Today's Word Radio

Brett Meador: Kind of a cool hip thing in the world is to say whatever God says, we're going to reject that. One of the great things that is sort of a litmus test if you're on God's side is: what do you think about God's people, the Jews? Man, that has been a test through all of time.

The Bible tells us in the last days, God's going to judge the nations that are against Israel. In the Abrahamic Covenant, God even says, "I'm going to bless the nations that bless my people and I'm going to curse the nations that curse Israel."

Guest (Male): Accused of blasphemy by the religious leaders, Stephen began his defense in Acts chapter 7 with a history lesson on God's promise to give Abraham's descendants the land of Israel. Inspired by this, Pastor Brett Meador traces Israel's history to the present day to explore who should possess the land and why. Once again, we'll see how today's word is reflected in today's news.

Brett Meador: Acts chapter 7, we sort of shift gears as we have a sermon, and it's quite a sermon. It's the sermon of the first martyr of the Christian faith. I've had sermons that have gotten me into trouble, but nothing like Stephen. Stephen is going to preach this sermon and they're going to stone him to death for it. But does he lose the battle or does he win? We're going to see. Stephen's going to come out victorious as it turns out, even though you might think dead is final. Not if you're a Christian. I can't wait to meet this guy in heaven.

Stephen goes into a little history lesson with the religious guys there on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the first century. It would be very pertinent to what they were talking about. Stephen's going to make a real powerful point at the end of his sermon, but it's amazing to me. The very thing Stephen's talking about in his sermon is the same thing the world is raging about today. The world is angry. People are killing people over something that Stephen's talking about, and it's still a problem. It has to do with Jerusalem and Israel and the Jews.

Who really belongs in Jerusalem? Who really belongs on the West Bank or the land of Israel? Do you believe like the Catholics that say, "Well, the Jews blew it. God no longer chooses them. He's forsaken the Jews. So, the church is now the replacement of the Jews. The church is God's people. The Jews have blown it"? If that's your doctrine, can I just warn you? Be worried, because if God forsook the Jews, what's keeping him from forsaking you?

He made a promise that was an everlasting covenant with the Jews. Whether they were on board or not, it was an everlasting, unconditional covenant he made called the Abrahamic Covenant. If he bails on that, then why wouldn't he bail on you? That's bad theology, by the way. The Bible tells us very clearly God has a plan for the Jews. As Gentiles, we should both be careful of being ignorant and also being arrogant. I'll show you that. Stephen gives us sort of a springboard to identify things that are happening in the news today that have to do with what Stephen's talking about.

Let's pick it up in Acts chapter 7, verses 2 through 8. It says, "And he said, 'Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken: The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said unto him, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall show thee." Then came he out of the land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Haran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him into this land, wherein ye now dwell.'"

He's talking to men in Jerusalem. He's talking about the Jews in Israel. Verse 5 says, "And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child. And God spake on this wise, that his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years. And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place. And he gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs."

Why would Stephen be going into this history of Israel with the people of Jerusalem? It has to do with God having a plan and a purpose. He's going to indict these religious guys as not believing truth, and he's saying that God's going to judge them for this. God's wrath would be upon them for that. He's going to indict this group of people and they're going to be so mad they're going to gnash their teeth. They're going to want to destroy him, so much that they start stoning him to death. This is the story.

What's the big deal? Why is Stephen going into this history lesson? It has to do with the Abrahamic Covenant. That's what we call it. It's a covenant that God made that's unconditional. This is a huge point of contention in the world today. When you hear people call Israel "the occupiers" in the land of Israel today, or Palestine as they want to call it still, they say the Jews are occupiers in that land. Where was Abraham originally from? Well, Stephen tells us: Ur of the Chaldees, near Babylon in Iraq.

The story goes just like Stephen said: Abraham begat Isaac and Jacob, and then Jacob had twelve sons, and those would be the twelve tribes of Israel. But because there was a famine in the land, the twelve sons of Jacob moved to Egypt. Joseph was there, the second most powerful man in the world at the time. It's an amazing story. But the Jews are there, and they're there for a few decades when the Pharaoh said, "These Jews, Hebrew people, sons of Jacob, Israel, they're getting mighty. They're getting too mighty."

So, they enslaved them. They were enslaved, as Stephen enumerates here, for four hundred years as slaves in Egypt. Now, why were they slaves there? There were two things God was doing. He was preparing the Jews for the land that he promised, but he was also preparing the land for the Jews. The people that were currently in the land of promise, we know them as the Canaanites. God's preparing them, and I'll tell you how in a minute.

