Sugar Land Bible Church

Guest (Male): Good morning. Good morning and welcome to Sugar Land Bible Church. Pastor Andy, as you know, is on sabbatical, so we've had some very good guest speakers. And our guest speaker this morning is going to be as good, very good. Dr. David Reagan, we're pleased to have him with us and his wife Linda. Dr. Reagan was with us at prophecy conference two years ago, so you may remember him.

But let me tell you just a little bit about him. He founded the Lamb and Lion Ministries in 1980, and then he's since stepped back from his leadership role. But he's a native Texan. He lives in the Dallas area. And he went to UT Austin, but he also earned graduate degrees in the field of international relations from Tufts and Harvard Universities. Before entering the ministry, he had an extensive career in higher education, a number of colleges including several here in Texas.

In the mid-sixties, he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Philippines and toured Southeast Asia. He's a lifelong Bible student, teacher, and preacher. He entered the full-time ministry in 1976 when he was called to serve as pulpit minister for a church in Irving, Texas. And he's authored many essays and published 20 books or so and contributed to many more. So please welcome Dr. David Reagan.

Dr. David Reagan: Good morning to all of you. I greet you in the name of Jesus our blessed hope. I have really looked forward to this. You know, Andy and I have ministered together many, many times all over this nation. He's one of my favorite Bible teachers, and I'm glad he's got a time to sit back and relax and refresh himself and come back with a fresh anointing for the Lord. I appreciate the fact that you've given him that sabbatical. It's so important in ministry.

I have got my wife with me this morning, and I hope you'll take an opportunity to meet her. She will be at our display table out there. As he said, I headed up Lamb and Lion Ministries for 41 years, and then I decided to step aside in June of 2021 and retire. But retire should be in quotation marks because basically what I did is I moved my office to my home. And since then, I've written seven books, and that's easy to do when you have nothing else to do.

In the mornings I do research; in the afternoons I do writing. And I've just finished my latest book. It's entitled Invincible Israel, and the subtitle is The Absolute Guarantee of the Survival of the Jewish People and Their State. It's a book about antisemitism. I hope to have it published before the end of this year. I think we only brought about three titles with us out there, but be sure and stop by and meet Linda.

I was married for 60 years to my first wife before she died in 2020. And Linda was married for 34 years to her husband who was a pastor before he died also in 2020. And I'd known them for 45 years when they were pastoring in the Dallas area. Linda is a very accomplished person. She's very gifted by the Lord. She has taught children for over 60 years really. She loves to teach children about the Bible.

One of her pet peeves is churches that entertain children rather than teaching them something about the word of God. And she knows how to teach them, I mean at early age, she can teach them about salvation and about the cross and so forth. And then the other gift she has is a gift of counseling. And since they were at many churches, five or six different churches across the nation, she gets calls every day from people who need counseling.

She spends most of all day, every day on the phone counseling people. So she is very, very active in ministry as well as my being active as well. I want to thank the tech team this morning for all the help that they gave me in getting my PowerPoints to work. And I appreciate that. I always like to stay on the good side of the tech team because they could just reach over and flip a switch and nobody can hear me talk. So I try to stay on a good side with them.

Anyway, I want to invite you to visit my personal website. I have a personal one. It's called Doc Reagan's Bible Prophecy Insights, and it has many, many articles, many videos, things of that nature about Bible prophecy. And the address is very easy to remember. The address is docreagan.com. That's all there is to it. I always like to begin with a few smiles. And this morning, I'm going to be talking about Bible prophecy.

At the second service or worship service, I'm not going to be talking about prophecy; I'm going to be talking about the life-changing power of Jesus. But this morning, Bible prophecy. So I thought I'd show you a few church signs about Bible prophecy. There's not many. You know, I've been collecting church signs for 45 years. I have over 900 in 29 different categories. And one of the smallest categories is church signs about Bible prophecy.

Most churches totally ignore Bible prophecy, never teach it, never preach it, and they don't ever put anything on their signs about it. But here's a few signs concerning Bible prophecy. First one: The outlook is gloomy, but the uplook is glorious. How about this one? Jesus is coming, look busy. When the rapture comes, who's going to change the sign, will you? And this one, going to go back here. I've got this thing going. Okay.

The next one is one of my favorites. You know the Bible says nobody knows the date of the Lord's return. But here's a church that believes they know the date. Are you ready for Jesus' return Sunday at 10:30? This next one had some, I think, prophets that were not very good. It says prophecy class canceled due to unforeseen circumstances. Here's an interesting one: Earth is preparing for war, heaven is preparing for a wedding. Yes sir.

