitimately combined in Him. Why? How can all the powers of government be entrusted to Him? Because He’s resurrected and sinless. That’s why the church of Jesus Christ in the Millennial Kingdom actually will be acting as the political leaders of the earth and the globe because at that time we will be resurrected and incorruptible. That’s the only way you can get concentration of power is to have incorruptible people doing it. That’s why this priest, this Melchizedek priest, combines all the powers.
But the idea, to get back to our theme, is that Jesus Christ became this priest and began exercising it, apparently here, or at least in His humanity here, He might have exercised it in His preincarnate nature before. But Psalm 110 like Psalm 2, like Daniel 7 all argue that there’s this time interval and something is going on that’s very, very interesting in the Church Age that has something to do with Jesus Christ conquering the nations, and yet not conquering them in a political way.
We’ll close by looking at the chart on page 13, and there is a verse that I want you to see in the New Testament, Ephesians 1:20. The chart on page 13 gives you those three passages we studied, and it divides up the accomplishments of the session, and the accomplishments [which are] still awaited. The first column, the accomplishments of the session they’re finished as of the completion of the First Advent of Christ. All those things going on in the second column are not finished until the Second Advent of Christ. So the inter-advent age, the Church Age separates those two columns.
When the New Testament authors used this Old Testament imagery, they did one thing that’s not in the Old Testament directly. It’s there by inference and they made it explicit. Ephesians 1:20 is one of dozens of verses we could go to, but look at it, see if by observing verses 20-21 you can spot what Paul has done, what new information does he tell us about Christ. Let’s read it through slowly. “Which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead,” we know that, that was the resurrection, “and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,” there’s the session, now look at what he does when he explains the implications of Christ’s session. He says He is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. [22] And He put all things in subjection under His feet,” who do you suppose Paul refers to in verse 21 when he says “all rule and authority and power and dominion,” especially after the word that closes out verse 20.
How does verse 20 end? He is where? He is in the heavenly places. And it’s there where He is over all principalities and powers. If you took a concordance and checked out principalities and powers you’d know what we are talking about. It’s the angelic forces that operate in history. Remember Daniel, remember what he prayed? Gabriel came to him and he had a big fight with the king of Persia, and it wasn’t the human king of Persia. The human king of Persia didn’t have any anti-air defense. That was another thing going on behind the political scene, and the biblical picture is that history has an appearance to it, a material, political, physical appearance, and we live in an appearance, every day of our lives we’re working on a [can’t understand word] that appears the way it is. But the New Testament adds another thing here. It’s adding that behind this appearance there is a reality and most of that reality we do not observe and does not appear to us.
Whatever Jesus is doing at the Father’s right hand is vitally related to this reality going on that doesn’t appear. There’s something going on, shall we say, in the background and as Christians that’s what we want to do, as we move into this Church Age we’re going to pull this curtain back a little bit on this unseen world and this unseen angelic conflict because that is one of the reasons for the existence of the inter-advent period. Is Jesus doing something? Yes. Is history accomplishing something from moment to moment? Yes. Is it that the Kingdom is being advanced? Yes. How? It’s something related to our existence as believers and Christians and united together in the body of Christ. That’s the theme that we’ll move on to as we get into the next section.
Question asked: Clough replies: The question is interesting in light of the analogue of the marriage, the groom and Christ, and the close relationship between Jesus Christ and the believers that the role of the King in the Kingdom includes the King’s bride, and you’ll see this gradually emerge as we go on through this. What I’m trying to get across in this session is we’re starting now with Christ’s position. We want to firmly establish and get a hold of Christ’s position because we’re going to get into what does it mean to be “in Christ.” The content of what that means isn’t really substantive until we know what Christ is, what is He doing, where is He located physically tonight. And what big thing is He doing.
We want to get that kind of in our minds fixed and the session is the event that gives you the imagery to do that. The next event coming up is Pentecost and the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the coming of the Spirit to the church, and that sometimes because it’s more glamorous and people talk about it more, that tends to eclipse the emphasis on the ascension and session of Christ, and I’m trying to balance it, so that when we get to Pentecost, yeah, Pentecost is Pentecost, but Pentecost is the arrival of the Spirit sent by whom? From where? We want to put Pentecost in perspective here; it carries out something that started at the session.