The idea is the Jews would then leave the captivity as slaves in Egypt and be led by Moses to get to the border of Israel, the land of promise, the Abrahamic Covenant promise. God's going to give to them that land as an everlasting covenant before the whole world. He says, "I'm giving you this land." Now, today, the world says, "That does not belong to the Jews." They're called occupiers.

It's tragic but so weird and odd that the world is making decisions just purposely to fly in the face of God. I think a lot of the stuff that you see that's "woke," or things like that, are things that are just flying in the face. They say there are not two genders, but there's 5,000 genders. Well, God says he created them male and female. Male and female did he create them. So, when you say there's more than two genders, you're actually saying, "I disagree with God."

I hope you know that if you're a woke person here today. We love you, but you need to wake up from your wokeness. God said there's two genders. That's God. But people say, "No, there's not." That's the thing. That's the cool hip thing in the world: to say whatever God says, we're going to rebel against that and reject that. One of the great things that is sort of a litmus test of whether you're on God's side is: what do you do with the Jew?

What do you think about God's people, the Jews? Man, that has been a test through all of time of how God sorts you out. The Bible even tells us in the last days, he's going to judge the nations that are against Israel. In the Abrahamic Covenant, God says, "I'm going to bless the nations that bless my people, and I'm going to curse the nations that curse Israel." Sadly, a lot of churches won't talk about this. They only want to talk about blessings and God's goodness and his grace, which I love talking about that.

But to get the whole story, you have to realize God is still holy and righteous. The Bible says in the last days, he's going to be full of wrath and he's going to pour out his wrath on a Christ-rejecting, sinful world. That's still coming in the future. Now, good news: God is so also loving, kind, patient, long-suffering, and he would that none should perish. The heart of God is that no one would be destroyed. But because of people's hardheartedness, they're going to be on the wrong side of God when he returns in his second coming, Jesus Christ.

The big question is: who really should be in the land of Israel? The world says Palestinians. But here in Stephen's sermon, he's saying, "This is the land that I am giving you as a possession." Why do the Jews belong there? I'm going to give you three reasons today and go through a little history lesson. Hopefully, I don't bore you with history, but I love history. Forgive me. If there's one thing you know in history, I think this is the stuff you need to know more than anything: more than the Civil War, more than World War II, or any history in the world.

The biggest and most important is the history of Israel because the Bible spends a lot of time talking about it. It's important to know it, I think. That's why I like to rehearse this so that we can be familiar with it. Hopefully, you're familiar enough with this so if you were to talk to somebody, you can actually explain what people don't know. The narrative out there is so misguided, and it's really rhetorical wacko-ness out there right now.

There's three reasons I want to give you why Israel, the Jews, belong in the Holy Land, Israel. Whatever you want to call it, Palestine, it's still the Jews. I'll tell you why. One reason why, point number one: God gave the land to Israel. Question: is there any other people group in the world that can say, "God gave us the land and we can prove it"? Nobody can say that. The Jews have the Bible, this book written over a 1500-year period by 40 different authors, three different languages, three different continents.

Throughout the whole scripture of the Bible, God says if you care what God says, if you care what the Bible says, it says Israel belongs—well, first of all, he says Jerusalem is mine. He says, "My name is on that city." I hope you realize when you talk about Jerusalem, God says, "My name is on that city." Not Dundee, not Portland, not New York City. He says Jerusalem has his name on it. So, first of all, that's important. Then he tells us who he gives this land as a possession.

Stephen reminded in our text there in Acts chapter 7, verse 5, "Yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him." That's his descendants, all the descendants of Abraham through the line of Isaac. This is called the Abrahamic Covenant. Now, if we were to do a timeline, this is the very first thing on a timeline that I'd like to show you, and that is the Abrahamic Covenant starts in 2000 BC. What happened? God gives to Abraham this promise, and it's an unconditional promise.

Now, some people try to say it's conditional. If Israel disobeys God, then he's going to forsake his covenant with them. No. This is an unconditional covenant. The confusion might come because there are, in the book of Deuteronomy, some conditional covenants: "If you don't do this, then I'm not going to do that." God makes those really clear. But when it comes to the land of promise, the covenant of Abraham, it's an unconditional covenant.

The Abrahamic Covenant's Genesis chapter 12, verses 1 through 3. It says, "Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Get thee out of thy country,'" that's Ur that Stephen was talking about, Ur of the Chaldees, "'and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation. And I will bless thee and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee, and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.'"

Now, just something you should be aware of if you're an anti-Semite who hates Jewish people: so unfortunate because you're not realizing, what have the Jewish people brought to the world? Have they brought anything to the world? Well, I don't even have time to go into the invention, the artistry, the science and technology. I could go on and on. The Jews are such a tiny percentage of the world's population, but they've given a majority of advancement to all of mankind. There's whole books written on this that are fascinating, how the Jews have contributed more than any other people.