And how about this one: Time is short, hell is hot, the king is coming, ready or not. Tomorrow's forecast: God reigns and the sun shines. And this one: Normal is not coming back, Jesus is. And I love this one: The rapture, separation of church and state. Amen. But my all-time favorite Bible prophecy sign is one that an Assembly of God put up one time, and it's this one: Satan, the fat lady is about to sing.

Well, this morning, I want to talk to you about an unusual topic, the varieties of Bible prophecy. Let's pray. Lord, I come to you in the name of Jesus, and I thank you for this church, for its strong stand in behalf of your word. I thank you for Andy and for the mighty anointing you have on his life and for the gift you've given him of Bible teaching. And I pray for refreshment for him and his wife during this sabbatical that they're taking.

And now I pray for your Holy Spirit to anoint what I have to say this morning as I teach this lesson about the varieties of Bible prophecy in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, one year I was reading through the New Testament. And I got to the book of Hebrews, and I was excited. I was looking forward to the next day when I would start to read Hebrews. Particularly the first chapter. I love the first chapter of Hebrews because that's the chapter that says Jesus is greater than the angels, that the angels worship him, that he is much greater than them.

In fact, it ends with two verses that I use all the time. It says that angels are active in the world today, ministering to those who are in the process of being saved. And I use those two verses all the time. When I get on an airplane, I pray Lord, surround this plane with your angels. When I get on the road as we did yesterday and drove for four hours down here from Dallas, I prayed Lord, surround our car with your angels and protect us every mile of the way.

I always ask the Lord to post a big, big angel at our house to protect it while we're gone. So I really use the ministry of angels all the time. And I was really looking forward to reading the book of Hebrews. So the next morning, I opened my Bible with great anticipation and I started reading. Here it goes: God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets at many portions and many ways. And I started to go to the second verse and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said stop.

And I stopped because I knew what was happening. I'd had it happen to me many times before. It'll happen to you if you're a regular Bible reader. I knew that the Holy Spirit was about to give me what's called a rhema. A rhema is where the Holy Spirit gives to you a special message from a verse that you are reading. It just puts it on your heart. It's like you read the verse a hundred times and it says nothing to you, and the 101st time you read it, it jumps off the page, grabs you by the throat, shakes you till your teeth rattle, and the Lord speaks to you through that.

So I knew I was going to have a rhema. Now, there are two Greek words for the word word. One of them is logos. Logos is the entire word of God. But a rhema is something else. A rhema is a special word from the scriptures via the Holy Spirit. And we have rhemas for several reasons. Let me just mention three that came to mind. We have a specific need that God wants to address in scripture. So for example, maybe a child has died, maybe a marriage has broken up, maybe a business has failed, maybe you've lost your job.

You've got a crisis in your life you've never had before, and you start reading and suddenly a verse jumps off the page at you because you need that verse that you never needed it before, and the Holy Spirit speaks to you concerning the problem in your life. A second reason rhemas occur: the Lord wants to teach you something new. You have reached the point in your spiritual maturity where you are ready for a new insight in God's word that you've never had before and he gives it to you.

Another reason for rhema: God wants to provide you with guidance. The Holy Spirit is our guide, and you need some special guidance for some reason or another and he will give you a rhema to do that. All of which reminds me of Hebrews 4:12, which says: The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit of both joints and marrow and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

The Bible is alive. The Holy Spirit is speaking to you from it. It's living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword. When you read it, listen for the Spirit to speak to you because he will do so. So with that in mind, knowing that I had a rhema coming, I went back up and I read Hebrews 1:1 again. I thought well, maybe the Lord has something special to speak to me from this verse. So I read: God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways.

And I was baffled. Usually when I have a rhema, I can immediately see what the Lord's trying to speak to me about. But I couldn't figure that out. That's not even a complete sentence. And so I kept reading it over and over. I thought what in the world does the Lord want to teach me from Hebrews 1:1? And suddenly I thought maybe what he wants me to do is go back to the Old Testament and look through it and even the New Testament and see what was the variety of prophets, what was the variety of ways in which they spoke?

And so I did that. And the first thing that came to mind was the writing prophets. Those are the people we know best, those are the people who have books named after them. And so I looked at them first, the writing prophets. Oh boy, did I begin to discover things. First of all, I discovered that among the writing prophecies, there is a diversity of people that is just absolutely unbelievable, the diversity of people that God spoke through.

For example, God spoke through a totally uneducated farmer like Amos, a fig picker from Tekoa. And yet he also spoke through a sophisticated noble like Isaiah. From an uneducated farmer to a person like Isaiah. He spoke through a reluctant spokesman like Jonah, who ran from the Lord. And also through bold and courageous men like Daniel. He spoke through obscure people like Joel that we know nothing about. And yet he also spoke through very famous people like King David.

