Today's Word Radio

Brett Meador: One of the things prophecy does is it gives you a heavenly eternal mindset. You think of the bigger picture. Too many people are all about this life. Now some of you, I know what you're thinking, "Brett, you Bible prophecy people, you're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good." But I would say you're not going to be any earthly good until you are heavenly minded.

Guest (Male): Pastor Brett Meador reminds us of scripture's command to watch and be ready concerning the end times.

Brett Meador: Bible prophecy automatically makes you realize we need to be about heaven and not about hope of this life, but its hope in the next that's most important.

Guest (Male): Zechariah prophesied the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, a procession that would have seemed noticeably much more humble than that of some noble Roman royalty. But that's what God's people missed about the first coming of the Messiah. He came as someone to serve, not to be served. Coming up, Pastor Brett Meador uncovers the healthy hope of prophecy in today's world.

Brett Meador: So far in our study we've been tackling the eight visions of Zechariah, and they've been quite amazing and a little crazy until you really see the detail and what it means. Then you realize it's about the end times and prophecy. Much of Zechariah is about prophecy, both of the first coming of Christ and also of the second coming of Christ. We have a little bit of both of that in this single verse of prophecy. Zechariah 9:9 is our text for today.

"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, thy king cometh unto thee. He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass." There's a bunch of prophecies in here about the coming Messiah. If you're a Hebrew person, the word "Messiah" means "king." They called David the Messiah and King Saul the Messiah. Any of their kings, that was what they called it.

But the Jews would agree there is a Messiah that is the Messiah, the one that's coming that they're looking for and they hope for. The Jews to this day are looking for the Messiah. The problem is when the Messiah really came, they missed him. There were more than 300 specific prophecies about the first coming of Christ. Including Zechariah 9:9 that says he will come riding on the colt of a donkey.

That would be Palm Sunday when Jesus would ride his triumphal entry as it's called, riding into Jerusalem as the King of Kings, the Messiah. There was a tiny, tiny little group of people saying, "Hosanna, save now! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." But most of the Jews were saying, "Yeah, whatever." See, the Jews, when they were thinking of their Messiah, they wanted a Messiah that was large and in charge.

But our verse says he's actually going to be lowly. How did they miss it? They took the scriptures talking about his first coming and they swept those under the rug. I don't blame them for this. This is probably what we would have done in their sandals. We would have said, "Yeah, we don't like those either," because they needed a king that was a conqueror, that was powerful.

They were hoping for a powerful king, so they loved the first part: "Shout, O daughter. Rejoice, O daughter of Zion. Behold, your king comes." They like that part. "And he will come who will be just." We need justice because in the first century, the Jews were dealing with all kinds of injustice. Enslaved in Egypt for 450 years, under the iron fist of Rome for almost 200 years, they didn't want someone lowly riding on a colt.

That's the part of the verse they say, "Whatever. We like the part where it's a king coming, and we like that he's just, and we also like that he has salvation because we need salvation from the Romans." They didn't realize he would come in two advents, that is, two separate comings. They didn't know that.

The prophecies about Jesus's first coming tend to be more the lowly stuff because he came the first time humbly. He wasn't a conquering king; he came as a carpenter from Nazareth. He didn't come to judge the world; he came to be judged by the world in his first coming. Was he lowly or a reigning king? I'd like you to jot down five things that we see here in prophecy. Zechariah 9:9 is packed full of Bible prophecy, so it gives us a platform.

Number one, the first thing about Bible prophecy is it proclaims future events. I already told you there were 300 references to the first coming of Christ. In the Old Testament, how many references are there to the second coming of Christ? As it turns out, 1,800. Seventeen Old Testament books give prominence to the theme of the second coming of Christ, like the Book of Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel.

Of the 260 chapters in the New Testament, there are more than 300 references to the Lord's return. If you do the math on this, one out of every 30 verses in the New Testament is speaking about the second coming of Christ. Is it a big deal? Isn't it amazing that churches are just ignoring Bible prophecy and not wanting to talk about the second coming of Christ? They're missing out on a huge part of the Bible.

Number two, Bible prophecy proves that God is God. If there's one thing that you can look at and say, "Does God exist and is he real?" all you have to do is take some time and study Bible prophecy. So many people say, "Yeah, I've read the Bible," but they really haven't looked hard at all the prophecies of the Bible that have come to pass hundreds of years after the prophecy was given with great specificity and great clarity.

I gave you Isaiah 46, but also Isaiah 48, verses 5 through 7. The prophet Isaiah says, "I have even from the beginning declared it to thee. Before it came to pass, I showed it to you lest thou shouldst say my idol hath done them, and my graven image, and my molten image hath commanded them." The people of Israel were—can you believe it?—they were saying, "We prayed for that, and look, Baal and Ashtoreth and Moloch did it for us."