If you look at their greatest enemies, ask how much they've contributed to science and medicine and technology and stuff like that, and you realize not that much. But when it comes to all the families of the earth shall be blessed, can anybody say one word? Jesus. Jesus was a Jew. Hello! If you don't know that, why are we blessed as Gentiles? Because Jesus the Jew, through the line of Abraham, the Messiah Jesus, came. We owe that to the Jewish people that the Messiah came through the Jewish people. This is what God's promising: all the nations of the earth.

You can check those boxes. Did the Lord make Israel a great nation? Check. Will he bless Israel? Check. Is his name being made great? Check. "But thou shalt be a blessing," and some people say, "No, Israel's a curse." See, that's like the people that want to fly in the face of God and say the Jews are a curse. Anti-Semitism is the result of that. Are we seeing any anti-Semitism today? It's feverish right now, horrifyingly bad. We'll get into that in a second.

This is the promise. So, when did they—like Stephen said, "Abraham, you're not going to necessarily see that promise when you get the land, but it'll be your descendants after." He said, "I will give it to him, your seed, a possession." Well, when did that happen? If we go to our timeline here, it's when Joshua took the land from the Canaanites there in 1500 BC. So, the first thing: Abraham, 2000 BC, the Abrahamic Covenant. The next item on the history timeline you really should be aware of is Joshua took over the land, fit the battle of Jericho.

By the way, some of you are like, "But Brett, how can the Jews do that? They went into a land and they conquered a bunch of people." Question: who did they conquer? Did they conquer Palestinians? Were the Palestinians there? Anybody? No. Palestinians are not going to come into the play as we know them today until the 1960s. 1960s? Yeah, hold that thought. Who was there in the land? Canaanites: there's the Jebusites, the Amorites, the flashlights and the gigabytes and all those guys. There's a long list of those guys.

Now, some of you are like, "But Brett, colonialism," if you went to college and they taught you how evil all that was, "the indigenous people, they were kicking them out." Let me just say, most people on the planet are not indigenous people. By the way, it's scientifically a fact that there's no such thing as indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere. Do you know that? Scientific fact. "Oh Brett, I disagree." You can be wrong if you want to be, but scientifically, we're all descendants of immigrants, whether by boat, plane, or the Alaskan land bridge.

If you know your DNA and all that, the what we call indigenous people in North America, their DNA points that they actually came here over the Alaskan land bridge or various ways. Now, the cruelty of Europeans in those dark times, including Christopher Columbus, was no greater than among the people everywhere on the earth, including the indigenous people as they're so-called. Were the indigenous people cruel? See, this is what you learn in elementary school: we took over the poor Indians and they were peace-loving people just sitting around smoking their peace pipes. No, they were slaughtering each other.

In fact, some of the amazing examples of that were the Aztecs and stuff. When Joshua came in, who were the Canaanites? They were the people that were horrible people. "Brett, are you suggesting that the Indians or the indigenous people were horrible people?" No, I'm suggesting that all people are horrible people. Man is evil no matter where you go. To try to pretend that some people group is the innocent people—like I remember I did a report when I was a kid on the Aztecs and how they would cut out the hearts and eat them and stuff like that. The Aztecs were not really friendly people, to say the least.

Have you ever wondered why when the Spaniards show up, the Conquistadors and all that, why did some of the Indian tribes welcome them with open arms? Largely it was because of the problem of the Aztecs. They were like, "Help us please, we're in trouble," and that was part of the deal. So, it's an interesting thing if you know your history. While it may be good and timely to celebrate Indian history and culture in America today, or as we call it Indigenous People's Day, we should probably change it to something more truthful and accurate like "We Got Here First Day."

That's the absolute truth. Almost every people group in the world boosted out somebody else, like kicked somebody else out. If they weren't there first, they bloodily killed people to move in. It's as common as everything. It's so crazy. So suddenly, the world has a conscience about that. And who are they most angry at? Those Jews who occupied the land of the poor Palestinians. That's not historically accurate.

That brings us back to our timeline. After Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, they wiped out the Canaanites: the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Perizzites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites, Hamathites, and Sidon. They didn't want to have, I guess, the "ite" at the end of their name. But the Canaanites, why did God wipe them out? This is where the Bible is accused of things like ethnic cleansing. You'll hear people say, "If you believe the Bible, you believe in ethnic cleansing."