He spoke through young people like Zachariah, who probably was an advanced teenager. And yet he also spoke through very elderly people like Haggai. Oh, the diversity of the people that God spoke through. As I looked over this highly diverse list of people, I was reminded of a statement in 2 Chronicles 16:9: The eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the earth that he may strongly support those whose heart is completely his.

You know, I had an experience with that, a personal experience. For 25 years, I was a member of a small country church, had only 90 members. And one time they decided to establish a Christian school, and they had no idea what a demand there was for that because within a year they had about 250 kids in the school and we still only had about 90 members of the church. The school grew that fast.

And they had a music teacher there who came once a week and taught the kids music. And one day as she was driving home, she began to think of a song that God laid on her heart. And when she got home, she sat down and she wrote the song and she wrote the music. And that teacher at that tiny little school at a rural church outside of Dallas, that song became the number one song in all of Christendom, the Revelation song.

Just an incredible song. The eyes of the Lord move to and fro throughout the earth that he may strongly support those whose heart is completely his. Always think of Donald Wildmon when I think of that. Donald Wildmon was the pastor of a little country church in Mississippi. How many people did God speak to at big churches and say I want you to stand up and speak out against the violence and against the lewdness on television and in movies?

And they'd say well, you know, Lord, I don't really have that much support, I don't know where I'd get the money for that and nobody would pay any attention to me. But God spoke to Donald Wildmon, who was the pastor of a tiny little country church in Mississippi. And Donald Wildmon stood up and spoke out, and God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and he became the scourge of the networks. I don't know if you ever met Donald Wildmon.

He became a friend of mine, but Donald Wildmon was a very, people called him a country hick. He'd come in and he'd have overalls on and he'd talk real country and boy, all these executives in New York thought man, we're going to take this guy to the cleaners. Time he got through with them, they didn't know what hit them. I even wrote to one of the networks one time, and I said you know, I am fed up with this violence and immorality on your television programs. You need to do something about it.

The Vice President of the network actually wrote me a personal letter and said I can tell from your letter that you are a follower of that nut called Donald Wildmon. He said we just can't understand why he has so much power. They hadn't heard of the Holy Spirit. That's where his power came from. Well, in addition to a diversity of people, we also have a diversity of styles. Great number of different styles that these people used.

For example, we have the poetry, the poetry of Isaiah and Joel and David. These were great poets. David's probably the greatest poet who ever lived. But all of these wrote in poetry. Then there was prose. Ezekiel, Daniel, and in the New Testament, Paul and John and Peter all spoke in prose. Then there were sermons. The book of Jeremiah is a book of sermons, one sermon after another sermon after another sermon. The same is true of Amos, it's a sermon.

Or drama. Take Habakkuk, for example. It reads like a drama. Habakkuk speaks, God speaks, Habakkuk speaks, God speaks. It's like a drama. And then there's apocalyptic literature that focuses on the end times by Zachariah, by Paul in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and by John in the book of Revelation. And then there's autobiographical. Jonah wrote an autobiography about his life. We have all kinds of styles. So we have diversity of people, we have diversity of style, we have diversity of revelation.

The most common form of revelation we find in the Bible is what I would call direct. Direct. Thus says the Lord, thus says the Lord. That's the way so many of the prophecies began. But there are also other methods of revelation that God used to give the prophets their messages. He gave some messages through dreams. He gave some messages through visions. He gave some messages through experience.

Now, that's kind of an unusual one and I'll explain it later on, but the very experience, life experience that the prophet had was a prophecy about the future, usually about the Messiah. So we've got the writing prophets, and the second category I came up with as I went through these was the oral prophets. Now, the oral prophets are those who never wrote anything. And yet some of them are the most important prophets in the Bible.

Like Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament. People wrote what they said, but they weren't the ones who wrote it. They were the ones who spoke it, other people wrote it down. But they were oral prophets, and they were powerful oral prophets. Most of the oral prophets were very little known. You go through the Old Testament and you will find literally dozens and dozens of oral prophets who are not even identified. They are referred to as, I'm sorry, most were little known.

There would be people like Balaam to Israel. Balaam to Israel, most people don't know that much about Balaam, but he was hired to prophesy against Israel. Nathan and Gad to David. Isn't that interesting? David was a prophet. Yet God raised up two prophets, Nathan and Gad, to prophesy to David. For example, when David came along, the worship of Israel had always been very formal and mainly consisted of sacrifices. That's all it was.