The Lord says, "I'm tired of you giving credit to your idols for things that have happened. I'm the one who did that." So the Lord says, "I'm going to take that argument away from you, so I will declare what happens in the future. Then when it happens, you'll know it was me and it wasn't your stupid fake god, Ashtoreth or Baal." That's what he's saying here.

Verse 6, he goes on and says, "Thou hast heard, see all this, and will you not declare it?" He says, "Now note this: I have showed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them." What didn't they know? Lots of stuff, including the first coming of Christ. The Jews blinded themselves and weren't willing to take the stuff that God had showed them through the prophets, like Zechariah 9:9. The Messiah's going to come, he's going to save, he's going to be just, but he's also come lowly, meek, riding on the colt of a donkey.

They said, "We're going to sweep that and hide it. We don't care about that." They, verse 7, "are created now and not from the beginning, even before the day when thou heardest them not, lest thou shouldst say, 'Behold, I knew them.'" In other words, the Lord's taking away argument from the people because he's saying, "I will predict what's going to happen. Bible prophecy sets me apart from all other gods, false gods."

The Bible drives the critics crazy because they can't figure out how God does it. You've heard me defend different theories about how Daniel knew about Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt, and how Daniel predicted the Romans and the Greeks and Alexander the Great. There have been critics who have tried to make it look like Daniel was a forgery and it was written in 90 AD and all that, which is a ridiculous argument because the Book of Daniel was in the Septuagint, the Greek translation, which we know was 233 BC or earlier.

The arguments are weak, and the Bible is powerful because it's proven to be God who tells us the future. That's prophecy. By the way, of all the prophecies of the Bible, one of the great proofs is the Jewish people. God said over and over in his word, "I'm going to take my Jews when they rebel, I'm going to scatter them all over the world for a long, long time. Thousands of years they'll be scattered. And then in the last days, I will start to regather my people."

Remember Ezekiel 36 and 37, the prophecy of the dry bones? He said, "I'm going to see the bones start to clink together in the desert. The knee bone connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone connected to the hip bone." The bones are walking skeletons, but there's no life breathed in them yet. He's talking about the Jews being gathered out of the world out of total diaspora.

Then when they're clinked together as bones, there's going to come a point where God's going to breathe life into those bones and there's going to be flesh on those bones and life. What are we seeing right now? We've seen the bones come together. May 14th, 1948, was amazing when the Jews became a nation again. The Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl and all that, they all started gathering again into the Holy Land.

There was just a bunch of Bedouins there before the 1700s. When did the Jews start coming? A couple hundred years ago, they started piling back into Israel. They became a nation in 1948, and now they're one of the more powerful nations in the world, just like the Bible said. As it turns out, the Lord even goes further and says the world's going to hate them, and the nations of the world are going to gather against them.

He even enlists the top nations in the Ezekiel 38 prophecy that Russia, Iran, and Turkey and other nations are going to have a confederation of nations and attack Israel in the last days. Isn't it interesting? The stage is set for exactly what the Lord says. It was Count von Zinzendorf who, when critics and atheists asked, "What is the proof of God's existence?" said two words: "The Jews."

If you just look at the Jews and what the Bible said would happen about them, you have to take the Bible as the word of God. It proves that God is God. Proclaiming future events, that's what Bible prophecy does. Number three, Bible prophecy prompts us to pray. If you're a Bible prophecy buff, which we all should be, one of the fruits of that is not to panic or to promote hype.

What are we supposed to do when we read Bible prophecy? I think we look to Daniel. Daniel was a guy who read Bible prophecy and what did he do? He prayed. You can jot this down in your notes: Daniel chapter 9, verses 1 through 4. Daniel, in the first year of Darius the king, he's there in captivity in Babylon and he starts reading Bible prophecy. What was he reading? The book of Jeremiah.

Jeremiah wrote prophetically the Jews will be in captivity in Babylon for 70 years. So Daniel says, in the first year of Darius, "I understood by the reading of Jeremiah the prophet that we would be in captivity for 70 years." He knew. He knew what was going on. So what did he do after that? Did he get all hyped up and start a blog? Nope.

I love what Daniel did when he first read Bible prophecy from Jeremiah. It says in Daniel chapter 9, verse 3, "And I, Daniel, I set my face unto the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. And I prayed to the Lord God and made confession." I love that the prophecy that he read from the scriptures prompted him to pray to the Lord. That's what you and I need to do.

When you see stuff that's crazy in our world today, you can sit around and moan about it or you can be critical of it. When people are saying there are many genders, there's no such thing as a male or female, and men can compete with women and women with men and men can have babies now, your temptation is to say, "That's nuts. That's crazy. There's two genders."