God did wipe these people out, but remember when I said the Jews were enslaved for four hundred years? God was preparing the people for the land, but he was also preparing the land for his people. Before he moved his people in, he gave the Canaanites four hundred years to repent of their evil, wicked ways. If you know Canaanite culture, it was horrifying. It even made the Aztecs look friendly. Some of the Canaanite practices: they'd build houses and they'd embed their children in the walls of their house. When they built them out of mud and stone, they'd sort of mortar their kids right into the wall and have them suffocate to death. They felt that that would appease the gods and the goddesses and make their house fruitful and prolific.

I would not have lasted through that very long. If I were a child, I would not like that very much, being built into the wall of my house. Worse still, they would sacrifice babies on the altar of Molech and Chemosh, the two gods—or some people think it was the same god—but giant iron idols with where they'd heat the arms of incandescent heat and lay babies on the hands of the iron gods and sizzle them to death.

They did that by the tens of thousands. The Canaanites, that was their thing. They did this and God said, "Repent," but they did not repent. God says, "I'm going to wipe you out with my wrath." As it turns out, God used the Jews coming into the Promised Land to be the instrument to judge those Canaanite nations. You might say, "Well, I don't like that." Can I just say, you better be on the right side of God because he hasn't changed. God hasn't changed from those days. He's still a God of righteousness, holiness, and even wrath.

If we think, "Well, we would have never done that," we're worse than that. American culture is worse than the Canaanite culture. "How could you say that?" Abortion. It's worse. We abort in America close to a million babies every year. If you say, "Well, it's not a baby, it's fetal tissue," the Bible disagrees. The Bible calls the baby being formed in the mother's womb a child, a baby. It's a life that God is forming and he blesses that life.

Even when John the Baptist was in his mother's womb, the Bible doesn't say, "And a fetal blob leaped for joy when she heard the news of Jesus being born of Mary." No, it says, "the child in Elizabeth's womb leaped for joy." Before the baby was even born, that's the way God looks at the unborn child. It's a person who he's already forming and he foreknew and preordained and is developing in a mother's womb. It should be the safest place on the planet, a mother's womb. But in America, it's the most dangerous place on the planet for a baby.

This is really a bummer, but it gets worse. Bible says God's going to pour out his wrath just like he did on the Canaanites. So, you can protest and say, "I don't like what happened to the Canaanites. I don't agree with it." It doesn't matter. God says, "I am holy and righteous." I believe God would be unloving to let that Canaanite culture go another couple hundred years. That would be not very loving to allow that culture to continue to sizzle babies on idols. God says there's a point where I just have to say time's up.

He's going to do that, by the way, with the whole world. This is where you and I have to pray, "Lord, forgive us as a nation for our horrible sins." I could go on and on about the sins, not just abortion, there's many others. But rebellion against God. God says there's going to come a point, and there's a stopwatch. Does anybody know what is the stopwatch in the Bible? Israel. If you watch Israel and what's happening in Israel, that's the stopwatch to say, "When is Christ returning?" We don't know the day or the hour, but the Bible says you will know the times and seasons. How will we know that? Keeping your eye on the epicenter of Bible prophecy: Jerusalem and the nation Israel. That's why this is all important.

Guest (Male): Pastor Brett Meador reminding us how the plan and purpose of Israel continues to unfold still today as revealed in today's word. I invite you to stay right there as Pastor Brett will join me here in a moment. But first, Today's Word is the radio ministry of Athey Creek Church in the Portland, Oregon area, where Pastor Brett Meador is the senior pastor. We invite you to find out more about Pastor Brett and Athey Creek Church by going to todayswordradio.com. If you missed any portion of this message, you'll find all of Pastor Brett's studies online at todayswordradio.com.

Well, I have Pastor Brett with me. We've been studying the book of Acts, and one of the things I wanted to know is what this book means to you personally, Brett. Can you share that with us?

Brett Meador: You bet. I think the book of Acts for me is sort of the owner's manual of the church: how to really operate, how to prioritize the church. I think that even though it was a couple thousand years ago, the same objectives that they had are our same objectives, or they should be our objectives. Like Acts 2:42, where they continued steadfastly with the apostles' doctrine, which is teaching, prayer, fellowship, and breaking of bread. Those four things were the main thing. As they did those things, the church just flourished. I see for me personally the book of Acts is a safety net as a pastor of a modern-day church just to say: how can we model the church today after the book of Acts? So, it's an important book to me personally.

Guest (Male): Well, thank you, Pastor Brett, for that explanation of what a church should be even today from the book of Acts. Friend, if you'd like more information about Pastor Brett Meador or Today's Word, you can just go to our website at todayswordradio.com. That's todayswordradio.com. Next time, Pastor Brett Meador will reflect how the unconditional nature of the Abrahamic Covenant continues to impact the current narrative in the Middle East today. Today's Word with Pastor Brett Meador is an outreach of Athey Creek Church in West Linn, Oregon.