But David said no, no. We are going to wave flags, we're going to dance, we're going to clap our hands, we're going to shout. We're going to have a worship that is enthusiastic. And it was totally different from anything Israel had ever experienced. And when people said how can you do this? He said Nathan and Gad told me that this is what God wanted and God approves of it. They prophesied to him about the worship of Israel. It's interesting.

Another of these people who were little known was Hulda, the prophetess who prophesied to Josiah and said to Josiah: You're doing what is right and the reforms you're bringing here in Israel. And because you are so committed to the Lord and doing what the Lord wants to do, you shall not live to see the destruction of this nation. You will die before this nation is destroyed. I'm going to destroy it because of their evil, but I won't allow it while you're alive.

And then there was Hananiah, the false prophet who told Jeremiah: You're a false prophet. And Jeremiah said: You're going to pay for making that statement. God's going to pour out his wrath upon you and your family. So we have all kinds of prophets that were oral prophets that are little known. And then we have another category here, and that's the nameless oral prophets. The Bible is full of these. There's probably more oral prophets without a name than there are ones with names.

I was looking through the book of Kings, for example, and I found prophet after prophet there. For example, they'll just say the old prophet said, the young prophet said, the evil prophet said, the lying prophet said, the man of God said. There's just dozens and dozens of these that are not even identified. They're just referred to. In the Old Testament, there are very, very few oral prophets. But there are some.

For example, there were the four daughters of the evangelist Philip. We don't know exactly what they prophesied about, but the Bible refers to them as prophetesses. Then there's Agabus. Remember Agabus? Paul came back from his third missionary journey, he arrived in Caesarea Maritima and Agabus appeared. And Agabus took a rope and wrapped himself with the rope and he said when you go to Jerusalem, you're going to end up like this. You're going to be arrested. You're going to be persecuted.

Paul said I know, Spirit's revealed it to me and I'm going to go anyway. And then most of the oral prophets in the New Testament are centered around one event, and that is the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. For the birth of Jesus, you have Zacharias singing a great hymn about the future, it's full of prophecy about I, my son will be John the Baptist, my son will be the forerunner of the Messiah. That was a prophecy that he gave.

Elizabeth. When Mary appeared, Elizabeth was given a word of knowledge and she used it as a prophecy. She said you are going to be the mother of the Messiah. And how did she know that? Because John the Baptist was turning somersaults in her womb. I always thought that was kind of funny. But anyway, she prophesied to Mary. Then Mary gives a tremendous prophecy, the song of Mary. She prophesies about all of the ministry of the Messiah to come.

It's an amazing series of prophecies she gives. And you know how something she starts that prophecy by saying I am going to give birth to the Messiah, my Savior. Note that. You know, I was on the radio for 20 years before we moved to television, and one of our major listening audiences was in Southern Louisiana. And Southern Louisiana is full of Catholics. And every Christmas, I'd get on the radio and talk about how Mary needed a savior.

I said she said so herself. She said give birth to the Messiah, my Savior. I said she was a sinner like the rest of us, but she needed a savior. I got death threats, I got hate mail because I'd said that Mary needed a savior. Nobody wanted to hear that. They thought she was perfect, but she was not. So anyway, those are some of the people. And then of course, when his parents took Jesus to the temple for the sacrifice they had to make for his birth, then Simeon saw them and went over and took the Christ child and lifted him up and prophesied about the future, saying God has told me I would live to see the Messiah, this is the Messiah.

Anna did the same thing, a woman who was probably over a hundred years old, did the same thing. But those are about it for oral prophets in the Old Testament except for one. The greatest oral prophet who ever lived is the one I haven't mentioned yet. The greatest oral prophet who's ever lived was of course Jesus Christ himself. He was an oral prophet. Now, he did have some writing. In the book of Revelation, he writes seven letters to seven churches.

And of course, as God in the flesh, he's responsible for the whole Bible. But as a person here on earth, he gave oral prophecies primarily. And you may remember he gave them about all kinds of things. He prophesied about villages and cities. Remember what he said about the three towns he focused his prophecies on? He had three towns he focused his ministry on, and that was Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin.

Right before he went to Jerusalem to be crucified, he said: I say to you, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Bethsaida and Chorazin, I say to you that if what I have preached to you had been preached to Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented, but you didn't repent. It's going to be worse for you on the day of judgment than for Sodom and Gomorrah. And it's interesting, within 200 years after that, a great earthquake occurred in that area and totally destroyed Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin.