Instead of getting upset, wouldn't it be great if we started to do what Daniel did and say, "We need to pray. We need to pray for this country that's lost." Daniel's stuck in Babylon, he understood how long he'd be there because of reading prophecy, but what was his response? It was prayer. Prophecy should make us pray. By the way, the epicenter of Bible prophecy is Jerusalem.

There's something about that when we study Bible prophecy, hopefully it makes us do what Psalm 122, verse 6 says: "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. They shall prosper that love thee." There's a prosperity that goes to the person who's praying for the peace of Jerusalem. Prayer is one of the great fruits of Bible prophecy. Number four, prophecy is to purify the believers.

There's a purifying effect on the person who believes in Bible prophecy and what the Bible says, that the Lord could come at any moment. The Rapture of the church—by the way, let me clarify something. We clumsily say this and it causes confusion, but is the Rapture of the church a coming of Christ? The answer is no, in the sense of putting his foot down and staying on the earth.

The first coming was when he was born in Bethlehem. That's the one the Jews missed. They didn't see it, and they pushed the scriptures about lowliness and being wounded and crucified under the rug. The second coming is Revelation 19 when he comes not on a little donkey, but he comes on a white horse. In the second coming, he's going to conquer and be King of Kings. That's in the future.

But the Rapture of the church is where we meet him in the air. The Bible says we'll be caught up. In the Latin Vulgate, it's the word "raptura." In the Greek, it's the word "harpazo." But it just means that the Lord's going to be in the sky and we're going to meet him. But when you are reading Bible prophecy, one of the things it does is it makes you look forward to and have the hope of Christ's coming for his church.

That hope that we have is something that purifies. How do I know that? The Apostle John writes about this in 1 John chapter 3, verses 1 through 3. He says, "Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

But I love this, he says, "But we know that when he shall appear, that we shall be like him." Has anybody been looking forward to that? Is anybody sick of themselves? It's funny when you're a human, you just go "ugh." You try to improve yourself, you try to help, but it's like "ugh." But when we see him, when you see Christ, guess what? We have this great blessing. When you see him, we'll be like him for we will see him as he is.

Then verse 3 says, "And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as he is pure." The hope of Christ and us seeing Christ, there's something purifying about that. It's like this: when we talk about the Lord's return and the Rapture of the church or the second coming of Christ, end-time stuff, what it shouldn't do is freak you out or make you get bunkers and guns.

What should we do then when we read Bible prophecy? Well, we should be praying, but it also purifies us. When we have the hope of Christ's return, we'll find ourselves serving the Lord and walking with him. If you believe the Rapture of the church could happen this afternoon, would you go after church over to the strip club and hang out and say, "Well, the Lord's coming, but let's just get one more visit in"? I would hope not.

You'd say, "Man, let's have a prayer meeting or a worship service or let's do stuff that's pure because Christ is coming." There's something about the person who knows Jesus is coming soon. He says, "And every man that has that hope of the Lord's return has a hope that purifies." I love that. And that's one of the things prophecy does: it gives you a heavenly eternal mindset. You think of the bigger picture.

It doesn't become all about this life. Too many people are all about this life. Now some of you, I know what you're thinking, "Brett, you Bible prophecy people, you're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good." But I would say you're not going to be any earthly good until you are heavenly minded. Jesus said set your affection on things above, not on this earth because moth and rust and thieves break in and steal this stuff.

When we have that heavenly mindset, we're right in thinking that way. Heaven and earth will pass away. Live for eternity and don't set your affection on your picket fence here on the earth or your house or your job or your career. You need to set your affection on things that are going to last, things that are eternal. Bible prophecy automatically makes you realize we need to be about heaven and not about hope of this life, but its hope in the next that's most important.

This purifying effect is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 24. He said there's a wicked, evil servant, and then there's a good servant. The good servant is looking and watching and waiting for Christ's return. The Lord says watch, be sober, be vigilant, don't be ignorant concerning the end times and the last days. Sadly, it's the thing the church is not doing for the most part today.

The very thing we're told over and over to do: watch, be ready, be sober. So the good servant's watching and serving the Lord, but the wicked servant there in Matthew 24 shall say in his heart, "Oh, the Lord delays his coming, whatever," and he smites his fellow servant and he drinks with the drunkard. When the Lord of that servant returns, Jesus said he'll find him partying down at an hour when he thinks not. It'd be better to be the servant that's faithful, watching, sober, and vigilant.

Well, one more point: Bible prophecy proclaims future events, proves that God is God, prompts us to pray, to purify the believers. But the last and most important one is this: to point us to Jesus Christ. Prophecy is all about Jesus. Prophecy is not to point us to geopolitics and get all excited about that. Prophecy is not about getting your guns and bunker and Cheerios.