Question asked: Clough replies: She’s bringing up the point that in Romans it talks about the blindness in part is come to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles come in, and that’s another very important commentary over this inter-advent age of what’s going on in the inter-advent age. She used the words “rescue mission” to the Gentiles, to bring them into the kingdom, and it is that. And that’s why, precisely because of that that when you read these biblical images of conquest you need to realize that the conquest that is going on is directed at what holds the Gentiles in dominion. In other words, Christ has enemies tonight and the enemies aren’t, in one sense, the enemies are not the unsaved, they’re the principalities and powers that control this world system.
Remember, the only reason we become Christians is because the gospel has been pumped our way, and we take for granted … we take for granted that the gospel is just kind of oh well, the gospel came my way, yeah. We forget that to get the gospel to us took something, and that Satan opposes that. This is why Satan opposed Paul on his missions. What does he say? Satan hindered him from coming to certain places. Why? Because what did Satan know Paul would do if he got to those certain places? He would bring the gospel with him. The Bible says who is it that seeks to take the Word of God out from the human heart just as soon as it’s delivered. Unseen principalities and powers.
We’ve very naïve and in the 20th century, 21st century “modern man” (quote unquote) actually it’s quite reversed the way he thinks. Modern man thinks he’s very sophisticated and the ancient people were stupid, I mean these poor stupid people in the Bible days were just so superstitious that they believed all these fairy stories. Well, we’ve got our own fairy stories. I don’t think anybody in the ancient world thought men came from apes? You know. They would really have a laugh over that one.
In fact I’m told by missionaries who have told, in Indonesia, the guys in the New Tribes they told the natives about what we believe, “we” being the country, and the west because the natives wanted to know what western culture was like, yeah, we believe that men come from monkeys, they weren’t saying Christians believe that, they were just saying that’s what our culture teaches. And the natives probably died laughing because they couldn’t believe, they’d never heard that one, they thought that was a good one.
We’re not the sophisticates of history and we’ve lost a lot. It’s true we don’t want to be spirtists, we don’t want to be preoccupied with the principalities and powers, but the New Testament talks about them and the place the New Testament appears to talk about them the most is when it talks about the session of Christ. It talks about He ascends, He pulls rank on them, He outranks them. He has the high ground, and it’s encouraging to know that, that in all the chaos of history, the apparent chaos of history, who is it that reigns and who is in place right now and to whom do the angelic powers, ferocious though they may be, and they are, because what image does Paul say Satan is? A roaring lion. He’s not going around knocking on doors, he’s busting them down. So he’s ferocious but he’s outranked. Jesus Christ has the high ground, he’ll never capture it, he can’t push Jesus off that high ground. That’s comforting and that gives content when we get into the Holy Spirit does this, and the Holy Spirit does that and all the rest of it in the Church Age, all that is kind of involved in this intrigue that’s going on.
Later we’ll see passages like in Romans 8, the passage where it says the Holy Spirit makes intercessions for us, and what does it say? “… With groanings that cannot be uttered.” People have taken that to mean that this is some esoteric thing that’s going on. If you look up the words “groanings that cannot be uttered,” it’s a word in the Greek language that’s used for secret fraternities. And the idea wasn’t that it was a non-human word, it was because of security, because if you have a group fraternity or a club or a mystical cult and they kept security over their terminology, and that was the deal. It was unutterable, because it was classified information.
You add that meaning into Romans 8, look what it does. In that passage the Holy Spirit is praying from us to the Father, and He’s praying over what in the context? He’s praying over our weaknesses, He’s praying over things in our life, He’s praying for us to be sanctified, and the Bible says that He’s praying on a secure channel. That’s the way we would say it in our high communication age, a secure channel.
Now that’s interesting, why is the Holy Spirit not praying in an unsecure channel? See this relates to something that’s going on with the church that it’s sort of this one-upmanship that Satan’s in a position of a reactor. He can’t really initiate things; he’s going around the world trying to put out fires because he can’t get into these channels that are going on linking the believers with the Lord Jesus Christ. The conversation is going on right now between the Holy Spirit and … you know, you’d probably be scared to see what He’s praying about us. But He’s praying for your sanctification, for my sanctification, but He’s doing it in such a way that it’s not being heard by certain individuals and that tells us there’s a war going on here. And there’s security, what we call in the military OpSec, Operation Security. Why do you need operation security if there are not enemies around, clandestine hearers that might, knowing the prayer, anticipate [can’t understand word] answers to that prayer. So it’s part of the big war, part of the cosmic thing that’s going on and it keeps the initiative in Jesus Christ’s camp. Jesus always initiates, Satan always comes in with a counterfeit afterwards and you can see it in church history. Every time the Holy Spirit does a work, Satan does a counterwork.