To the point that by 1800, people who were pagans and who were trying to destroy the Bible wrote books. In the early 1800s, they wrote books and their early 1900s, explaining that the Bible is full of myth, legend, and superstition because those three cities never existed. Well, in the mid-19th century, Capernaum was found. In the late 19th century, Chorazin was found. And just a few months ago, Bethsaida was found, the real Bethsaida. They had always identified a false town as Bethsaida.

So all three existed, and Jesus said it's going to be worse for you than for Sodom and Gomorrah. Jesus also prophesied about people. For example, the one that immediately comes to mind is when he said to Peter: Peter, you're going to deny me three times before the cock crows. And that's exactly what happened, and Peter went out and wept bitterly. But most of his prophecies, interestingly enough, were about himself. He told the disciples over and over again: I'm going to go to Jerusalem, I'm going to be crucified, I'm going to die, I'm going to be raised from the dead, and I'm going to meet you in Galilee.

Over and over he gave prophecies like that. And finally, his last prophecy, one that he made over many, many times, but the last prophecy gives in the book of Revelation: I am coming back. I am returning. I'm going to come back to this earth. He gave so many, many prophecies. And because of that, he fulfilled a prophecy. And that prophecy was given by Moses many, many years ago. The prophecy is in Deuteronomy 18.

Speaking for God, Moses said: I, God, will raise up a prophet from you among their brothers, among the Jewish people, like you, and I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them and I will command him. When Jesus came, everybody knew this prophecy. All the rabbis claimed this was a Messianic prophecy. They claimed that the Messiah would be a prophet. That's the reason that when John the Baptist began to preach at the Jordan River, people came out and they said are you the prophet?

He said well, I'm a prophet but I'm not the prophet. I have come to prepare the way for the prophet. But that was the reason they quoted that is because they all knew this, that the Messiah was going to be a prophet and he was. He fulfilled that prophecy. So we've got writing prophets. We've got oral prophets. And then we come to my favorite category, the acting prophets. I think what happened is that from time to time, God would give prophecies to prophets calling Israel to repentance.

They wouldn't repent, they shook their fist at God. And God just got finally fed up with them and thought okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to stop giving prophecies by word, I'm going to have prophecies acted out. They will have to pay attention because we're going to act them out. He knew how to get people's attention. For example, he spoke to Isaiah one day and he said Isaiah, nobody is paying any attention to you. So let's get their attention. I want you to go barefoot and naked for three years.

Isaiah was the original streaker. Now, scholars say, the scholars who are familiar with the culture of that time, that by naked it didn't mean buck naked, that it meant that he got rid of his outer clothes and he wore only his underwear as only a slave would do. And he did that for three and a half years, walked around and people would say what are you doing? Why are you walking around like this? You're a highly cultured and sophisticated man, why are you dressed like this?

And of course his response was God is calling you to repentance and you are not paying attention. And if you don't pay attention, you know what's going to happen? God is going to take you into captivity so fast that you will not even be able to get dressed. You will go into captivity wearing what you've got on. God often spoke through acting prophets, and it's amazing some of the things he asked them to do. For example, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah kept pouring his heart out about how the Jewish people needed to repent and they laughed at him, they scoffed at him, they called him all kinds of names. They tried to kill him more than once. And finally one day God spoke to him and said: All right, Jeremiah, nobody's paying attention to you, let's get their attention. He said: I want you to put an ox yoke around your neck. And I want you to go into the center of Jerusalem and walk around with this ox yoke on your neck.

When people ask you what are you doing, I want you to say: God has spoken and because of your sins and your refusal to repent, here's what God wants you to do. He wants you to surrender to Nebuchadnezzar and go into captivity with a yoke around your neck. Well, to say the least, that was not a popular prophecy. And the result was they decided to kill him and they threw him in a pit and tried to kill him. And he almost died. But that's what God called him to do, walk around the city with that yoke on.

But the one who was asked to do the most acting was Ezekiel. And the reason Ezekiel was asked to do so much writing, you may never notice this in scriptures, is that when he was called to be a prophet of God, God struck him mute. And he couldn't speak. Did you know he was mute for seven and a half years until Jerusalem fell? When Jerusalem fell, God allowed him to speak again. So what he would do is he would act out prophecies.

Then when people say well, what are you doing, he would write on a scroll what it meant. And one of the first things God said is I want you to find a sandpile, get you a sandpile, put a brick in the middle of the sandpile, go and take the sand and put it around so it's like a wall around the brick. Then get some twigs and put the twigs up against the walls. And when people ask you what that's all about, write down and say: The brick represents Jerusalem. The sand around it represents the walls.