Prophecy is about Jesus. In fact, I love Revelation chapter 19 is that radical end of the Antichrist scripture, and then Jesus returns in Revelation 19. The tribulation period is over, and then it starts talking about Jesus. But that last phrase in Revelation 19:10 is the operable phrase. It says, "The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."

When you study Bible prophecy, it should be all about Jesus. We're looking for Jesus, we're worshipping Jesus, the point of prophecy is to point to Jesus. You know, it's amazing. The Jews missed the first coming. They could have known from those 300 specific prophecies. They should have known Palm Sunday, they should have known the very day. It goes back to Luke chapter 19, verses 41 and 42. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey, it says when he came near, he beheld the city and he wept over it.

Why did Jesus weep over Jerusalem? He said, "If thou hadst known, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace. But now they are hid from thine eyes." The Jews didn't get that Jesus was the Messiah because they didn't care about Old Testament Hebrew Bible prophecies concerning his first coming. So Jesus is weeping because they missed it. They missed the joy of the Messiah coming.

You say, "Well, that's bad for the Jews. Good for us, we know the Bible." But here's my concern: is the church ready for the second coming? Are we just like the Jews? Sadly, that's the problem. When the church bails out on Bible prophecy and reading about the future coming of the Lord, a lot of the church is going to be just like the Jews, and they won't be looking for Christ or the signs of the times because they haven't been reading about Bible prophecy.

Even as the Jews missed the first coming, I think some in the church are going to even miss the second coming because we couldn't care less what the Bible says. Now, I have to say this before we're too hard on the Jews. We have to be careful as Gentiles. "Yeah, those Jews missed it," but we're just as ignorant in some ways. So the Bible says this in Romans 11, and this is good news for the Jews, by the way.

It says, "For I would not, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own conceits." He's talking to Gentiles, us. Don't be prideful about this or arrogant. Blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. When is the fullness of the Gentiles and the end of the church age, anybody? The Rapture of the church.

When the church age is over, the church gets raptured. So at the fullness of the Gentiles, what's going to happen? The eyes of the Jews will be opened during the tribulation period. And it says, verse 26, "So all of Israel shall be saved, as it is written, 'There shall come out of Zion a deliverer,'" that's Jesus the Messiah, "'and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob,'" that's Israel, "'for this is my covenant unto them when I shall take away their sins.'"

The Jews missed it the first time, but in the tribulation period, God is going to reinvest into the Jewish people and their eyes will be opened. Those bones of the valley of dry bones that I talked about earlier, the Lord's going to breathe life into the Jews and they're going to see that Jesus is the Messiah. That'll be in his second coming. You and I, however, should not make the same mistake of the Jews in the first coming, but know the days and the signs of the times. You are not supposed to be ignorant of this. That's how this verse starts: don't be ignorant about that.

Studying Bible prophecy is important. Bible prophecy is important. It's not a waste of time and the Bible says don't be ignorant about these things. Why are you telling us all this now? Because the rest of the Book of Zechariah, as we study through it, is some heavy-duty Bible prophecy. We're going to talk about some powerful things in the future events that are going to happen in Zechariah. So let's embrace it and study Bible prophecy.

Guest (Male): Pastor Brett Meador concluding a fascinating study of the coming of Christ found in the prophecy of Zechariah, noting there's even more to come as our study series continues on Today's Word. Pastor Brett will be closing in prayer in just a moment, so I hope you'll stick around for that.

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 by going to todayswordradio.com. If you've missed any portion of this study, you'll find all of Pastor Brett's messages online at todayswordradio.com.

Our vision on Today's Word is to proclaim the hope of salvation and help people know Jesus through careful study of the Bible. We invite you to find out more by going to todayswordradio.com. I also want to mention that in addition to the main Athey Creek campus in West Linn, Oregon, we also have locations in Hillsboro and McMinnville. For more information, go to todayswordradio.com and click on the link "Locations." Well, here again is Pastor Brett to lead us in a brief prayer to end our time together.

Brett Meador: Lord, how thankful we are for your word that's living and powerful, miraculous. Lord, we see your miraculous fingerprints on this word. I pray, Lord, that you'd give us just a new respect and reverence for your word. As we study it, Lord, I pray that like Paul, we would not shun to declare the whole counsel, the full word of God. Help us not to pick and choose our topics, but help us to let your word dictate the pace and the frequency of the topics as we go through your word together. Bless this time, Lord, as we continue to plug away in our through-the-Bible study. Give us understanding, give us application now of your word in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): Amen. Pastor Brett Meador closing our time here on Today's Word. And that's all the time we have. Next time, Pastor Brett will continue another verse-by-verse study in the Book of Zechariah. Today's Word with Pastor Brett Meador is an outreach of Athey Creek Church in West Linn, Oregon.