The twigs on the walls represent siege machines. This city is going to come under siege by the Babylonians, and they are going to destroy this city if you don't repent. You need to repent. God is calling you to repentance. They didn't want to hear that message, but that was what the first thing he asked him to do. And he just went on and on asking him to act out prophecies. For example, another one he called him to act out is that he told him to shave his head.

Said shave your head and take your hair and divide it into three equal parts. Then go down to the center of Jerusalem and in front of everybody take one-third throw it up in the air and hack it with a sword. Then throw one-third take one-third and burn it. And then take one-third and throw it up in the air. Well, by that time I'm sure they were calling the guys at the funny farm to come and get him because everybody thought he was crazy.

But that isn't what happened. They wanted to know what that meant. He said: Here's what it means. If you don't repent, God's going to send an enemy that's going to destroy this city. And one-third of you will be killed by the sword, one-third of you will die in the fire that's going to be set to this city, and one-third of you, that last group thrown in the air, are going to be taken away into captivity. But they refused to repent. And finally God fulfilled those prophecies by bringing about the destruction of Jerusalem.

So we have the writing prophets, the oral prophets, and the acting prophets. But the acting prophet that I think's going to get the Oscar for best actor is one I haven't named yet. I think it's going to be one of the minor prophets. I think the minor prophet named Hosea is going to get the Oscar for being the best actor of all because of the things God asked him to do and he faithfully did them.

He was the most righteous man in all of Israel at the time God called him to be a prophet. And what did God do? God said: Hosea, I want you to go out, the most righteous man in the land. I want you to go out and I want you to find a prostitute and I want you to marry the prostitute. She must have been a very beautiful woman because she had the ugliest name in the Bible, her name was Gomer. But he did, he found her and he married her.

Then God said preach it. Go forth and preach it. And what was the message? The message was Israel was a spiritual prostitute when God selected them as a chosen people. You see, the Jewish people were full of pride. He said I want you to go out and I want you to tell the Jewish people I didn't select them for their beauty, I didn't select them for their money, I didn't select them for their mental ability, I didn't select them for any of those reasons.

I selected them out of my grace. Out of my grace. They were as sinful as anybody else that existed at that time. But they're full of pride now, they think they're better than anybody else because they're my chosen people. Tell them to humble themselves, tell them to repent before me. So he did, and it was not a popular message. He was very badly treated as he did this. Finally, in exhaustion, he came back home and he discovered something that he could not believe.

He discovered something he could not believe, and that was his wife had become unfaithful while he was gone. She had gone back on the bidding block, getting up and selling herself to the highest bidder. Her wife had returned to prostitution. He was totally humiliated. Totally humiliated. How could this woman do that? I brought her out of prostitution, I gave her a good name, I gave her a place to live, I gave her a good life, and then she goes right back into it.

What is going on here? His heart was broken. And God said to him: I want you to go forth and preach the message of this. And what was the message? Like Gomer, Israel has been unfaithful to her husband, chasing after foreign gods. And like Hosea, God's heart is broken. So he went forth and he said you have been unfaithful to God, you're like a prostitute, you have prostituted yourself to every foreign nation. And he says God's heart is broken just like my heart is broken over my wife.

Again he was not well received. He came home and the third time God spoke to him. And God commanded him to forgive his wife and redeem her from harlotry. Now, this had to be one of the hardest things any prophet had to do. She's up there selling herself to the highest bidder and he goes down there to bid for her in front of everybody else, and they're mocking him, they're ridiculing him, they're making fun of him as he bids to try to buy his wife out of harlotry.

She didn't deserve it. She hadn't repented. She was a brazen prostitute, but he bid until his bid won. And he won her out of harlotry and brought her back home and forgave her. And what was the message? The message was the grace of God. The grace of God. All of us are sinners, all of us have rebelled against God, and none of us deserve anything except the wrath of God.

But Jesus made it possible for us to escape from the wrath of God by putting our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior. That's what John 3:16 is all about. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. What a glorious story the story of Hosea is. And you know something? It ends there. It doesn't tell us any more about the relationship between Hosea and his wife.

But it doesn't need to. Because I'll tell you, after he had bought her out when she did not deserve it, when he had bought her out and brought her back home and forgave her, I can assure you that she was faithful to him the rest of the days of her life, just as we are when we are redeemed from our evil lives, we become faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ who made it possible for us to be redeemed.

So we have written prophecy, we have oral prophecy, we have acted prophecy, and then there's a fourth category. Really, this is my favorite. The fourth category is symbolic prophecy. Symbolic prophecy. This is where God provides prophecies through symbols. For example, he often speaks through individual lives. Their lives, the individual lives are a prophecy about the Messiah, and I'll talk more about this later.

He also speaks through historical events. Historical events that point to prophecies in the future, things about the life of the Messiah. And he speaks through inanimate objects. Probably every person here has had a class on the Tabernacle of Moses and how everything in that Tabernacle, everything from the entrance gate to the altar, everything is a prophecy pointing to the coming Messiah. That's symbolic prophecy.

Let me give you an example, individual lives. Let's take the life of Joseph. Here is one of the most interesting examples of individual prophecy in a life of a person. Let's compare Joseph with Jesus. Joseph was rejected by his brothers, Jesus was rejected by his people. Joseph had a symbolic killing. His brothers took him, threw him in a pit, went home and told his father he was dead, and they expected him to die. It was a symbolic killing because he didn't actually die, but it was symbolic.

Jesus actually died, he was crucified. Third, there was a symbolic resurrection because a caravan came along, found him in the pit, pulled him out, and he had a symbolic resurrection just as Jesus had a true resurrection. Then he was deported for a far country. He was taken to Egypt, and Jesus has departed for a far country, he is ascended into heaven. And Joseph took a Gentile bride, and Jesus is taking a Gentile bride right now, his church.

And Joseph revealed himself to his brother just as Jesus is going to reveal himself to the Jewish people at his second coming, and they will look upon him whom they have pierced and weep and wail and mourn as one mourns for the loss of an only child and they will receive him as their Messiah. They will cry out Baruch haba b'Shem Adonai, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. And number seven, he was accepted by his brothers finally, as the Jewish people to the remnant left alive at the end of the tribulation, all of them will come to the end of themselves and receive Yeshua as their Messiah.

We can also see prophecies in historical events. Israel had seven feasts that were conducted over a period of seven months. The first three were in the spring of the year. Jesus was our Passover Lamb. Jesus was our unleavened bread. Leaven was a symbol of sin, he was perfectly sinless. Jesus was resurrected on the Feast of Firstfruits, and Paul later refers to him as the firstfruits of the resurrection.

You know the Bible says there's going to be two resurrections, the just and the unjust. But the resurrection of the just occurs in stages. Jesus is the first stage of the resurrection of the just. The second stage will be the rapture when church age saints are resurrected. The third stage will be at the second coming when the tribulation saints and the Old Testament saints are resurrected. So he was our Passover, our unleavened bread, our firstfruits.

Then we had a period that led up to June, and that was the Feast of Harvest, the day that the church was established. And then we're in that long period now, the church age. And the church age is going to come to a screeching halt, I believe that the last three feasts for the in the fall of the year, they're in September and October, the last three feasts are going to be literally fulfilled just as the first four were.

The first will be the Feast of Trumpets, probably the day of the rapture. We don't know for sure about that, but it could well be. And then second, the day of atonement. I believe that's going to be the second coming of Jesus when the Jewish remnant receives their atonement and are saved. And then the Feast of Tabernacles. Tabernacles means Jesus is coming back to tabernacle with us, to live with us for a thousand years during his millennial reign here upon the earth.

Then finally, quickly, inanimate objects. Let's consider the Ark of the Covenant. It is a prophecy from beginning to end. It's made of wood, which meant the Messiah would be human. It is overlaid with gold, meaning the Messiah would be divine. It contains three things: the stone tablets of Moses, the law, which the Messiah was going to perfectly obey. A bowl of manna: the Messiah would be the bread of life. And finally, Aaron's rod that budded: the Messiah would be resurrected from the dead.

There was a lid called the mercy seat because it indicated that the mercy of God was going to cover the law of God. And at each end of the mercy seat were two angels, one at each end. And once a year, the high priest would enter the holy of holies. And when he would enter, he would sprinkle the blood. This was a prophecy that the blood of the Messiah would cover the law of Moses. He'd sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat.

It was an indication that the blood of the Messiah would cover the law of Moses, making it possible for people to be reconciled with their creator by the grace of God through faith in the shed blood of the Messiah. But what most people don't notice is it says the high priest always stepped back and sprinkled the blood on the ground. And what was that? The high priest would sprinkle blood on the ground in front of the ark as a symbolic prophecy that the blood of the Messiah would also make it possible for the restoration of the creation to its original purity.

This is symbolic prophecy, helps us to see things we might otherwise overlook. Let me give you one example of that and I'll close. This is a picture of the garden tomb in Jerusalem. Many of you have been there and seen this. The garden tomb had a trough in front of it where a big round boulder would move. It's gone from this particular one, but here's a picture of another tomb of the same type with the big rolling stone.

All of these tombs of the first century were laid out the same way. This is a diagram of how they were laid out. This large room was the weeping chamber. You'd go in and it could hold maybe as many as 15 people. You entered through this door here, and to the right of it there was a window to let some light in. There were two ledges for bodies where the dead bodies would be placed.

The dead bodies would be left there for a year until all of the flesh had decayed. Then they would come and gather the bones and the bones would be put in a bone box or what was called an ossuary. So that was the situation. We go back for a moment and take a look at this. It was possible to stand at the door and look at one of those places where the body would have lain because you can see right on through it.

This place in the middle here that's number two, that was a small wall only about three feet tall. So you could see over it from the door right into the place where the body had been lain. Mary Magdalene came and she walked up to the door and she looked in. And when she looked in, what did she see? Well, according to John chapter 20, this is what she saw. Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping, and so as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb.

And she beheld two angels in white sitting one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been lying. Now think about it for a moment. Based on what we've discovered about the prophetic symbolism of the Ark of the Covenant, what did Mary really see? She saw the place where the body of Jesus had lain, the mercy seat. And she saw two angels sitting there, one at one end and one at the other end.

This was a fulfillment of all the prophecies of the Ark of the Covenant. She saw it with her own eyes. This is the reason that Jeremiah tells us: There will be no ark in the millennial temple. Ezekiel says the same thing. No ark. In fact, Jeremiah says the ark will be forgotten. Why? Because it has been fulfilled in the life of Jesus Christ. He is our Ark of the Covenant and all those prophecies have been fulfilled.

You know, the fulfillment of prophecy, the first coming prophecies in the life of Jesus, prove that he was who he was, God in the flesh. Consider for example, there are approximately 330 prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures concerning the first coming of the Messiah. But many of those are overlapping, many of them are the same prophecy presented over and over again. If you go through carefully, you will find many are repetitive, and there's 109 separate and distinct prophecies about the first coming of the Messiah.

Peter Stoner was a professor of mathematics and physics and he was at the Pasadena City College in the 1950s. He was an expert in statistics. You know what he did? He took the odds, he calculated the odds of just seven prophecies being fulfilled accidentally in someone's life. And he said that's 1 in 10 to the 17th power. That's a big number, folks. That number is 100 quadrillion, 1 in 100 quadrillion that seven of the prophecies concerning the Messiah could be fulfilled accidentally in the life of one person.

And then he gave a great example. I want to meet him when I get to heaven because I know he's got to be a good guy, he uses Texas to give his example. He says: Let me give you an example because that's a number you can't grasp. Here's what he did. He said: Imagine the state of Texas being fulfilled knee-deep in silver dollars. Then fly over the state and take a silver dollar with a black checkmark on and flip it out the window somewhere over the state.

Then turn 10,000 bulldozers loose for a year and let them just rampage around the state and get those silver dollars mixed up real good. Then take a guy and blindfold him and turn him loose in the sea of silver dollars. The odds that the first silver dollar he'll pick up will be the one with the black checkmark is 1 in 10 to the 17th power. Don't let people tell you it's an accident that these prophecies were fulfilled in the life of Jesus. God ordained it.

Luke 24, some of the last words of Jesus: These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you that all things which are written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. And that includes the fact that one day he is coming to reign in glory and majesty from Mount Zion in Jerusalem. He's going to reign with a rod of iron and the earth is going to be filled with peace, righteousness, and justice as the waters cover the sea.

How we interpret Bible prophecy is very, very important. The reason there's so many different interpretations of prophecy is because people do not take the Bible to mean what it says. Let me leave you with three principles you should use in interpreting Bible prophecy. Number one, the golden rule. The golden rule is if the plain sense makes sense, don't look for any other sense or you'll end up with nonsense. That's the golden rule.

The second: All of the first coming prophecies meant what they said. So don't spiritualize the second coming prophecies to mean something other than what they say. And third: God knows how to communicate and you do not have to have a doctorate in hermeneutics to understand what he has promised in his word about the future. Jesus left us with a prophecy. His very last words on this earth to John on the Isle of Patmos was a prophecy: I am coming.

And he is coming, he is coming any moment. The signs of the times have converged as never before. We are living in biblical times. One time recently I was having lunch with a man who said to me: David, wouldn't it have been exciting to live in Bible times? I said: Brother, we are living in Bible times. We're seeing prophecies fulfilled before our very eyes that were made thousands of years ago. We're living in the season of the Lord's return. Jesus is coming soon to reign in glory and majesty from Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The Jews will cry out Baruch haba b'Shem Adonai, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. And I cry out every morning: Maranatha, Maranatha, Maranatha, come quickly Lord Jesus. Thank you.